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I don't think copyright has much meaning left in it anymore. Any work can be "extracted" into its elements, ideas and style, and recombined in million ways. Yo

I don't think copyright has much meaning left in it anymore. Any work can be "extracted" into its elements, ideas and style, and recombined in million ways. You could generate a billion images with SD and train the next model on them. Make sure they don't look close to copyrighted works. Being AI generated, they have no copyright. You can still use real data as well if it is in the public domain. If you do this enough the initial copyrighted dataset is going to be further removed from the model. The model can't reproduce a copyrighted work because it hasn't seen any of them during training. But more importantly, this process strictly separates ideas from expression and trains only on ideas without copyrighted expression. If authors complain it means they want to own ideas and styles. You can also use copyrighted works to train a classifier to rank the quality of training examples, and apply it to filter your synthetic data to be higher quality. You can even train a RLHF model to say when two works are "close enough" to constitute an infringement, and double down on safety by ensuring you don't generate or use risky works. That's why I was saying that I don't think copyright has much meaning left in it anymore. Knowledge wants to be free, it travels, shape-shifts and evolves. It does not belong to any one of us except if we keep it to ourselves.

PUSH_AX 3y ago
You can’t trust the output to be accurate yet, the resulting model would be worse than the original for artefacts.
- visarga 3y ago
  In smaller LLMs it has been demonstrated that purely synthetic datasets can make a model 5x more efficient. So a 1.5B model can score like a 7B model. The model is Phi-1.5 from Microsoft. But you can also empower the LLM, it can use more tokens, chain of thought, multiple rounds of LLM inference, use other specialized models, use tools, execute code, use search, and have a human in the loop. Does that remind you of anything? Yes, "OpenAI GPTs", they are the empowered LLM environments that can create data superior to LLM alone. The general recipe is LLM+something extra = smarter than LLM. That something extra is usually a simulation or code execution or some real world interaction. This generates LLM error examples and feedback to learn to fix them in the next iteration. It is targeted training data.
esafak 3y ago
How does knowledge want to be free? We're talking about generating derivatives of other people's art. Instead of hiring an artist I can ask the model to generate art in the same style for much less. Is that right?
- visarga 3y ago
  What I meant was that knowledge distillation from trained models is a very efficient process. That's why it "wants" to be free. Knowledge is easy to scrape, transform and train on. Once it gets into the open datasets, all models trained on that data will inherit the skills. In language, more recently the most useful training data has been generated with GPT4. Its abilities get transferred very efficiently to lower models. I think the same will happen with images. We're going to generate synthetic datasets that would replace the original copyrighted works, but be more efficient and diverse.
- fallingknife 3y ago
  You can already ask artist A to make art in the style of artist B. So if you ask a machine to do the same thing, it's almost certainly going to be ruled legal by the courts. The concept of having copyright over a style is ridiculous anyway. Our courts should have their time taken up by making subjective determinations of whether some art is in the style of another.
- stavros 3y ago
  Instead of hiring Banksy, I can ask a guy down the hall to draw me something in the style of Banksy.
  - esafak 3y ago
    The concern is commercial art, not celebrity art, where the artist trumps the art. The way I see it playing out is that potential clients will tell the generator what to emulate and even link to or upload some samples. As tools continue to improve, the market for professional artists is going to shrink. To add insult to injury, the very art they create is being used to take away their livelihoods. That does not strike me as fair.
ben_w 3y ago
My gut says that you're approaching this at the wrong level of abstraction. If new tech circumvents the law, the law can easily be changed, so: > If authors complain it means they want to own ideas and styles. is "yes, and?" Also, copyright as it currently exists (a legal construct) is supposedly to promote the arts. GenAI may obviate the economic need to promote the arts… but if art is to us as a peacock's tail, then it won't ever obviate the desire to promote (and protect) the arts. The expense of human labour may be the point.
- visarga 3y ago
  > is "yes, and?" It would be self defeating for artists. The same tools developed to scan AI art for copyright infringement will trigger on their own works as well. All "side inspiration" will be revealed, it will have a chilling effect on freedom. Do you want art to be made of little islands of copyright, where someone staked their claim - nobody else is allowed to create? If they can own styles they can ban others from using those styles. Let's explain it like this: in a system, a user has ownership over a few files. But from now on users will own whole extensions, like ".json" and own everything "*.json" instead of "myreport.json". They want copyright wildcard "*.©", it's a power grab. They want copyright to be more like patents.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > The same tools developed to scan AI art for copyright infringement will trigger on their own works as well Perhaps; frightened and angry people often can't see the consequences of the direction they're running in. But: if the effort is the point of art, then "proof of work" is how that goes down, not your scenario. Filming the artist as they put oil to canvas etc. > They want copyright to be more like patents. Not patents, trademarks. Patents cover novel specific inventions for a few years, trademarks cover anything that's similar enough it might confuse a customer for as long as you maintain it. And what I want is almost irrelevant, the question is the aggregate will of society. My preferences feel like they're negatively correlated with public opinion on the topics loud people discuss most.
vidarh 3y ago
> Being AI generated, they have no copyright. Careful with this assumption. The US Copyright Office have said this. Some other jurisdictions may have similar statements. But few (any?) claims around this have been tested in court, and specifically there is still the risk that there may be jurisdictions that find the output to be infringing if the training data is. It will take time for this to shake out. I do mostly agree with you that I think enough doors will be left open that it will be possible to find paths that will effectively "work around" copyright in fairly significant ways, but it's not so open and shut what will be ok and what won't.
- cyanydeez 3y ago
  the most likely outcome seems to be a black hole event where new rules of copyright will be established. I think if you replaced human with computer and went through all the training, you come to the conclusion that the human is recreating copyrighted works . so if you the send that human out to all these people knowing what they know, they're creating infringement. the hinge will be that the training data was never licensed by the model maker, the trainer for the human computer analog. the only thing limiting damage is that the scale of impact is unmanageable.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    If so, it will not affect the progress of AI, because the AI companies will simply buy sufficient data. E.g. OpenAI's valuation alone means it could buy the largest publishers and image banks if they wanted. What an outcome like that would do, however, would be to massively centralise the ability to train legal models. At the same time you'd end up with a lot of "washing" of training data (a lot of "works for hire" that'd really be outputs of models trained on copyrighted works), and a lot of development moving to other countries.
    - cyanydeez 3y ago
      consider what a properly vetted model looks like. besides obtaining copyright it'd also become a wiki like source combed through and cleaned up. I'm pretty sure we are at the low hanging fruit and waiting for a mechanical turk to properly put a training set together.

PUSH_AX 3y ago

You can’t trust the output to be accurate yet, the resulting model would be worse than the original for artefacts.

visarga 3y ago
In smaller LLMs it has been demonstrated that purely synthetic datasets can make a model 5x more efficient. So a 1.5B model can score like a 7B model. The model is Phi-1.5 from Microsoft. But you can also empower the LLM, it can use more tokens, chain of thought, multiple rounds of LLM inference, use other specialized models, use tools, execute code, use search, and have a human in the loop. Does that remind you of anything? Yes, "OpenAI GPTs", they are the empowered LLM environments that can create data superior to LLM alone. The general recipe is LLM+something extra = smarter than LLM. That something extra is usually a simulation or code execution or some real world interaction. This generates LLM error examples and feedback to learn to fix them in the next iteration. It is targeted training data.

esafak 3y ago

How does knowledge want to be free? We're talking about generating derivatives of other people's art. Instead of hiring an artist I can ask the model to generate art in the same style for much less. Is that right?

visarga 3y ago
What I meant was that knowledge distillation from trained models is a very efficient process. That's why it "wants" to be free. Knowledge is easy to scrape, transform and train on. Once it gets into the open datasets, all models trained on that data will inherit the skills. In language, more recently the most useful training data has been generated with GPT4. Its abilities get transferred very efficiently to lower models. I think the same will happen with images. We're going to generate synthetic datasets that would replace the original copyrighted works, but be more efficient and diverse.
fallingknife 3y ago
You can already ask artist A to make art in the style of artist B. So if you ask a machine to do the same thing, it's almost certainly going to be ruled legal by the courts. The concept of having copyright over a style is ridiculous anyway. Our courts should have their time taken up by making subjective determinations of whether some art is in the style of another.
stavros 3y ago
Instead of hiring Banksy, I can ask a guy down the hall to draw me something in the style of Banksy.
- esafak 3y ago
  The concern is commercial art, not celebrity art, where the artist trumps the art. The way I see it playing out is that potential clients will tell the generator what to emulate and even link to or upload some samples. As tools continue to improve, the market for professional artists is going to shrink. To add insult to injury, the very art they create is being used to take away their livelihoods. That does not strike me as fair.

ben_w 3y ago

My gut says that you're approaching this at the wrong level of abstraction. If new tech circumvents the law, the law can easily be changed, so: > If authors complain it means they want to own ideas and styles. is "yes, and?" Also, copyright as it currently exists (a legal construct) is supposedly to promote the arts. GenAI may obviate the economic need to promote the arts… but if art is to us as a peacock's tail, then it won't ever obviate the desire to promote (and protect) the arts. The expense of human labour may be the point.

visarga 3y ago
> is "yes, and?" It would be self defeating for artists. The same tools developed to scan AI art for copyright infringement will trigger on their own works as well. All "side inspiration" will be revealed, it will have a chilling effect on freedom. Do you want art to be made of little islands of copyright, where someone staked their claim - nobody else is allowed to create? If they can own styles they can ban others from using those styles. Let's explain it like this: in a system, a user has ownership over a few files. But from now on users will own whole extensions, like ".json" and own everything "*.json" instead of "myreport.json". They want copyright wildcard "*.©", it's a power grab. They want copyright to be more like patents.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > The same tools developed to scan AI art for copyright infringement will trigger on their own works as well Perhaps; frightened and angry people often can't see the consequences of the direction they're running in. But: if the effort is the point of art, then "proof of work" is how that goes down, not your scenario. Filming the artist as they put oil to canvas etc. > They want copyright to be more like patents. Not patents, trademarks. Patents cover novel specific inventions for a few years, trademarks cover anything that's similar enough it might confuse a customer for as long as you maintain it. And what I want is almost irrelevant, the question is the aggregate will of society. My preferences feel like they're negatively correlated with public opinion on the topics loud people discuss most.

vidarh 3y ago

> Being AI generated, they have no copyright. Careful with this assumption. The US Copyright Office have said this. Some other jurisdictions may have similar statements. But few (any?) claims around this have been tested in court, and specifically there is still the risk that there may be jurisdictions that find the output to be infringing if the training data is. It will take time for this to shake out. I do mostly agree with you that I think enough doors will be left open that it will be possible to find paths that will effectively "work around" copyright in fairly significant ways, but it's not so open and shut what will be ok and what won't.

cyanydeez 3y ago
the most likely outcome seems to be a black hole event where new rules of copyright will be established. I think if you replaced human with computer and went through all the training, you come to the conclusion that the human is recreating copyrighted works . so if you the send that human out to all these people knowing what they know, they're creating infringement. the hinge will be that the training data was never licensed by the model maker, the trainer for the human computer analog. the only thing limiting damage is that the scale of impact is unmanageable.
- vidarh 3y ago
  If so, it will not affect the progress of AI, because the AI companies will simply buy sufficient data. E.g. OpenAI's valuation alone means it could buy the largest publishers and image banks if they wanted. What an outcome like that would do, however, would be to massively centralise the ability to train legal models. At the same time you'd end up with a lot of "washing" of training data (a lot of "works for hire" that'd really be outputs of models trained on copyrighted works), and a lot of development moving to other countries.
  - cyanydeez 3y ago
    consider what a properly vetted model looks like. besides obtaining copyright it'd also become a wiki like source combed through and cleaned up. I'm pretty sure we are at the low hanging fruit and waiting for a mechanical turk to properly put a training set together.