7 ms·

This will be the greatest act of Intellectual Property theft in history. All because judges will be befuddled about what to do after hearing terms like “traini

This will be the greatest act of Intellectual Property theft in history. All because judges will be befuddled about what to do after hearing terms like “training data” and “compression”. We will, of course get the emails in 10-20 years showing that it’s all lies and that the CEOs of these companies knew exactly what they were doing. If this continues, AI will be the great inequality machine in history. Take data from 1,000,000 individuals, train your AI to replace them, compensate no one. You can do this in every area: driving, farming, cooking. Music. Just dispossess everyone of all their property by training an AI to copy all their work! What could be easier (and less morally right)…

treyd 3y ago
Intellectual property never really existed. Copyright is something we made up to extend the logic of commodities to the full value chain for books, which made sense 200 years ago. But it makes no sense to apply the logic of commodities to digitally produced and distributed media. The production of culture has been slowly becoming more distorted as cultural assets that should be and historically were held in common accumulates under the umbrella of massive intellectual property holders (Disney, Universal, etc) after we took the legal concept that was meant to apply to a much more narrow context and applied it broadly. They benefit disproportionally from intellectual property than individual artists do. The (recent) past dominating the present, being ruled by abstractions, and all that. Is it bad that this will be used to displace individual artists/creatives in the value chain of media production? Of course it is. But we shouldn't be responding to that by clinging harder to schemes that have outlived their usefulness, we should be developing new models for funding production.
- rvz 3y ago
  > Copyright is something we made up to extend the logic of commodities to the full value chain for books, which made sense 200 years ago. But it makes no sense to apply the logic of commodities to digitally produced and distributed media. Great! So given your articles are in the public domain on your website I can make millions out of it without given you a cent or direct credit and sources without paying you and can claim it all as my own then.
  - abakker 3y ago
    This argument kind of elides over how you will make the millions, when the author has not. The hypothetical of lost revenue needs to be validated by the evidence of actual revenue being made in this way. Right now, I see lots of interest in paying for the _tool_, but almost none in paying human wages for the _output_ of generative models. (I am not proposing that my above distinction is a legal test. Just pointing out that all these arguments would be more credible if actual ai generated works were being sold by AI companies)
    - rvz 3y ago
      As long as it is public domain it does not matter how the millions is made; ebook, book or newsletter. There is no recognition of 'lost revenue' for the commercialization of public domain works.
      - abakker 3y ago
        I don't disagree at all. The OP I was responding to mentioned non-public-domain works like a blog. My point was that we haven't yet seen the products of GenAI stuff really making money yet. People are paying for the tool, and people are paying for work that is being done using the tool, but nobody buys a book, image, movie, or similar from OpenAI or Google directly.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    Anyone who programs for a living should be making whatever preparations are possible for being replaced by an AI. If AIs are good at art they'll be better at coding. I have sympathy for the artists, but frankly this is progress and it can't be stopped. The economics are so lop-sided in favour of silicon that the law won't be able to hold it back without crippling society at large. Artists aren't the only ones affected and they may not even be the profession most impacted.
    - myaccountonhn 3y ago
      > I have sympathy for the artists, but frankly this is progress and it can't be stopped. Kinda sad that artists having their income even more crippled is seen as progress.
CrimsonRain 3y ago
There is no "taking data" going on. Nobody is going into your private locker and training on your painting, music or cooking recipes. If you put your "work" out in the world, anyone who views it, is automatically training their brains on it. Viewing is training.
- kranke155 3y ago
  Ok, so reproduce me a Picasso. You've seen one right?
  - test6554 3y ago
    Obligatory My first grader can do that.
  - WithinReason 3y ago
    AI can't reproduce a Picasso exactly either. That's the main reason the lawsuit was dismissed according to TFA.
- kranke155 3y ago
  It's funny to me that we haven't reached AGI or anywhere near it, but when we talk about training Diffusion models, suddenly they're "just like a person" for legal reasons. Same thing that happened on the construction of the "corporation as a person", built on top of rulings made to protect African Americans.
  - EnergyAmy 3y ago
    That's like saying "it's funny to me that this baby can't drive a car, but we still call it a 'person'". We've achieved AGI, it's just yet a baby. Only a few years ago, if you wanted a model that could complete a task, you'd have to train a model specific to that task. GPT-4 can do a large variety of tasks without being specifically trained on them, i.e. it's suitable for a wide range of general tasks. Yeah, it sucks at some of them, but focusing on that is short-sighted. Look at the progress made from just a few years ago and where it's going, especially with multimodality and increased compute power.
williamcotton 3y ago
Google “expert witness”! Courts are also known to hire their own experts who mediated between the experts on either side. Also, those emails seem very likely to be ordered to be produced during discovery. This thing could really go either way at this point but I feel like Stability has the upper hand. Imagine training a model without any of the plaintiffs images, then using that side by side with the model that does. This could then be used to show the jury that those individual works are of no importance to the system if the images are of the same quality. They will probably argue that the individual expressions of each work are not copied, rather the abstract ideas of two-dimensional representations present across any and all images. Expect lots of side by side pictures as Exhibits from both side! Grandma and her fellows have to weigh in on this one! This is a fun one!
- kranke155 3y ago
  Stable Diffusion has been known to make virtually identical copies of the images it was "trained" on, afaik. If the images are REALLY of no importance, they wouldn't have been used anyway.
  - williamcotton 3y ago
    And then the defense reminds the court that copyright is about specific works. Clearing the specific intent to copy a specific work is pretty key if you want to argue idea/expression or fair use or whatever their strategy may be. And yes, the nearly identical copies will definitely be presented to the jury.
  - michaelbrave 3y ago
    that's a gross oversimplification and an argument that was made in bad faith that has now spread like a meme. The gist was if you overtrain a model, and try to recreate an exact image by prompting very similar things, and run it several thousand times, then you can recreate an image. If you seriously crank up the overtraining it's even easier. But normal use of the models do not just pump out recreations of training data.
  - WithinReason 3y ago
olalonde 3y ago
Learning is not theft and never has been. I don't care whether it's a human or machine doing it. AI will benefit everyone enormously, even if it won't be equally distributed. The real issue here is that some skills are increasingly becoming obsolete and people have a hard time coping with that. Instead of demanding compensation, which would really be impractical to implement anyways, why not focus on developing new skills?
- kranke155 3y ago
  No that is not what people are upset about. They are upset that their life's work is being used without even asking permission, for someone else to get insanely rich. That's what they're upset about. If there were no use for 2D artists, then Stability Ai wouldn't be making an AI to replace them. Key word here is: replace. 2D artists are not becoming obsolete - they're being replaced by a machine that was trained on their works without permission. If you want to make an AI that does amazing paintings, and doesn't use human training data, more power to you. I can't compete with that. But if you use MY WORK to make a machine that's going to replace me, you do it under the cover of darkness and without permission - yeah i'll get pretty mad. What happened to visual artists was more like Logitech announcing Logitech CoPilot and revealing they've extracted code from keylogging for the past 20 years.
  - constantly 3y ago
    > No that is not what people are upset about. They are upset that their life's work is being used without even asking permission, for someone else to get insanely rich. That's what they're upset about. This is kind of petulant then, respectfully. They got paid to produce that work, and they sold their services for that paycheck and the knowledge that they were putting their work into the world. The fruits of their labor were already being used to make Disney, etc. massively wealthy. But this is even another step of indirection from that totally fine and reasonable situation: people (or machines) are learning from the work and producing their own. They might as well be angry at interns who learned their style to get junior jobs at Disney and who are now up and coming, replacing them.
harshreality 3y ago
If you memorize all of harry potter word for word, or some famous solo vocal track from memory, are you committing a copyright violation? Or only if you then recreate it and try to redistribute your copy? The scenario where AI training is locked down doesn't result in 1,000,000 individuals getting paid. (What would they get paid, and by whom?) It results in Disney, Adobe, etc.—massive companies with existing licenses to use content just about however they want—training their own models and locking everyone else out of the large AI model training game, until AI gets good enough to start generating human-quality creative work on its own (the same kind of progression as alphago/lee to alphago/zero), perhaps with the addition of a small set of purely copyright-free material. Excluding all copyrighted material would be tying an AI model's metaphorical hands behind its back, since humans, although capable of producing great works through much iterative effort in isolation, all rely on having learned from some copyrighted work. Find an author who hasn't read plenty of recent books as well as older classics, or a musician (other than classical) who hasn't listened to plenty of modern music, or a director or editor who hasn't watched tons of movies and films. Recall Newton, "[I]f I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Many of those "shoulders" are copyrighted.
- kranke155 3y ago
  Yes, and you know how humans acquire works to learn from? They pay for it. They buy the books. They buy tickets to theatre. They buy entrance to the gallery. The trick that's being done now is hey, we don't have to pay since it's not a person. (to the creator) But hey, it is just like a person when it learns! (legal system) If AI models require human training data, then they should pay for it. Easy.
  - harshreality 3y ago
    False. Libraries exist. Borrowing books from neighborhood libraries or friends exists. Watching movies and TV with friends exists. Listening to music on the radio (yes, those free electromagnetic thingies) still exists. There are many, many, many free performances or accessible copies of all kinds of copyrighted content, plenty to train either a neural net or a human brain on. Books3 has separate legal concerns, but Google has a legally acquired corpus of tons of books, which they've mostly cleaned up from scans (probably far better than IA has), and have probably used to train Bard on. Their lawyers must be biting their nails waiting to see how these lawsuits turn out, though. Until AGI arrives, or some other method of training LLMs from the ground up on sparse examples by incrementally building on structural knowledge of language.... training on ridiculous amounts of copyrighted content is required. Not because anyone wants to copy those works, but because training that way fills in for a lack of real-world experience that every child gets, which includes consuming and interacting with a bunch of copyrighted content that isn't tracked because it's not practical to do so. You could train a LLM only on project gutenberg, and the LLM would churn out stilted English and the occasional iambic pentameter. That's great if you want works that seem like they were written over a century ago, but nearly useless otherwise.
Kim_Bruning 3y ago
Just because it's on twitter doesn't mean it's true. I think a court setting where things are contemplated in a rigorous and reasoned way has a somewhat better chance of arriving at something resembling the truth. We've been here before several times: Silhouette painting, Photography, Airbrushing, Pianos, Synthesizers, Sampling, Photoshop, Ray Tracing, and many more. "It's not real art", "they're stealing from us", "we'll go hungry!" . Some of these are already quite old. For others, I've actually been asked the question back when I was in school: "Are you really making music if your instrument has a microprocessor in it?". Um, yes, yes I claim I am making music thank you very much. First people complain, then they adapt, and then they end up making awesome art with the new tools and/or instruments. Which isn't to say historically it was all rainbows and roses, but it was never the end of the world either. Seeing the newer generation of AI tools and how the tools end up getting integrated into regular workflows, it seems to be going the same direction. To quote the song, I think it's "all just little bits of history repeating".
- kranke155 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - EnergyAmy 3y ago
    I guess enjoy rejecting modern life. We're going to see an explosion of new works from people using these new tools in creative ways. I'm sure you'll say that you don't want anything to do with AI-generated art, but that will soon mean avoiding just about every new work.
    - kranke155 3y ago
      I have nothing against AI-generated art. It's the usage of unlicensed images and text in their training data that I have an issue with. If you wrote a book or made a painting, GPT-4 should pay for the rights to read or look at it.
      - EnergyAmy 3y ago
EnergyAmy 3y ago
Don't be silly. This was a level-headed ruling that avoids retarding the progress of science and the useful arts. I'd really like to see people drop the inequality argument. If you actually cared about that instead of virtue signaling, you'd push for a mandatory GPL-style license that forces models to be available to anybody that uses them. That would avoid trying to unsuccessfully put the genie back in the bottle, while also preventing a few companies from benefiting at the expense of everyone else. Just like OpenAI's original mission of making AI available for everyone, before they got dollar signs in their eyes.
surgical_fire 3y ago
> This will be the greatest act of Intellectual Property theft in history. Good. Intellectual Property is a mistake. If AI brings about its end, I welcome it.
- Illotus 3y ago
  Not really good if AI can run around it but to normal people it exists as before.
smrtinsert 3y ago
Is this supposed to be sarcastic, because this is impossible and you're arguing a strawman. You could also say electricity enabled this great inequality, we have got to stop electricity.
mock-possum 3y ago
Sing it with me now: Copying Is Not Theft https://youtu.be/IeTybKL1pM4 https://youtu.be/IeTybKL1pM4

treyd 3y ago

Intellectual property never really existed. Copyright is something we made up to extend the logic of commodities to the full value chain for books, which made sense 200 years ago. But it makes no sense to apply the logic of commodities to digitally produced and distributed media. The production of culture has been slowly becoming more distorted as cultural assets that should be and historically were held in common accumulates under the umbrella of massive intellectual property holders (Disney, Universal, etc) after we took the legal concept that was meant to apply to a much more narrow context and applied it broadly. They benefit disproportionally from intellectual property than individual artists do. The (recent) past dominating the present, being ruled by abstractions, and all that. Is it bad that this will be used to displace individual artists/creatives in the value chain of media production? Of course it is. But we shouldn't be responding to that by clinging harder to schemes that have outlived their usefulness, we should be developing new models for funding production.

rvz 3y ago
> Copyright is something we made up to extend the logic of commodities to the full value chain for books, which made sense 200 years ago. But it makes no sense to apply the logic of commodities to digitally produced and distributed media. Great! So given your articles are in the public domain on your website I can make millions out of it without given you a cent or direct credit and sources without paying you and can claim it all as my own then.
- abakker 3y ago
  This argument kind of elides over how you will make the millions, when the author has not. The hypothetical of lost revenue needs to be validated by the evidence of actual revenue being made in this way. Right now, I see lots of interest in paying for the _tool_, but almost none in paying human wages for the _output_ of generative models. (I am not proposing that my above distinction is a legal test. Just pointing out that all these arguments would be more credible if actual ai generated works were being sold by AI companies)
  - rvz 3y ago
    As long as it is public domain it does not matter how the millions is made; ebook, book or newsletter. There is no recognition of 'lost revenue' for the commercialization of public domain works.
    - abakker 3y ago
      I don't disagree at all. The OP I was responding to mentioned non-public-domain works like a blog. My point was that we haven't yet seen the products of GenAI stuff really making money yet. People are paying for the tool, and people are paying for work that is being done using the tool, but nobody buys a book, image, movie, or similar from OpenAI or Google directly.
- roenxi 3y ago
  Anyone who programs for a living should be making whatever preparations are possible for being replaced by an AI. If AIs are good at art they'll be better at coding. I have sympathy for the artists, but frankly this is progress and it can't be stopped. The economics are so lop-sided in favour of silicon that the law won't be able to hold it back without crippling society at large. Artists aren't the only ones affected and they may not even be the profession most impacted.
  - myaccountonhn 3y ago
    > I have sympathy for the artists, but frankly this is progress and it can't be stopped. Kinda sad that artists having their income even more crippled is seen as progress.

CrimsonRain 3y ago

There is no "taking data" going on. Nobody is going into your private locker and training on your painting, music or cooking recipes. If you put your "work" out in the world, anyone who views it, is automatically training their brains on it. Viewing is training.

kranke155 3y ago
Ok, so reproduce me a Picasso. You've seen one right?
- test6554 3y ago
  Obligatory My first grader can do that.
- WithinReason 3y ago
  AI can't reproduce a Picasso exactly either. That's the main reason the lawsuit was dismissed according to TFA.
kranke155 3y ago
It's funny to me that we haven't reached AGI or anywhere near it, but when we talk about training Diffusion models, suddenly they're "just like a person" for legal reasons. Same thing that happened on the construction of the "corporation as a person", built on top of rulings made to protect African Americans.
- EnergyAmy 3y ago
  That's like saying "it's funny to me that this baby can't drive a car, but we still call it a 'person'". We've achieved AGI, it's just yet a baby. Only a few years ago, if you wanted a model that could complete a task, you'd have to train a model specific to that task. GPT-4 can do a large variety of tasks without being specifically trained on them, i.e. it's suitable for a wide range of general tasks. Yeah, it sucks at some of them, but focusing on that is short-sighted. Look at the progress made from just a few years ago and where it's going, especially with multimodality and increased compute power.

williamcotton 3y ago

Google “expert witness”! Courts are also known to hire their own experts who mediated between the experts on either side. Also, those emails seem very likely to be ordered to be produced during discovery. This thing could really go either way at this point but I feel like Stability has the upper hand. Imagine training a model without any of the plaintiffs images, then using that side by side with the model that does. This could then be used to show the jury that those individual works are of no importance to the system if the images are of the same quality. They will probably argue that the individual expressions of each work are not copied, rather the abstract ideas of two-dimensional representations present across any and all images. Expect lots of side by side pictures as Exhibits from both side! Grandma and her fellows have to weigh in on this one! This is a fun one!

kranke155 3y ago
Stable Diffusion has been known to make virtually identical copies of the images it was "trained" on, afaik. If the images are REALLY of no importance, they wouldn't have been used anyway.
- williamcotton 3y ago
  And then the defense reminds the court that copyright is about specific works. Clearing the specific intent to copy a specific work is pretty key if you want to argue idea/expression or fair use or whatever their strategy may be. And yes, the nearly identical copies will definitely be presented to the jury.
- michaelbrave 3y ago
  that's a gross oversimplification and an argument that was made in bad faith that has now spread like a meme. The gist was if you overtrain a model, and try to recreate an exact image by prompting very similar things, and run it several thousand times, then you can recreate an image. If you seriously crank up the overtraining it's even easier. But normal use of the models do not just pump out recreations of training data.
- WithinReason 3y ago

olalonde 3y ago

Learning is not theft and never has been. I don't care whether it's a human or machine doing it. AI will benefit everyone enormously, even if it won't be equally distributed. The real issue here is that some skills are increasingly becoming obsolete and people have a hard time coping with that. Instead of demanding compensation, which would really be impractical to implement anyways, why not focus on developing new skills?

kranke155 3y ago
No that is not what people are upset about. They are upset that their life's work is being used without even asking permission, for someone else to get insanely rich. That's what they're upset about. If there were no use for 2D artists, then Stability Ai wouldn't be making an AI to replace them. Key word here is: replace. 2D artists are not becoming obsolete - they're being replaced by a machine that was trained on their works without permission. If you want to make an AI that does amazing paintings, and doesn't use human training data, more power to you. I can't compete with that. But if you use MY WORK to make a machine that's going to replace me, you do it under the cover of darkness and without permission - yeah i'll get pretty mad. What happened to visual artists was more like Logitech announcing Logitech CoPilot and revealing they've extracted code from keylogging for the past 20 years.
- constantly 3y ago
  > No that is not what people are upset about. They are upset that their life's work is being used without even asking permission, for someone else to get insanely rich. That's what they're upset about. This is kind of petulant then, respectfully. They got paid to produce that work, and they sold their services for that paycheck and the knowledge that they were putting their work into the world. The fruits of their labor were already being used to make Disney, etc. massively wealthy. But this is even another step of indirection from that totally fine and reasonable situation: people (or machines) are learning from the work and producing their own. They might as well be angry at interns who learned their style to get junior jobs at Disney and who are now up and coming, replacing them.

harshreality 3y ago

If you memorize all of harry potter word for word, or some famous solo vocal track from memory, are you committing a copyright violation? Or only if you then recreate it and try to redistribute your copy? The scenario where AI training is locked down doesn't result in 1,000,000 individuals getting paid. (What would they get paid, and by whom?) It results in Disney, Adobe, etc.—massive companies with existing licenses to use content just about however they want—training their own models and locking everyone else out of the large AI model training game, until AI gets good enough to start generating human-quality creative work on its own (the same kind of progression as alphago/lee to alphago/zero), perhaps with the addition of a small set of purely copyright-free material. Excluding all copyrighted material would be tying an AI model's metaphorical hands behind its back, since humans, although capable of producing great works through much iterative effort in isolation, all rely on having learned from some copyrighted work. Find an author who hasn't read plenty of recent books as well as older classics, or a musician (other than classical) who hasn't listened to plenty of modern music, or a director or editor who hasn't watched tons of movies and films. Recall Newton, "[I]f I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Many of those "shoulders" are copyrighted.

kranke155 3y ago
Yes, and you know how humans acquire works to learn from? They pay for it. They buy the books. They buy tickets to theatre. They buy entrance to the gallery. The trick that's being done now is hey, we don't have to pay since it's not a person. (to the creator) But hey, it is just like a person when it learns! (legal system) If AI models require human training data, then they should pay for it. Easy.
- harshreality 3y ago
  False. Libraries exist. Borrowing books from neighborhood libraries or friends exists. Watching movies and TV with friends exists. Listening to music on the radio (yes, those free electromagnetic thingies) still exists. There are many, many, many free performances or accessible copies of all kinds of copyrighted content, plenty to train either a neural net or a human brain on. Books3 has separate legal concerns, but Google has a legally acquired corpus of tons of books, which they've mostly cleaned up from scans (probably far better than IA has), and have probably used to train Bard on. Their lawyers must be biting their nails waiting to see how these lawsuits turn out, though. Until AGI arrives, or some other method of training LLMs from the ground up on sparse examples by incrementally building on structural knowledge of language.... training on ridiculous amounts of copyrighted content is required. Not because anyone wants to copy those works, but because training that way fills in for a lack of real-world experience that every child gets, which includes consuming and interacting with a bunch of copyrighted content that isn't tracked because it's not practical to do so. You could train a LLM only on project gutenberg, and the LLM would churn out stilted English and the occasional iambic pentameter. That's great if you want works that seem like they were written over a century ago, but nearly useless otherwise.

Kim_Bruning 3y ago

Just because it's on twitter doesn't mean it's true. I think a court setting where things are contemplated in a rigorous and reasoned way has a somewhat better chance of arriving at something resembling the truth. We've been here before several times: Silhouette painting, Photography, Airbrushing, Pianos, Synthesizers, Sampling, Photoshop, Ray Tracing, and many more. "It's not real art", "they're stealing from us", "we'll go hungry!" . Some of these are already quite old. For others, I've actually been asked the question back when I was in school: "Are you really making music if your instrument has a microprocessor in it?". Um, yes, yes I claim I am making music thank you very much. First people complain, then they adapt, and then they end up making awesome art with the new tools and/or instruments. Which isn't to say historically it was all rainbows and roses, but it was never the end of the world either. Seeing the newer generation of AI tools and how the tools end up getting integrated into regular workflows, it seems to be going the same direction. To quote the song, I think it's "all just little bits of history repeating".

kranke155 3y ago
[flagged]
- EnergyAmy 3y ago
  I guess enjoy rejecting modern life. We're going to see an explosion of new works from people using these new tools in creative ways. I'm sure you'll say that you don't want anything to do with AI-generated art, but that will soon mean avoiding just about every new work.
  - kranke155 3y ago
    I have nothing against AI-generated art. It's the usage of unlicensed images and text in their training data that I have an issue with. If you wrote a book or made a painting, GPT-4 should pay for the rights to read or look at it.
    - EnergyAmy 3y ago

EnergyAmy 3y ago

Don't be silly. This was a level-headed ruling that avoids retarding the progress of science and the useful arts. I'd really like to see people drop the inequality argument. If you actually cared about that instead of virtue signaling, you'd push for a mandatory GPL-style license that forces models to be available to anybody that uses them. That would avoid trying to unsuccessfully put the genie back in the bottle, while also preventing a few companies from benefiting at the expense of everyone else. Just like OpenAI's original mission of making AI available for everyone, before they got dollar signs in their eyes.

surgical_fire 3y ago

> This will be the greatest act of Intellectual Property theft in history. Good. Intellectual Property is a mistake. If AI brings about its end, I welcome it.

Illotus 3y ago
Not really good if AI can run around it but to normal people it exists as before.

smrtinsert 3y ago

Is this supposed to be sarcastic, because this is impossible and you're arguing a strawman. You could also say electricity enabled this great inequality, we have got to stop electricity.

mock-possum 3y ago

Sing it with me now: Copying Is Not Theft https://youtu.be/IeTybKL1pM4 https://youtu.be/IeTybKL1pM4