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I can already see a future where a watchdog group gets an AI to generate something very close to a copyrighted work and accuses the AI company of having include

by xg15 3y ago

I can already see a future where a watchdog group gets an AI to generate something very close to a copyrighted work and accuses the AI company of having included that work in the training data without declaring; the AI company denying that and explaining the generation with "parallel evolution" or spontaneous inspiration of the AI or something; and we're being left to guess who's right and who's wrong...

tomrod 3y ago
Say a Dan Brown book enters the public domain. Then every Dan Brown book enters the public domain, as he uses more or less the same structure for every book, with different details. Gonna be a messy time when we catch up to that can down the road.
- gedy 3y ago
  This. Many people act as if copyright is eternal and never expiring and that fair use does not exist, but that is not (or was not) the intention. They have time limits, and fair use mean you can use content without permission and in ways the creator "did not intend". And to your point, we cannot copyright style, only the exact content itself.
  - pests 3y ago
    Can patent rounded corners though.
    - visarga 3y ago
      Hey, that technology took 10 years to develop.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  That’s just so dumb though. You can write a book “like Dan brown” and it’s fine. It’s absolute nonsense to imply that ai can’t generate something unless there’s something similar enough that’s open. Anyone can claim that a book is like another book because that’s a dumb and pointlessly subjective metric.
  - tomrod 3y ago
    I'm not sure how you inferred "metric" from my comment, only that Dan Brown's scaffolding was apparent when I read three or four of his novels in quick succession. Such patterns are equivalent to artists' signature techniques and lend themselves to transfer learning, like generating an image in the style of starry night. This is more one-shot examples versus measurement or a loss function.
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      You said if one book enters public domain then every book effectively enters public domain from a plausible deniability angle of using the one relevant book. But that makes no sense at all. Because anyone can write a book in the style of Dan Brown without infringing on his IP. You don’t need Starry Night to teach a model to make works like Starry Night. You just need a work like Starry Night. And if you want to argue that the machine can learn style better than humans for text, then how is this ever going to hold up in court as “too similar to the style”?
      - tomrod 3y ago
        Got it. So we are effectively agreeing!
        jncfhnb 3y ago
        I do not think so? For one I think there is no can to kick down the road at all because the effect you say isn’t real
- happytiger 3y ago
  The copyright system has been broken for a long time. AI is just making the system’s inadequacy more obvious. Just look at YouTube copyright strike and understand how screwed up the enforcement of a law like this is going to be. Tom Scott did a piece on it that’s worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU
jefftk 3y ago
Unlike in the real world, when it's sonor extremely difficult to prove that you have never seen a given a copyrighted work, is sort of questions seems quite practical to resolve here? Keeping complete records of what went into training an LLM sounds like what we already do?
stuckinhell 3y ago
I doubt this once Bloomberg, Netflix, and Hollywood fully jump abroad the AI train. They'll probably just lobby to change the laws, seeing this happen already.
nickpsecurity 3y ago
It’s not so hypothetical. They’re already stealing copyrighted works and putting them in the AI’s. I put a list of them with their licenses in the “Proving Wrongdoing” section of my article: http://gethisword.com/tech/exploringai/index.html http://gethisword.com/tech/exploringai/index.html I also put a copyright proposal in there which should work for all the competing interests. I mean, people will still be greedy. Yet, I think it’s a win to allow all copyrighted works to be used for training while restricting only the outputs to only the degree we do for people. Personally, I really hope the law allows GPT4-style AI’s to be built legally and affordable. If so, there’s so many benefits to be gained in businesses we can start, augmenting workers to improve work/life/productivity balance, and non-profit projects. Plus, whichever countries don’t do it will be left behind in this area by the countries that make AI training easier. Japan is the only one I’ve heard made it legal to use copyrighted works for data-science models. I don’t know that you can distribute them like The Pile or Common Crawl, though. If you scraped or bought it yourself, Japan is the closest thing I know to being legal under copyright law.
pir8 3y ago
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by xg15 3y ago

tomrod 3y ago

Say a Dan Brown book enters the public domain. Then every Dan Brown book enters the public domain, as he uses more or less the same structure for every book, with different details. Gonna be a messy time when we catch up to that can down the road.

gedy 3y ago
This. Many people act as if copyright is eternal and never expiring and that fair use does not exist, but that is not (or was not) the intention. They have time limits, and fair use mean you can use content without permission and in ways the creator "did not intend". And to your point, we cannot copyright style, only the exact content itself.
- pests 3y ago
  Can patent rounded corners though.
  - visarga 3y ago
    Hey, that technology took 10 years to develop.
jncfhnb 3y ago
That’s just so dumb though. You can write a book “like Dan brown” and it’s fine. It’s absolute nonsense to imply that ai can’t generate something unless there’s something similar enough that’s open. Anyone can claim that a book is like another book because that’s a dumb and pointlessly subjective metric.
- tomrod 3y ago
  I'm not sure how you inferred "metric" from my comment, only that Dan Brown's scaffolding was apparent when I read three or four of his novels in quick succession. Such patterns are equivalent to artists' signature techniques and lend themselves to transfer learning, like generating an image in the style of starry night. This is more one-shot examples versus measurement or a loss function.
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    You said if one book enters public domain then every book effectively enters public domain from a plausible deniability angle of using the one relevant book. But that makes no sense at all. Because anyone can write a book in the style of Dan Brown without infringing on his IP. You don’t need Starry Night to teach a model to make works like Starry Night. You just need a work like Starry Night. And if you want to argue that the machine can learn style better than humans for text, then how is this ever going to hold up in court as “too similar to the style”?
    - tomrod 3y ago
      Got it. So we are effectively agreeing!
      - jncfhnb 3y ago
        I do not think so? For one I think there is no can to kick down the road at all because the effect you say isn’t real
happytiger 3y ago
The copyright system has been broken for a long time. AI is just making the system’s inadequacy more obvious. Just look at YouTube copyright strike and understand how screwed up the enforcement of a law like this is going to be. Tom Scott did a piece on it that’s worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU

jefftk 3y ago

Unlike in the real world, when it's sonor extremely difficult to prove that you have never seen a given a copyrighted work, is sort of questions seems quite practical to resolve here? Keeping complete records of what went into training an LLM sounds like what we already do?

stuckinhell 3y ago

I doubt this once Bloomberg, Netflix, and Hollywood fully jump abroad the AI train. They'll probably just lobby to change the laws, seeing this happen already.

nickpsecurity 3y ago

It’s not so hypothetical. They’re already stealing copyrighted works and putting them in the AI’s. I put a list of them with their licenses in the “Proving Wrongdoing” section of my article: http://gethisword.com/tech/exploringai/index.html http://gethisword.com/tech/exploringai/index.html I also put a copyright proposal in there which should work for all the competing interests. I mean, people will still be greedy. Yet, I think it’s a win to allow all copyrighted works to be used for training while restricting only the outputs to only the degree we do for people. Personally, I really hope the law allows GPT4-style AI’s to be built legally and affordable. If so, there’s so many benefits to be gained in businesses we can start, augmenting workers to improve work/life/productivity balance, and non-profit projects. Plus, whichever countries don’t do it will be left behind in this area by the countries that make AI training easier. Japan is the only one I’ve heard made it legal to use copyrighted works for data-science models. I don’t know that you can distribute them like The Pile or Common Crawl, though. If you scraped or bought it yourself, Japan is the closest thing I know to being legal under copyright law.

pir8 3y ago

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