11 ms·

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

• 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.