9 ms·

Still not convinced training AI is theft, and I think copyright law is a cudgel used by powerful corpos to extract rent and smash innovation.

cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
Yep. That is the question. Anyone that immediately comes back with “it’s stealing!”, especially those that were confidently saying it when this first became an issue, long before they would’ve had any time to contemplate it deeply, are just proving that techies’ sense of transferable expertise is completely unfounded.
- Retric 3y ago
  No it isn’t, because ‘steeling’ is allowed. There’s no question these neural networks and their output are derivative works. However being a derivative work isn’t enough to guarantee copyright infringement. So, the only question is if we are going to carve out an exception here or not. The idea someone can use a VCR to copy live TV and let people watch it later came out of a court case not copyright law. There’s a lot of such exceptions, but getting one isn’t guaranteed.
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    There are some ironclad exceptions but they would have to make it through the dysfunctional Congress. The big one is recipes. Recipes under the current copyright regime in the US are considered non-copyrightable facts, which is why every cookbook and recipe blog has lots of copyrightable splash photos and personal anecdotes. Congress specifically doesn’t want grandmas getting sued for copying the recipe on the box.
    - blibble 3y ago
      not sure what Congress has to do with a case in the UK fair use is mostly a US concept, there is no such thing in the UK or most other countries
      - bobthepanda 3y ago
        It seems like UK and EU agree that you cannot copyright a recipe other than maybe the exact way it was written: https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2020/uk/intellectual-property-rights-in-recipes-and-food https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2020/uk/intellectual-pr... https://www.copyright.eu/docs/protection-of-a-recipe/ https://www.copyright.eu/docs/protection-of-a-recipe/ Though you can patent novel methods of food production, which is also true in the US. The root statement is still the same, legislatures can amend copyright laws as they wish if they really care. I don’t know that the UK parliament is exactly functioning well right now, but that’s my impression from across the pond.
        blibble 3y ago
        > I don’t know that the UK parliament is exactly functioning well right now in terms of ability to legislate it works considerably better than the US congress up to you if you call that well functioning
        surfacedetail 3y ago
        You can only copyright the actual expression of a recipe as a literary work, but the functional aspect, the cake let's say, isn't copyrightable.
    - papercrane 3y ago
      > Congress specifically doesn’t want grandmas getting sued for copying the recipe on the box. Recipes don't have a specific exception within the the copyright law that Congress has carved out. It is also not cut and dry. It basically boils down to facts not being copyrightable. So a list of ingredients and basic instructions (e.g. cooking time and temperature) won't be granted copyright protection. But, the prose in the instructions can be copyrighted. So copying a whole recipe verbatim can be copyright infringement, but copying the list of ingredients and writing out the basic instructions is not.
      - visarga 3y ago
        Sounds like a job for LLMs - extract ingredients and steps, then verbalize it back in a completely different style.
        bobthepanda 3y ago
        But to what end? SEO optimized recipe copy sites already exist and are so numerous to the point where going to specific sites or books is now just a signal of reputability in a sea of trash.
  - AmericanChopper 3y ago
    > There’s no question these neural networks and their output are derivative works. Most generated content almost certainly isn’t derivative work by the standards of copyright law. It’s plainly obvious to anybody who’s read Frank Herbert’s books that he derived a lot of ideas from Isaac Asimov, but it’s equally obvious that Dune isn’t a derivative work of Foundation. If I had some commercial interest in generative AI models, I’d be very happy that everybody is debating the copyright implications. Because copyright law is certainly going to favour the models. The biggest regulatory risk to them as far as I can tell is that they clearly don’t have section 230 protections, and I can’t imagine how that isn’t going to come crashing down around them rather soon.
    - Retric 3y ago
      If you run someone over you can’t defend yourself by saying 99.999% of the time you didn’t run someone over. Most output being free of copyright issues isn’t a defense if any output has those issues. Specific examples of clear copyright infringement mean that output is a derivative work AND by encoding enough information to recreate it the underlying neural network must itself be a derivative work.
  - Ukv 3y ago
    > There’s no question these neural networks and their output are derivative works. In the two US cases we have any progress on so far, the established requirement for substantial similarity (opposed to "dependant on" or such) has been upheld, with Judge Vince Chhabria specifically setting out that it'd "have to mean that if you put the Llama language model next to Sarah Silverman's book, you would say they're similar". and Judge William H. Orrick agreeing with the defendants that "plaintiffs cannot plausibly allege the Output Images are substantially similar or re-present protected aspects of copyrighted Training Images, especially in light of plaintiffs’ admission that Output Images are unlikely to look like the Training Images". The UK definition of derivative works is, to my understanding, narrower and specifically enumerated as opposed to the US's more open-ended definition. The remaining area of doubt, assuming the above remains consistent, is over the transient copying that occurs during training.
    - surfacedetail 3y ago
      The defendants will evidently claim transient copying.
      - Retric 3y ago
        I doubt these companies constantly downloading the full training set rather than keeping it in a database somewhere. Hard to argue keeping a copy of some copyrighted work indefinitely counts as transient.
        surfacedetail 3y ago
        > I doubt these companies constantly downloading the full training set rather than keeping it in a database somewhere. Precisely to argue for transient copies, they don't need to keep terabytes of data stored. >Hard to argue keeping a copy of some copyrighted work indefinitely counts as transient. You're assuming that they're keeping the works indefinitely, which again is not the case.
        Retric 3y ago
  - deeviant 3y ago
    > There’s no question these neural networks and their output are derivative works. A derivative work is an expressive creation that includes major copyrightable elements of a first, previously created original work (the underlying work). There is absolutely no agreement that what neural networks do (as a rule) counts as such, so it is not at all correct to say "there is no question..." If learning how to draw by watching other people draw makes everything you draw a derivative work, then perhaps you have a point.
    - Retric 3y ago
      The network in question recreated the exact content in question on a specific event. What happens is general isn’t the issue, the problem comes from specific output. For a neural network to be able to recreate a complex work with minimal prompting it must be encode that information and therefore be a derivative work.
  - surfacedetail 3y ago
    Derivative work has a specific meaning in copyright law, there has to be something in the output, and that's not the case here. Otherwise every single owner of 5 billion images could sue you for your "cat at a cafe" midjourney picture. Judge Orrick in one of the US cases already called this idea 'nonsense", his words.
    - Retric 3y ago
      Not all outputs are at issue here, but if ANY output is copyright infringement they have problems. Specific and clear examples of derivative works are shown therefore both those exact examples and the underlying neural network must be a derivative work.
gumballindie 3y ago
Using that which belongs to others without their consent is theft. There isn’t much to debate, unless of course, you wish to benefit from that theft. Powerful corpos can train whatever they wish against the data they own. For instance, microsoft can train its bots on microsoft’s source code, instead of people’s code, but that is not going to happen because they are aware of the implications - the procedural generators are exactly that and nothing more. Meanwhile we cant use their products without a license. So if they decides to play this game then so should we.
- AmericanChopper 3y ago
  > Using that which belongs to others without their consent is theft. Using publicly available information doesn’t require anybody’s consent.
- tavavex 3y ago
  Theft is the act of taking away someone else's property. "Using" (aka copying) the public data I create isn't theft, be it with my consent or without. It may be copyright infringement under certain conditions, but arguing that this infringement is stealing is like arguing that digital piracy and shoplifting are basically the same thing.
- Ukv 3y ago
  > Using that which belongs to others without their consent is theft Are text snippets, thumbnnails and site caches shown by search engines (on an opt-out basis) "theft"? If you draw a car, which you can do due to having seen many individually-copyrighted car designs, are you stealing from auto manufacturers? Have I just committed theft by using a portion of your comment above as a quote? I don't claim here that statistical model fitting inherently needs to be treated the same as the above examples, but rather use examples to show that the bar of "using" is far too broad. Legally, copyright infringement in the US requires that the works are substantially similar and not covered by Fair Use. Morally, I believe that artificial scarcity, such as evergreening of medical patents, is detrimental and needs to be prevented wherever feasible - and wouldn't call any kind of copying/sharing/piracy "theft". The digital equivalent of theft is, for example, account theft where you're actually removing the object from the owner's possession.
Loughla 3y ago
What is your justification for AI training not being theft?
- artninja1988 3y ago
  Copying is not theft in general as you don't take anything away from anybody
  - oblib 3y ago
    >>Copying is not theft in general as you don't take anything away from anybody That's a perfect oxymoron.
  - anonymousab 3y ago
    The major corps and tech companies loved to claim otherwise for years as it suited their interests.
- gedy 3y ago
  Fair use. (Even if the creator doesn't like that)
- prvc 3y ago
  If including a copyrighted work in an AI training corpus is theft because of its influence on some artificial neural net, then so is viewing it by a human being, whose memory is now somehow the property of the copyright holder, an absurd conclusion.
  - poidos 3y ago
    Your premise that a neural net is equivalent to a human brain seems much more absurd.
    - prvc 3y ago
      You wouldn't look at a car.
  - 3y ago
JambalayaJim 3y ago
Training a model on another person’s work shouldn’t be considered theft, but the model also shouldn’t be allowed to generate profits. Without of course compensating the owner of the training data. Someone needs to come up with a royalty structure for this stuff.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
throwaway14356 3y ago
if you can legally use something its not stealing. Even the argument that its logical to call it that isn't certain. If i take your picture I own it? If you take a picture and i upload it to fb meta gets to use it? If I publish your book under my name and no one finds out, did I write it? If no author can be found, may I read it?
- sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
  [flagged]
rasz 3y ago
Thats because the word 'training' is doing all the heavy lifting here. Think of it as copying, compressing and storing all the copyrighted material in a database. Humans learn, humans train, computers encode data. You would never say ffmpeg learned a movie.
- chii 3y ago
  > You would never say ffmpeg learned a movie. no you wouldn't, but these diffusion models do way more than ffmpeg, and do qualitatively different things. I am on the fence, but i lean towards the side where training an AI using existing works is not infringement, as long as the AI's output is (or can be) majority new works. For example, a poor training algorithm that merely repeats the training dataset (and cannot output new works) is infringing, while a different algorithm (such as the current stable diffusion one) that can output works that has never been made and is totally new, does not infringe - after all, style and ideas are not infringing and if the algorithm managed to extract those ideas from the training set, all the better.
  - ddol 3y ago
    What’s the test for “has never been made and is totally new”? If I look at a photo of Prince and then using that image as reference create a new silkscreen painting is that fair use or infringement? Because the US Supreme Court has ruled that instance I referenced was infringement as both images were used for magazine covers [0]. [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna64624 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna64624
    - chii 3y ago
      > What’s the test for “has never been made and is totally new”? the existing copyright rulings are sufficient to determine this, and has nothing to do with ai models. You've already pointed out a case - if you use an AI to generate an image which has sufficient likeness to an existing one, then the AI portion is irrelevant to the ruling. You could've made that same image in photoshop without AI, and should obtain the same ruling. But in the above circumstance, the silkscreen used in the creation of the image does not itself infringe. And replace that silkscreen with AI model, nothing has changed.
jterrys 3y ago
I think using data that you don't have the copyrights to train AI is theft. That being said, Getty is hardly the paragon of goodwill considering they regularly steal from public domain databases, issue DMCA takedown requests of the stolen content from said databases, and then turn around to sell it to unwitting people for a subscription. They own none of the copyrights for what they are doing but have been allowed to get away with it.
- zmgsabst 3y ago
  Have you only read books you own the copyright to? What’s the legal distinction between you learning and AI learning?
  - keonix 3y ago
    If I regurgiate something I read in copyrighted book without proper license that also would be theft, no distinction there. I'm not distributing my brain, at least same (but probably more restrictive) should apply to models - training is okay, but using and distributing should be limited by copyright
    - broken-kebab 3y ago
      Explaining anything publicly based on my understanding I got reading books would be illegal following this logic. I'm not sure this is how it works.
      - visarga 3y ago
        They want to muddle the distinction between ideas and expression. You can't copyright ideas. Everyone is entitled to copy ideas.
      - keonix 3y ago
        It would not be illegal based on fair use (though you have to be careful there also), but if you try to regurgiate large portions of the book then it would be. And we do know that models regurgiate training material verbatim (Copilot)
lelanthran 3y ago
I think that if you stick to a definition of 'fair use' that allows the slurping of entire corpuses, then copyright doesn't have any teeth anymore. If the license makes the data public viewing, like with websites, then slurp all you want. If the license forbids automated bulk processing, then stop whining about fair use and pay for a license that allows bulk processing. "Out system actively uses every single byte of data to produce any output" is so obviously not the intention fair use clauses.
- surfacedetail 3y ago
  Fair use doesn't exist in the UK.
vohk 3y ago
While I somewhat agree with that take on copyright, I think you have to pick a lane to keep that position coherent: Either you insist that copyright must be respected at every level, and the creators of material used for training deserve appropriate compensation, or You throw out copyright completely in this context, but that means the resulting models cannot be treated as proprietary either unless they were produced using absolutely no unlicensed training data. I think there is an argument for both. Want to create a proprietary model for commercial use? Pay up. Creating an open source, copyleft project exclusively for personal use and artistic expression? Exemption. The current status quo is perfectly described by powerful corpos extracting rent. Billions for themselves and pennies for the average artist.
- tavavex 3y ago
  > Either you insist that copyright must be respected at every level, and the creators of material used for training deserve appropriate compensation I don't think that current copyright laws automatically entitles people to royalties from something like AI-generated imagery. The dichotomy you've presented here isn't pro-copyright vs anti-copyright, but "so pro-copyright that they argue for expanding the current laws" vs not. > Want to create a proprietary model for commercial use? Pay up. Creating an open source, copyleft project exclusively for personal use and artistic expression? Exemption. That definitely benefits all the "powerful corpos" you've mentioned here. Now, Disney, Adobe, Meta etc. can use a fraction of their money to get all the data they would ever need and be the sole profiteers, while all newcomers will face an impassable barrier to entry that prevents them from ever threatening the existing players.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  There is at least one middle ground area where you acknowledge that copyright and intellectual property restrictions should be removed, but that we should also recognize that all of the existing work was created by artists who expected they would have copyright protection. We should in my view not take from artists without their consent, and there is no implied consent when their works were posted at a time they believed they were protected by copyright. This would mean we have to do a few difficult and worthwhile things: explicitly dismantle the copyright system, encourage artists to donate their existing works to the commons, and then only make datasets based on legally collected information. This would also have the side effect of encouraging the development of new training techniques and model designs which are more sample efficient. I am afraid that what we will do instead is allow some erosion of copyright for small creators without dismantling the power large intellectual property holders have over the rest of us.
anonymousab 3y ago
> I think copyright law is a cudgel It is interesting to me that we are finally seeing a case where many smaller, independent artists and creators are using these laws to assert their rights against the encroachment of the moneyed tech interests, and of course now all of the powerful corpos are singing another tune. Rules for thee, not for me.

cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago

Yep. That is the question. Anyone that immediately comes back with “it’s stealing!”, especially those that were confidently saying it when this first became an issue, long before they would’ve had any time to contemplate it deeply, are just proving that techies’ sense of transferable expertise is completely unfounded.

Retric 3y ago
No it isn’t, because ‘steeling’ is allowed. There’s no question these neural networks and their output are derivative works. However being a derivative work isn’t enough to guarantee copyright infringement. So, the only question is if we are going to carve out an exception here or not. The idea someone can use a VCR to copy live TV and let people watch it later came out of a court case not copyright law. There’s a lot of such exceptions, but getting one isn’t guaranteed.
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  There are some ironclad exceptions but they would have to make it through the dysfunctional Congress. The big one is recipes. Recipes under the current copyright regime in the US are considered non-copyrightable facts, which is why every cookbook and recipe blog has lots of copyrightable splash photos and personal anecdotes. Congress specifically doesn’t want grandmas getting sued for copying the recipe on the box.
  - blibble 3y ago
    not sure what Congress has to do with a case in the UK fair use is mostly a US concept, there is no such thing in the UK or most other countries
    - bobthepanda 3y ago
      It seems like UK and EU agree that you cannot copyright a recipe other than maybe the exact way it was written: https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2020/uk/intellectual-property-rights-in-recipes-and-food https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2020/uk/intellectual-pr... https://www.copyright.eu/docs/protection-of-a-recipe/ https://www.copyright.eu/docs/protection-of-a-recipe/ Though you can patent novel methods of food production, which is also true in the US. The root statement is still the same, legislatures can amend copyright laws as they wish if they really care. I don’t know that the UK parliament is exactly functioning well right now, but that’s my impression from across the pond.
      - blibble 3y ago
        > I don’t know that the UK parliament is exactly functioning well right now in terms of ability to legislate it works considerably better than the US congress up to you if you call that well functioning
      - surfacedetail 3y ago
        You can only copyright the actual expression of a recipe as a literary work, but the functional aspect, the cake let's say, isn't copyrightable.
  - papercrane 3y ago
    > Congress specifically doesn’t want grandmas getting sued for copying the recipe on the box. Recipes don't have a specific exception within the the copyright law that Congress has carved out. It is also not cut and dry. It basically boils down to facts not being copyrightable. So a list of ingredients and basic instructions (e.g. cooking time and temperature) won't be granted copyright protection. But, the prose in the instructions can be copyrighted. So copying a whole recipe verbatim can be copyright infringement, but copying the list of ingredients and writing out the basic instructions is not.
    - visarga 3y ago
      Sounds like a job for LLMs - extract ingredients and steps, then verbalize it back in a completely different style.
      - bobthepanda 3y ago
        But to what end? SEO optimized recipe copy sites already exist and are so numerous to the point where going to specific sites or books is now just a signal of reputability in a sea of trash.
- AmericanChopper 3y ago
  > There’s no question these neural networks and their output are derivative works. Most generated content almost certainly isn’t derivative work by the standards of copyright law. It’s plainly obvious to anybody who’s read Frank Herbert’s books that he derived a lot of ideas from Isaac Asimov, but it’s equally obvious that Dune isn’t a derivative work of Foundation. If I had some commercial interest in generative AI models, I’d be very happy that everybody is debating the copyright implications. Because copyright law is certainly going to favour the models. The biggest regulatory risk to them as far as I can tell is that they clearly don’t have section 230 protections, and I can’t imagine how that isn’t going to come crashing down around them rather soon.
  - Retric 3y ago
    If you run someone over you can’t defend yourself by saying 99.999% of the time you didn’t run someone over. Most output being free of copyright issues isn’t a defense if any output has those issues. Specific examples of clear copyright infringement mean that output is a derivative work AND by encoding enough information to recreate it the underlying neural network must itself be a derivative work.
- Ukv 3y ago
  > There’s no question these neural networks and their output are derivative works. In the two US cases we have any progress on so far, the established requirement for substantial similarity (opposed to "dependant on" or such) has been upheld, with Judge Vince Chhabria specifically setting out that it'd "have to mean that if you put the Llama language model next to Sarah Silverman's book, you would say they're similar". and Judge William H. Orrick agreeing with the defendants that "plaintiffs cannot plausibly allege the Output Images are substantially similar or re-present protected aspects of copyrighted Training Images, especially in light of plaintiffs’ admission that Output Images are unlikely to look like the Training Images". The UK definition of derivative works is, to my understanding, narrower and specifically enumerated as opposed to the US's more open-ended definition. The remaining area of doubt, assuming the above remains consistent, is over the transient copying that occurs during training.
  - surfacedetail 3y ago
    The defendants will evidently claim transient copying.
    - Retric 3y ago
      I doubt these companies constantly downloading the full training set rather than keeping it in a database somewhere. Hard to argue keeping a copy of some copyrighted work indefinitely counts as transient.
      - surfacedetail 3y ago
        > I doubt these companies constantly downloading the full training set rather than keeping it in a database somewhere. Precisely to argue for transient copies, they don't need to keep terabytes of data stored. >Hard to argue keeping a copy of some copyrighted work indefinitely counts as transient. You're assuming that they're keeping the works indefinitely, which again is not the case.
        Retric 3y ago
- deeviant 3y ago
  > There’s no question these neural networks and their output are derivative works. A derivative work is an expressive creation that includes major copyrightable elements of a first, previously created original work (the underlying work). There is absolutely no agreement that what neural networks do (as a rule) counts as such, so it is not at all correct to say "there is no question..." If learning how to draw by watching other people draw makes everything you draw a derivative work, then perhaps you have a point.
  - Retric 3y ago
    The network in question recreated the exact content in question on a specific event. What happens is general isn’t the issue, the problem comes from specific output. For a neural network to be able to recreate a complex work with minimal prompting it must be encode that information and therefore be a derivative work.
- surfacedetail 3y ago
  Derivative work has a specific meaning in copyright law, there has to be something in the output, and that's not the case here. Otherwise every single owner of 5 billion images could sue you for your "cat at a cafe" midjourney picture. Judge Orrick in one of the US cases already called this idea 'nonsense", his words.
  - Retric 3y ago
    Not all outputs are at issue here, but if ANY output is copyright infringement they have problems. Specific and clear examples of derivative works are shown therefore both those exact examples and the underlying neural network must be a derivative work.

gumballindie 3y ago

Using that which belongs to others without their consent is theft. There isn’t much to debate, unless of course, you wish to benefit from that theft. Powerful corpos can train whatever they wish against the data they own. For instance, microsoft can train its bots on microsoft’s source code, instead of people’s code, but that is not going to happen because they are aware of the implications - the procedural generators are exactly that and nothing more. Meanwhile we cant use their products without a license. So if they decides to play this game then so should we.

AmericanChopper 3y ago
> Using that which belongs to others without their consent is theft. Using publicly available information doesn’t require anybody’s consent.
tavavex 3y ago
Theft is the act of taking away someone else's property. "Using" (aka copying) the public data I create isn't theft, be it with my consent or without. It may be copyright infringement under certain conditions, but arguing that this infringement is stealing is like arguing that digital piracy and shoplifting are basically the same thing.
Ukv 3y ago
> Using that which belongs to others without their consent is theft Are text snippets, thumbnnails and site caches shown by search engines (on an opt-out basis) "theft"? If you draw a car, which you can do due to having seen many individually-copyrighted car designs, are you stealing from auto manufacturers? Have I just committed theft by using a portion of your comment above as a quote? I don't claim here that statistical model fitting inherently needs to be treated the same as the above examples, but rather use examples to show that the bar of "using" is far too broad. Legally, copyright infringement in the US requires that the works are substantially similar and not covered by Fair Use. Morally, I believe that artificial scarcity, such as evergreening of medical patents, is detrimental and needs to be prevented wherever feasible - and wouldn't call any kind of copying/sharing/piracy "theft". The digital equivalent of theft is, for example, account theft where you're actually removing the object from the owner's possession.

Loughla 3y ago

What is your justification for AI training not being theft?

artninja1988 3y ago
Copying is not theft in general as you don't take anything away from anybody
- oblib 3y ago
  >>Copying is not theft in general as you don't take anything away from anybody That's a perfect oxymoron.
- anonymousab 3y ago
  The major corps and tech companies loved to claim otherwise for years as it suited their interests.
gedy 3y ago
Fair use. (Even if the creator doesn't like that)
prvc 3y ago
If including a copyrighted work in an AI training corpus is theft because of its influence on some artificial neural net, then so is viewing it by a human being, whose memory is now somehow the property of the copyright holder, an absurd conclusion.
- poidos 3y ago
  Your premise that a neural net is equivalent to a human brain seems much more absurd.
  - prvc 3y ago
    You wouldn't look at a car.
- 3y ago

JambalayaJim 3y ago

Training a model on another person’s work shouldn’t be considered theft, but the model also shouldn’t be allowed to generate profits. Without of course compensating the owner of the training data. Someone needs to come up with a royalty structure for this stuff.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

throwaway14356 3y ago

if you can legally use something its not stealing. Even the argument that its logical to call it that isn't certain. If i take your picture I own it? If you take a picture and i upload it to fb meta gets to use it? If I publish your book under my name and no one finds out, did I write it? If no author can be found, may I read it?

sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
[flagged]

rasz 3y ago

Thats because the word 'training' is doing all the heavy lifting here. Think of it as copying, compressing and storing all the copyrighted material in a database. Humans learn, humans train, computers encode data. You would never say ffmpeg learned a movie.

chii 3y ago
> You would never say ffmpeg learned a movie. no you wouldn't, but these diffusion models do way more than ffmpeg, and do qualitatively different things. I am on the fence, but i lean towards the side where training an AI using existing works is not infringement, as long as the AI's output is (or can be) majority new works. For example, a poor training algorithm that merely repeats the training dataset (and cannot output new works) is infringing, while a different algorithm (such as the current stable diffusion one) that can output works that has never been made and is totally new, does not infringe - after all, style and ideas are not infringing and if the algorithm managed to extract those ideas from the training set, all the better.
- ddol 3y ago
  What’s the test for “has never been made and is totally new”? If I look at a photo of Prince and then using that image as reference create a new silkscreen painting is that fair use or infringement? Because the US Supreme Court has ruled that instance I referenced was infringement as both images were used for magazine covers [0]. [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna64624 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna64624
  - chii 3y ago
    > What’s the test for “has never been made and is totally new”? the existing copyright rulings are sufficient to determine this, and has nothing to do with ai models. You've already pointed out a case - if you use an AI to generate an image which has sufficient likeness to an existing one, then the AI portion is irrelevant to the ruling. You could've made that same image in photoshop without AI, and should obtain the same ruling. But in the above circumstance, the silkscreen used in the creation of the image does not itself infringe. And replace that silkscreen with AI model, nothing has changed.

jterrys 3y ago

I think using data that you don't have the copyrights to train AI is theft. That being said, Getty is hardly the paragon of goodwill considering they regularly steal from public domain databases, issue DMCA takedown requests of the stolen content from said databases, and then turn around to sell it to unwitting people for a subscription. They own none of the copyrights for what they are doing but have been allowed to get away with it.

zmgsabst 3y ago
Have you only read books you own the copyright to? What’s the legal distinction between you learning and AI learning?
- keonix 3y ago
  If I regurgiate something I read in copyrighted book without proper license that also would be theft, no distinction there. I'm not distributing my brain, at least same (but probably more restrictive) should apply to models - training is okay, but using and distributing should be limited by copyright
  - broken-kebab 3y ago
    Explaining anything publicly based on my understanding I got reading books would be illegal following this logic. I'm not sure this is how it works.
    - visarga 3y ago
      They want to muddle the distinction between ideas and expression. You can't copyright ideas. Everyone is entitled to copy ideas.
    - keonix 3y ago
      It would not be illegal based on fair use (though you have to be careful there also), but if you try to regurgiate large portions of the book then it would be. And we do know that models regurgiate training material verbatim (Copilot)

lelanthran 3y ago

I think that if you stick to a definition of 'fair use' that allows the slurping of entire corpuses, then copyright doesn't have any teeth anymore. If the license makes the data public viewing, like with websites, then slurp all you want. If the license forbids automated bulk processing, then stop whining about fair use and pay for a license that allows bulk processing. "Out system actively uses every single byte of data to produce any output" is so obviously not the intention fair use clauses.

surfacedetail 3y ago
Fair use doesn't exist in the UK.

vohk 3y ago

While I somewhat agree with that take on copyright, I think you have to pick a lane to keep that position coherent: Either you insist that copyright must be respected at every level, and the creators of material used for training deserve appropriate compensation, or You throw out copyright completely in this context, but that means the resulting models cannot be treated as proprietary either unless they were produced using absolutely no unlicensed training data. I think there is an argument for both. Want to create a proprietary model for commercial use? Pay up. Creating an open source, copyleft project exclusively for personal use and artistic expression? Exemption. The current status quo is perfectly described by powerful corpos extracting rent. Billions for themselves and pennies for the average artist.

tavavex 3y ago
> Either you insist that copyright must be respected at every level, and the creators of material used for training deserve appropriate compensation I don't think that current copyright laws automatically entitles people to royalties from something like AI-generated imagery. The dichotomy you've presented here isn't pro-copyright vs anti-copyright, but "so pro-copyright that they argue for expanding the current laws" vs not. > Want to create a proprietary model for commercial use? Pay up. Creating an open source, copyleft project exclusively for personal use and artistic expression? Exemption. That definitely benefits all the "powerful corpos" you've mentioned here. Now, Disney, Adobe, Meta etc. can use a fraction of their money to get all the data they would ever need and be the sole profiteers, while all newcomers will face an impassable barrier to entry that prevents them from ever threatening the existing players.
TaylorAlexander 3y ago
There is at least one middle ground area where you acknowledge that copyright and intellectual property restrictions should be removed, but that we should also recognize that all of the existing work was created by artists who expected they would have copyright protection. We should in my view not take from artists without their consent, and there is no implied consent when their works were posted at a time they believed they were protected by copyright. This would mean we have to do a few difficult and worthwhile things: explicitly dismantle the copyright system, encourage artists to donate their existing works to the commons, and then only make datasets based on legally collected information. This would also have the side effect of encouraging the development of new training techniques and model designs which are more sample efficient. I am afraid that what we will do instead is allow some erosion of copyright for small creators without dismantling the power large intellectual property holders have over the rest of us.

anonymousab 3y ago

> I think copyright law is a cudgel It is interesting to me that we are finally seeing a case where many smaller, independent artists and creators are using these laws to assert their rights against the encroachment of the moneyed tech interests, and of course now all of the powerful corpos are singing another tune. Rules for thee, not for me.