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I think the fundamental question behind this and similar cases will be "how many degrees of derivation are required to go from copying to learning". If I read

I think the fundamental question behind this and similar cases will be "how many degrees of derivation are required to go from copying to learning". If I read a lot of New York times and then go and write a political thriller, that's fine. If I read the New York times and then go and report the same news, but in my own voice, that's debatable. If I take the New York times article and publish it verbatim, that's a problem. All of these cases are ultimately on a spectrum - and the answer will go beyond AI I think. Tesla's lead designer previously worked at Mazda, GM and Volkswagen - so does Tesla owe these companies money because their designer learned car design there? This might sound silly, but it's a fair argument when it comes to AI - how much distance does there need to be between the learned from material and the output?

tumult 3y ago
You aren't software. The laws that apply to people reading and learning do not apply to software. Software isn't people. It can't be liable, it isn't taken to court. It can't go to jail, it can't marry, it can't raise a family. Saying that you can legally learn from something by reading it and producing something else, and therefore so should software, is a non sequitur.
- throwaway4aday 3y ago
  I would not make that the foundation of my argument over the long term.
  - tumult 3y ago
    Assuming that software won't receive legal personhood seems like a pretty good foundation. If that's no longer the case, you have much crazier things to worry about than copyright infringement.
- ravenstine 3y ago
  What makes humans special? Because they can marry and go to jail? That's not relevant, and what is relevant is the difference in outcome. If something takes in information, learns from it, and spits out information as a result of its learning, then why does the implementation matter at all? So what if it's software? That's the point. You're speaking as if it's a given that the issue comes down to software not being people, therefore society as a group should make software do whatever it wants even if it doesn't own that software. Not everyone is going to agree with that because it's not clear why, if something is wrong for software to do, it isn't also wrong for a human brain.
  - tumult 3y ago
    > You're speaking as if it's a given that the issue comes down to software not being people, therefore society as a group can make software do whatever it wants even if it doesn't own it. Yes. It's an object or writing. Not a person. You're arguing for giving personhood to software right now and that's crazy.
    - Ekaros 3y ago
      If we give personhood to software, wouldn't it mean that you cannot shutdown or delete it ever? You cannot destroy the equipment it is on? As clearly that would be murder. What would be your financial responsibility to keep AI running?
      - merrywhether 3y ago
        These are famously the types of questions surfaced in countless sci-fi books. And as long as humans don’t destroy themselves first, it is likely that we will have to address them eventually. In most stories it generally happens too late after some terrible war/conflict, so it wouldn’t be unreasonable to tackle them proactively. And then maybe it’s not so weird to think about these concepts even if their realization isn’t imminent. Working backwards in such a framework would probably give much better laws for today.
      - ravenstine 3y ago
        This has nothing to do with personhood of software. Restricting the freedom of human beings, which includes the ones that run companies, based on the tool they choose to use, without the basis of obvious direct harm, is questionable. The fact that AI can operate autonomously is a side tangent; they are created by humans and, so far, their only proximal purpose is to serve humans.
      - filoleg 3y ago
        Corporate personhood is a thing in the US, and you are allowed to shutdown your company just fine.
    - 3y ago
- chii 3y ago
  > therefore so should software, is a non sequitur. it's not. Why isn't photoshop being sued as copyright infringement? People can reproduce infringing works in it easily enough. How is pressing buttons in photoshop different to pressing buttons in chatGPT?
  - dd82 3y ago
    It is exactly the same. You can absoutely be sued for copyright infringement in your example. https://www.adobe.com/legal/dmca.html https://www.adobe.com/legal/dmca.html Just because you produce an infringing work doesn't mean it will be discovered and then a legal case made.
    - m-s-y 3y ago
      Correct. But the person using the software is charged. Not the software itself. The NYT is trying to push liability onto the software (ChatGPT-cannot be sued) instead of the software’s users (you and me-can be sued). I feel this is the correct interpretation.
      - tumult 3y ago
        No. They are suing the people who made the software. They are not suing the software. You can't sue software. Software isn't a person.
        filoleg 3y ago
        This is just pedantry. Would NYT be suing Adobe (the people who made the software), if one of their users utilized Photoshop to produce an image that violates copyright? I don’t think so.
        tumult 3y ago
        No. They would sue Adobe if Adobe put images that violate copyright into Photoshop and let users insert them from a dropdown menu. Your comparison is incorrect and bad.
- fourside 3y ago
  It’s puzzling to me why some people take it as a given that if a person is legally able to do A, then software should too. The capabilities of software are so different than that of a person that it seems reasonable to consider how the laws apply to software separately. A group of individuals could not absorb the NYT’s content nearly as fast as software can. Like, can we confidently say that laws around copyright and licensing would not have been written any differently had LLMs existed at the time? It’s not obvious to me that the answer is yes.
- CivBase 3y ago
  No it's not. The AI isn't the one publishing its works. If I write an article that is word-for-word the same as a Times article, I'm not liable for anything until I make it available to others. The means by which I wrote the article are irrelevant. This is the core of the issue. In this case, the "AI" is basically just a fancy writing tool for the publisher.
- ericmay 3y ago
  > You aren't software. The laws that apply to people reading and learning do not apply to software. If you're going to draw a sharp distinction between reading/words/people (software isn't people, etc.) and software I would argue that the legal and copyright considerations should be stronger for software, not weaker, precisely because of your argument.
mongol 3y ago
This is not what using copyrighted works for AI is about. A human is not software, when you read an article it is not "copied" into your brain.
- pmarreck 3y ago
  > when you read an article it is not "copied" into your brain. 1) You cannot prove that this does not happen in some form. The fact that manual electrical stimulation of the cortex triggers random memories is sort of the proof that you are wrong here; if there wasn't some kind of "copy, transformed somehow into a 3D space we call the brain" in there, then that localized stimulation wouldn't trigger a particular memory at all. 2) And yet, this is not true of AI's either. Knowledge encoded into either real neurons or a simulation of them may be similar both in how it's not a "literal copy" but a kind of copy nevertheless. If we are only concerned with "literal" or "verbatim" copies, then there is no case here.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  Right because copyrighted works has nothing to do with ai. So it’s all irrelevant.
gremlinunderway 3y ago
It should hopefully be a good highlight of some of the base absurdities that we accept as fact when it comes to "intellectual property" law.
j4yav 3y ago
I feel like AI-personhood is not a road OpenAI want to go down. They want to produce something that doesn’t have rights.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mikeryan 3y ago
Honestly I don’t think this is the fundamental question in this case. It’s buried a bit by the lede but IMO the more fundamental question is whether AI models can be trained off of publicly available, copyrighted content without compensating the owner of said copyright. This is regardless of how the eventual work is presented and how “different” it is. It’s where this falls on the “fair use” spectrum. This is uncharted territory for any sort of fair use doctrine as written.
merrywhether 3y ago
Many people don’t like equating human and AI learning (see sibling), but it’s interesting to pull more on that thread. In all three of your transformation examples, you likely would’ve paid the NYT either indirectly via ads or directly via a subscription (contentious ad-blocking aside). And Mazda, GM, and VW surely generated far more value from the car designer in revenue than the designer got in salary and knowledge. Broadly, humans pay something (tuition, apprenticeship, etc) to learn knowledge and skills. Even schools and libraries are not free, though they may feel so at time of use. _Some_ free learning is beginning to emerge on the internet, but much of it is as upsell to paid learning. OpenAI on the other hand has been purely extractive in its learning relationships. A single human contravening normal learning costs would go unnoticed but also would not scale their own downstream impact. But an organized large group doing so would certainly run into issues (10k interlopers couldn’t just sneak into a single college course, for instance). And I think a large group of aligned/associated people is more akin to AI than a single person is, given the differences in scalability.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  Even in the human example - if you pay for NYT, perfectly memorise its articles and reproduce them for other for a fee, you’ll probably find yourself in trouble!
weare138 3y ago
If I take the New York times article and publish it verbatim, that's a problem. And that's seems to be the problem. Apparently ChatGPT was spitting out entire copies of NYT articles without attribution and falsely attributing things to NYT it had made up.

tumult 3y ago

You aren't software. The laws that apply to people reading and learning do not apply to software. Software isn't people. It can't be liable, it isn't taken to court. It can't go to jail, it can't marry, it can't raise a family. Saying that you can legally learn from something by reading it and producing something else, and therefore so should software, is a non sequitur.

throwaway4aday 3y ago
I would not make that the foundation of my argument over the long term.
- tumult 3y ago
  Assuming that software won't receive legal personhood seems like a pretty good foundation. If that's no longer the case, you have much crazier things to worry about than copyright infringement.
ravenstine 3y ago
What makes humans special? Because they can marry and go to jail? That's not relevant, and what is relevant is the difference in outcome. If something takes in information, learns from it, and spits out information as a result of its learning, then why does the implementation matter at all? So what if it's software? That's the point. You're speaking as if it's a given that the issue comes down to software not being people, therefore society as a group should make software do whatever it wants even if it doesn't own that software. Not everyone is going to agree with that because it's not clear why, if something is wrong for software to do, it isn't also wrong for a human brain.
- tumult 3y ago
  > You're speaking as if it's a given that the issue comes down to software not being people, therefore society as a group can make software do whatever it wants even if it doesn't own it. Yes. It's an object or writing. Not a person. You're arguing for giving personhood to software right now and that's crazy.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    If we give personhood to software, wouldn't it mean that you cannot shutdown or delete it ever? You cannot destroy the equipment it is on? As clearly that would be murder. What would be your financial responsibility to keep AI running?
    - merrywhether 3y ago
      These are famously the types of questions surfaced in countless sci-fi books. And as long as humans don’t destroy themselves first, it is likely that we will have to address them eventually. In most stories it generally happens too late after some terrible war/conflict, so it wouldn’t be unreasonable to tackle them proactively. And then maybe it’s not so weird to think about these concepts even if their realization isn’t imminent. Working backwards in such a framework would probably give much better laws for today.
    - ravenstine 3y ago
      This has nothing to do with personhood of software. Restricting the freedom of human beings, which includes the ones that run companies, based on the tool they choose to use, without the basis of obvious direct harm, is questionable. The fact that AI can operate autonomously is a side tangent; they are created by humans and, so far, their only proximal purpose is to serve humans.
    - filoleg 3y ago
      Corporate personhood is a thing in the US, and you are allowed to shutdown your company just fine.
  - 3y ago
chii 3y ago
> therefore so should software, is a non sequitur. it's not. Why isn't photoshop being sued as copyright infringement? People can reproduce infringing works in it easily enough. How is pressing buttons in photoshop different to pressing buttons in chatGPT?
- dd82 3y ago
  It is exactly the same. You can absoutely be sued for copyright infringement in your example. https://www.adobe.com/legal/dmca.html https://www.adobe.com/legal/dmca.html Just because you produce an infringing work doesn't mean it will be discovered and then a legal case made.
  - m-s-y 3y ago
    Correct. But the person using the software is charged. Not the software itself. The NYT is trying to push liability onto the software (ChatGPT-cannot be sued) instead of the software’s users (you and me-can be sued). I feel this is the correct interpretation.
    - tumult 3y ago
      No. They are suing the people who made the software. They are not suing the software. You can't sue software. Software isn't a person.
      - filoleg 3y ago
        This is just pedantry. Would NYT be suing Adobe (the people who made the software), if one of their users utilized Photoshop to produce an image that violates copyright? I don’t think so.
        tumult 3y ago
        No. They would sue Adobe if Adobe put images that violate copyright into Photoshop and let users insert them from a dropdown menu. Your comparison is incorrect and bad.
fourside 3y ago
It’s puzzling to me why some people take it as a given that if a person is legally able to do A, then software should too. The capabilities of software are so different than that of a person that it seems reasonable to consider how the laws apply to software separately. A group of individuals could not absorb the NYT’s content nearly as fast as software can. Like, can we confidently say that laws around copyright and licensing would not have been written any differently had LLMs existed at the time? It’s not obvious to me that the answer is yes.
CivBase 3y ago
No it's not. The AI isn't the one publishing its works. If I write an article that is word-for-word the same as a Times article, I'm not liable for anything until I make it available to others. The means by which I wrote the article are irrelevant. This is the core of the issue. In this case, the "AI" is basically just a fancy writing tool for the publisher.
ericmay 3y ago
> You aren't software. The laws that apply to people reading and learning do not apply to software. If you're going to draw a sharp distinction between reading/words/people (software isn't people, etc.) and software I would argue that the legal and copyright considerations should be stronger for software, not weaker, precisely because of your argument.

mongol 3y ago

This is not what using copyrighted works for AI is about. A human is not software, when you read an article it is not "copied" into your brain.

pmarreck 3y ago
> when you read an article it is not "copied" into your brain. 1) You cannot prove that this does not happen in some form. The fact that manual electrical stimulation of the cortex triggers random memories is sort of the proof that you are wrong here; if there wasn't some kind of "copy, transformed somehow into a 3D space we call the brain" in there, then that localized stimulation wouldn't trigger a particular memory at all. 2) And yet, this is not true of AI's either. Knowledge encoded into either real neurons or a simulation of them may be similar both in how it's not a "literal copy" but a kind of copy nevertheless. If we are only concerned with "literal" or "verbatim" copies, then there is no case here.
jncfhnb 3y ago
Right because copyrighted works has nothing to do with ai. So it’s all irrelevant.

gremlinunderway 3y ago

It should hopefully be a good highlight of some of the base absurdities that we accept as fact when it comes to "intellectual property" law.

j4yav 3y ago

I feel like AI-personhood is not a road OpenAI want to go down. They want to produce something that doesn’t have rights.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

mikeryan 3y ago

Honestly I don’t think this is the fundamental question in this case. It’s buried a bit by the lede but IMO the more fundamental question is whether AI models can be trained off of publicly available, copyrighted content without compensating the owner of said copyright. This is regardless of how the eventual work is presented and how “different” it is. It’s where this falls on the “fair use” spectrum. This is uncharted territory for any sort of fair use doctrine as written.

merrywhether 3y ago

Many people don’t like equating human and AI learning (see sibling), but it’s interesting to pull more on that thread. In all three of your transformation examples, you likely would’ve paid the NYT either indirectly via ads or directly via a subscription (contentious ad-blocking aside). And Mazda, GM, and VW surely generated far more value from the car designer in revenue than the designer got in salary and knowledge. Broadly, humans pay something (tuition, apprenticeship, etc) to learn knowledge and skills. Even schools and libraries are not free, though they may feel so at time of use. _Some_ free learning is beginning to emerge on the internet, but much of it is as upsell to paid learning. OpenAI on the other hand has been purely extractive in its learning relationships. A single human contravening normal learning costs would go unnoticed but also would not scale their own downstream impact. But an organized large group doing so would certainly run into issues (10k interlopers couldn’t just sneak into a single college course, for instance). And I think a large group of aligned/associated people is more akin to AI than a single person is, given the differences in scalability.

madeofpalk 3y ago
Even in the human example - if you pay for NYT, perfectly memorise its articles and reproduce them for other for a fee, you’ll probably find yourself in trouble!

weare138 3y ago

If I take the New York times article and publish it verbatim, that's a problem. And that's seems to be the problem. Apparently ChatGPT was spitting out entire copies of NYT articles without attribution and falsely attributing things to NYT it had made up.