7 ms·

> It's likely that generative AI in general will be deemed fair use Everybody seems to be saying this, but I really don't think there's even 50% chance of it h

> It's likely that generative AI in general will be deemed fair use Everybody seems to be saying this, but I really don't think there's even 50% chance of it happening. Google books was fair use because it was a public benefit and did not take away from publishers or authors, to the contrary it helped people find their works. Compare generative AI which extracts the essence of people's works and recreates similar works (in terms of style, etc) while cutting out the original authors completely. This potentially denies them the fruits of their labor. It's notable that it's a purely mechanical process and no human creativity is involved, except that which is extracted from other authors. Mere prompts don't count. The argument you're suggesting will hold is essentially "yes we're using copyrighted works, but we're doing it at scale and blending it, so that's ok".

CatWChainsaw 3y ago
So many downthread comments pulling out the computers and brains are exactly the same meeeerrrrrr BS. "I'll keep saying it every time this comes up. I LOVE being told by techbros that a human painstaking studying one thing at a time, and not memorizing verbatin but rather taking away the core concept, is exactly the same type of "learning" that a model does when it takes in millions of things at once and can spit out copyrighted code verbatim." (I also love it when they're deliberately obtuse about it too. The past decade has made me sick of this trolling tactic.)
- dang 3y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and/or posting in the flamewar style? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. p.s. Also, please don't copy/paste comments on HN.
r00fus 3y ago
Ultimately I find that commoditization enables the purest form of the banality of evil. Commoditized goods allows the bad to be sorted in with the good, allowing a price to be put on the commodity. Great where it's applicable but horrendous when it's improperly done - ie, home loans, or intellectual property. If your commodity markets aren't properly regulated you get a race to the bottom. If you are trying to commoditize something that shouldn't be, it's effectively enables white-collar looting or money laundering.
dokein 3y ago
I won't debate that no 'human' creativity is involved, but human brains are a purely mechanical process, and that's where human creativity originates (unless one invokes the supernatural). LLMs are typically implemented in a way that makes them non-deterministic (i.e. temperature > 0).
satvikpendem 3y ago
First, style is not copyrightable. I could draw something in a Studio Ghibli style and they could do nothing about it, legally speaking. Second, the way we've seen generative AI be used is not really the same as it was touted originally, that a mere prompt could replace an entire artist's work. A year later, we see that most people, artists included, don't use it as a verbatim text to image machine, they use it as a tool. See apps like ComfyUI or others which allow Node based or layer based image creation and editing, which even Photoshop now has. It's the same as Copilot and ChatGPT, it's not replacing any programmers, just increasing their productivity Given that, it is not looking like generative AI is hurting one's professions, quite the opposite.
- iraqmtpizza 3y ago
  Ghibli style is probably trademarked. Different thing. Outline width, color palette, ambient noises, musical style, how the eyes and hands are drawn, when used together, would be possible to trademark I would think.
- akhosravian 3y ago
  While there are no IP protections for “style” there are certainly elements that are covered. Particular colors be trademarked, characters can be copyrighted separately from the works they appear in, design patents are a thing that cover more than most folks realize. I don’t think any but the most copyleft segment of society thinks it would be reasonable for a generative AI trained on exactly one persons work to be used for profit by someone else. An AI trained on two or ten people’s work probably feels the same for most folks, but what about when it’s thousands or millions? What if instead of one persons work it is the works held in copyright by an entity like Getty Images?
  - gmerc 3y ago
    You can make trademarked colors with microsoft paint…
  - regularfry 3y ago
    > I don’t think any but the most copyleft segment of society thinks it would be reasonable for a generative AI trained on exactly one persons work to be used for profit by someone else. Why do you think that? It doesn't seem obvious to me at all.
tick_tock_tick 3y ago
> Everybody seems to be saying this, but I really don't think there's even 50% chance of it happening. That's true it's probably 99% plus it happening or at-least that's the conclusion that the experts and lawyers hired to help evaluate AI startup valuations are coming too. Hired by banks, venture funds, short selling shops, etc plenty of people who don't depending on it being ok to make money. > "yes we're using copyrighted works, but we're doing it at scale and blending it, so that's ok" I mean you know collages are legal right? You literally take 100s of copyrighted pictures and put them together and suddenly it's perfectly legal and ok.
- digging 3y ago
  > I mean you know collages are legal right? You literally take 100s of copyrighted pictures and put them together and suddenly it's perfectly legal and ok. Really? When has this been done?
  - tick_tock_tick 3y ago
    You've never seen a collage?
    - jazzyjackson 3y ago
      I've never seen one go to court
- heisenzombie 3y ago
  Art made from a collage of, say, magazine photos does not supplant or substitute for the magazine photos which is why it's much more likely to be deemed fair-use. Despite the collage using perhaps large portions of the copyrighted photos, it is nonetheless transformative in the sense that no-one is deciding to buy the collage art instead of the magazine photo. Contrast LLM-created code which is certainly a substitute for the original copyrighted work.
- mbreese 3y ago
  > you know collages are legal right Only if it’s sufficiently transformative. There was recently a case that hit the US Supreme Court about this subject regarding an Andy Warhol adaptation of a portrait of Prince [1]. So, in the US, fair use in this regard requires some amount of substantive transformation of the material. But, as we are talking about AI algorithms, there isn’t a person in between the model and the training data. The argument here is whether or not a person is required to make a transformative use of the material (and thus fair use applies). Given that AI generated (and non-human animal generated) works aren’t copyrightable due to the lack of human involvement, I’d wager that any AI use of copyrighted material won’t get fair use protections. [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/what-supreme-courts-decision-warhol-means-fair-use https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/what-supreme-courts-de...
dmix 3y ago
> Google books was fair use because it was a public benefit What are the odds the market leaders in LLM right now are just the current day version of Borland-style compilers before open source takes it over? I've heard arguments the infrastructure part is a long term barrier to entry for OSS development, which will continue to remain in the future. But I don't know enough about it. Who knows maybe the legal/gov world will move slow enough to miss the bulk of the money-extraction opportunities before OSS takes over and the reality of this problem never going away fully kicks in.
- heavyset_go 3y ago
  You'd need millions of dollars to just compile and label datasets. The training itself requires a lot of resources and money, as does human reinforcement. Open source models would need benefactors with deep pockets.
spott 3y ago
>extracts the essence of people's works and recreates similar works (in terms of style, etc) while cutting out the original authors completely. Only if you ask it to. At which point the person asking is at the very least culpable as well of violating someone's IP. It is also illegal for me to pay someone to write Micky Mouse fan fiction (though if I don't publish it, this gets more murky). > The argument you're suggesting will hold is essentially "yes we're using copyrighted works, but we're doing it at scale and blending it, so that's ok". I want to flip this on its head: the argument you are suggesting is essentially "LLMs should be illegal because they can be asked to break copyright at scale!" It isn't illegal to be an author for hire, even though someone could potentially ask you to write fan fiction for their personal collection in the style of Tolkien, but because an LLM can do it at scale, it is illegal?
- regularfry 3y ago
  > Only if you ask it to. This isn't necessarily true. It's entirely possible for a model to regurgitate a chunk of GPL'd code without you knowing that's what it's done.
  - spott 3y ago
    True, though I’m not sure this risk isn’t overblown. I’ve heard of a couple cases where someone got a copyright statement spit out, but I haven’t been able to find much more than the one or two that I’ve seen on hn. If you have more examples, I’d love to hear about them. Code is also tricky: there are a finite number of ways to write an algorithm, and I’m sure both that multiple people have written the same version of left pad for example, and that it is not possible to copyright something small like that. When the code gets bigger, the likelihood of an llm spitting out large chunks of GPL’d code seems vanishingly small (without asking for something specific like that). Though I’d love to see examples to the contrary.
    - regularfry 3y ago
      https://twitter.com/DocSparse/status/1581461734665367554 https://twitter.com/DocSparse/status/1581461734665367554 is the one I was thinking of. It's not just the copyright header in that case.
graeme 3y ago
Indeed. Further to this, training on data involves copying it. To do so without permission robs authors of the right to contract their work for this training, either to OpenAi or any other third party.
- livrem 3y ago
  Every kind of web crawler has to copy data. If that part of the AI training is illegal for that reason then every web crawler ever is suddenly declared automatically illegal.
  - graeme 3y ago
    Web crawlers generally allow sites to remove them from the index. Are there any crawlers used for commercial purposes which refuse to remove sites from an index if they ask? The distinction from OpenAI is that there is no way to be removed from openai's training set. You can remove yourself from the crawler not but not from what they previously crawled.
    - livrem 3y ago
      BIf a copy of the downloaded file is redistributed or used in possibly other ways that infringe on copyrights, THAT I could understand, but suddenly making the act of just downloading the file (assuming it is made legally available to the public). But if the downloaded file is analyzed by some software and then thrown away, I don't see how that is infringing copyrights, more than say downloading an image to decompress it and scale it to display on a screen (then throw it away once it is no longer needed).
semiquaver 3y ago
> yes we're using copyrighted works, but There’s no law against “using” copyrighted works, there is a law against copying and distributing them. Fair use analysis doesn’t come into play unless we’re dealing with clearly established copyright infringement. What LLMs do doesn’t clearly qualify as any of the behaviors reserved to copyright owners. For example, it certainly doesn’t “copy” the things it’s trained on by any legal definition. Law works on precedent and analogy when there’s no clearly on-point statutes or case law. The most analogous situation to what transformer models do is a person learning from experience and creating their own work _influenced_ by what they’ve observed. That behavior is not copyright infringement by any stretch of the imagination. The fact that it’s done with a computer is not as important as people seem to think it is.
- diffeomorphism 3y ago
  > For example, it certainly doesn’t “copy” the things it’s trained on by any legal definition. What about pictures still containing watermarks? Regardless of the actual legality, this does not fit "certainly". > The most analogous situation to what transformer models do is a person learning from experience and creating their own work _influenced_ by what they’ve observed No, it is not. It is called machine "learning" so clearly that is a fly made out of butter. Maybe courts will agree, maybe they won't, but the analogy to human learning is quite strenuous at best.
  - semiquaver 3y ago
    Here is the section of title 17 that defines the rights of copyright holders and what terms like “copy” mean in US law. It’s clear as mud but I feel it’s likely that the process of training neural network weights is not going to be held as equivalent to verbatim digital copies. It’s just not the same thing and the law has no clear provision for it, except by analogy to existing human creative processes. https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#106A https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#106A The most closely applicable existing law is that of “derivative works” but those require human authorship, so it’s far from clear that those would apply to AI output either. Ultimately this is going to be hashed out in the courts until some actual laws are written to deal with it. (IANAL)
az226 3y ago
Copilot makes open source developers and contributors that much more productive which is a public good.

CatWChainsaw 3y ago

So many downthread comments pulling out the computers and brains are exactly the same meeeerrrrrr BS. "I'll keep saying it every time this comes up. I LOVE being told by techbros that a human painstaking studying one thing at a time, and not memorizing verbatin but rather taking away the core concept, is exactly the same type of "learning" that a model does when it takes in millions of things at once and can spit out copyrighted code verbatim." (I also love it when they're deliberately obtuse about it too. The past decade has made me sick of this trolling tactic.)

dang 3y ago
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and/or posting in the flamewar style? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. p.s. Also, please don't copy/paste comments on HN.

r00fus 3y ago

Ultimately I find that commoditization enables the purest form of the banality of evil. Commoditized goods allows the bad to be sorted in with the good, allowing a price to be put on the commodity. Great where it's applicable but horrendous when it's improperly done - ie, home loans, or intellectual property. If your commodity markets aren't properly regulated you get a race to the bottom. If you are trying to commoditize something that shouldn't be, it's effectively enables white-collar looting or money laundering.

dokein 3y ago

I won't debate that no 'human' creativity is involved, but human brains are a purely mechanical process, and that's where human creativity originates (unless one invokes the supernatural). LLMs are typically implemented in a way that makes them non-deterministic (i.e. temperature > 0).

satvikpendem 3y ago

First, style is not copyrightable. I could draw something in a Studio Ghibli style and they could do nothing about it, legally speaking. Second, the way we've seen generative AI be used is not really the same as it was touted originally, that a mere prompt could replace an entire artist's work. A year later, we see that most people, artists included, don't use it as a verbatim text to image machine, they use it as a tool. See apps like ComfyUI or others which allow Node based or layer based image creation and editing, which even Photoshop now has. It's the same as Copilot and ChatGPT, it's not replacing any programmers, just increasing their productivity Given that, it is not looking like generative AI is hurting one's professions, quite the opposite.

iraqmtpizza 3y ago
Ghibli style is probably trademarked. Different thing. Outline width, color palette, ambient noises, musical style, how the eyes and hands are drawn, when used together, would be possible to trademark I would think.
akhosravian 3y ago
While there are no IP protections for “style” there are certainly elements that are covered. Particular colors be trademarked, characters can be copyrighted separately from the works they appear in, design patents are a thing that cover more than most folks realize. I don’t think any but the most copyleft segment of society thinks it would be reasonable for a generative AI trained on exactly one persons work to be used for profit by someone else. An AI trained on two or ten people’s work probably feels the same for most folks, but what about when it’s thousands or millions? What if instead of one persons work it is the works held in copyright by an entity like Getty Images?
- gmerc 3y ago
  You can make trademarked colors with microsoft paint…
- regularfry 3y ago
  > I don’t think any but the most copyleft segment of society thinks it would be reasonable for a generative AI trained on exactly one persons work to be used for profit by someone else. Why do you think that? It doesn't seem obvious to me at all.

tick_tock_tick 3y ago

> Everybody seems to be saying this, but I really don't think there's even 50% chance of it happening. That's true it's probably 99% plus it happening or at-least that's the conclusion that the experts and lawyers hired to help evaluate AI startup valuations are coming too. Hired by banks, venture funds, short selling shops, etc plenty of people who don't depending on it being ok to make money. > "yes we're using copyrighted works, but we're doing it at scale and blending it, so that's ok" I mean you know collages are legal right? You literally take 100s of copyrighted pictures and put them together and suddenly it's perfectly legal and ok.

digging 3y ago
> I mean you know collages are legal right? You literally take 100s of copyrighted pictures and put them together and suddenly it's perfectly legal and ok. Really? When has this been done?
- tick_tock_tick 3y ago
  You've never seen a collage?
  - jazzyjackson 3y ago
    I've never seen one go to court
heisenzombie 3y ago
Art made from a collage of, say, magazine photos does not supplant or substitute for the magazine photos which is why it's much more likely to be deemed fair-use. Despite the collage using perhaps large portions of the copyrighted photos, it is nonetheless transformative in the sense that no-one is deciding to buy the collage art instead of the magazine photo. Contrast LLM-created code which is certainly a substitute for the original copyrighted work.
mbreese 3y ago
> you know collages are legal right Only if it’s sufficiently transformative. There was recently a case that hit the US Supreme Court about this subject regarding an Andy Warhol adaptation of a portrait of Prince [1]. So, in the US, fair use in this regard requires some amount of substantive transformation of the material. But, as we are talking about AI algorithms, there isn’t a person in between the model and the training data. The argument here is whether or not a person is required to make a transformative use of the material (and thus fair use applies). Given that AI generated (and non-human animal generated) works aren’t copyrightable due to the lack of human involvement, I’d wager that any AI use of copyrighted material won’t get fair use protections. [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/what-supreme-courts-decision-warhol-means-fair-use https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/what-supreme-courts-de...

dmix 3y ago

> Google books was fair use because it was a public benefit What are the odds the market leaders in LLM right now are just the current day version of Borland-style compilers before open source takes it over? I've heard arguments the infrastructure part is a long term barrier to entry for OSS development, which will continue to remain in the future. But I don't know enough about it. Who knows maybe the legal/gov world will move slow enough to miss the bulk of the money-extraction opportunities before OSS takes over and the reality of this problem never going away fully kicks in.

heavyset_go 3y ago
You'd need millions of dollars to just compile and label datasets. The training itself requires a lot of resources and money, as does human reinforcement. Open source models would need benefactors with deep pockets.

spott 3y ago

>extracts the essence of people's works and recreates similar works (in terms of style, etc) while cutting out the original authors completely. Only if you ask it to. At which point the person asking is at the very least culpable as well of violating someone's IP. It is also illegal for me to pay someone to write Micky Mouse fan fiction (though if I don't publish it, this gets more murky). > The argument you're suggesting will hold is essentially "yes we're using copyrighted works, but we're doing it at scale and blending it, so that's ok". I want to flip this on its head: the argument you are suggesting is essentially "LLMs should be illegal because they can be asked to break copyright at scale!" It isn't illegal to be an author for hire, even though someone could potentially ask you to write fan fiction for their personal collection in the style of Tolkien, but because an LLM can do it at scale, it is illegal?

regularfry 3y ago
> Only if you ask it to. This isn't necessarily true. It's entirely possible for a model to regurgitate a chunk of GPL'd code without you knowing that's what it's done.
- spott 3y ago
  True, though I’m not sure this risk isn’t overblown. I’ve heard of a couple cases where someone got a copyright statement spit out, but I haven’t been able to find much more than the one or two that I’ve seen on hn. If you have more examples, I’d love to hear about them. Code is also tricky: there are a finite number of ways to write an algorithm, and I’m sure both that multiple people have written the same version of left pad for example, and that it is not possible to copyright something small like that. When the code gets bigger, the likelihood of an llm spitting out large chunks of GPL’d code seems vanishingly small (without asking for something specific like that). Though I’d love to see examples to the contrary.
  - regularfry 3y ago
    https://twitter.com/DocSparse/status/1581461734665367554 https://twitter.com/DocSparse/status/1581461734665367554 is the one I was thinking of. It's not just the copyright header in that case.

graeme 3y ago

Indeed. Further to this, training on data involves copying it. To do so without permission robs authors of the right to contract their work for this training, either to OpenAi or any other third party.

livrem 3y ago
Every kind of web crawler has to copy data. If that part of the AI training is illegal for that reason then every web crawler ever is suddenly declared automatically illegal.
- graeme 3y ago
  Web crawlers generally allow sites to remove them from the index. Are there any crawlers used for commercial purposes which refuse to remove sites from an index if they ask? The distinction from OpenAI is that there is no way to be removed from openai's training set. You can remove yourself from the crawler not but not from what they previously crawled.
  - livrem 3y ago
    BIf a copy of the downloaded file is redistributed or used in possibly other ways that infringe on copyrights, THAT I could understand, but suddenly making the act of just downloading the file (assuming it is made legally available to the public). But if the downloaded file is analyzed by some software and then thrown away, I don't see how that is infringing copyrights, more than say downloading an image to decompress it and scale it to display on a screen (then throw it away once it is no longer needed).

semiquaver 3y ago

> yes we're using copyrighted works, but There’s no law against “using” copyrighted works, there is a law against copying and distributing them. Fair use analysis doesn’t come into play unless we’re dealing with clearly established copyright infringement. What LLMs do doesn’t clearly qualify as any of the behaviors reserved to copyright owners. For example, it certainly doesn’t “copy” the things it’s trained on by any legal definition. Law works on precedent and analogy when there’s no clearly on-point statutes or case law. The most analogous situation to what transformer models do is a person learning from experience and creating their own work _influenced_ by what they’ve observed. That behavior is not copyright infringement by any stretch of the imagination. The fact that it’s done with a computer is not as important as people seem to think it is.

diffeomorphism 3y ago
> For example, it certainly doesn’t “copy” the things it’s trained on by any legal definition. What about pictures still containing watermarks? Regardless of the actual legality, this does not fit "certainly". > The most analogous situation to what transformer models do is a person learning from experience and creating their own work _influenced_ by what they’ve observed No, it is not. It is called machine "learning" so clearly that is a fly made out of butter. Maybe courts will agree, maybe they won't, but the analogy to human learning is quite strenuous at best.
- semiquaver 3y ago
  Here is the section of title 17 that defines the rights of copyright holders and what terms like “copy” mean in US law. It’s clear as mud but I feel it’s likely that the process of training neural network weights is not going to be held as equivalent to verbatim digital copies. It’s just not the same thing and the law has no clear provision for it, except by analogy to existing human creative processes. https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#106A https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#106A The most closely applicable existing law is that of “derivative works” but those require human authorship, so it’s far from clear that those would apply to AI output either. Ultimately this is going to be hashed out in the courts until some actual laws are written to deal with it. (IANAL)

az226 3y ago

Copilot makes open source developers and contributors that much more productive which is a public good.