4 ms·

Yeah it's surprising to me how many people who were previously skeptical of IP laws in general, are all on board to use them to attack AI companies, advocating

Yeah it's surprising to me how many people who were previously skeptical of IP laws in general, are all on board to use them to attack AI companies, advocating that a copyright holder should have the right to control exactly how their work can be used by any downstream system. The nightmare scenario I see is, if this principle is established for AIs, it will not just be restricted to AIs. Human artists too will eventually be required to only create new commercial works under license, based on the artistic works they have been exposed to. The result will that it be impossible to be create art commercially except by working for a large content company with a large existing IP library and cross-licensing agreements with other rights holders. And if you think this is an impossible scenario, ask yourself when lawyers, lobbyists and politicians have ever shrank from expanding legal rights for corporations at the expense of individuals, even when the vast majority of people would not agree to the expansion. Today's absurdity is tomorrow's legal reality, and the chance to fully control creative expression will be far too tempting to turn down.

danaris 3y ago
[flagged]
- MightyBuzzard 3y ago
  AI is not reproducing it any more than someone inspired by it creating something new in the same style would be. They're just greedy ass hats.
  - danaris 3y ago
    "Regular people writing and creating artwork are greedy asshats for wanting it to remain possible to be compensated for their creations" is really not a strong argument, especially against "massive, wealthy companies want to be able to create works that mimic the style of these artists and writers for profit with zero marginal cost in perpetuity".
    - MightyBuzzard 3y ago
      [dead]
  - AlexandrB 3y ago
    > AI is not reproducing it any more than someone inspired by it creating something new in the same style would be. This argument implies that AI scientists have replicated the human mind. Despite the hype, they have not. The two processes are not the same, nor is the nature of the "training data" both entities have been trained on.
    - hn_acker 3y ago
      >> AI is not reproducing it any more than someone inspired by it creating something new in the same style would be. > This argument implies that AI scientists have replicated the human mind. No, MightyBuzzard was not necessarily making an argument about the way the human mind is. Suppose that an AI model is prompted to make an image in X artist's style, and a human is commissioned to make an image in the same X artist's style. The result from the AI model cannot be ex-ante assumed to be more of a reproduction of X artist's actual works than is the result from the human. What matters first is the actual similarity of the new works to one or more old works. The method of creation of the new work comes second. If the style of the new work is similar to the style of the old work but the new work is not actually substantially similar to any of the old works, then the method of creation doesn't matter. 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] The key phrase is "the work". An actual work, not a style. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity#Substantial_similarity_in_copyright_infringement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity#Substan...
Arainach 3y ago
"Skeptical of IP law" does not mean I believe IP law should not exist. I believe copyright terms in the US are too long and should be more like 20 years, but I do not believe everything should be a free for all where any person or any program can immediately reuse any idea.
- MightyBuzzard 3y ago
  Works are not ideas, they are expressions. Protecting ideas is insane.
  - Arainach 3y ago
    I disagree. Protecting ideas for a limited duration is how you incentivize creation. If someone comes up with a new machine, why publish it if it's legal for every factory and large company to start producing them without compensating the inventor? Why sell it yourself if any big company can immediately clone it and undercut your price? As for "works", I also disagree. Consider music: two artists may have unique performances of a piece, but the composition exists separate from either.
    - malwrar 3y ago
      > If someone comes up with a new machine, why publish it if it's legal for every factory and large company to start producing them without compensating the inventor? Why sell it yourself if any big company can immediately clone it and undercut your price? Because you want to make money? There will always be a period in which you exclusively are manufacturing and marketing your machine, before your hypothetical evil omni-corp manages to clone it. Reverse engineering takes time, and (fair, enforced) competition on manufacturing means that we converge on the true cost to manufacture a good faster.
      - Arainach 3y ago
        That period is a matter of hours. Unless you already own a plant, the companies that produce goods produce generic clones with the same tooling after hours. New fashion trends have clones in online stores in days. Unofficial accessories and cases are available before product launches. Crowdfunded campaigns for hardware have clones on Alibaba before the funding campaign is over.
waffletower 3y ago
An even more serious risk, is the establishment of a de facto "pay per thought" society -- an economic state where mind/machine interfaces improve and proliferate due to capabilities, and memory and thought itself become monetized by the totalist application of copyright laws. The endgame of copyright is exceptionally bleak.
gedy 3y ago
Yeah a lot of the objections I've heard about AI revolve around "it can copy an artist's style" or "they didn't intend it to be used that way" which are mostly legal now by humans, either by being fair use or not copyrightable today. I don't want to change this! Let's not use "AI" as an excuse to tighten copyright even further. Last thing I want is more "Blurred Lines" style lawsuits[0]. [0] https://www.berklee.edu/berklee-today/summer-2015/coda/richard-niles https://www.berklee.edu/berklee-today/summer-2015/coda/richa...
- nullindividual 3y ago
  ChatGPT is outright ripping straight from copyrighted works. https://www.404media.co/google-researchers-attack-convinces-chatgpt-to-reveal-its-training-data/ https://www.404media.co/google-researchers-attack-convinces-...
  - ithkuil 3y ago
    Just playing devil's advocate for a moment (I'm still trying to figure out myself what I think about all that): When I watch a painting in a gallery and after a few weeks I paint something inspired by what I saw, am I breaking the copyright law? If I sell such a painting, am I breaking the copyright law? I guess it also depends on how much the painting is similar. Is it an outright copy? Is it lure plagiarism? Is it just inspired by? Does it matter whether I paid the museum or bought the book where I saw the picture?
    - rijoja 3y ago
      aha if I watch at your credit card for ten minutes, and then goes shopping on eBay using the information, and order stuff that I desire. If I sell what I bought on for profit, am I breaking the law? It depends on how much I'm willing to deceive myself. Is it outright theft? Is it pure luck? Is it divine intervention? The algorithm leaks 1:1 personal details of people, which means that they didn't care to sanitize the data, which is an obvious oversight, you're not really doing a great job of being the devils advocate if you ask me.
toss1 3y ago
The problem isn't so much "reading" (i.e., training on or ingesting) the copyrighted content, it is writing it out again. Artists, writers, and coders are rightly angered when I can simply say "make a painting of XYZ in the style of Foo", and have a painting rendered that is nearly an exact copy of an item in the training set. Similar analogy for writing or code. I see now that when trying to specify an image of an impossible object with ChatGPT4+DALL-E, it will balk if I say "like an Escher object". I have to be more verbose, and it will not render his signature style. As long as particular artistic or writing or coding styles aren't specify-able and generate-able, this seems like a reasonable fair use solution, and does not require us to suddenly become copyright maximalists. (Without such prohibitions on generation of similar works, we must become copyright maximalists.)
AlexandrB 3y ago
If AI companies and their benefactors are so concerned about this, they should be pushing for shorter copyright terms and more fair use exemptions. AFAIK they are not. Probably because they're hoping to lock up the AI models and possibly their output under the same onerous copyright system they flaunted when it was convenient for "training". Rules should be applied fairly. It's galling to see small creators get content taken down by DMCA strikes and then have large, well-funded players scoop up everything they can with no issue.
wredue 3y ago
I don’t accept your ridiculous slippery slope. “We should allow AI to have unilateral access to licensed works for free cause then we will have to restrict human artists otherwise” We already have separated digital and human artist laws and the law has, thus far, not had too much trouble accidentally thinking that humans are CPUs and vice versa.

danaris 3y ago

[flagged]

MightyBuzzard 3y ago
AI is not reproducing it any more than someone inspired by it creating something new in the same style would be. They're just greedy ass hats.
- danaris 3y ago
  "Regular people writing and creating artwork are greedy asshats for wanting it to remain possible to be compensated for their creations" is really not a strong argument, especially against "massive, wealthy companies want to be able to create works that mimic the style of these artists and writers for profit with zero marginal cost in perpetuity".
  - MightyBuzzard 3y ago
    [dead]
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  > AI is not reproducing it any more than someone inspired by it creating something new in the same style would be. This argument implies that AI scientists have replicated the human mind. Despite the hype, they have not. The two processes are not the same, nor is the nature of the "training data" both entities have been trained on.
  - hn_acker 3y ago
    >> AI is not reproducing it any more than someone inspired by it creating something new in the same style would be. > This argument implies that AI scientists have replicated the human mind. No, MightyBuzzard was not necessarily making an argument about the way the human mind is. Suppose that an AI model is prompted to make an image in X artist's style, and a human is commissioned to make an image in the same X artist's style. The result from the AI model cannot be ex-ante assumed to be more of a reproduction of X artist's actual works than is the result from the human. What matters first is the actual similarity of the new works to one or more old works. The method of creation of the new work comes second. If the style of the new work is similar to the style of the old work but the new work is not actually substantially similar to any of the old works, then the method of creation doesn't matter. 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] The key phrase is "the work". An actual work, not a style. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity#Substantial_similarity_in_copyright_infringement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity#Substan...

Arainach 3y ago

"Skeptical of IP law" does not mean I believe IP law should not exist. I believe copyright terms in the US are too long and should be more like 20 years, but I do not believe everything should be a free for all where any person or any program can immediately reuse any idea.

MightyBuzzard 3y ago
Works are not ideas, they are expressions. Protecting ideas is insane.
- Arainach 3y ago
  I disagree. Protecting ideas for a limited duration is how you incentivize creation. If someone comes up with a new machine, why publish it if it's legal for every factory and large company to start producing them without compensating the inventor? Why sell it yourself if any big company can immediately clone it and undercut your price? As for "works", I also disagree. Consider music: two artists may have unique performances of a piece, but the composition exists separate from either.
  - malwrar 3y ago
    > If someone comes up with a new machine, why publish it if it's legal for every factory and large company to start producing them without compensating the inventor? Why sell it yourself if any big company can immediately clone it and undercut your price? Because you want to make money? There will always be a period in which you exclusively are manufacturing and marketing your machine, before your hypothetical evil omni-corp manages to clone it. Reverse engineering takes time, and (fair, enforced) competition on manufacturing means that we converge on the true cost to manufacture a good faster.
    - Arainach 3y ago
      That period is a matter of hours. Unless you already own a plant, the companies that produce goods produce generic clones with the same tooling after hours. New fashion trends have clones in online stores in days. Unofficial accessories and cases are available before product launches. Crowdfunded campaigns for hardware have clones on Alibaba before the funding campaign is over.

waffletower 3y ago

An even more serious risk, is the establishment of a de facto "pay per thought" society -- an economic state where mind/machine interfaces improve and proliferate due to capabilities, and memory and thought itself become monetized by the totalist application of copyright laws. The endgame of copyright is exceptionally bleak.

gedy 3y ago

Yeah a lot of the objections I've heard about AI revolve around "it can copy an artist's style" or "they didn't intend it to be used that way" which are mostly legal now by humans, either by being fair use or not copyrightable today. I don't want to change this! Let's not use "AI" as an excuse to tighten copyright even further. Last thing I want is more "Blurred Lines" style lawsuits[0]. [0] https://www.berklee.edu/berklee-today/summer-2015/coda/richard-niles https://www.berklee.edu/berklee-today/summer-2015/coda/richa...

nullindividual 3y ago
ChatGPT is outright ripping straight from copyrighted works. https://www.404media.co/google-researchers-attack-convinces-chatgpt-to-reveal-its-training-data/ https://www.404media.co/google-researchers-attack-convinces-...
- ithkuil 3y ago
  Just playing devil's advocate for a moment (I'm still trying to figure out myself what I think about all that): When I watch a painting in a gallery and after a few weeks I paint something inspired by what I saw, am I breaking the copyright law? If I sell such a painting, am I breaking the copyright law? I guess it also depends on how much the painting is similar. Is it an outright copy? Is it lure plagiarism? Is it just inspired by? Does it matter whether I paid the museum or bought the book where I saw the picture?
  - rijoja 3y ago
    aha if I watch at your credit card for ten minutes, and then goes shopping on eBay using the information, and order stuff that I desire. If I sell what I bought on for profit, am I breaking the law? It depends on how much I'm willing to deceive myself. Is it outright theft? Is it pure luck? Is it divine intervention? The algorithm leaks 1:1 personal details of people, which means that they didn't care to sanitize the data, which is an obvious oversight, you're not really doing a great job of being the devils advocate if you ask me.

toss1 3y ago

The problem isn't so much "reading" (i.e., training on or ingesting) the copyrighted content, it is writing it out again. Artists, writers, and coders are rightly angered when I can simply say "make a painting of XYZ in the style of Foo", and have a painting rendered that is nearly an exact copy of an item in the training set. Similar analogy for writing or code. I see now that when trying to specify an image of an impossible object with ChatGPT4+DALL-E, it will balk if I say "like an Escher object". I have to be more verbose, and it will not render his signature style. As long as particular artistic or writing or coding styles aren't specify-able and generate-able, this seems like a reasonable fair use solution, and does not require us to suddenly become copyright maximalists. (Without such prohibitions on generation of similar works, we must become copyright maximalists.)

AlexandrB 3y ago

If AI companies and their benefactors are so concerned about this, they should be pushing for shorter copyright terms and more fair use exemptions. AFAIK they are not. Probably because they're hoping to lock up the AI models and possibly their output under the same onerous copyright system they flaunted when it was convenient for "training". Rules should be applied fairly. It's galling to see small creators get content taken down by DMCA strikes and then have large, well-funded players scoop up everything they can with no issue.

wredue 3y ago

I don’t accept your ridiculous slippery slope. “We should allow AI to have unilateral access to licensed works for free cause then we will have to restrict human artists otherwise” We already have separated digital and human artist laws and the law has, thus far, not had too much trouble accidentally thinking that humans are CPUs and vice versa.