16 ms·

OpenAI's justification for why training data is fair use, not infringement [pdf]

• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• buildbot 3y ago
  Skimming, this quote by itself seems enough to solidly make their case: >>> "The “object of the original creation,” in other words, is direct human consumption of the author’s expression. 18 Intermediate copying of works in training AI systems is, by contrast, “non-expressive”:19 the copying helps computer programs learn the patterns inherent in human-generated media. The aim of this process—creation of a useful generative AI system—is quite different than the original object of human consumption.20 The output is different too: nobody looking to read a specific webpage contained in the corpus used to train an AI system can do so by studying the AI system or its outputs. The new purpose and expression are thus both highly transformative.21" Like you can make a transformer output some part of it's training data - but not an entire work, and more to the point, that's not the point (to copy) of the model or it's training data.
  • tyingq 3y ago
    >Like you can make a transformer output some part of it's training data - but not an entire work There's been many examples of getting large verbatim passages of text or large image regions, etc, from AI tools. I don't think you need to use the entire work to infringe. Certainly lawsuits claiming use of part of the work have had the rights holder prevail.
    • theptip 3y ago
      How large? Copying some verbatim is still fine under fair use.
      • dragonwriter 3y ago
        Copying entire works is fine under fair use in certain circumstances, too. (See, e.g., time-shifting.)
        • theptip 3y ago
          For written text? Not aware of any examples, can you share any? (To be clear by copying I mean repeating the text in your derived work, perhaps I should have been more explicit. The crux of this case is whether “copying into training set” counts as copying the whole work. )
          • dragonwriter 3y ago
            The first examples that comes to mind is reproducing an entire copyright-protected article, either a single copy for personal use by a researcher or multiple copies for classroom use.
            • jazzyjackson 3y ago
              Right, determined fair use by the supreme court in Williams & Wilkins Co. v. United States. You can walk into a library and make a wholesale copy for research purposes. The case involved a medical journal publisher suing medical doctors, who made a strong argument that their ability to make copies was a matter of life and death. Winner: Xerox. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_%26_Wilkins_Co._v._United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_%26_Wilkins_Co._v._...
            • DoughnutHole 3y ago
              That's an interesting example because it illustrates out how fair use is in part defined by its effect on the market. A teacher copying a New York Times article verbatim and distributing it to a classroom for the purpose of analysis or criticism is likely to be held by the courts as fair use. On the other hand a teacher photocopying an entire textbook (or distributing a PDF) would probably not be considered fair use. Both are copying educational material in full, but they have a different impact on the market. Distributing copies of an old news article to 30 students realistically isn't a direct substitute for 30 subscriptions to The New York Times. But a textbook publisher's business model specifically revolves around selling its textbooks to students - the teacher is distributing their copyrighted material to their target market and removing any incentive for the students to pay the publisher.
    • mannerheim 3y ago
      Copying verbatim passages can be fair use if it is transformative.
      • tyingq 3y ago
        Outputting unattributed copies large passages of text to end customers with the implied okay to use it any way they want, though....that's what these tools do. The end user often has no idea they just received something with potential IP issues.
        • lsaferite 3y ago
          Does the model even have enough information to be able to _know_ that though? If it's simply using probability to ties a series of tokens together into text based on numerical probability, that doesn't store enough information to understand that _this specific sequence of tokens_ represents come specific copyrighted work. Storing that information would _actually_ seem to fall afoul of copyright. The fact that it can spit out chunks of copyrighted works is driven by the input token sequence and the model weights pointing to a specific path that have an ever so slightly higher probability of being the expected output, right? It's not like the model stores the copyrighted work directly. (Yes, I know the algorithms are more complex than what I expressed, but the general idea holds in my understanding)
          • pclmulqdq 3y ago
            The model doesn't know anything - people personify LLMs too much. It is a mathematical text predictor that has almost certainly ingested the text it is copying verbatim to string together the words it is reproducing. The fact that it is a highly compressed representation of its training corpus (and thus doesn't "know" that it is copying something) is not an excuse. I think you could make a good argument about this if you could prove that the text being spit out verbatim is _not_ contained in the training corpus, but that is not the situation we have today.
            • lsaferite 3y ago
    • dcow 3y ago
      You can also get “the whole work” by asking another human to recite the lyrics to a song or draw the Finder logo from memory. What’s really happening is that AI models have much better memory than humans and are more precise in their output. It would be stupid to try and “dumb down” AI models because they’re better at remembering some licensed content. In spirit, it’s still fair use.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • jonny_eh 3y ago
        > You can also get “the whole work” by asking another human to recite the lyrics Is that human earning money by reciting the lyrics? If so, that's already not allowed. It's called a performance.
        • dcow 3y ago
          Covers are generally transformative, right? Edit: I guess even if they are SCOTUS recently decided that even transformative works can infringe if they compete commercially. So the question is not: “did the reciter make money performing”, it’s “did the reciter’s performance detract financially for the original artist”.
          • Retric 3y ago
            No, covers aren’t considered transformative. I think a great deal of this discussion comes from people not understanding copyright. https://attorneyatlawmagazine.com/public-articles/intellectual-property/a-myth-cover-songs https://attorneyatlawmagazine.com/public-articles/intellectu...
            • dcow 3y ago
              I personally think our law regarding covers has been heavily influenced by record labels and is wrong about them, in practice. I’ve already heard the original enough times that if I want to hear a string quartet perform Viva La Vida it’s because it’s a new refreshing piece of art. The whole compulsory license thing indicates the law got it wrong. Anyway…
  • leereeves 3y ago
    But the creation of a useful generative AI system is just an intermediate step toward the ultimate goal of producing output for direct human consumption.
    • verdverm 3y ago
      With Chain-of-Thought and Mixture of Experts, it may be that, in the long-term, most LLM output is primarily consumed by other LLMs [1] [1] (meme, the future of communication) https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/123tyge/the_future_of_communication/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/123tyge/the_future...
    • est31 3y ago
      Yes but there is transformative work involved in the process, which is what the model does. It's not a non-transformative simple display of the work (say when I show a movie), but deeply transformative.
      • ang_cire 3y ago
        But it's still illegal for me to download a movie without a license, even if I just intend to make AMVs with/ "transform" it. OpenAI's entire argument is that they think this shouldn't apply to them, because they don't want to have to make deals with the original content authors in order to get legal copies to use in their training, because that would be expensive.
        • est31 3y ago
          It wouldn't just be expensive, it would basically be impossible to figure out the content owners of random works on the internet at the scale needed for the LLMs to output the high quality content that they do output. Even if they strike deals with the large content owners, they need way way more content than that.
          • ang_cire 3y ago
            Too bad. No one has a right to mass data collection.
  • verdverm 3y ago
    We might also consider that the LLMs will take traffic away from original sources, much like Google Search showing the relevant passages that answer your question. It's not always about outputting the exact passage, though this point may be tangential to the post & case at hand. My primary usage of LLMs fit this pattern. Use Bard for simple programming questions, typically something I would have previously searched for via docs/reference/SO for. Now I don't have to filter the results or skim the pages for the right section, it's just given to me, and I can ask/make follow up questions or corrections. This here is what makes them much better than vanilla search, the ability to iterate and refine.
    • TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
      > We might also consider that the LLMs will take traffic away from original sources, much like Google Search showing the relevant passages that answer your question. That said, Google has motivation not to over do it though as millions of websites are part of their ad network. If people stop visiting the sites, they lose money too.
      • verdverm 3y ago
        Paradigms have changed, chat will be a primary modal for search in time. This is why Bing and Goog are both finding ways to get ads into our chat experiences. We might be forced away from ad dollars being the primary way to pay for the internet. With data privacy, ideally content based ad placement over individual targeting (think magazine style ads), the move to paid access to sites or content... there are trends that may combine to break the current foundations.
    • acomjean 3y ago
      I think in some ways LLMs have shown people want simple answers to their questions when they pose it to a search engine. Stack Overflow was good because it had answers (one chosen as right) and a little bit of discussion about why and how and other considerations. Much of the web is verbose to an extreme to get the search engines to rank it highly. People don't want that, they just want answers.
  • tejtm 3y ago
    I expect it is very much the entire point to copy the human intellect producing individual arts (a.k.a. patterns inherent in human-generated media) So they may be replicated by other individuals lacking the specific intellect or training to produce their own
    • ajmurmann 3y ago
      You are reproducing the abstract content, not the work itself. If your argument was valid, summaries of books and offerings like Blinkist should be illegal as well.
      • tejtm 3y ago
        When "abstract content" has sufficient cover to generate indistinguishable replicates of the original is it still abstract? In contrast I could read Blinkist for years and it would never make me write like Hemingway. Note: I am arguing for sport here and not from some deep resentment of reality.
  • Palmik 3y ago
    I think we should not stop innovation, but let's not minimize the impact on the producers of the content (the whole of humanity). First of all, even if the models never reproduce any of the copyrighted content verbatim, they will soon be good enough that they will be able to replace the work of the people [1] that produced the content the AI was trained on, like writers and programmers. Second of all, the nature of the use of the copyrighted content is purely for-profit, and the ability to squeeze the profit out of the best models will stay with the largest corporations -- effectively transferring wealth from the people that produced the content, to the corporations. We need to find way to make sure the access to this data the models were trained on, and the resulting models, is open and fair. Who wrote which paper [2], or who supplied the initial GPU training, should not really matter that much in the grand scheme of things. [1] or at least cause downward pressure on their earning potential [2] you could use similar arguments here they use for using the copyrighted content -- each paper (except maybe the Attention is all you need paper) contributed only marginally
    • skerit 3y ago
      > We need to find way to make sure the access to this data the models were trained on, and the resulting models, is open and fair Agreed. The irony is that all the current anti-machine-learning lawsuits will make it so only big companies with deep pockets will be able to continue to make & use them.
    • Pet_Ant 3y ago
      I mean we never seem to care about the downward pressures we put on others, so this seems a contrived place to do it now. My take on the matter is that facts aren't copyrightable. A LLM is basically recording facts. I have a background in stylometry where you basically determine authorship by recording statistics on known pieces of writing to try to find the author of another piece of writing. So just extracting facts. You could easily now generate random sentences and filter ones that pass a certain threshold. LLMs are basically this on steroids. So it's just facts and data, not copyright infringement. Otherwise, you'd have to argue that software reading the text contents of a book are copyright infringement.
      • 3y ago
  • bena 3y ago
    The point isn't the point. The reason a work was created is immaterial to copyright law. It would be like saying, I'm not consuming this media for enjoyment, but to learn how to create media, therefore it's ok that I'm not compensating the creators for that media. That would not fly. They want to be able to flagrantly ignore copyright because the whole enterprise becomes prohibitively expensive otherwise. You'd have to go and track down the source of every item fed into the model and request permission. Even without actually paying anyone, that's a time investment no one has.
    • sethrin 3y ago
      The linked paper describes the conditions for fair use as given in 17 U.S.C. § 107, of which the first seven words are "the purpose and character of the use". Law is a field where context is essential: to analyze a particular set of facts you need not solely the text of the law, but the full historical use and interpretation of that text in regards to other sets of facts. Speculation based on what one imagines the law to be is rarely useful in understanding law or legal arguments.
      • bena 3y ago
        The purpose and character of their use, the infringing use, not the purpose and character of the original. The rest of that segment is "including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;" And then you go on to say "context is essential" while using the text of the law to justify your opinion. The "full historical use and interpretation of that text in regards to other sets of facts" has shown that original purpose has little to no bearing on trying to claim fair use. Also, the list is not exhaustive. Those factors are considered, but they're not the entire test. Even the purposes themselves are examples, not an exhaustive list. So why the original was created has no bearing on whether or not you've infringed copyright. Their main thrust however seems to be that they're metaphorically making paper mache whales from shredded copies of whale books. Yes, the entire text of Moby Dick is on that whale, but it is not Moby Dick, you can't extract Moby Dick from it, you couldn't even tell Moby Dick was used in its entirety. Which is a much better argument than "bruh, we gave it to a computer".
  • denton-scratch 3y ago
    "Fair use" doesn't generally include taking the author's entire work (or for that matter, his entire lifetime's corpus). According to WP, there are four factors to consider: 1. Purpose, including whether it's commercial. 2. Nature of the work (e.g. fiction/non-fiction, published/unpublished) 3. How much was used 4. Whether the use impairs the author's ability to exploit his work ==== 1. The use is definitely commercial. 2. This use consumes anything and everything. 3. This use consumes entire libraries. 4. It can diminish the market for the author's own work (observe authors complaining that GPT simulacra of their work are competing with their own publications on Amazon). Each of these factors is to be weighed by the court; no one factor is decisive. But, for example, if you use the entire work, factor #2 weighs against you. It looks to me that the four factors all weigh against OpenAI.
    • cmdli 3y ago
      Copyright doesn’t apply to consumption of a work, only redistribution. For example, it is not a violation of copyright for you to make many copies of a movie for personal use. Similarly, it is not a violation of copyright for an artist to learn by looking at other works, even if they then compete against the original work. OpenAI’s system is much more similar to calculating statistics from public artwork than copying and redistributing artwork.
      • rpdillon 3y ago
        > For example, it is not a violation of copyright for you to make many copies of a movie for personal use. This likely varies by jurisdiction, but in the United States, copyright law covers four exclusive rights: 1. The right to make copies 2. The right to distribute copies 3. The right to create derivative works 4. The right to publicly perform the work Making copies for personal use absolutely violates the first of these exclusive rights.
        • marcinzm 3y ago
          Sure if you utterly ignore all of the fair use parts of US copyright law.
  • adamsvystun 3y ago
    Isn't the point of transformer training for it to learn to imitate the distribution of the training data? While concepts of "imitating the distribution" and "copying verbatim" are different, they are not too far off each other either.
  • cmiles74 3y ago
    I think that even summaries are not fair use when they get to a certain length. The Cliff Notes company has to license the material that they summarize, why not OpenAI?
    • gaganyaan 3y ago
      Do they have to, or do they choose to, to avoid a costly court case?
      • cmiles74 3y ago
        They have to, it's a "derivative work".
  • interestica 3y ago
    Musical genres are a weird parallel to me: humans "training" on a giant dataset and creating an output that is differentiable from any of the source material. We've decided that using that "training data" is fair use.
    • JambalayaJim 3y ago
      Humans are not AI models
  • atleastoptimal 3y ago
    Makes sense that a transformer is transformative lol
  • thomastjeffery 3y ago
    I'm all about getting rid of copyright. This is...bullshit. > patterns inherent in human-generated media That's what you hope your model is, not what your model literally is! > The aim of this process That's a lovely thought. Now let's get back to talking about the process itself. I'm not interested in treating LLM tech like a black box. That's intentional stupidity. OpenAI's entire argument hangs on not understanding how its tech works! I can't see any difference between that and fraud.
    • devmor 3y ago
      >OpenAI's entire argument hangs on not understanding how its tech works! I can't see any difference between that and fraud. This is how I see it as well. If you can't explain, in detail, how your mechanism is not violating copyright then you have no defense.
      • Tadpole9181 3y ago
        That's not how law works in the US. You are presumed innocent and there must be a preponderance of evidence of guilt. If they can't prove the AI model contains or reproduces exact copies of their copyrighted work, there's no case to be had.
        • devmor 3y ago
          No one said otherwise. There is already a case against them, their defense is that they don't know how it works, so it can't be true. This was clearly laid out in the comment I replied to, and the comment that reply was made to in turn.
        • thomastjeffery 3y ago
          But we can. There are countless documented instances. OpenAI describes these as "limitations". A more accurate word would be "features".
          • skeaker 3y ago
  • ang_cire 3y ago
    See, for me this section also jumped out, but for the opposite reason. They are intentionally being deceptive about the aim of AI training. The aim is not to create a model, for the sake of having a model, the aim is to create a model that produces content for "direct human consumption". I could use their argument to say it's fine for me to illegally download movies because I intend to simply create a corpus of works, and whether that corpus will be consumed by humans afterwords is (by their logic) irrelevant. Or that I should be able to download them because I only intend to transform them into AMVs. You still have to legally obtain the original work for Fair Use to apply, and in many cases they are not legally obtaining them. "Publicly-accessible" has been ruled repeatedly in copyright law not to inherently imply "legal to copy", but that is exactly what they're claiming should be applied here.
  • bigboy12 3y ago
    All art is a variation of other art and the first art was a variation of nature.
• leereeves 3y ago
  > 1. “The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.” > This factor asks “whether the new work merely ‘supersede[s] the objects’ of the original creation, or instead adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the first with new expression, meaning, or message; it asks, in other words, whether and to what extent the new work is ‘transformative.’” What? How do they get "is the work transformative" from "is the work commercial"? I assume they are highlighting an interpretation or commentary that they prefer rather than discussing the actual quote from the statute.
  • dragonwriter 3y ago
    > What? How do they get "is the work transformative" from "is the work commercial"? They get it from the case law applying the purpose and character portion of the fair use criteria, back to the original articulation of fair use as a Constitutional limit on copyright law stemming from the First Amendment protection of freedom of speech and press, which the statutory rule were an attempt to codify, they don't get it from the “especially...” clause at the end of the statutory articulation of the purpose and character criterion. (But its kind of weird that you read the “especially...” clause as limiting/negating the broader language that precedes it.)
    • leereeves 3y ago
      > back to the original articulation of fair use as a Constitutional limit on copyright law stemming from the First Amendment protection of freedom of speech and press, It's a bit weird to argue that freedom of speech and press somehow guarantees a fair use right to train AI models. If that is the foundation of fair use, then it shouldn't apply. Edit: I think I can clarify what I mean. Fair use protects human "speech" even if it's partially a copy of someone else's speech. There's no reason the same rule should apply to a technological device that isn't speech.
      • dragonwriter 3y ago
        > It's a bit weird to argue that freedom of speech and press somehow guarantees a fair use right to train AI models Most specific fair use applications would seem weird as direct applications of the First Amendment protections, nevertheless, that there is a broad space defined by the factors set out as the fair use factors which rest on those principles and into which the restrictions imposed under copyright law cannot be applied is well-established. This flows from the fact that everything copyright law controls is on some level speech or press acts, or precursors to them (creating AI models is a precursor to publishing them) and that therefore the copyright power is read narrowly and its purpose clause read strictly, by similar constitutional logic to the application of strict scrutiny to government acts affecting fundamental rights. The fair use factors are specifically factors which either relate to the most sensitive areas of expression or to the boundaries of the purpose of the copyright power (the purpose and nature factor being one of the trickier ones because it involves both.)
• minimaxir 3y ago
  What year was this filed? It was awhile ago since some of submitters no longer work at OpenAI.
  • sillysaurusx 3y ago
    2020. I ran out of characters to add that to the title. The way I determined it was by looking it up on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/OpenAI_RFC-84-FR-58141.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://www.uspt...
    • judge2020 3y ago
      This is a heavily editorialized title either way. > Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
      • carbocation 3y ago
        Looking at (1) the document contents, (2) its title page, and (3) the HN headline, the HN headline seems reasonable. How would you formulate it?
  • kubrickslair 3y ago
    Looks like 2019.
• wordpad25 3y ago
  One could easily argue derived work is sufficiently different from the original to avoid a violation. ChatGPT doesn't just steal and slightly modify the original. It fully copies the style and feel, which aren't copyright protected. You can't just change the color of Mikey Mouse, call him AI Mouse and be good, but you can certainly create a new Disney-style character without triggering copyright violations.
  • cj 3y ago
    > It fully copies the style and feel, which aren't copyright protected. Is that for certain? I have a feeling this point could be debated.
    • dcow 3y ago
      Exactly. The court would consider other things like the impact of your modified copy and whether it competes financially with the original.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
      "style and feel" are entirely subjective. If I give DALL-E or MidJourney a picture of myself that I took (and therefore I own the copyright), and ask it to "Recreate this picture in the style of Pixar", am I violating Pixar's copyright? What if I decide to model it myself and deliberately imitate Pixar. Have I violated copyright? What if I decide to model it myself, and it just happens to look similar to Pixar, because I've watched a lot of their movies and it has influenced how I model people in 3D animation. Have I violated copyright?
      • cj 3y ago
        What if an AI model took the Barbie movie and added a filter to change the hue of every pixel and altered the voices to have Australian accents instead of American accents? I wonder if Disney would sue if you tried to sell and distribute despite 100% of the pixels and audio file not exactly copying the original. (Rhetorical question, Disney would definitely sue)
• pylua 3y ago
  "Authors may object that the outputs of generative AI systems will harm the value of their works." I do not see this addressed adequately anywhere in the article. Granted, it is addressed, but not in detail or with any solution that is palatable. I imagine this is what people are most concerned about, and only a tiny part of the article addresses these points. People must be incentivized to create, and compensated fairly from that. If the current law cannot make that happen, and I am definitely not convinced by this article, then, the laws need to be changed.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• yeahsurebuddy 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • chatmasta 3y ago
    Yeah, it's Google all over again. I can scrape your website to list it in my search results, but you can't scrape my search results to make another search engine.
• throw7 3y ago
  Can I use their output as the training data input for my use?
  • tempodox 3y ago
    Stealing others’ works is legal for me but not for thee.
  • sebzim4500 3y ago
    It's against their TOS, but if you don't sign the TOS and take the data from another source then of course you can.
• cm2012 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • esafak 3y ago
    Artists and writers complaining about IP theft are not reactionaries standing in the way of progress. They are the fonts of culture; the pinnacle of civilization. So paying them is a very good thing. It creates the right incentive structure without intervention. It will enable the democratization of art without starving the geese that lay the golden eggs.
    • cm2012 3y ago
      AI is creating new value from old assets. Those old assets were already paid for in their original use. It's like saying I should pay Apple a dollar because their inspired me to make my site white and minimal or something.
      • esafak 3y ago
        You're not merely depriving the original creators of royalties (e.g., in music or stock photos), you're shrinking the market for anything that can be artificially generated. One problem with this is that these might be the cash cows. An artist can't survive on sophisticated art that computers can't yet generate because customers may be satisfied with less (esp. for the price); they also need to peddle the potboilers that bring home the bacon. Also, budding artists will find it difficult to stay solvent long enough to become better than the computer. Being an artist is hard enough as it is. Now it risks becoming a pastime for the rich, even in rich countries.
        • cm2012 3y ago
          Yeah but any productivity increasing tech decreases the size of the market to some extent, that's a separate issue than ownership
  • alehlopeh 3y ago
    There’s no vote happening though. You do understand that, right?
• 7e 3y ago
  AIs do not create new works. They merely blend multiple copyrighted works together to create a new derived work. Just because the derived work comes from multiple authors doesn’t make it fair use.
  • orangecat 3y ago
    AIs do not create new works. They merely blend multiple copyrighted works together to create a new derived work. Depending on your definition for "new works" this is either false, or true and also true of most humans.
  • lsaferite 3y ago
    > They merely blend multiple copyrighted works together to create a new derived work Is this true though? If your model is trained on multiple copyrighted works to learn the statistical probabilities and relationships between tokens of those works, because they represent examples of common language usage, that's not storing a copyrighted work en masse. If those probabilities happen to pump out a chunk of copyrighted work it's due to the statistical relationship between the tokens (overfitting?), not that it's saved that specific content.
• AK42 3y ago
  Isn't web crawling essentially "training data" ?
  • jonny_eh 3y ago
    Just because something is published on the web, it doesn't mean it's free of copyright protections.
  • TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
    Nope. That just indexing, i.e. making an index. That said, Google does cache other people's content and walks a fine line doing so - there is also that AMP thing. They probably haven't gotten sued because they don't affect those websites' ad revenue - don't know how that works.
    • sebzim4500 3y ago
      AMP is opt-in, isn't it? Presumably the website has agreed to their data being distributed in that way.
• mongol 3y ago
  So we have a copyrighted work. A program reads it and somehow processes it, and does its AI thing . But in the very first step, the work is copied verbatim into the program, right? Even if it is not reproduced, is it allowed to process a copyrighted work for arbitrary purposes, as long as it is not further reproduced? Let's say I could mine coins from hashes of a copyrighted text. Would that infringe on the copyright? I don't know what copyright _really_ means, I realize
  • orangecat 3y ago
    But in the very first step, the work is copied verbatim into the program, right? Even if it is not reproduced, is it allowed to process a copyrighted work for arbitrary purposes, as long as it is not further reproduced? In some cases yes, otherwise search engines couldn't exist.
    • mongol 3y ago
      Yes search engines are a good analog. Are search engines allowed to index and make copyrighted works searchable, _without_ permission from the cooyright holder? I seem to recall that Google did not get it their way with Google Books?
      • sebzim4500 3y ago
        Google won the Google Books case. And they were actively scanning books rather than just indexing the internet like OpenAI is.
        • ang_cire 3y ago
          They were scanning books they had legally-obtained copies of. OpenAI is very often downloading whole books which they do not have licenses for. Publicly-accessible does not equal legal to download, in US copyright law.
  • henryfjordan 3y ago
    Any time you make a copy of an expressive work without express permission from the author (in the form of a license), you are committing copyright infringement. Fair Use is a defense to copyright infringement. Under certain circumstances you are allowed to commit copyright infringement. For instance you can copy a short scene from a movie if you are making a review/commentary video. OpenAPI is arguing that training AI models should be a "fair use". They are not claiming they never used copyrighted materials.
• sillysaurusx 3y ago
  If you liked reading this, you might also like reading through the Authors Guild class action lawsuit against OpenAI, filed a couple weeks ago: https://authorsguild.org/app/uploads/2023/09/Authors-Guild-OpenAI-Class-Action-Complaint-Sep-2023.pdf https://authorsguild.org/app/uploads/2023/09/Authors-Guild-O... (Notably, John Grisham and George R.R. Martin are plaintiffs.) It cites OpenAI's justification (which is how I found it) and tries to refute it. Whether the court will agree remains to be seen. Other lawsuits: Silverman vs OpenAI https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67569254/silverman-v-openai-inc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67569254/silverman-v-op... (complaint PDF: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.415174/gov.uscourts.cand.415174.1.0_2.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.41...)
  • sethrin 3y ago
    > It cites OpenAI's justification (which is how I found it) and tries to refute it. I actually didn't see any refutation in either complaint. I'm not sure that I would have expected to, given that fair use is an affirmative defense, but I would certainly be interested in an attempt to address it.
    • sillysaurusx 3y ago
      Partly. One of the refutations is that they say there will be substantial economic impact on authors from generative AI, which is one of the four criteria in OpenAI’s fair use claims (point #4). You’re right that the complaint seems to go “all in” on this one particular point, rather than listing reasons to refute points 1 through 3. That seems surprising, but maybe it’s a good legal strategy since there’s less attack surface to raise objections.
      • sethrin 3y ago
        The economic impact discussion to my reading is actually intended to establish standing, by showing a concrete and particularized harm to the plaintiffs. Generally, a well-formed complaint is trying to establish that there exists a 'case or controversy' which the court is able to redress, not necessarily to answer all questions of law, and generally not to make prophylactic arguments about your opponents' hypothetical defenses. The USPTO document is being used as an example of OpenAI admitting copyright infringement, which they seem to have been happy to do -- one hopes that they fully anticipated this lawsuit.
• Palmik 3y ago
  Summary of their arguments for why training on copyrighted datasets is OK: (1) Training AI systems on large copyrighted datasets constitutes fair use under current copyright law. They believe it is highly transformative, does not harm the market for the original works, and serves a different purpose than the original works. (2) If it were an infringement, it would severely hinder AI progress, which has many societal benefits. Copyright law should promote creativity and innovation. (3) Other legal tools like infringement suits on AI outputs, anti-scraping laws, etc can address valid concerns instead of rigid copyright laws. Expanding on (1), they say: (1.a) The corpora used for training are not made publicly accessible - they are only consumed by machines during training. So authors do not lose any potential audience. (1.b) The outputs of AI systems do not regenerate significant portions of the original works verbatim. The systems learn general patterns, not the specific expression of any particular work. (1.c) Well-constructed AI systems do not overfit on any particular work. Each work contributes very minimally to the overall model. --- I think we should not be stopping progress, but this document 100% minimizes the impact/harm. Soon AI writers and programmers will be so good, that even if they do not reproduce copyright content verbatim, they will be able to replace large % of the future work of the people that produced the copyrighted content the AI was trained on. This seems like a clear harm. Given that the datasets are the product of the whole population, the whole population should be able to reap the benefits. As things are heading, only the largest corporations will be able to squeeze profit from the most powerful models. This goes against (1.a), if one company can use the data for training, it should be made easily accessible to everyone. Side note for (1.b), many companies implement this as a dumb filter on top of the LLM output, making sure that no N character substring appears in some copyrighted text.
  • judge2020 3y ago
    > Soon AI writers and programmers will be so good, that even if they do not reproduce copyright content verbatim, they will be able to replace large % of the future work of the people that produced the copyrighted content the AI was trained on. This seems like a clear harm. Note that "harm the market for the original works" is only a part of Fair Use and harming the original work does not necessarily make your use of it 'not fair use'. Movie critics using movie clips can absolutely destroy the market for the original work while still being fair use criticism. Now whatever the USPTO says/does is important for now, but it's a backdrop to the legal challenges that will arise. Because the USPTO has to adhere to new laws and must follow whatever the courts rule regarding how copyright is defined, if the USPTO tries to say "ai is not fair use" then the courts can disagree with them and issue a Court Order to recognize certain copyrights, whenever someone challenges the USPTO's actions.
• debrice 3y ago
  I always felt that if you want fairness and want to rip the full benefits of your creation (here AI) you should also be assuming full responsibilities for it. This is were most organizations fell short as they are always trying shift all responsibility to their users (self driving anyone?).
  • aldousd666 3y ago
    When you have millions of users, and your product has inherent danger, you can't assume the liability for all of them. (hammers and nails anyone?) The only reason that Microsoft has agreed to be liable for their users copyright stuff is because they know this case is a winner for OpenAI and that it does indeed meet merit for fair use. They wouldn't do that to 'be nice,' because not even microsoft can foot the bill for millions of users being sued. Their only alternative would be to not produce the product.
    • ang_cire 3y ago
      You are missing that the AI is the one creating the output. If I sell you a hammer and nails, I'm not liable if you create a dangerous building. If you ask me to build you a dangerous building and I do it, I am liable if people get hurt. OpenAI wants to pretend that its users are creating the output because they write the prompt, but this is just plainly false, and OpenAI's own limits they put on output shows they know this. Otherwise they'd let the models output information about how to write exploits, how to kill people, etc, which they don't.
    • debrice 3y ago
      If you product has inherent danger you should be responsible for it, I don't think it's unreasonable. If you're asking the same rights as human beings, then you should assume the same exact responsibilities
• yieldcrv 3y ago
  > Legal uncertainty on the copyright implications of training AI systems imposes substantial costs on AI developers and so should be authoritatively resolved Why are they writing to the USPTO, when that's the wrong agency for this matter and the US Copyright Office has already authoritatively resolved this as well as at least one lower court in the federal judicial branch
• Topfi 3y ago
  To add some important context, as far as I can tell (I am not very knowledgeable in US filing, so someone please correct me if I am wrong), this was submitted in late 2019, and it stands to reason that a lot of the more recent developments, especially concerning the quality of possible output, may have led to this topic being looked at more intensely by legal experts than four years ago during the era of GPT-2. Perhaps the year could be added to the title to help put this in the proper context.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• nblgbg 3y ago
  I am just curious not an opinion, if OpenAI is not making money, does it still count as fair use? We do remember many songs that we have not paid for. As long as I am not trying to make money, does the logic of fair use hold?
  • judge2020 3y ago
    There is this[0] from the USC, but Fair Use is a complex topic that requires every aspect of the statute be considered. For example, tons of YouTubers make a lot of money based on Fair Use, such as (good) react channels who actually criticise/review/add transformative content to their reviews that show a lot of the original work, sometimes even a substantial/full portion of the original work. But it's also not fair use to just disable ads on a video/make nothing from it, and show the full original content/movie with just a video of you eating popcorn under the movie. Any claim of Fair Use ultimately has to be decided by a judge/jury. 0: (1)the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107
  • creer 3y ago
    Nothing in "fair use" is about the new work making money or not. You can write criticism or commentary that includes bits of the original work and make money selling that new work. You can't give a free concert and argue that it being free makes that music performance fair use.
    • p_j_w 3y ago
      >Nothing in "fair use" is about the new work making money or not. This is completely wrong, at least in the US. It is explicitly laid out in the law that whether the new work is commercial vs. not for profit/educational is one of four factors to consider in deciding whether or not it's fair use.
      • creer 3y ago
        Yes and no. There is a distinction between "making money" and "commercial". But even then it's pretty slim in the law. For once the US law is short and compact. (Keeping in mind that in the US much of the law is in regulations and how the law has been used in earlier cases - still usually the law is not short...) Here it is: - ---------- 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include— (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors. - ------------ In the US, plenty of criticism is done as part of a job, an enterprise to make money, a business. Same for news reporting, same for teaching, etc. The new work makes money - at least as part of an overall activity - or it doesn't exist. So after that it's up to the court to interpret "commercial nature" within the previous list of activities that are mostly professional. Anyway: You'll have a better time is you can claim "nonprofit educational" - even if you make money by selling the new work. You can make money selling the new work, and still operate a nonprofit, non-commercial legal entity.
• lionkor 3y ago
  If they believed this, they could "just" check all generated output and check it against the training data, and make sure nothing is verbatim, and then censor that like any inappropriate content. But of course, they know, this doesnt work because it does reproduce verbatim copyrighted content a lot.
• PaulHoule 3y ago
  I'd make the case that if training an A.I. on text is a copyright infringement than training a human how to use language or be an expert in a field by watching TV, listening to the radio, and reading books is copyright infringement. For instance warblogger Denys Davydov boasts that uses a VPN to circumvent restrictions so he can watch the TV show Friends to improve his English. On top of any other copyright violation that is going on, his ability to speak English belongs to Warner Media.
  • evdubs 3y ago
    Copyright infringement is about making a copy. It is not making a copy if you read a book. It is not making a copy if you watch TV. It is not making a copy if you listen to the radio. If Denys makes a video/audio file of himself quoting a large segment from "Friends", that's copyright infringement. When machines train on a corpus of data, that corpus data is a copy and is almost certainly infringing on copyright (depending on how they acquired it). When machines use their training model and reproduce verbatim copyrighted works that they've been trained with, that copy is infringing (depending on licenses they acquired to reproduce copyrighted data).
    • PaulHoule 3y ago
      When I read a book I read a "copy" of that book, which was typically reproduced on paper under contract with the copyright owner. The model is not capable of reproducing the input verbatim (not enough synapses to do that and it wouldn't generalize properly if there were) although the training process does involve producing a cleaned up text which is typically retained. (The point of building your language skills from watching "Friends" or an LLM developing linguistic/world knowledge competence or the simulation thereof from reading text is not that the text can be regurgitated, but that you or the the model develops a generalized capacity.) (... if LLMs were able to remember everything they read, why do we always catch them confabulating?) It would be possible in principle to point a camera at the book, OCR it in real time, and feed that into the training process. Of course this would be slow and wouldn't benefit from the cleanup process that goes into making a training set. Note that somebody could stick a fine grid of wires into my V1 visual cortex and extract something that looks very much like an image of what I am focusing on at the moment. Thus, for just a few milliseconds an image "copy" of a text I am reading exists in my brain.
• acomjean 3y ago
  Likely content creators will encrypt everything, then use the DMCA to protect it from any use they don't want. Then the act of "Decryption to feed your AI" not being acceptable according to the licenses you are granted with your book or image unless explicitly allowed. Information returning to a locked up state will start make its return. Its going to make the world much less open and much less pleasant. It will be to protect "the creators" (which it will do) but more so protect the corporate creative companies (movies, music, books, tv).
  • greggsy 3y ago
    IMO, the most likely outcome will be a move towards stronger checks to validate personhood. The sociotechnical changes necessary to do this effectively are already in motion, facilitated through the big three consumer identity providers - Apple, Google and Microsoft. State-run services could also play a part. There are privacy preserving means of doing this safely, but they would need to be extremely robust in order to gain and maintain the public’s trust.
• StarterPro 3y ago
  Not sure if its new, but I tried to get the first 4 paragraphs of "The Grapes of Wrath" and received the following: This content may violate our content policy or terms of use. If you believe this to be in error, please submit your feedback — your input will aid our research in this area. So they have something in place to avoid straight up infrigement.
• ben7799 3y ago
  I am OK with AI being allowed to train on publicly accessible data, I'm not sure I see a big difference between me reading something publicly accessible versus a computer program reading the data. I do think however that we are mostly ignoring cases where the AI literally does plagiarize the training data. I've seen some very egregious examples of Chat GPT "generating" code that is line-by-line copied from Open Source code and could be in violation of licenses, and Chat GPT does not cite the original source. You ask Chat GPT to write something relatively simple and the output looks OK, but you ask it to do something very specific and it seems to like to spit back a copy of OSS code that someone already wrote.
  • dheera 3y ago
    > I do think however that we are mostly ignoring cases where the AI literally does plagiarize the training data. So just punish the AI just like you would punish a human? Take it to court, have it respond before a judge, if it loses it will be subject to having GPUs taken out.
    • IshKebab 3y ago
      Yes I think that's fine. So OpenAI is more or less safe, but it also means that nobody can really use copilot without a fairly huge legal risk. Probably solvable though. Can't be that hard to do a fuzzy search of the training set for similar code.
      • dheera 3y ago
        The point I was trying to illustrate is that our legal system needs to change from one that is focused on punishment to one that is focused on rectifying the problem, for non-violent, reversible crimes like plaigarism. When the legal system can make that change, it becomes a non-issue.
        • deleted 3y ago
          [deleted]
    • 3y ago
• pierat 3y ago
  Ugh, this is the result of a "right to copy" and capitalism rears its ugly head with systems that can ingest massive quantities of information. Where this can lead to, I see, is that Universities and companies will move to claim "ownership" of their students thoughts and content, no matter how far away they are from that institution. I know my username is "pierat", for obvious reasons... but sharing and learning from information is not just human, but most animals do this. And we all learn from our experiences and from what others do. Even reading stories gives us new ideas how to do things and think about stuff, yet nobody would say anything about inspirations stemming from experiencing content... even though if there's no "copyright" on our minds eye. Now, we have what amounts to a simulacrum that has no real personality of its own, with the crystallized knowledge from terabytes of sources publicly available online. And it's mostly similarly functional to a young human in terms of connections and understanding (not much). If the plaintiffs win, that sets the stage of IPR ownership of human and similar minds. If OpenAI wins, it means mass consumption of any data, anywhere, to be fed into a system for the profit of a very few. Either way, we the public lose.
  • jprete 3y ago
    IANAL, but the government and courts aren't obligated to treat AI learning and human learning as equivalent, just because a lot of AI boosters want to blend the two together for the fair use argument.
• Bjartr 3y ago
  Don't forget, there are two discussions here. One is around whether use of copyrighted works in training violates current laws. The other is whether the answer to the first question is to society's benefit, and if not, how should the law be changed to make it so.
• class4behavior 3y ago
  When it comes to AI, I'm less interested in the aspect of copyright infringement - it's more of an anti-trust issue, imho - as in the privacy concerns that the tech enables, but if you can forbid reverse engineering of your product, I don't see how's that that much different with AI. Besides, no harm to the market of the original works? They're quite shameless.
• Someone 3y ago
  FTA: “courts have rejected the argument that commercial fair use is by its nature invalid” They don’t mention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,.... There, initial settlements had book authors share revenues with Google, and Google was allowed to go ahead with the project because Google Books complied with (from that Wikipedia page) “the four traditional factors […] that decide whether use of a copyrighted work constitutes fair use under United States copyright law”, stating “Google Books enhances the sales of books to the benefit of copyright holders.” Of course this is a different case, but I think it’s similar enough for a judge to at least consider whether what OpenAI does is to the benefit of copyright holders. Unless they start revenue sharing with copyright holders or paying them, I don’t see how they can be.
  • ang_cire 3y ago
    Yeah, it seems like so many people in here are shilling for AI companies over actual creators, it is absolutely depressing. No one is arguing that OpenAI should not be allowed to train on copyrighted works, they are arguing that OpenAI should not be allowed to train on copyrighted works FOR FREE. OpenAI should, just like anyone else who wants to make use of a work (even in a transformative way, like having a clip from a song or movie playing in the background of their movie), have to make an agreement with the copyright holder that allows use for training. Of course, OpenAI doesn't want this because actually paying all the artists who their business relies on would be too expensive, so they just want to claim that they should be allowed to use the work anyways.
    • JeremyNT 3y ago
      > Yeah, it seems like so many people in here are shilling for AI companies over actual creators, it is absolutely depressing. It's the general sentiment on HN. Remember this forum is based in SV, moving fast, breaking things, tech eating the world, all that. This is a really complex issue. Personally I really dislike copyright as it has been used in practice up to now: as a way to lock culture and progress away behind the control of megacorporations. But now we have the case where the megacorporations are suggesting that they should be immune to such restrictions, free to bypass them given that their bots "transform" the original works. It actually seems like copyright is the only possible check on their power. I can't claim to know how the matter of law will be resolved here, but "always bet on the biggest corporations winning" is a generally useful heuristic to apply. By far the worst outcome would be that megacorps are deemed immune from obeying copyright restrictions when consuming creative works, but are somehow still protected by copyright when their bots spit out derived works.
• iamnafets 3y ago
  Doesn't this line of argumentation undermine OpenAI's TOS which disallow training models on their output?
  • dragonwriter 3y ago
    No. If it was a copyright violation to use it that way without a license, the ToS would not need to explicilty probibit it (though it might still do so for the sake of clarity.) OTOH, ToS and other contracts limit behavior in ways that the law itself would otherwise not, that's the whole point of having them.
• kklisura 3y ago
  Hypothetically: if we would to dump prompts and GPT answers and collect them in order to train some new network on it - would that be fair use or infringement? My guess is OpenAI would not look favorably upon that situation and they would claim infringement. Is there anything in their ToS about this?
• umvi 3y ago
  Say we put up a ton of red tape around what you are allowed to train on to develop an LLM... how does that not result in a future where China (who ignores such laws) becomes the new world leader in AI/LLMs? I guess if we hobble the ability of US companies to make good LLMs, we'll all start using ChatBaidu instead of ChatGPT.
  • ang_cire 3y ago
    If Sinophobia is a valid justification to ignore laws, you can do just about anything.
• aldousd666 3y ago
  I think they successfully make their case and cite enough previous examples that they will win this. Individual users will get sued for infringement if they do silly things with the output, but I don't think training will be considered infringement after reading this document.
• User23 3y ago
  What’s your justification for learning from copyrighted materials? Why aren’t your reconfigured neural connections a derivative work that needs to be licensed from the original rights holder?
• Chatting 3y ago
  "The fair use of a copyrighted work [...] for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include— (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work." -- 17 U.S. Code § 107 (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107) I don't know how one can read this as an impartial observer and make an honest argument that OpenAI is in the right. Their use of copyrighted material does not fit any of the purposes enumerated in the first paragraph; it fails criteria #1 because it is of a commercial nature; it fails criteria #2 because it includes all kinds of works; it fails criteria #3 because it's not limited to very small extracts; and it fails at criteria #4 because their products are already having an obvious effect on the market.
  • garba_dlm 3y ago
    but it also fails on the very philosophical framework used to come up with those laws they're using philosophical frameworks older than digital computers; which is ok, and is as should be. up to the point where those ways to understand fail to capture certain qualities of computers and digital technology which break the whole notion of copyright and have been doing it for a few decades now. those lawmakers are using obsolete philosophy! but we gotta wait until they all die off, is not like people, specially older people, are willing or possibly able to change how they think I blame digital technology, it just doesn't work like the rest of reality does...
    • make3 3y ago
      using obsolete philosophy has never stopped a supreme court judge from upholding shit written by the founding fathers
• TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
  Frankly, the point of copyright - an artificial monopoly on the reproduction of a work - is to encourage people to create by allowing them to financially benefit from their works. If letting AI train on whatever their masters want and it results in a reduction of creative works being created ... I think governments might just amend the law to fix that - rendering all the "lawyering" by OpenAI over current copyright laws moot.
  • dragonwriter 3y ago
    Its worth noting that Fair Use, while now also incorporated into statute which Congress can change by refular law, was first articulated by courts as a First Amendment limit on the copyright power, and later incorporated as statute law (which is why its kind of a fuzzy statute: it just literally reproduced the judicially-articulated multifactor test.) So, fair use arguments probably cannot be overcome by simple statutory change.
    • TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
      Free speech is about expression. It doesn't say anything about consumption. I think congress can ban the feeding of copyrighted content to AI. But IANAL.
    • ang_cire 3y ago
      Sure, in terms of removing Fair Use entirely, but nothing about Fair Use is absolute, and it can absolutely be substantially changed and reinterpreted. Especially since this is about companies using Fair Use for financial gain, in ways that could absolutely harm the original creators, which runs completely counter to Fair Use's 1A intent.
      • dragonwriter 3y ago
        > Sure, in terms of removing Fair Use entirely, but nothing about Fair Use is absolute, and it can absolutely be substantially changed and reinterpreted Yes, the courts could change how they interpret the first amendment restriction on the copyright power, but absent that, the interpretation binds the power and Congress cannot expand the scope by weakening the statutory articulation of the pre-existing court intepretation of the boundary of that limit. (Now, trying to do so would be a way to push the courts to reconsider the boundary, but that's about it.)
• sensanaty 3y ago
  Wow the Micro$oft backed megacorp whose entire business model relies on having unfettered access to infinite data says they should get that data for free and shouldn't have to credit the people they're stealing the data from. What a completely unexpected stance for them to take. I'm getting real tired of AI sycophants anthropomorphizing these data hoovering black boxes and pretending AI === Human Brains
  • archontes 3y ago
    Well, as long as you're tired... Who cares what the stupid law says.
  • adroitboss 3y ago
    The data was already free. It was posted to the internet for anyone's viewing pleasure.
• SergeAx 3y ago
  I am all in for training data being fair use as long as ML-infered data are not copyrighted.
• iambateman 3y ago
  In this case, the technology is so new and so transformative, this question can’t really be answered by the law. Perhaps existing law can help inform, but the question of how we handle LLM technology should not be left to the courts…it must be answered by our culture. First, fair use has basic assumptions which are being violated here. The LLM use case is so far outside of the original concept of fair use that it’s not useful to draw a connection. Creating something which approximates an intelligence requires new thinking based on what outcomes we as a culture want. It’s like a restaurant selling an all-you-can-eat buffet for $24 only to be greeted by a child with an infinite appetite. Our friends at OpenAI have introduced us to questions we didn’t know we needed to ask…questions poorly addressed by systems like fair use, patents, and even capitalism in general. The primary questions I see are: - how can we truly guarantee long-term, equal access to LLM’s for all Americans? Our copyright instincts suggest that the inventors of the technology should be allowed to determine its usage, but given the scope and scale of LLM’s, I’m not sure that’s true. - how can we legislate safety, to guarantee sane controls are in place for researchers? If we can guarantee safety and equity, I believe LLM’s have an incredibly bright future.
• jessenaser 3y ago
  Humans may read entire books, movies, art, music, and fit these complex ideas into a neural graph that does not resemble the original. Then humans can output information related to that medium from their neural graph in an expressive form. The word human can be replaced with the word GPT-4. So time to ban humans learning? I think not.
  • ang_cire 3y ago
    Humans have legal rights like 1A that form the basis for many carve-outs like Fair Use. GPT-4 does not.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • jessenaser 3y ago
      A robot can post comments, or make a song out of an algorithm that a human designed, however the robot did not infringe copyright because what it is communicating is of its own source. If a robot was tasked to download images and re-post them, then it would infringe copyright. No matter if the robot did it or the human did it. Since this robot does not have autonomy, we refer to the human who instructed it.
      • ang_cire 3y ago
        Right, which OpenAI is trying to argue should not apply to their illegal downloading of copyrighted material for training use.
        • jessenaser 3y ago
          Googlebot downloads and crawls pages and stores bits about that page to deliver search. Humans also manually download and crawl pages on the internet (in view of their web browser). In the brief moments before storage in the mind or in the database, the entire medium is available to Googlebot or humans. After its encoding it cannot be put back to the original in a way to infringe its copyright. At best, humans could recite quotes but not the entire work. Since Googlebot and humans do not distribute their verbatim copies, but destroy the original form, and later can only be probed to say similar but not identical things about the original data, there is not copyright infringement.
• Animats 3y ago
  There are a large number of similar acts routinely performed by humans which are not considered copyright violations. - Reading multiple books and writing an essay on the subject. - Summarizing an article. - Learning to paint by looking at museum collections and then painting similar pictures. The problem is not that AI systems are doing something new. It's that they are doing something old, but much more cheaply and in volume. What might be justified is some minimum distance between input and output. Some LLMs do tend to replicate input text, but that problem seems to have been much reduced.
  • HDThoreaun 3y ago
    Has anyone learned to paint by just looking at museum collections? Painting has tons of technical technique that aren’t self evident just from looking at a painting
    • Animats 3y ago
      Not "just looking". In some museums, you'll see artists set up in front of paintings, practicing to duplicate them. It's like music practice.
• artninja1988 3y ago
  It should be fair use imo
• ang_cire 3y ago
  Something that is very disturbing in seeing people compare AI models to humans is the seeming implication by many of them that humans only have rights because a law says they do, and that there are no rights inherent to being a human (which AI models are not). Arguing that because a human can do something, an AI model should be allowed to as well, shows a remarkable lack of value of humans. Humans are more valuable than AI models, and should retain many inherent rights that AI models should not. AI models are just pieces of software, they're not actual intelligence or sentience or life. And companies using them are just profit-driven companies, not benevolent child-rearers of a new lifeform. This entire case is just a corporate power-grab seeking to profit from the work of others for free without legal repercussion, and it's sad seeing so many people jump to support the corporations.
  • red-iron-pine 3y ago
    > a corporate power-grab seeking to profit from the work of others for free without legal repercussion, and it's sad seeing so many people jump to support the corporations lol who do you think posts on HN? a tech startup blog run by an incubator. half of us are those people, or aspire to be.
    • ang_cire 3y ago
      I'm a Bay Area startup alumni, so closer to the actual VC scene than most on here, and all the actual successful founders I know have a pretty strong belief in the good that their products will bring, even if they usually overstate the likely impacts quite a bit. "Move fast and break stuff" != "...and run people over in the process". Are there greedy a-holes in every space? Of course. But if you think that's the default mindset at startups, I don't feel like you're going to have much success in the space. Do I think OpenAI probably thinks that their work is less impactful to Steven King's sales than he is claiming? Absolutely. Do I think they're lying to themselves about the actual negative impacts of their work because they think their product is really cool and has so many potential uses? Absolutely. Do I think they secretly all just want to be the guy with the boot, crushing artists' livelihoods and pushing for regulatory capture, like you seem to be implying they (and others here) are? No.
• puppycodes 3y ago
  Intellectual property in general is a harmful model that creates false value through forced scarcity. I'm hopeful AI will at least have a hand in destroying this mode of thinking. Everything is a derivitive work and digital content should simply not be subject to copyright whatsoever.
• jamager 3y ago
  I am not a lawyer, but it isn't "fair use" an US thing? Haven't they been sued from other countries where they had released their products?
• baerrie 3y ago
  The claim that AI is transformative is baseless atm. And no, sophisticated sales person/helper chat bots are not transformative. They are merely replacing existing resources, not removing their need or easing any real pain
• OrangeMusic 3y ago
  Kagi Summary: The document discusses whether training artificial intelligence (AI) systems on large amounts of copyrighted material constitutes fair use under copyright law. It argues that AI training should be considered a fair use for several reasons: - AI training is highly transformative - the purpose is to develop useful systems, not expressive communication. This weighs strongly in favor of fair use according to court precedent. - It has little impact on the original works' markets, since AI systems consume data non-expressively. Authors lose no audience. - Analogous cases found search engines' indexing and displaying of thumbnails/snippets as fair use due to their transformative nature. AI training is even more transformative. - Strict copyright barriers could jeopardize AI's social benefits and drive innovation abroad. Other legal tools like infringement suits are better to address potential harms. In conclusion, the document makes a compelling case that under current law, training AI systems should qualify as a fair use of copyrighted works to avoid hampering an important technology with significant potential benefits.