5 ms·

>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

by 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.
    - spott 3y ago
      Interesting, though I think I would put those examples under a “will emit copyrighted code if prompted to”. I can’t think of a compelling reason someone would prompt for a sparse matrix function with a “cs_” unless they were searching for copyrighted code they knew existed. Though that is definitely a simpler prompt than I would have expected was necessary to get such a result. Thanks! (The first example also isn’t the same code. It is very close, and definitely similar in style, but it isn’t clear that code would a)run, or b) would work as expected. I need to sleep though, so I’m not sure how much that matters.)
belorn 3y ago
Both Napster and the Pirate Bay founders argued that only users could be held responsible, since it was the user who requested the infringing files. It did not stop the courts. Anyone could use those tools to download creative common files and linux ISO, but those arguments did not succeed in the legal system. Bittorent as a technology was however not made illegal, as could be seen in games using it to distribute patches.
- spott 3y ago
  Napster and the Pirate Bay struggled because the vast majority of content was pirated. You would be hard pressed to say a significant minority of generative ai has any copyright issues, much less copyright issues as blatant as straight piracy.
  - Spivak 3y ago
    Yeah they seem to be applying legal theory like programming code. If what they said about Napster applied to every website then literally every site with user generated content would be instantly wiped off the internet.
  - Retric 3y ago
    I’m not convinced any of the output of these generative AI is free from copyright issues. Consider, a ROT13 copy of a book may at first glance look nothing like the original, but distributing digital copies would be clear copyright infringement. Feature extraction is literally a form of lossy compression. You can prod DALEE to make obvious copies of some of the works it was trained on, but even seemingly novel images could contain enough similarities to training material to be problematic.
    - nickpsecurity 3y ago
      The foundational models most coding models are built on May have comments and code in them. They’re almost certainly built on a number of legal violations, including copyright infringement. I have details in “Proving Wrongdoing” section here: https://www.heswithjesus.com/tech/exploringai/index.html https://www.heswithjesus.com/tech/exploringai/index.html I’ve also seen GPT spit out proprietary content word for word that’s not licensed for commercial use that I’m aware of. They probably got it from web crawling without checking licenses. What I want more than anything in this space right now are two models: all public domain books (eg Gutenberg); permissive code in at least Python, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, C, C++, and ASM’s. One layered on the other but released individually. We can keep using that to generate everything from synthetic data to code to revenue-producing deliverables. All with nearly zero, legal risk.

by spott 3y ago

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.
  - spott 3y ago
    Interesting, though I think I would put those examples under a “will emit copyrighted code if prompted to”. I can’t think of a compelling reason someone would prompt for a sparse matrix function with a “cs_” unless they were searching for copyrighted code they knew existed. Though that is definitely a simpler prompt than I would have expected was necessary to get such a result. Thanks! (The first example also isn’t the same code. It is very close, and definitely similar in style, but it isn’t clear that code would a)run, or b) would work as expected. I need to sleep though, so I’m not sure how much that matters.)

belorn 3y ago

Both Napster and the Pirate Bay founders argued that only users could be held responsible, since it was the user who requested the infringing files. It did not stop the courts. Anyone could use those tools to download creative common files and linux ISO, but those arguments did not succeed in the legal system. Bittorent as a technology was however not made illegal, as could be seen in games using it to distribute patches.

spott 3y ago
Napster and the Pirate Bay struggled because the vast majority of content was pirated. You would be hard pressed to say a significant minority of generative ai has any copyright issues, much less copyright issues as blatant as straight piracy.
- Spivak 3y ago
  Yeah they seem to be applying legal theory like programming code. If what they said about Napster applied to every website then literally every site with user generated content would be instantly wiped off the internet.
- Retric 3y ago
  I’m not convinced any of the output of these generative AI is free from copyright issues. Consider, a ROT13 copy of a book may at first glance look nothing like the original, but distributing digital copies would be clear copyright infringement. Feature extraction is literally a form of lossy compression. You can prod DALEE to make obvious copies of some of the works it was trained on, but even seemingly novel images could contain enough similarities to training material to be problematic.
  - nickpsecurity 3y ago
    The foundational models most coding models are built on May have comments and code in them. They’re almost certainly built on a number of legal violations, including copyright infringement. I have details in “Proving Wrongdoing” section here: https://www.heswithjesus.com/tech/exploringai/index.html https://www.heswithjesus.com/tech/exploringai/index.html I’ve also seen GPT spit out proprietary content word for word that’s not licensed for commercial use that I’m aware of. They probably got it from web crawling without checking licenses. What I want more than anything in this space right now are two models: all public domain books (eg Gutenberg); permissive code in at least Python, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, C, C++, and ASM’s. One layered on the other but released individually. We can keep using that to generate everything from synthetic data to code to revenue-producing deliverables. All with nearly zero, legal risk.