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The sooner anyone making profit from models trained on creators proprietary content start paying for the content they’re using the better for creators, society

The sooner anyone making profit from models trained on creators proprietary content start paying for the content they’re using the better for creators, society and even the AI companies. It’s pretty tiring hearing people argue about whether copyright law applies to AI companies or not. It applies. Just get on and sort out a proper licensing model.

rimeice 3y ago
s/profit/any revenue what so ever
Wissenschafter 3y ago
It's pretty tiring hearing people think anything like what you're saying is going to happen. The horse is out of the barn already, deal with it.
- BizarreByte 3y ago
  > The horse is out of the barn already, deal with it. Like leaded gas, the government can make regulations to deal with anything should they choose to. Why do you think it's okay for massive companies to freely profit off the work of others?
  - Wissenschafter 3y ago
    Leaded gas isn't open source software. Try again.
    - BizarreByte 3y ago
      Most of the big AI models aren't open source and even if they were? You can absolutely regulate them.
      - Wissenschafter 3y ago
        [flagged]
        BizarreByte 3y ago
        > Go ahead and legislate it, in a free economy world your country is fucked, and stupid, if they do. This is a tired argument that has been repeated every time almost any regulation has been proposed let alone implemented. We could be more economically competitive with the world if we had no holidays and worked 13 hour days too.
        Wissenschafter 3y ago
        [flagged]
- networkchad 3y ago
  [dead]
encomiast 3y ago
> It applies. If only saying it would make it so. Unfortunately, it's not easy to make this legal argument given how copyright law only protects fixed, tangible expressions, not ideas, concepts, principles, etc. and has a gaping hole called 'fair use.'
- __loam 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - Zpalmtree 3y ago
    Maybe the "rat fucks" just wanted to make cool images?
    - enticeing 3y ago
      And profit off of it?
    - lacrimacida 3y ago
      More likely they just wanted to make money
      - fragmede 3y ago
        By giving the model away for free?
    - __loam 3y ago
      You can use this cool technology to do that without stolen labor. It's called "drawing".
- eigenket 3y ago
  The new York Times has examples where GPT will reproduce world for word exactly paragraphs of their (copyrighted) text if you ask it to. That's a pretty fixed tangible expression I think.
jeremyjh 3y ago
It applies - but how it applies is simply not settled. Clearly, there is no statistical model that can launder IP. If someone uses Midjourney to produce someone else's IP, that user (not Midjourney) would be in violation of copyright if they use it in a way that does not conform to the license, such as by creating their own website of cat and girl comics and running Adsense on it. However, if other artists are inspired by this style of comic, and it influences their work - that is simply fair use. If that artist is some rando using a tool like Midjourney - that is inspired by the art but doesn't reproduce it - it is not at all clear to me that this is not also fair use.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  The point is that Midjourney itself, the model weights, is possibly a derivative work of all of the works that went into its training. The fact that it can produce almost identical copies of some of them, especially if not carefully prevented from doing so through secondary mechanisms, is obvious proof that it directly encodes copies of some of these works. That already clearly means that they couldn't publish the model directly even if they wanted to, since they don't have the right to distribute copies of those works, even if they are represented in a weird lossy encoding. Whether it's legal for them to give access to the model through an API that prevents returning copyrighted content is a much more complex legal topic.
  - encomiast 3y ago
    > possibly a derivative work of all of the works that went into its training. or… it is possibly a transformative work of the all the works that went into it's training, which would lead to a strong fair use argument. Given how permissive the courts have been with transformative work, this seems like an easier argument to make.
    - poncho_romero 3y ago
      But again, we’ve seen these models spit out verbatim text and images that are copyrighted (many examples throughout this thread). That doesn’t strike me as “transformative work.”
artninja1988 3y ago
>the better for [...] AI companies Yes exactly. Kill off the free alternative since nobody else can afford licenses with big rights holders. Google will love this. Creators will get pennies. Everyone has to go through proprietary apis, OS will be outlawed. Not something I would want to see!
Jasper_ 3y ago
> "The bottom line is this," the firm, known as a16z, wrote. "Imposing the cost of actual or potential copyright liability on the creators of AI models will either kill or significantly hamper their development." > The firm said payment for all of the copyrighted material already used in LLMs would cost the companies that built them "tens or hundreds of billions of dollars a year in royalty payments." https://www.businessinsider.com/marc-andreessen-horowitz-ai-copyright-2023-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/marc-andreessen-horowitz-ai-...
- rideontime 3y ago
  Good.
- mattgreenrocks 3y ago
  Starting a business is huge amounts of risk to begin with. Just because you may lose more doesn't mean you're magically exempt from being able to ignore that. Watching the superstars of venture capital whine that copyright is unfair is quite something, though.
- plorkyeran 3y ago
  Sounds like they need to find someone good at developing business models who can help them figure one out.
- seurimas 3y ago
  Doesn't that kind of demonstrate the value being actively stolen from the creators, more than anything? Copyright law killed Napster, too. That doesn't mean applying copyright law was wrong.
  - unnamed76ri 3y ago
    And now the guy who started Napster is on the board of Spotify who just decided they weren’t going to pay small time artists for their music anymore. Go figure.
    - 3y ago
crooked-v 3y ago
I think it's worth noting that Adobe Firefly and iStock already have generators that use only licensed content.
- raincole 3y ago
  Highly doubtful. Yes, I know Adobe said so. No, I don't trust them. Facts: 1. Adobe Firefly is trained with Adobe Stock assets. [1] 2. Anyone can submit to Adobe Stock. 3. Adobe Stock already has AI-generated assets that are not correctly tagged so. [2] 4. It's hard to remove an image from a trained model. Unless Adobe carefully scrutinize every image in the training set, the logical conclusion is Adobe Firefly already contains at least second-handed unauthorized images (e.g. those generated by Stable Diffusion). It's just "not Adobe's fault". [1] https://www.adobe.com/products/firefly.html https://www.adobe.com/products/firefly.html : "The current Firefly generative AI model is trained on a dataset of licensed content, such as Adobe Stock, and public domain content where copyright has expired." [2] Famous example: https://twitter.com/destiny_thememe/status/1744842365767225556 https://twitter.com/destiny_thememe/status/17448423657672255...
throw10920 3y ago
> anyone making profit from models It's actually just "anyone making models". If you train a model with other people's art (without their permission) and then distribute the model or output for free, your still stealing their work, even if you make zero profit.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Kiro 3y ago
Why do you as a hacker shamelessly support copyright?

rimeice 3y ago

s/profit/any revenue what so ever

Wissenschafter 3y ago

It's pretty tiring hearing people think anything like what you're saying is going to happen. The horse is out of the barn already, deal with it.

BizarreByte 3y ago
> The horse is out of the barn already, deal with it. Like leaded gas, the government can make regulations to deal with anything should they choose to. Why do you think it's okay for massive companies to freely profit off the work of others?
- Wissenschafter 3y ago
  Leaded gas isn't open source software. Try again.
  - BizarreByte 3y ago
    Most of the big AI models aren't open source and even if they were? You can absolutely regulate them.
    - Wissenschafter 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - BizarreByte 3y ago
        > Go ahead and legislate it, in a free economy world your country is fucked, and stupid, if they do. This is a tired argument that has been repeated every time almost any regulation has been proposed let alone implemented. We could be more economically competitive with the world if we had no holidays and worked 13 hour days too.
        Wissenschafter 3y ago
        [flagged]
networkchad 3y ago
[dead]

encomiast 3y ago

> It applies. If only saying it would make it so. Unfortunately, it's not easy to make this legal argument given how copyright law only protects fixed, tangible expressions, not ideas, concepts, principles, etc. and has a gaping hole called 'fair use.'

__loam 3y ago
[flagged]
- Zpalmtree 3y ago
  Maybe the "rat fucks" just wanted to make cool images?
  - enticeing 3y ago
    And profit off of it?
  - lacrimacida 3y ago
    More likely they just wanted to make money
    - fragmede 3y ago
      By giving the model away for free?
  - __loam 3y ago
    You can use this cool technology to do that without stolen labor. It's called "drawing".
eigenket 3y ago
The new York Times has examples where GPT will reproduce world for word exactly paragraphs of their (copyrighted) text if you ask it to. That's a pretty fixed tangible expression I think.

jeremyjh 3y ago

It applies - but how it applies is simply not settled. Clearly, there is no statistical model that can launder IP. If someone uses Midjourney to produce someone else's IP, that user (not Midjourney) would be in violation of copyright if they use it in a way that does not conform to the license, such as by creating their own website of cat and girl comics and running Adsense on it. However, if other artists are inspired by this style of comic, and it influences their work - that is simply fair use. If that artist is some rando using a tool like Midjourney - that is inspired by the art but doesn't reproduce it - it is not at all clear to me that this is not also fair use.

tsimionescu 3y ago
The point is that Midjourney itself, the model weights, is possibly a derivative work of all of the works that went into its training. The fact that it can produce almost identical copies of some of them, especially if not carefully prevented from doing so through secondary mechanisms, is obvious proof that it directly encodes copies of some of these works. That already clearly means that they couldn't publish the model directly even if they wanted to, since they don't have the right to distribute copies of those works, even if they are represented in a weird lossy encoding. Whether it's legal for them to give access to the model through an API that prevents returning copyrighted content is a much more complex legal topic.
- encomiast 3y ago
  > possibly a derivative work of all of the works that went into its training. or… it is possibly a transformative work of the all the works that went into it's training, which would lead to a strong fair use argument. Given how permissive the courts have been with transformative work, this seems like an easier argument to make.
  - poncho_romero 3y ago
    But again, we’ve seen these models spit out verbatim text and images that are copyrighted (many examples throughout this thread). That doesn’t strike me as “transformative work.”

artninja1988 3y ago

>the better for [...] AI companies Yes exactly. Kill off the free alternative since nobody else can afford licenses with big rights holders. Google will love this. Creators will get pennies. Everyone has to go through proprietary apis, OS will be outlawed. Not something I would want to see!

Jasper_ 3y ago

> "The bottom line is this," the firm, known as a16z, wrote. "Imposing the cost of actual or potential copyright liability on the creators of AI models will either kill or significantly hamper their development." > The firm said payment for all of the copyrighted material already used in LLMs would cost the companies that built them "tens or hundreds of billions of dollars a year in royalty payments." https://www.businessinsider.com/marc-andreessen-horowitz-ai-copyright-2023-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/marc-andreessen-horowitz-ai-...

rideontime 3y ago
Good.
mattgreenrocks 3y ago
Starting a business is huge amounts of risk to begin with. Just because you may lose more doesn't mean you're magically exempt from being able to ignore that. Watching the superstars of venture capital whine that copyright is unfair is quite something, though.
plorkyeran 3y ago
Sounds like they need to find someone good at developing business models who can help them figure one out.
seurimas 3y ago
Doesn't that kind of demonstrate the value being actively stolen from the creators, more than anything? Copyright law killed Napster, too. That doesn't mean applying copyright law was wrong.
- unnamed76ri 3y ago
  And now the guy who started Napster is on the board of Spotify who just decided they weren’t going to pay small time artists for their music anymore. Go figure.
  - 3y ago

crooked-v 3y ago

I think it's worth noting that Adobe Firefly and iStock already have generators that use only licensed content.

raincole 3y ago
Highly doubtful. Yes, I know Adobe said so. No, I don't trust them. Facts: 1. Adobe Firefly is trained with Adobe Stock assets. [1] 2. Anyone can submit to Adobe Stock. 3. Adobe Stock already has AI-generated assets that are not correctly tagged so. [2] 4. It's hard to remove an image from a trained model. Unless Adobe carefully scrutinize every image in the training set, the logical conclusion is Adobe Firefly already contains at least second-handed unauthorized images (e.g. those generated by Stable Diffusion). It's just "not Adobe's fault". [1] https://www.adobe.com/products/firefly.html https://www.adobe.com/products/firefly.html : "The current Firefly generative AI model is trained on a dataset of licensed content, such as Adobe Stock, and public domain content where copyright has expired." [2] Famous example: https://twitter.com/destiny_thememe/status/1744842365767225556 https://twitter.com/destiny_thememe/status/17448423657672255...

throw10920 3y ago

> anyone making profit from models It's actually just "anyone making models". If you train a model with other people's art (without their permission) and then distribute the model or output for free, your still stealing their work, even if you make zero profit.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Kiro 3y ago