3 ms·

This is just a hit piece which tries to frame scraping whole internet as-is as fair-use, because it's profitable for the AI companies, that's all. There are th

This is just a hit piece which tries to frame scraping whole internet as-is as fair-use, because it's profitable for the AI companies, that's all. There are things on the internet which can be shared freely, but not allowed to be altered. Similarly there are things which are for your eyes only (source-available licensed software, for example), and not to be built-upon. AI companies bundle all of them, say that their models are learning like a human, and this is fair use and training data is non-reproducible. Then someone shows that their code, work, poem, whatever can be emitted as-is, damaging them; same companies act surprised, and a couple of censor filters, and go on. This is not fair use.

davexunit 3y ago
Yeah, it's just copyright laundering. If this is deemed legal, then it's fair to return the favor by doing things like training models on proprietary source code to build free software. Effectively killing copyright would be the best possible outcome.
- Spivak 3y ago
  But it isn't. If the AI produces a work found to be a copyright violation it isn't magically not just because it was made by AI. This nonsense has laid bare for the world just how little people actually understand copyright. The only interesting question is whether the models themselves violate copyright and it's a tough sell without being able to actually show the copy. Because even if it's able to make something similar to your work it doesn't show the model actually contains a copy of it. If you coax a model to make an image that violates copyright it's gonna be hard to say that it's anything other than you using an advanced drawing tool to copy an image.
  - bayindirh 3y ago
    Let's imagine an hypothetical LLM, which has been trained on books, published by publishers (companies). Thousands, thousands of book which are not out of their copyright terms, without telling to their authors. All of the things emitted by this LLM will be a remix of these books. Will the outputs of this LLM be a violation of copyright? I bet it will be. Let's train the same AI, on self-published, but again copyrighted material. Will the outputs of this LLM be a violation of copyright? I bet it should be. but, in reality, in discourse, we see that if it's company IP, then ordinary people are doing it wrong because it's copyright violation, and if it's people's IP, then ordinary people are doing it wrong, because it's fair use. Copyrighting things are not a privilege given to corporations. If it's fair use, I can train a voice model with Freddie Mercury's voice, and make him a vocal of my garage band, but RIAA will end my life, but if a company samples my sound and reproduces for a video without my consent, it'll be fair use because I don't have 1000 lawyers. This is what bothers me.
    - Spivak 3y ago
      Once you read the dictionary everything else is just a remix by your own definition. > If it's fair use, I can train a voice model with Freddie Mercury's voice This is where it falls down. If it's fair use you can train your AI using clips of his voice. It does not give you the right to then produce a sample similar enough to one of his songs and use it in your own (without royalties). But you absolutely can use your FM voice to sing your own song because voices can't be copywriitten.
    - 2devnull 3y ago
      “fair use because I don't have 1000 lawyers” That the legal system operates differently for those with greater wealth is a more general, certainly important problem, but not specific to LLMs or copyright. One hopeful thought to consider, if big corporations like Disney use generative ai that have been trained on Joe Nobody’s artwork, and they will most likely, now Joe Nobody can sue Disney, and he may be able to find attorney’s because Disney has enough money to make themselves a lucrative target for lawsuits. Maybe this isn’t how the legal system works, I have very little knowledge of copyright law.
      - confidantlake 3y ago
        Yeah good luck going up against Disney. They are described as a law company with an entertainment side business. I am not even going to write everything I want to say because even as a random nobody on an anon account it is still far too dangerous.
cle 3y ago
Whether it's fair use or not (under US law) is still very unclear to me. Consider the "fair use" criteria laid out in Folsom v. Marsh: 1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes This is quite muddied. OpenAI is in some commercial and non-profit superposition, and many of its users are commercial and using the technology for commercial applications. But a huge swath of its users are using it for nonprofit educational purposes too. I use it primarily for learning, along with most people I know who use it. IMO there's no clear characterization here, given the information we have. Maybe a court could compel more information to clarify this. 2) the nature of the copyrighted work I don't know enough about it to have an opinion. 3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and This is also unclear to me, because the models are effectively word-lossy compression, so are unlikely to reproduce substantial portions of works that impact the copyright holder. But they could in some cases. 4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work Also unclear. I can easily imagine scenarios where the use of an LLM has a negative market impact on a copyright holder, but I can also imagine scenarios where it has a positive impact (ex "Give me some book recommendations"). What's the net impact? No idea.
- bayindirh 3y ago
  Well, I was discussing Large Language Models (LLMs) as a technology, and esp, via this video [0] with a friend, just now. He made a striking remark. LLMs compress the information they ingest in a variably-lossy way, and when you query them, they rebuild a representation from whole or part of this compressed data in a statistical manner. As a result they're a lossy storage medium. Not unlike some music formats which store audio data in a lossy way. You know, this data can be restored with mathematical and statistical wizardry. You don't get everything you put in, but 97%-99% out of it, and companies and RIAA went bonkers for years, because even if it's not an exact reproduction, it was a reproduction enough, and this is a copyright violation. If an LLM can reproduce what I have written, or coded with 97%-99% accuracy without any license information, and I licensed this thing with less than permissive licenses, and sue the maker of that LLM, what will happen? - Will it be a copyright infringement? - Will it be fair use? It's the first if you look at it fairly, but it'll be probably be the latter, because money, fame and other corporate points will be at stake, otherwise. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjkBMFhNj_g&start=323 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjkBMFhNj_g&start=323 Edit: I forgot to add the video. :)
bonton89 3y ago
> AI companies bundle all of them, say that their models are learning like a human, and this is fair use and training data is non-reproducible. Then someone shows that their code, work, poem, whatever can be emitted as-is, damaging them; same companies act surprised, and a couple of censor filters, and go on. If it is fair use, why are they adding censor filter exceptions at all? "Tim Burton's style" appears to be a banned term on Bing Chat Enterprise.
hn_acker 3y ago
> This is just a hit piece which tries to frame scraping whole internet as-is as fair-use, because it's profitable for the AI companies, that's all. No, the Matthew Lane's argument (the author of the article being Matthew Lane) is that the AI model as a whole cannot be ex-ante assumed to be an infringement on the copyrights to one or works in the training set. Copyright is about the actual works, and infringement is about the similarity between actual outputs by models and existing works by humans. My argument is that similarity of new works (including AI model outputs) to actual works (not to non-existing works, existing styles, or theoretical aggregations of multiple works) is a prerequisite to infringement. From an article about the substantial similarity test in the US [1]: > To win a claim of copyright infringement in civil or criminal court, a plaintiff must show he or she owns a valid copyright, the defendant actually copied the work, and the level of copying amounts to misappropriation.[1][3] In order to get an infringing output, the user usually has to include a reference to an existing author or an existing work in the prompt. Sometimes that's not the case (which I've worried about with respect to Copilot), but in order to damn the model as a whole, you would have to establish that in over some percentage of cases the model produces infringing outputs for prompts which don't reference a particular author (whether individual or collective), a particular work, or a style strongly associated with a single or a few authors. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity
geraldhh 3y ago
> This is just a hit piece which tries to frame scraping whole internet as-is as fair-use google already did that, 20 years ago
- bayindirh 3y ago
  But, Google didn't train a LLM which ripped all license, context and author information, and provided a mishmash of information which can't be guaranteed to be true. They just mapped the connection between the sites, and provided summaries of it, derived from the sites themselves verbatim. They didn't create new articles from what they seen, generated new code from code they have harvested and disregarded its license, etc.
  - geraldhh 3y ago
    mostly untrue, but irrelevant
    - bayindirh 3y ago
      Pretty relevant, actually. Care to elaborate on untrue parts and/or your take?
      - geraldhh 3y ago
        if you must ... > But, Google didn't train a LLM they sure did > They just mapped the connection between the sites, and provided summaries of it, derived from the sites themselves verbatim. summary is an out-of-context, altered version of the source material. alteration of intent is pretty much a given. see quick answers > They didn't create new articles from what they seen, generated new code from code they have harvested and disregarded its license, etc. see above. for the code side, the oracle lawsuit comes to mind. gpl-violations notwithstanding if something is on the internet, it's in the public domain. whether you like it or not, it will be copied, altered, remixed, shared. that's why the internet is so great. anyways, the original point was the indiscriminate scraping, which again, is common practice.

davexunit 3y ago

Yeah, it's just copyright laundering. If this is deemed legal, then it's fair to return the favor by doing things like training models on proprietary source code to build free software. Effectively killing copyright would be the best possible outcome.

Spivak 3y ago
But it isn't. If the AI produces a work found to be a copyright violation it isn't magically not just because it was made by AI. This nonsense has laid bare for the world just how little people actually understand copyright. The only interesting question is whether the models themselves violate copyright and it's a tough sell without being able to actually show the copy. Because even if it's able to make something similar to your work it doesn't show the model actually contains a copy of it. If you coax a model to make an image that violates copyright it's gonna be hard to say that it's anything other than you using an advanced drawing tool to copy an image.
- bayindirh 3y ago
  Let's imagine an hypothetical LLM, which has been trained on books, published by publishers (companies). Thousands, thousands of book which are not out of their copyright terms, without telling to their authors. All of the things emitted by this LLM will be a remix of these books. Will the outputs of this LLM be a violation of copyright? I bet it will be. Let's train the same AI, on self-published, but again copyrighted material. Will the outputs of this LLM be a violation of copyright? I bet it should be. but, in reality, in discourse, we see that if it's company IP, then ordinary people are doing it wrong because it's copyright violation, and if it's people's IP, then ordinary people are doing it wrong, because it's fair use. Copyrighting things are not a privilege given to corporations. If it's fair use, I can train a voice model with Freddie Mercury's voice, and make him a vocal of my garage band, but RIAA will end my life, but if a company samples my sound and reproduces for a video without my consent, it'll be fair use because I don't have 1000 lawyers. This is what bothers me.
  - Spivak 3y ago
    Once you read the dictionary everything else is just a remix by your own definition. > If it's fair use, I can train a voice model with Freddie Mercury's voice This is where it falls down. If it's fair use you can train your AI using clips of his voice. It does not give you the right to then produce a sample similar enough to one of his songs and use it in your own (without royalties). But you absolutely can use your FM voice to sing your own song because voices can't be copywriitten.
  - 2devnull 3y ago
    “fair use because I don't have 1000 lawyers” That the legal system operates differently for those with greater wealth is a more general, certainly important problem, but not specific to LLMs or copyright. One hopeful thought to consider, if big corporations like Disney use generative ai that have been trained on Joe Nobody’s artwork, and they will most likely, now Joe Nobody can sue Disney, and he may be able to find attorney’s because Disney has enough money to make themselves a lucrative target for lawsuits. Maybe this isn’t how the legal system works, I have very little knowledge of copyright law.
    - confidantlake 3y ago
      Yeah good luck going up against Disney. They are described as a law company with an entertainment side business. I am not even going to write everything I want to say because even as a random nobody on an anon account it is still far too dangerous.

cle 3y ago

Whether it's fair use or not (under US law) is still very unclear to me. Consider the "fair use" criteria laid out in Folsom v. Marsh: 1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes This is quite muddied. OpenAI is in some commercial and non-profit superposition, and many of its users are commercial and using the technology for commercial applications. But a huge swath of its users are using it for nonprofit educational purposes too. I use it primarily for learning, along with most people I know who use it. IMO there's no clear characterization here, given the information we have. Maybe a court could compel more information to clarify this. 2) the nature of the copyrighted work I don't know enough about it to have an opinion. 3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and This is also unclear to me, because the models are effectively word-lossy compression, so are unlikely to reproduce substantial portions of works that impact the copyright holder. But they could in some cases. 4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work Also unclear. I can easily imagine scenarios where the use of an LLM has a negative market impact on a copyright holder, but I can also imagine scenarios where it has a positive impact (ex "Give me some book recommendations"). What's the net impact? No idea.

bayindirh 3y ago
Well, I was discussing Large Language Models (LLMs) as a technology, and esp, via this video [0] with a friend, just now. He made a striking remark. LLMs compress the information they ingest in a variably-lossy way, and when you query them, they rebuild a representation from whole or part of this compressed data in a statistical manner. As a result they're a lossy storage medium. Not unlike some music formats which store audio data in a lossy way. You know, this data can be restored with mathematical and statistical wizardry. You don't get everything you put in, but 97%-99% out of it, and companies and RIAA went bonkers for years, because even if it's not an exact reproduction, it was a reproduction enough, and this is a copyright violation. If an LLM can reproduce what I have written, or coded with 97%-99% accuracy without any license information, and I licensed this thing with less than permissive licenses, and sue the maker of that LLM, what will happen? - Will it be a copyright infringement? - Will it be fair use? It's the first if you look at it fairly, but it'll be probably be the latter, because money, fame and other corporate points will be at stake, otherwise. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjkBMFhNj_g&start=323 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjkBMFhNj_g&start=323 Edit: I forgot to add the video. :)

bonton89 3y ago

> AI companies bundle all of them, say that their models are learning like a human, and this is fair use and training data is non-reproducible. Then someone shows that their code, work, poem, whatever can be emitted as-is, damaging them; same companies act surprised, and a couple of censor filters, and go on. If it is fair use, why are they adding censor filter exceptions at all? "Tim Burton's style" appears to be a banned term on Bing Chat Enterprise.

hn_acker 3y ago

> This is just a hit piece which tries to frame scraping whole internet as-is as fair-use, because it's profitable for the AI companies, that's all. No, the Matthew Lane's argument (the author of the article being Matthew Lane) is that the AI model as a whole cannot be ex-ante assumed to be an infringement on the copyrights to one or works in the training set. Copyright is about the actual works, and infringement is about the similarity between actual outputs by models and existing works by humans. My argument is that similarity of new works (including AI model outputs) to actual works (not to non-existing works, existing styles, or theoretical aggregations of multiple works) is a prerequisite to infringement. From an article about the substantial similarity test in the US [1]: > To win a claim of copyright infringement in civil or criminal court, a plaintiff must show he or she owns a valid copyright, the defendant actually copied the work, and the level of copying amounts to misappropriation.[1][3] In order to get an infringing output, the user usually has to include a reference to an existing author or an existing work in the prompt. Sometimes that's not the case (which I've worried about with respect to Copilot), but in order to damn the model as a whole, you would have to establish that in over some percentage of cases the model produces infringing outputs for prompts which don't reference a particular author (whether individual or collective), a particular work, or a style strongly associated with a single or a few authors. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity

geraldhh 3y ago

> This is just a hit piece which tries to frame scraping whole internet as-is as fair-use google already did that, 20 years ago

bayindirh 3y ago
But, Google didn't train a LLM which ripped all license, context and author information, and provided a mishmash of information which can't be guaranteed to be true. They just mapped the connection between the sites, and provided summaries of it, derived from the sites themselves verbatim. They didn't create new articles from what they seen, generated new code from code they have harvested and disregarded its license, etc.
- geraldhh 3y ago
  mostly untrue, but irrelevant
  - bayindirh 3y ago
    Pretty relevant, actually. Care to elaborate on untrue parts and/or your take?
    - geraldhh 3y ago
      if you must ... > But, Google didn't train a LLM they sure did > They just mapped the connection between the sites, and provided summaries of it, derived from the sites themselves verbatim. summary is an out-of-context, altered version of the source material. alteration of intent is pretty much a given. see quick answers > They didn't create new articles from what they seen, generated new code from code they have harvested and disregarded its license, etc. see above. for the code side, the oracle lawsuit comes to mind. gpl-violations notwithstanding if something is on the internet, it's in the public domain. whether you like it or not, it will be copied, altered, remixed, shared. that's why the internet is so great. anyways, the original point was the indiscriminate scraping, which again, is common practice.