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That's why there is a safe harbor provision in DMCA.

grogenaut 3y ago
Does that provision allow them to build derivative works, when they get a dmca request do they retrain the AI after removing the copyrighted work?
- luma 3y ago
  Copyright law as it exists today allows one to create transformative works. There is little to suggest that an AI trained on copyrighted works is in any way violating that copyright when inference is run.
  - TheDong 3y ago
    Copyright law as it exists allows a creative process to create transformative works. Computers cannot create copyright. They are not creative. Just because I save your image as webp or jpeg or whatever doesn't mean I have changed the copyright. Just because I zip it up with a hundred other images doesn't mean the zipfile is free of your copyright. Effectively, computers are executing math, and math by itself does not construct new copyright, since copyright is the result of a creative human process. As far as I can tell, current AI are fundamentally not too different from wildly complex compression algorithms. You compress a billion images down to a model. The model now can reproduce a fraction or the whole of the copyrighted work with some low probability. Rote and probabilistic compression. The creator of the AI might own the copyright for what it produces if constructing the AI was suitably creative, i.e. if you construct an AI that trains on random noise and produces images, those are clearly something you, the author of the AI's code, can claim copyright over... But current AI seem like math more than anything else. It's plausible that reinforced learning or some other part of training does imbue creativity into the process, but that doesn't seem obviously true to me.
    - kolinko 3y ago
      Argument "it's just math underneath" is flawed. Photoshop also has math underneath - does it mean that if you use Photoshop, you're not doing a creative process? Also, saying that it's math ergo it's not creative is something that most people on HN would not agree with. As for "it's just compression" - compression means that you can recover the original data - perhaps with a loss of quality, but still you can. With modern ML you mostly can't.
      - pritambaral 3y ago
        > Photoshop also has math underneath - does it mean that if you use Photoshop, you're not doing a creative process? By the mere act of using Photoshop, no. By the act of providing your own inputs to Photoshop, yes.
      - TheDong 3y ago
        The human using photoshop is providing the creativity, and thus the human using photoshop owns the copyright, if they do sufficiently creative work (like actually drawing). However, when using the current image gen AIs, the input you provide is a sentence of text and a couple parameters, a minimal amount of creativity. This would be akin to opening photoshop and doing minimal work, such as choosing "resize image, apply blur filter". If you open photoshop and do a few rote transformations, you indeed have not imbued enough creativity to create a new copyrighted work, the work retains its original copyright if you just open it in photoshop and resize it.
        PeterStuer 3y ago
        'the input you provide is a sentence of text and a couple parameters, a minimal amount of creativity" Have you tried creating art with AI? Usually it takes hundreds of iterations of text-to-image, image-to-image, inpainting, outpainting using dozens of different models. "A sentence is all it takes" is like saying all it takes to make a million is crossing some numbers on a grid.
        pyuser583 3y ago
        Is creativity a legal concept?

Does that provision allow them to build derivative works, when they get a dmca request do they retrain the AI after removing the copyrighted work?

luma 3y ago
Copyright law as it exists today allows one to create transformative works. There is little to suggest that an AI trained on copyrighted works is in any way violating that copyright when inference is run.
- TheDong 3y ago
  Copyright law as it exists allows a creative process to create transformative works. Computers cannot create copyright. They are not creative. Just because I save your image as webp or jpeg or whatever doesn't mean I have changed the copyright. Just because I zip it up with a hundred other images doesn't mean the zipfile is free of your copyright. Effectively, computers are executing math, and math by itself does not construct new copyright, since copyright is the result of a creative human process. As far as I can tell, current AI are fundamentally not too different from wildly complex compression algorithms. You compress a billion images down to a model. The model now can reproduce a fraction or the whole of the copyrighted work with some low probability. Rote and probabilistic compression. The creator of the AI might own the copyright for what it produces if constructing the AI was suitably creative, i.e. if you construct an AI that trains on random noise and produces images, those are clearly something you, the author of the AI's code, can claim copyright over... But current AI seem like math more than anything else. It's plausible that reinforced learning or some other part of training does imbue creativity into the process, but that doesn't seem obviously true to me.
  - kolinko 3y ago
    Argument "it's just math underneath" is flawed. Photoshop also has math underneath - does it mean that if you use Photoshop, you're not doing a creative process? Also, saying that it's math ergo it's not creative is something that most people on HN would not agree with. As for "it's just compression" - compression means that you can recover the original data - perhaps with a loss of quality, but still you can. With modern ML you mostly can't.
    - pritambaral 3y ago
      > Photoshop also has math underneath - does it mean that if you use Photoshop, you're not doing a creative process? By the mere act of using Photoshop, no. By the act of providing your own inputs to Photoshop, yes.
    - TheDong 3y ago
      The human using photoshop is providing the creativity, and thus the human using photoshop owns the copyright, if they do sufficiently creative work (like actually drawing). However, when using the current image gen AIs, the input you provide is a sentence of text and a couple parameters, a minimal amount of creativity. This would be akin to opening photoshop and doing minimal work, such as choosing "resize image, apply blur filter". If you open photoshop and do a few rote transformations, you indeed have not imbued enough creativity to create a new copyrighted work, the work retains its original copyright if you just open it in photoshop and resize it.
      - PeterStuer 3y ago
        'the input you provide is a sentence of text and a couple parameters, a minimal amount of creativity" Have you tried creating art with AI? Usually it takes hundreds of iterations of text-to-image, image-to-image, inpainting, outpainting using dozens of different models. "A sentence is all it takes" is like saying all it takes to make a million is crossing some numbers on a grid.
      - pyuser583 3y ago
        Is creativity a legal concept?