3 ms·

> This is only possible if the AI is remembering large portions of the original trained-on works which is fine in my books. You could equivalently produce the

by chii 3y ago

> This is only possible if the AI is remembering large portions of the original trained-on works which is fine in my books. You could equivalently produce the same works from searching thru the digits of pi. The only enforcement that's needed is on the end user of the model - if they choose to produce the training set, they are violating copyright. The creator of the model _does not_ violate copyright merely by creating and distributing the weights of a neural network, as long as the space of potential output is vastly larger than the training set.

johnnyanmac 3y ago
>You could equivalently produce the same works from searching thru the digits of pi. in the same way you can brute force an MD5 Hash if you had a few centuries, I guess. I don't think "monkey's making Shakespeare" is a good metric for when to determine if a piece of art is unique enough to be scraped. Tracing is looked down upon in the art community and this feels way too close to tracing if they just have these images in a database ready to reference. You can't store copyrighted movies nor music on such private databases (one of the few times I will ever utter the words "thank you DMCA"), I don't see why art pieces would be exempt.
bjt 3y ago
That's a really weird argument. Copyright is a legal system created by the Constitution and statutes and administrative rules. It cares about whether you are "copying", and it cares about whether you're creating things that compete with the works of the original authors. It doesn't care about potential output spaces. In this context, I don't see a principled difference between the model weights and really good compression. If I send you a gzipped copy of the latest bestseller book it's still copyright infringement. And it would still be infringement if I shipped it inside a software program that can _also_ reshuffle the words in a bajillion different ways, if there's a "copy" of the original work in there.
- scheeseman486 3y ago
  You can eke out large chunks of works from Google Books with the right queries too.
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    Yes, but Google Books is a search engine. It doesn't write books, it just tells you where a particular phrase might occur in those books. There's explicit caselaw allowing you to do this, extending back before Google was even a thing. For related reasons, Google Books also does not let you read the whole book - just the page the search match came from. OpenAI and other large language model developers are claiming they have a machine that can write books, but they also fed it shittons of books, and they can't account for where all that text went. At best they can say "well, it doesn't produce exact, verbatim copies of the training set all the time".
    - scheeseman486 3y ago
      Generative AI doesn't write books either, it's a machine spitting out results based on queries entered by a person. It has no personhood nor rights to ownership, in spite of what AI more crackpot advocates try to claim, it's more a very complicated pencil.
numpad0 3y ago
If those HDF5 or .gguf or whatever file format turns out to be lossy decodable as images and texts, it shouldn't be considered kosher just like pirated and transcoded movies aren't considered lawful transformative original creations.
kmeisthax 3y ago
Courts won't buy this, at least not completely. Copyright infringement liability accrues to the entire value chain - model users and developers alike. So the only way for a model to see copyrighted data during training and be non-infringing is if there's no conceivable way to reproduce training data. I don't think fair use saves us either, at least not the model authors, because the whole selling point of these models is to replace artists. Yes, artists can use them as tools, but that is far less lucrative. The valuations and hype being thrown around specifically come from, among other things, being able to cut the creative class out of their own business. No court is going to look at that and say "ok, yeah, sure, it's perfectly fine for you to be using other people's work to train on". An individual using an AI art generator may still wind up getting novel output that isn't obviously infringing to anything in the dataset. If that's the case then they probably haven't infringed copyright. Or at least, it'd be difficult to make a case around it.

by chii 3y ago

johnnyanmac 3y ago

>You could equivalently produce the same works from searching thru the digits of pi. in the same way you can brute force an MD5 Hash if you had a few centuries, I guess. I don't think "monkey's making Shakespeare" is a good metric for when to determine if a piece of art is unique enough to be scraped. Tracing is looked down upon in the art community and this feels way too close to tracing if they just have these images in a database ready to reference. You can't store copyrighted movies nor music on such private databases (one of the few times I will ever utter the words "thank you DMCA"), I don't see why art pieces would be exempt.

bjt 3y ago

That's a really weird argument. Copyright is a legal system created by the Constitution and statutes and administrative rules. It cares about whether you are "copying", and it cares about whether you're creating things that compete with the works of the original authors. It doesn't care about potential output spaces. In this context, I don't see a principled difference between the model weights and really good compression. If I send you a gzipped copy of the latest bestseller book it's still copyright infringement. And it would still be infringement if I shipped it inside a software program that can _also_ reshuffle the words in a bajillion different ways, if there's a "copy" of the original work in there.

scheeseman486 3y ago
You can eke out large chunks of works from Google Books with the right queries too.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  Yes, but Google Books is a search engine. It doesn't write books, it just tells you where a particular phrase might occur in those books. There's explicit caselaw allowing you to do this, extending back before Google was even a thing. For related reasons, Google Books also does not let you read the whole book - just the page the search match came from. OpenAI and other large language model developers are claiming they have a machine that can write books, but they also fed it shittons of books, and they can't account for where all that text went. At best they can say "well, it doesn't produce exact, verbatim copies of the training set all the time".
  - scheeseman486 3y ago
    Generative AI doesn't write books either, it's a machine spitting out results based on queries entered by a person. It has no personhood nor rights to ownership, in spite of what AI more crackpot advocates try to claim, it's more a very complicated pencil.

numpad0 3y ago

If those HDF5 or .gguf or whatever file format turns out to be lossy decodable as images and texts, it shouldn't be considered kosher just like pirated and transcoded movies aren't considered lawful transformative original creations.

kmeisthax 3y ago

Courts won't buy this, at least not completely. Copyright infringement liability accrues to the entire value chain - model users and developers alike. So the only way for a model to see copyrighted data during training and be non-infringing is if there's no conceivable way to reproduce training data. I don't think fair use saves us either, at least not the model authors, because the whole selling point of these models is to replace artists. Yes, artists can use them as tools, but that is far less lucrative. The valuations and hype being thrown around specifically come from, among other things, being able to cut the creative class out of their own business. No court is going to look at that and say "ok, yeah, sure, it's perfectly fine for you to be using other people's work to train on". An individual using an AI art generator may still wind up getting novel output that isn't obviously infringing to anything in the dataset. If that's the case then they probably haven't infringed copyright. Or at least, it'd be difficult to make a case around it.