5 ms·

"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 factor

"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 Nature of the work (e.g. fiction/non-fiction, published/unpublished) 3.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.
    - jazzyjackson 3y ago
      The law is not clear, otherwise it wouldn't have to go to the supreme court to contrive the notion of "time-shifting" to allow for making personal copies. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Uni....
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - marcinzm 3y ago
        Sure which is why saying it's absolutely a violation isn't a correct interpretation. So is saying it's absolutely not a violation. Even if the supreme court rules on the issue it's not absolutely anything because that ruling only applies until a future supreme court potentially changes its mind.
        rpdillon 3y ago
        I understand how my use of "absolutely" could be misleading. I'll attempt to clarify. My understanding of the reality: * Violations of those four rights give copyright holders standing to sue over duplication. * Fair Use is a defense against that violation. What I was trying to get at in my first post above is that it is a violation of copyright law as the law is written, and because of this, you expose yourself to lawsuits when you make copies for personal use (assuming anyone could ever find out...I'm not, and never have, argued that copyright law is correct or good). The fact that you can defend yourself using a Fair Use defense is also important and a good point, but still requires hiring a lawyer, going to court, and winning. In my book, this is quite a bit different than saying it's not a violation. IANAL, though I follow this fairly closely, and I'm not aware of any cases that have established that copying for personal use is Fair Use; I'd be very happy to read through a decision that establishes this!
rpdillon 3y ago
The models that are trained on these inputs absolutely do not contain all of the text that they're trained on. Even with non-quantized models you're looking at somewhere in the realm of 3% of the training data being present in the final model. Further, these models are not used to reproduce copyrighted works... they would be one of the least efficient ways to do so. I also don't think there's a particularly strong argument that training on a book or image decreases the market for the original book or image. To take an example, zero folks that want to read Game of Thrones are asking ChatGPT to generate Game of Thrones for them instead of buying the book. I think what's really happened here is that artists' work has utility outside of the originally intended audience, that utility largely comes from statistically analyzing the writing, and the debate is about whether or not the utility of those statistics requires additional compensation for the artists. That question seems to hinge on the intricacies of copyright law, but as I've stated before, I think the fair use argument is quite strong.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  >I also don't think ... that training on a book or image decreases the market for the original book or image. ... zero folks that want to read Game of Thrones are asking ChatGPT to generate Game of Thrones ... For now. But when you can generate work in the style of an artist without paying that artist, I would. More importantly, media production companies will and so will use access to people's post work to put them out of work now. We need to distribute the benefits, we're drifting towards copyright infringement being allowed by rich corporation (with resources to generate "AI") as long as they abstract it through a transformer, or whatever.
  - antifa 3y ago
    Crypto was a decentralized ponzi scheme. AI will be decentralized mass copyright infringement.
    - artninja1988 3y ago
      Copyright laws are fascist and should be abolished
CamperBob2 3y ago
The copyright violation, if there is one, is committed by the person who extracts data from the model and uses or distributes it in ways not permitted by law. Not by the person who feeds data into the model... and not by the model itself, for merely retaining an unrecognizable, unusable, highly-compressed and -transformed representation internally. Seems simple enough. Any other judicial outcome will either halt the process of human intellectual evolution, or transfer a staggering amount of power to people who DGAF about US copyright law. So be careful what you wish for.
troupe 3y ago
> "Fair use" doesn't generally include taking the author's entire work (or for that matter, his entire lifetime's corpus). If someone studies every one of Stephen King's books, studies King's style, studies his plots, etc. and uses the knowledge to learn how to be a writer, there is no need to invoke "fair use" unless they are actually copying King's books. Studying an author's corpus in order to be able to produce works like the author is not copyright infringement. It is just the way we learn...and the way LLMs learn as well. If we want to say it isn't allowed because LLM read too quickly, then we could do that. Maybe make them not read any faster than humans. But LLMs aren't doing something different than humans other than just the speed at which they do it.
- ang_cire 3y ago
  If you read the PDF, you'd know that OpenAI admits they ARE actually copying his books, in order to train on them, and they are arguing that this is okay because they don't want to have to obtain a legal copy of the work, because that would be too expensive. They are literally arguing they should be allowed to illegally download stuff so long as no human reads the downloaded work directly. To further your analogy, it would be like your prospective writer objecting to being arrested for stealing the books from the bookstore because he just wanted to become a better writer by studying them, not read them for entertainment purposes.
  - pests 3y ago
    This reminds me of the Google Books lawsuit back in the 2010s. Google didn't ask permission from every copyright holder but was still allowed to scan books due to fair use.
    - kelseyfrog 3y ago
      This very lawsuit is referenced in OpenAI's memo as precedent > Perhaps the most compelling case on point is Authors Guild v. Google. There, search engine Google digitally scanned “tens of millions of books” without their authors’ permission for inclusion in a searchable digital database.

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.
  - jazzyjackson 3y ago
    The law is not clear, otherwise it wouldn't have to go to the supreme court to contrive the notion of "time-shifting" to allow for making personal copies. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Uni....
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - marcinzm 3y ago
      Sure which is why saying it's absolutely a violation isn't a correct interpretation. So is saying it's absolutely not a violation. Even if the supreme court rules on the issue it's not absolutely anything because that ruling only applies until a future supreme court potentially changes its mind.
      - rpdillon 3y ago
        I understand how my use of "absolutely" could be misleading. I'll attempt to clarify. My understanding of the reality: * Violations of those four rights give copyright holders standing to sue over duplication. * Fair Use is a defense against that violation. What I was trying to get at in my first post above is that it is a violation of copyright law as the law is written, and because of this, you expose yourself to lawsuits when you make copies for personal use (assuming anyone could ever find out...I'm not, and never have, argued that copyright law is correct or good). The fact that you can defend yourself using a Fair Use defense is also important and a good point, but still requires hiring a lawyer, going to court, and winning. In my book, this is quite a bit different than saying it's not a violation. IANAL, though I follow this fairly closely, and I'm not aware of any cases that have established that copying for personal use is Fair Use; I'd be very happy to read through a decision that establishes this!

rpdillon 3y ago

The models that are trained on these inputs absolutely do not contain all of the text that they're trained on. Even with non-quantized models you're looking at somewhere in the realm of 3% of the training data being present in the final model. Further, these models are not used to reproduce copyrighted works... they would be one of the least efficient ways to do so. I also don't think there's a particularly strong argument that training on a book or image decreases the market for the original book or image. To take an example, zero folks that want to read Game of Thrones are asking ChatGPT to generate Game of Thrones for them instead of buying the book. I think what's really happened here is that artists' work has utility outside of the originally intended audience, that utility largely comes from statistically analyzing the writing, and the debate is about whether or not the utility of those statistics requires additional compensation for the artists. That question seems to hinge on the intricacies of copyright law, but as I've stated before, I think the fair use argument is quite strong.

pbhjpbhj 3y ago
>I also don't think ... that training on a book or image decreases the market for the original book or image. ... zero folks that want to read Game of Thrones are asking ChatGPT to generate Game of Thrones ... For now. But when you can generate work in the style of an artist without paying that artist, I would. More importantly, media production companies will and so will use access to people's post work to put them out of work now. We need to distribute the benefits, we're drifting towards copyright infringement being allowed by rich corporation (with resources to generate "AI") as long as they abstract it through a transformer, or whatever.
- antifa 3y ago
  Crypto was a decentralized ponzi scheme. AI will be decentralized mass copyright infringement.
  - artninja1988 3y ago
    Copyright laws are fascist and should be abolished

CamperBob2 3y ago

The copyright violation, if there is one, is committed by the person who extracts data from the model and uses or distributes it in ways not permitted by law. Not by the person who feeds data into the model... and not by the model itself, for merely retaining an unrecognizable, unusable, highly-compressed and -transformed representation internally. Seems simple enough. Any other judicial outcome will either halt the process of human intellectual evolution, or transfer a staggering amount of power to people who DGAF about US copyright law. So be careful what you wish for.

troupe 3y ago

> "Fair use" doesn't generally include taking the author's entire work (or for that matter, his entire lifetime's corpus). If someone studies every one of Stephen King's books, studies King's style, studies his plots, etc. and uses the knowledge to learn how to be a writer, there is no need to invoke "fair use" unless they are actually copying King's books. Studying an author's corpus in order to be able to produce works like the author is not copyright infringement. It is just the way we learn...and the way LLMs learn as well. If we want to say it isn't allowed because LLM read too quickly, then we could do that. Maybe make them not read any faster than humans. But LLMs aren't doing something different than humans other than just the speed at which they do it.

ang_cire 3y ago
If you read the PDF, you'd know that OpenAI admits they ARE actually copying his books, in order to train on them, and they are arguing that this is okay because they don't want to have to obtain a legal copy of the work, because that would be too expensive. They are literally arguing they should be allowed to illegally download stuff so long as no human reads the downloaded work directly. To further your analogy, it would be like your prospective writer objecting to being arrested for stealing the books from the bookstore because he just wanted to become a better writer by studying them, not read them for entertainment purposes.
- pests 3y ago
  This reminds me of the Google Books lawsuit back in the 2010s. Google didn't ask permission from every copyright holder but was still allowed to scan books due to fair use.
  - kelseyfrog 3y ago
    This very lawsuit is referenced in OpenAI's memo as precedent > Perhaps the most compelling case on point is Authors Guild v. Google. There, search engine Google digitally scanned “tens of millions of books” without their authors’ permission for inclusion in a searchable digital database.