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>> If you think OpenAI is less valuable because it can't use copyrighted content, then it should give some of that value back to the content. But we are allowe

>> If you think OpenAI is less valuable because it can't use copyrighted content, then it should give some of that value back to the content. But we are allowed to use copyrighted content. We are not allowed to copy copyrighted content. We are allowed to view and consume it, to be influenced by it, and under many circumstances even outright copy it. If one doesn't want anyone to see/consume or be influenced by one's copyrighted work, then lock it in a box and don't show it to anyone. I have some, but diminishing sympathy for artists screaming about how AI generates images too similar to their work. Yes, the output does look very similar to your work. But if I take your work and compare it to the millions of other people's work, I'd bet I can find some preexisting human-made art that also looks similar to your stuff too. This is why clothing doesn't qualify for copyright. No matter how original you think your clothing seems, someone in the last many thousands of years of fashion has done it before. Visual art may be approaching a similar point. No matter how original you think your drawings are, someone out there has already done something similar. They may not have created exactly the same image, but neither does AI literally copy images. That reality doesn't kill visual arts as it didn't kill off the fashion industry.

Osmose 3y ago
Because we are humans and our capability of abusing those rights is limited. The scale and speed at which LLMs can abuse copyrighted work to threaten the livelihoods of the authors of those works is reason enough to consider it unethical.
- visarga 3y ago
  Writing good text with LLM is actually slow and takes a lot of fixing.
- unfamiliar 3y ago
  I don’t think it is. What you describe is similar to any other industry disruption, and I don’t think those are unethical. I’d actually argue that preventing disruption is often (not always) unethical, because you artificially prolong an inefficient or inferior alternative.
  - wheelie_boy 3y ago
    I think the big difference is that it's not a direct replacement - it feeds off of the existing people while making it much harder for them to make a living. It would be as if instead of cars running on gasoline, they ran on chopped up horseflesh. Not good for the horses, and not sustainable in the long term.
  - bayindirh 3y ago
    So you're saying that, we should stop pursuing art and prose? Because when you fine tune midjourney with 30 or so images of an artist, it can create any image with the artist's style. You removed the value and authenticity that artist in 30 minutes, you applauded it, and defended that it should be the norm. OK then, we can close down all entertainment business, and generate everything with AI, because it can mimic styles, clone sounds, animate things with gaussian splats, and so on. Maybe we can hire coders to "code" films? Oh sorry. ChatGPT can do that too. So we need a keypad then, only the most wealthy can press. Press 1 for a movie, 2 for a new music album, 3 for a new book, and so on. We need 10 buttons or so, as far as I can see. Maybe I can ask ChatGPT 4 to code one for me.
    - gedy 3y ago
      > Because when you fine tune midjourney with 30 or so images of an artist, it can create any image with the artist's style. Artists style is not copyrightable, at least in the US. And if they changed that because of "AI"? My word, the lawsuits that would arise between artists...
      - bayindirh 3y ago
        Doesn't matter. You pay the artist for their style of rendering things. Consider XKCD, PHD Comics, Userfriendly, etc. At least 50% of the charm is the style, remaining 50% is the characters and the story arc. You can't copyright style of a Rolex, but people pay a fortune to get the real deal. Same thing. > My word, the lawsuits that would arise between artists... Artists imitate/copy artists as a compliment, at least in illustration and comics world. Unless you do it in bad faith, I don't think artists gonna do that. Artists have a sense of humor to begin with, because art is making fun of this world, in a sense.
- Vvector 3y ago
  > ...reason enough to consider it unethical. But unethical =/= illegal, unfortunately.
  - orangecat 3y ago
    But unethical =/= illegal, unfortunately. That is very much fortunate.
- derangedHorse 3y ago
  "abusing those rights" is a subjective phrase. What about it is "abuse"? If I learned how to draw cartoon characters from copying Family Guy and released a cartoon where the characters are drawn in a similar style, would that be abuse (assuming my show takes some of Family Guy's viewership)? Is your ethical hangup with the fact it's wrong to use the data of others to influence one's work (which could potentially be an algorithm) or that people are losing opportunities based on the influenced work? If it's the latter how do we find the line between what's acceptable and what's not? For example, most people wouldn't be against the creation and release of a cure for cancer developed in this way. It would lead to the loss of opportunities for cancer researchers but I believe most people would deem that an acceptable tradeoff. A grayer area would be an AI art generator used to generate the designs for a cancer research donation page. If it could potentially lead to a 10% increase in donations, does that make it worth it?
  - scythe 3y ago
    >For example, most people wouldn't be against the creation and release of a cure for cancer developed in this way. Intellectual property law does presently restrict the development of cancer treatments and demands in many cases exorbitant royalties from patients and practitioners, so I'm not convinced that this is accurate. If people believed that the loss of opportunities would constrain innovation in the field of cancer research, I think they'd expect the AI users to pay royalties as well.
    - derangedHorse 3y ago
      I never made a legal appeal in my previous comment so legalities are irrelevant. It also differs from my argument on derivative/transformative works rather than specific works. What I was questioning was whether people would think it's morally right or not to generate inspired works. For example, if someone made an algorithm to read the relevant papers and make a cancer treatment that addresses the same areas/conditions of a method under IP law but don't equate to the exact method, I don't see that as a morally wrong action by itself.
    - s1artibartfast 3y ago
- Wissenschafter 3y ago
  Because we are humans and our capability of abusing those rights is limited. The scale and speed at which looms can abuse copyrighted work to threaten the livelihoods of the seamstresses of those works is reason enough to consider it unethical. Replace loom for printing press etc, you realize you're a luddite?
  - halostatue 3y ago
    Ned Ludd was onto something. He wasn't anti-progress. He was anti-labour theft. The problem was not that people were losing their jobs, but that they were being punished by society for losing their jobs and not being given the ability to adapt, all to satisfy the greed of the ownership class. I am hearing a strong rhyme. Commercialized LLMs are absolutely labour theft even if they are useful.
    - Wissenschafter 3y ago
      Capatalism has really done a number on the human psyche, WE WANT OUR LABOR STOLEN. That's the whole point, so we don't have to labor anymore. Boggles my mind how warped peoples thinking is.
      - halostatue 3y ago
        We do not want our labour stolen. We want to labour less, and we want to be fairly compensated for when we have to labour. The Luddites and the original saboteurs (from the French sabot) had a problem where the capital class invested in machines that let them (a) get more work done per person, (b) employ fewer people, and (c) pay those fewer people less because now they weren't working as hard. The people they fired? They (and the governments of the day — just like now) basically told them to go starve. > The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers which > opposed the use of certain types of cost-saving machinery, and often destroyed the > machines in clandestine raids. They protested against manufacturers who used machines > in "a fraudulent and deceitful manner" to replace the skilled labour of workers and > drive down wages by producing inferior goods.[1][2] Members of the group referred to > themselves as Luddites, self-described followers of "Ned Ludd", a legendary weaver > whose name was used as a pseudonym in threatening letters to mill owners and > government officials.[3] Yes, we want to work less. But fair work should result in fair compensation. Ultimately, this is something that the copyright washing of current commercialized LLMs cannot achieve.
- Vvector 3y ago
  Are photocopy machines illegal? Are CD-ROM burners illegal? Both allow near-unlimited copies of copyrighted material at a scale much faster than a human could do alone. The tools are not the problem, it's how humans use them.
  - chlorion 3y ago
    >CD-ROM burners They can be used in an illegal way if used to copy copyrighted material, yes.
    - Vvector 3y ago
      Same as an LLM, they can be used in an illegal way if used to copy copyrighted material. So I can't tell it to reproduce a copyrighted work. But it can create new material in the style of another artist.
      - chlorion 3y ago
        The difference is that the LLM is still copying copyrighted material in your case, but if I burn a Linux ISO, that is not happening. You do not have to produce an exact copy of something to violate copyright, and I think anything the LLM outputs is violating copyright for everything it has ever trained on, unless the operator (the person operating the LLM and/or the person prompting it) has rights to that content.
    - squidbeak 3y ago
      And are the burners themselves illegal because you can name illegal uses for them?
      - chlorion 3y ago
        No, and I don't think anyone is arguing that LLMs should be illegal either. I personally am not against LLMs training on things the operator has rights to, and even training on copyrighted things, but I am against it laundering those things back out and claiming it's legal.
zanellato19 3y ago
Who is "we" here? Are you making a distinction between people and machines? If I built a machine that randomly copied from a big sample of arts that I wanted, would that machine be ok? OpenAI built a machine that does exactly that. They just sampled _everyone_.
tedivm 3y ago
I firmly believe that training models qualifies as fair use. I think it falls under research, and is used to push the scientific community forward. I also firmly believe that commercializing models built on top of copyrighted works (which all works start off as) does not qualify as fair use (or at least shouldn't) and that commercializing models build on copyrighted material is nothing more than license laundering. Companies that commercialize copyrighted work in this manner should be paying for a license to train with the data, or should stick to using the licenses that the content was released under. I don't think your example is valid either. The reason that AI models are generating content similar to other people's work is because those models were explicitly trained to do that. That is literally what they are and how they work. That is very different than people having similar styles.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  If I read a lot of stories in a certain genre that I like, and I later write my own story, it’s almost by definition going to be a mish-mash of everything I like. Should I pay the authors of the books I read when I sell mine?
  - fragmede 3y ago
    Did you not pay them when you bought their book to read it in the first place? That dead trees don't lend themselves to that sort of payoff is a limitation of the technology. In music, sampling is a well-accepted mechanism for creating new music, and the original authors of the music they used do get paid when the new one is used.
    - soulofmischief 3y ago
      No, I bought the books used for 25 cents at a local booksale, and the authors did not benefit from my secondary market transaction.
      - downWidOutaFite 3y ago
        You got that via the legal "first sale doctrine" which has been killed for digital works.
mondrian 3y ago
Does copyright law say you can ingest copyrighted work at very large scale and sell derivates of those works to gain massive profit / massive market capitalizations? Honestly wondering. This seems to be the crux issue here.
- Workaccount2 3y ago
  It does. See app stores and the endless copy-cat games and apps, right down to the art style.
  - freejazz 3y ago
    I sue people for copyright infringement frequently. It's rare that I have a defendant whose defense is "the internet is full of other infringers, why should I be held responsible?" Never have they won. This debate would go better if people didn't base it on assumptions they gleam from the world around them, but with regard to the actual law and not specious reasoning like "well, they did it too!!"
    - Workaccount2 3y ago
      I'd love to be the lawyer of the first anime artist then.
      - freejazz 3y ago
        Why engage with nearly 200 years of copyright jurisprudence when you can just insist you are right because anime?
        Workaccount2 3y ago
        No, I can insist they are copying my style, which is anime. Or maybe you cannot copyright style, and all those apps do fall on legal ground?
        3y ago
madeofpalk 3y ago
I'm not as interested in making a technical/legal argument, as I'm just sharing my feelings on the topic (and eventually, what I think the law should be), but during training copies are made of copyrighted material, even if the model doesn't contain exact copies of work. Crawling, downloading, storing (temporarily) for training all involve making copies, and thus are subject to copyright law. Maybe those copies are fair use, maybe it's not (I think it shouldn't be). My main point is that OpenAI is generating an incredible amount of value all hinging on other people's work at a massive scale, without paying for their materials. Take all the non-public domain work off Netflix and Netflix doesn't have the same value they have today, so Netflix must pay for content it uses. Same goes for OpenAI imho.
- nulld3v 3y ago
  Assume I agree that copyright holders should be compensated for their works (because I do in some sense). How would this compensation work? Let's say a portion of profits from LLMs that were trained on copyrighted work should be sent to the copyright holders. How would we allocate which portion of the profits go to which creators? The only "fair" way here would be if we could trace how much a specific work influenced a specific output but this is currently impossible and will likely remain impossible for quite some time.
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - jprete 3y ago
    This is what licensing negotiations are for. One doesn't get to throw up their hands and say "I don't know how to fairly pay you so I won't pay you at all".
    - cwkoss 3y ago
      Your argument is ridiculous, because it could identically be applied to "every human artist should have to pay a license to every artist whose work they were inspired by". That would obviously be a horrible future, but megacorps like Disney would love it.
kevincrane 3y ago
I agree with the other commenters about the scale of this “deriving inspiration from others” is where this feels wrong. It feels similar to the ye olden debates on police surveillance. Acquiring a warrant to tail a suspect, tapping a single individual’s phone line, etc all feels like very normal run-of-the-mill police work that no one has a problem with. Collating your behavior across every website and device you own from a data broker is fundamentally the same thing as a single phone’s wiretap, but it obviously feels way grosser and more unethical because it scales way past the point of what you’d imagine as being acceptable.
- derangedHorse 3y ago
  In that example it's not the scale that makes it right or wrong, the scale of people impacted just affects the degree of wrongs that have been committed. > Acquiring a warrant to tail a suspect, tapping a single individual’s phone line, etc all feels like very normal run-of-the-mill police work that no one has a problem with. If acquiring a warrant is the basic action being scaled, I'd be okay with that ethically if it was done under, what I define as, reasonable pretenses. Regardless of how it scales, I still think it would be the right thing to do assuming the pretenses for the first action could be applied to everyone wiretapped. Now if I thought the base action was morally wrong (someone was tailed or wiretapped without proper pretenses), I'd think it's wrong regardless of the scale. The number of people it affected might impact how wrong I saw it, but not whether it was right or wrong to.
freejazz 3y ago
>But we are allowed to use copyrighted content Well, not exactly. Certain uses are fair. The question is does OpenAI's use count as fair. I don't think your immediate response comes close to addressing that question despite your conviction it does otherwise. Also, clothing designs are copyrightable. The conviction expressed by some participants in this debate is exhausting in light of their familiarity with actual copyright law.
melagonster 3y ago
a lot of popular AIy tool is designed to mimic a specific artist's style. human is not permitted to draw so similar graph.
IanCal 3y ago
I do think it's worth remembering there's a difference between "legal" and "good". It's entirely legal for me to leave the pub every time it comes up to my round. It's legal for me to get into a lift and press all the buttons. It's not unreasonable I think for people to be surprised at what is now possible. I'm personally shocked at the progress in the last few years - I'd not have guessed five years ago that putting a picture online might result in my style being easily recreated by anyone for the benefit mostly of a profitable company.
cmiles74 3y ago
The artist in the article clearly states that his work was free to use only if it was not used to make a profit, those were the terms of their license. In the artist's opinion, OpenAI violated that license by training their tool on their work and then selling that tool. This artist doesn't complain about work similar to their own being generated, and their artwork is very clearly not clothing.
- sandworm101 3y ago
  >> In the artist's opinion, OpenAI violated that license... So? Why does the author's opinion even enter into the equation? Authors cannot claim ownership beyond the bounds of copyright. If what AI is doing qualifies as fair use, the artist cannot do anything about it. I'm sure that lots of artists would not want anyone to lampoon or criticize their work. They cannot stop such things. I'm sure lots of artists would never want anyone to ever create anything in any way similar to their work. They cannot do that either.
  - cmiles74 3y ago
    It is not clear that training an LLM falls under "fair use". We are then left with the license of the work, in this case that license forbids re-selling the work for a profit. It is the artist's license for their work at issue, not their opinion.
    - scheeseman486 3y ago
      If the legality is ambiguous then we're left with an impending court decision. Fair use is an affirmative defense, considered case by case.
- Vvector 3y ago
  > "...clearly states that his work was free to use only if it was not used to make a profit" Replace "use" with "copy". No one may copy the work to make a profit. Fair Use has long been an exemption to copyright, with Learning an example of Fair Use. But no one expected AIs to learn so quickly. I don't think it is clear either way, and will end up in SCOTUS. Free and redistribute the material
voidhorse 3y ago
Sorry, but these arguments by analogy are patently ridiculous. We are not talking about the eons old human practice of creative artistic endeavor, which yes, is clearly derivative in some fashion, but which we have well established practices around. We are discussing a new phenomenon of mass replication or derivation by machine at a scale impossible for a single individual to achieve by manual effort. Further, artists tend to either explicitly or implicitly acknowledge their priors in secondary or even primary material, much like one cites work in an academic context. Also, the claim: >But if I take your work and compare it to millions of other people's work... Is ridiculous. A. you haven't, nor will you ever actual do this. B. This is never how the system of artistic practice up to this point has worked precisely because this sort of activity is beyond the scale of human effort. In addition, plagiarism exists and is bad. There's no reason that concept can be extended and expanded to include stochastic reproduction at scale. If you feel artists shouldn't have a say and a future in which capital concentrates even further into the hands of a few technological elite who make their money off of flouting existing laws and the labor of thousands, by all means. But this argument that somehow by analogy to human behavior companies should not be responsible for the vast use of material without permission is absolutely preposterous. These are machines owned by companies. They are not human beings and they do not participate in the social systems of human beings the way human beings do. You may want to consider a distinction in the rules that adequately reflects this distinction in participatory status in a social system.
- derangedHorse 3y ago
  So your argument is predicated on the scale of inspired work being the problem? > They are not human beings and they do not participate in the social systems of human beings the way human beings do I don't think this adds anything to the argument besides you using this as a reason analogies with humans can't be used to compare the specific concept of inspired works? I don't think this holds up. Algorithms participating in social systems has nothing to do with whether inspired works have a moral claim to existence for some. The fact that your ethics system values the biological classification of the originator of inspired works is something that can't be reconciled into a general argument. I could make the claim that the prompt engineer is the artist in this case. > capital concentrates even further into the hands of a few technological elite who make their money off of flouting existing laws That can be said by the development of any technology. Fear of capital concentration is more a critique on capitalism than it is on technological development.
scythe 3y ago
>But we are allowed to use copyrighted content. We are not allowed to copy copyrighted content. We are allowed to view and consume it, to be influenced by it, and under many circumstances even outright copy it. It's important to consider in any legalistic argument over copyright that, unlike conventional property rights which are to some degree prehistoric, copyright is a recent legal construct that was developed for a particular economic purpose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property#History The existing standards of fair use are what they are because copyright was developed with supporting the art industry as an intentional goal, not because it was handed down from the heavens or follows a basic human instinct. Ancient playwrights clipped each others' ideas liberally; late medieval economists observed that restricting this behavior seemed to encourage more creativity. Copyright law is a creation of humans, for humans, and is subordinate to moral and economic reasoning, not prior to it.
- ls612 3y ago
  Copyright only makes any sense for goods with a high fixed cost of production and low to zero marginal cost. Any further use beyond solving that problem is pure rent seeking behavior Also, with computers being functional copyright has become a tool of social control; any function in a physical object can be taken away from you at a whim with no recourse so long as a computer can be inserted into the object. Absent a major change in how society sees copyright I envision a very bleak totalitarian future arising from this trend.
  - Ferret7446 3y ago
    No, copyright only makes sense insofar that it provides a net positive value for society: that it promotes/protects more creativity leading to economic output than it prevents. That is, does the amount of creative/economic output dissuaded by allowing AI (preventing people who would not be able to or not want to create art if they couldn't get paid) exceed the creative/economic output of letting people develop and use such AIs?
    - ls612 3y ago
thomastjeffery 3y ago
Copyright is a bad idea in the first place, and should just be thrown out entirely; but that isn't the whole picture here. If OpenAI is allowed to be ignorant of copyright, then the rest of us should be allowed, too. The problem is that OpenAI (alongside a handful of other very large corporations) gets exclusive rights to that ignorance. They get to monopolize the un-monopoly. That's even worse than the problem we started with.
davidguetta 3y ago
Same for patents
BobaFloutist 3y ago
Let's say I'm an artist. I have, thus far, distributed my art for consumption without cost, because I want people to engage with and enjoy it. But, for whatever reason, I have a deep, irrational philosophical objection to corporate profit. I want to preclude any corporation from ever using my art to turn a profit, when at all possible. I have accepted that in some sense, electrical and internet corporations will be turning a profit using my work, but cannot stomach AI corporations doing so. If I cannot preclude AI corporations from turning a profit using my work, I will stop producing and distributing my work. Do you think it's reasonable for me to want some legal framework that allows me to explicitly deny that use of my work? Because I do.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  When you put it that way, I think you just laid out the case for creating a Copyleft for art.
  - Tijdreiziger 3y ago
    A copyleft license is enforced by copyright. That’s the reason others can’t simply ignore the license.
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Lerc 3y ago
I think there is a case to be made when AI models do produce copies. For instance, I think the NYT have a right to have an issue with the near verbatim recall of NYT articles. It's not clear cut though, when these models produce copies, they are not functioning as intended. Legally that might produce a quagmire, is it fair use when you intend to be transformative but by accident it isn't? Does it matter if you have no control over which bits are not transformative? Does it matter if you know in advance that some bits will be non transformative but you don't know which ones. I presume there are people working on research relating to how to prevent output of raw training data, what is the state of the art in this area? Would it be sufficient to prevent output of the training data or should the models be required to have no significant internal copies of training examples?
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miohtama 3y ago
Copying is not illegal, but publishing. You can have as many private copies as you wish for any content.
chlorion 3y ago
>We are allowed to view and consume it, to be influenced by it, and under many circumstances even outright copy it. People keep saying this but it's actually much more complicated, and in many cases you can't view copyrighted content. An example, MicroSoft employees are not permitted to view or learn from an open source (GPL-2) terminal emulator: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10462#issuecomment-873515286 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10462#issuecomm... Another example is proprietary software that may have it's source available, either intentionally or not. If you view this and then work on something related to it, like WINE for example, you are definitely at risk of being successfully sued. If you worked at MicroSoft and worked on Windows, you would not be able to participate in WINE development at all without violating copyright. If you viewed leaked Windows source code you also would not be able to participate in WINE development. An interesting question that I have, is whether training on proprietary, non-trade-secret sources would be allowed. Something like unreal engine, where you can view the source but it's still proprietary. Another question is whether training on leaked sources of proprietary and private but non-trade-secret code, like source dumps of Windows is legal.
- shkkmo 3y ago
  Your link isn't very clear, but I think your are talking about the "clean room design" strategy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design The way this works is they way many of us are arguing that AI and copyright should work. Vieiwing (or training on) copyrighted work isn't copyright infringement. What can be copyright infringement is using an employee who has viewed (or a model that was trained on) copyrighted work to create a duplication of that work. In most of the examples of infringing output that I've seen, the prompt is pretty explicit in its request to duplicate copyrighted material. Models that produce copyrighted content when not explicitly asked for will have trouble getting traction among users who are concerned about the risk of infringement (such the examples you listed.) I also see this approach opening an opportunity for models that acquire specific licenses for the content they train on that would grant licenses to the users of the model to duplicate some or all of the copyrighted works. The responsibility for how a model is used should rest primarily on the user, not the model trainers.
petsfed 3y ago
>I have some, but diminishing sympathy for artists screaming about how AI generates images too similar to their work. Yes, the output does look very similar to your work. But if I take your work and compare it to the millions of other people's work, I'd bet I can find some preexisting human-made art that also looks similar to your stuff too. Just like the rest of AI, if your argument is "humans can already do this by hand, why is it a problem to let machines do it?", its because you are incorrectly valuing the labor that goes into doing it by hand. If doing X that has potentially negative side effect Y, then the human labor to accomplish X is the principle barrier to Y, which can be mitigated via existing structures. Remove the labor barrier, and the existing mitigation structures cease to be effective. The fact that we never deliberately established those barriers is irrelevant to the fact that our society expects them to be there.
tracerbulletx 3y ago
Copyright is just made up for pragmatic purposes. To incentive creation. It does not matter if training models is not the same as reproducing something exactly if we wish to decide that it's unfair or even just desirable for economic incentive to disallow it, then we are free to make that decision. The trade offs are fairly profound in both directions I think and likely some compromise will need to be made that is fair to all parties and does not cripple economic and social progress.
eslaught 3y ago
> ... as it didn't kill off the fashion industry. Clothes are inherently consumable goods. If you use them, they will wear out. If you do not use them, they still age over time. You cannot "copy" a piece of clothing without a truly astonishing amount of effort. Both the processes, and the materials, may be difficult or impossible to imitate without a very large investment of effort. Compare this to digital art: You can copy it literally for free. Before AI, at least you had to copy it mostly verbatim (modulo some relatively boring transforms, like up/down-scaling, etc.). That limited artist's incomes, but not their future works. But in a post-AI world, you can suck in an artist's life's work, and generate an unlimited number of copycats. Right now, the quality of those might be insufficient to be true replacements, but it's not hard to imagine we'll be in a world not so far off when it will be sufficient, and then artists will be truly screwed.
- Animats 3y ago
  > You cannot "copy" a piece of clothing without a truly astonishing amount of effort. Sure you can. There's a whole industry making knockoffs.
  - mftrhu 3y ago
    GP compared copying a piece of clothing to copying digital art. I'd say that setting up a factory to make knockoffs - or even "just" buying a sewing machine, finding and buying the right fabric, laying out the piece you want to copy, tracing it, cutting the fabric, sewing it, and iterating until it comes out right - would qualify as "a truly astonishing amount of effort" for a person.
    - Animats 3y ago
      You can outsource. Look for "knockoff clothing manufacturers".
      - mftrhu 3y ago
        Yes. Now you - a generic person without any specific skills - just have to search for someone who is willing to sew knockoff clothing to your specification, ship them the item, and wait for them to get back to you - a month or longer, probably, as they are likely based in China and shipping things by boat - while hoping that your cursory search led you to an honest knockoff manufacturer, who won't just take your money and disappear. I'd say that it still qualifies as a "truly astonishing amount of effort" when compared to the right-clicking and pressing save method of copying digital art.
kiba 3y ago
AI doing things that human laboriously learned and inspired from is just different. After all, sheer quantity can be its own quality, especially with AI learning. Now, i am worried about companies like OpenAI monopolizing technology through making their technology proprietary. I think their output should be public domain and copyright should only apply to human authors if they should be at all.
pxoe 3y ago
people and companies are copying copyrighted content when they're using datasets that contain copyrighted content (which also repackage and distribute copyrighted content - not just as links but as actual works/images too), download linked copyrighted content, and store that copyrighted content. plenty of copies created and stored, it seems to me. and like, what, do you think they're trying their damnedest to keep datasets clean and to not store any images in the process? how do you think they retrain on datasets over and over? it's really simple - by storing terabytes of copyrighted content. for ease of use, of course - why download something over and over, if you can just download it and keep it. and if they really wanted to steer clear of copyright infringement, if there's truly "no good solution" (which is bullshit for compute, oh, they can compute everything but not that part) - why can't they just refrain from recklessly scraping everything, if something were to just 'slip in'? like, if you know it's kinda bad, just don't do the thing, right? well, maybe copyright infringement is just acceptable to them. if not the actual goal. what they generate is kinda irrelevant - there's plenty of copyright infringement happening even before any training were to be done. assembling of datasets and bad datasets containing copyrighted content are the start and the core of the copyright problems. there's a really banal thing at the core of this, and it's just a multi-TB storage filled with pirated works.
logifail 3y ago
> We are allowed to view and consume it, to be influenced by it, and under many circumstances even outright copy it. In theory: sure In practice: not really, especially when you're small and the other side is big and has lots of lawyers and/or lawmakers in their pockets. Disney ("In 1989, for instance, the company even threatened to sue three Florida daycare centers unless they removed murals featuring some of its characters") and Deutsche Telekom[1][2] ("the company's actions just smack of corporate bully tactics, where legions of lawyers attempt to hog natural resources — in this case a primary color — that rightfully belong to everyone") are just two examples that spring to mind. [0] https://hls.harvard.edu/today/harvard-law-i-p-expert-explains-how-disney-has-influenced-u-s-copyright-law-to-protect-mickey-mouse-and-winnie-the-pooh/ https://hls.harvard.edu/today/harvard-law-i-p-expert-explain... [1] https://www.dw.com/en/court-confirms-deutsche-telekoms-right-to-pink/a-968525 https://www.dw.com/en/court-confirms-deutsche-telekoms-right... [2] https://futurism.com/the-byte/tmobile-legal-rights-obnoxious-pink-color https://futurism.com/the-byte/tmobile-legal-rights-obnoxious...
bugglebeetle 3y ago
> This is why clothing doesn't qualify for copyright. No matter how original you think your clothing seems, someone in the last many thousands of years of fashion has done it before. Most every fashion company has a legal team that reviews print and pattern, as well as certain other aspects of design, relative to any source of inspiration. My husband works in the industry and has to send everything he does for review in this way. I’m not sure where you got the idea that there are no IP protections for fashion, but this is untrue.
pointlessone 3y ago
If training a model is fair use than model output should also fallow fair use criteria. The very first thing you can find on the internet about fair use is Wikipedia article on the topic. It lists a bunch of factors to decide whether something is fair use. The very first one has a quote from an old copyright case: > [A] reviewer may fairly cite largely from the original work, if his design be really and truly to use the passages for the purposes of fair and reasonable criticism. On the other hand, it is as clear, that if he thus cites the most important parts of the work, with a view, not to criticise, but to supersede the use of the original work, and substitute the review for it, such a use will be deemed in law a piracy. Most use of LLMs and image generation models do not produce criticism of their training data. The most common use is to produce similar works. You can find this very common “trick” to get a specific style of output to add “in style of <artist>”. Is this a direct way "to supersede the use of the original work”? You can certainly see how other factors more or less put gen ai output into the grey zone. The fact that clothing doesn’t qualify for copyright doesn’t mean text and images don’t. Or if you advocate that they don’t then you pretty much advocate for abolishment of copyright because those are the major areas of copyright applicability at the moment. Which is a stance to have but you’d probably be better to actually say that because saying that copyright applies to some images and text but not others is a much harder position to defend.
tripzilch 3y ago
OP's argument was about right and wrong, not about legal and illegal. There's a difference. You'd have to argue the entirety, everything about copyright law being ethical, to make your version of the argument.
a_vanderbilt 3y ago
I feel the emotionally charged nature of the topic prevents a lot of rational discussion from taking place. That's totally understandable too, it's the livelihood for some of those involved. Unless we start making specific regulations for Generative AI, current copyright law is pretty clear: you can't call your art a Picasso, but you can certainly say it was inspired by Picasso. The difference is that GAI can do it much faster and cheaper. The best middle ground in my opinion is to allow GAI to train on copyrighted data, but the output cannot be copyrighted, and the model weights creating it can't be copyrighted either. Any works modified by a human attempting to gain copyright protection should have to fulfill the requirements to be substantiative and transformative just as fair use requires now.

Osmose 3y ago

Because we are humans and our capability of abusing those rights is limited. The scale and speed at which LLMs can abuse copyrighted work to threaten the livelihoods of the authors of those works is reason enough to consider it unethical.

visarga 3y ago
Writing good text with LLM is actually slow and takes a lot of fixing.
unfamiliar 3y ago
I don’t think it is. What you describe is similar to any other industry disruption, and I don’t think those are unethical. I’d actually argue that preventing disruption is often (not always) unethical, because you artificially prolong an inefficient or inferior alternative.
- wheelie_boy 3y ago
  I think the big difference is that it's not a direct replacement - it feeds off of the existing people while making it much harder for them to make a living. It would be as if instead of cars running on gasoline, they ran on chopped up horseflesh. Not good for the horses, and not sustainable in the long term.
- bayindirh 3y ago
  So you're saying that, we should stop pursuing art and prose? Because when you fine tune midjourney with 30 or so images of an artist, it can create any image with the artist's style. You removed the value and authenticity that artist in 30 minutes, you applauded it, and defended that it should be the norm. OK then, we can close down all entertainment business, and generate everything with AI, because it can mimic styles, clone sounds, animate things with gaussian splats, and so on. Maybe we can hire coders to "code" films? Oh sorry. ChatGPT can do that too. So we need a keypad then, only the most wealthy can press. Press 1 for a movie, 2 for a new music album, 3 for a new book, and so on. We need 10 buttons or so, as far as I can see. Maybe I can ask ChatGPT 4 to code one for me.
  - gedy 3y ago
    > Because when you fine tune midjourney with 30 or so images of an artist, it can create any image with the artist's style. Artists style is not copyrightable, at least in the US. And if they changed that because of "AI"? My word, the lawsuits that would arise between artists...
    - bayindirh 3y ago
      Doesn't matter. You pay the artist for their style of rendering things. Consider XKCD, PHD Comics, Userfriendly, etc. At least 50% of the charm is the style, remaining 50% is the characters and the story arc. You can't copyright style of a Rolex, but people pay a fortune to get the real deal. Same thing. > My word, the lawsuits that would arise between artists... Artists imitate/copy artists as a compliment, at least in illustration and comics world. Unless you do it in bad faith, I don't think artists gonna do that. Artists have a sense of humor to begin with, because art is making fun of this world, in a sense.
Vvector 3y ago
> ...reason enough to consider it unethical. But unethical =/= illegal, unfortunately.
- orangecat 3y ago
  But unethical =/= illegal, unfortunately. That is very much fortunate.
derangedHorse 3y ago
"abusing those rights" is a subjective phrase. What about it is "abuse"? If I learned how to draw cartoon characters from copying Family Guy and released a cartoon where the characters are drawn in a similar style, would that be abuse (assuming my show takes some of Family Guy's viewership)? Is your ethical hangup with the fact it's wrong to use the data of others to influence one's work (which could potentially be an algorithm) or that people are losing opportunities based on the influenced work? If it's the latter how do we find the line between what's acceptable and what's not? For example, most people wouldn't be against the creation and release of a cure for cancer developed in this way. It would lead to the loss of opportunities for cancer researchers but I believe most people would deem that an acceptable tradeoff. A grayer area would be an AI art generator used to generate the designs for a cancer research donation page. If it could potentially lead to a 10% increase in donations, does that make it worth it?
- scythe 3y ago
  >For example, most people wouldn't be against the creation and release of a cure for cancer developed in this way. Intellectual property law does presently restrict the development of cancer treatments and demands in many cases exorbitant royalties from patients and practitioners, so I'm not convinced that this is accurate. If people believed that the loss of opportunities would constrain innovation in the field of cancer research, I think they'd expect the AI users to pay royalties as well.
  - derangedHorse 3y ago
    I never made a legal appeal in my previous comment so legalities are irrelevant. It also differs from my argument on derivative/transformative works rather than specific works. What I was questioning was whether people would think it's morally right or not to generate inspired works. For example, if someone made an algorithm to read the relevant papers and make a cancer treatment that addresses the same areas/conditions of a method under IP law but don't equate to the exact method, I don't see that as a morally wrong action by itself.
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
Wissenschafter 3y ago
Because we are humans and our capability of abusing those rights is limited. The scale and speed at which looms can abuse copyrighted work to threaten the livelihoods of the seamstresses of those works is reason enough to consider it unethical. Replace loom for printing press etc, you realize you're a luddite?
- halostatue 3y ago
  Ned Ludd was onto something. He wasn't anti-progress. He was anti-labour theft. The problem was not that people were losing their jobs, but that they were being punished by society for losing their jobs and not being given the ability to adapt, all to satisfy the greed of the ownership class. I am hearing a strong rhyme. Commercialized LLMs are absolutely labour theft even if they are useful.
  - Wissenschafter 3y ago
    Capatalism has really done a number on the human psyche, WE WANT OUR LABOR STOLEN. That's the whole point, so we don't have to labor anymore. Boggles my mind how warped peoples thinking is.
    - halostatue 3y ago
      We do not want our labour stolen. We want to labour less, and we want to be fairly compensated for when we have to labour. The Luddites and the original saboteurs (from the French sabot) had a problem where the capital class invested in machines that let them (a) get more work done per person, (b) employ fewer people, and (c) pay those fewer people less because now they weren't working as hard. The people they fired? They (and the governments of the day — just like now) basically told them to go starve. > The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers which > opposed the use of certain types of cost-saving machinery, and often destroyed the > machines in clandestine raids. They protested against manufacturers who used machines > in "a fraudulent and deceitful manner" to replace the skilled labour of workers and > drive down wages by producing inferior goods.[1][2] Members of the group referred to > themselves as Luddites, self-described followers of "Ned Ludd", a legendary weaver > whose name was used as a pseudonym in threatening letters to mill owners and > government officials.[3] Yes, we want to work less. But fair work should result in fair compensation. Ultimately, this is something that the copyright washing of current commercialized LLMs cannot achieve.
Vvector 3y ago
Are photocopy machines illegal? Are CD-ROM burners illegal? Both allow near-unlimited copies of copyrighted material at a scale much faster than a human could do alone. The tools are not the problem, it's how humans use them.
- chlorion 3y ago
  >CD-ROM burners They can be used in an illegal way if used to copy copyrighted material, yes.
  - Vvector 3y ago
    Same as an LLM, they can be used in an illegal way if used to copy copyrighted material. So I can't tell it to reproduce a copyrighted work. But it can create new material in the style of another artist.
    - chlorion 3y ago
      The difference is that the LLM is still copying copyrighted material in your case, but if I burn a Linux ISO, that is not happening. You do not have to produce an exact copy of something to violate copyright, and I think anything the LLM outputs is violating copyright for everything it has ever trained on, unless the operator (the person operating the LLM and/or the person prompting it) has rights to that content.
  - squidbeak 3y ago
    And are the burners themselves illegal because you can name illegal uses for them?
    - chlorion 3y ago
      No, and I don't think anyone is arguing that LLMs should be illegal either. I personally am not against LLMs training on things the operator has rights to, and even training on copyrighted things, but I am against it laundering those things back out and claiming it's legal.

zanellato19 3y ago

Who is "we" here? Are you making a distinction between people and machines? If I built a machine that randomly copied from a big sample of arts that I wanted, would that machine be ok? OpenAI built a machine that does exactly that. They just sampled _everyone_.

tedivm 3y ago

I firmly believe that training models qualifies as fair use. I think it falls under research, and is used to push the scientific community forward. I also firmly believe that commercializing models built on top of copyrighted works (which all works start off as) does not qualify as fair use (or at least shouldn't) and that commercializing models build on copyrighted material is nothing more than license laundering. Companies that commercialize copyrighted work in this manner should be paying for a license to train with the data, or should stick to using the licenses that the content was released under. I don't think your example is valid either. The reason that AI models are generating content similar to other people's work is because those models were explicitly trained to do that. That is literally what they are and how they work. That is very different than people having similar styles.

Aeolun 3y ago
If I read a lot of stories in a certain genre that I like, and I later write my own story, it’s almost by definition going to be a mish-mash of everything I like. Should I pay the authors of the books I read when I sell mine?
- fragmede 3y ago
  Did you not pay them when you bought their book to read it in the first place? That dead trees don't lend themselves to that sort of payoff is a limitation of the technology. In music, sampling is a well-accepted mechanism for creating new music, and the original authors of the music they used do get paid when the new one is used.
  - soulofmischief 3y ago
    No, I bought the books used for 25 cents at a local booksale, and the authors did not benefit from my secondary market transaction.
    - downWidOutaFite 3y ago
      You got that via the legal "first sale doctrine" which has been killed for digital works.

mondrian 3y ago

Does copyright law say you can ingest copyrighted work at very large scale and sell derivates of those works to gain massive profit / massive market capitalizations? Honestly wondering. This seems to be the crux issue here.

Workaccount2 3y ago
It does. See app stores and the endless copy-cat games and apps, right down to the art style.
- freejazz 3y ago
  I sue people for copyright infringement frequently. It's rare that I have a defendant whose defense is "the internet is full of other infringers, why should I be held responsible?" Never have they won. This debate would go better if people didn't base it on assumptions they gleam from the world around them, but with regard to the actual law and not specious reasoning like "well, they did it too!!"
  - Workaccount2 3y ago
    I'd love to be the lawyer of the first anime artist then.
    - freejazz 3y ago
      Why engage with nearly 200 years of copyright jurisprudence when you can just insist you are right because anime?
      - Workaccount2 3y ago
        No, I can insist they are copying my style, which is anime. Or maybe you cannot copyright style, and all those apps do fall on legal ground?
        3y ago

madeofpalk 3y ago

I'm not as interested in making a technical/legal argument, as I'm just sharing my feelings on the topic (and eventually, what I think the law should be), but during training copies are made of copyrighted material, even if the model doesn't contain exact copies of work. Crawling, downloading, storing (temporarily) for training all involve making copies, and thus are subject to copyright law. Maybe those copies are fair use, maybe it's not (I think it shouldn't be). My main point is that OpenAI is generating an incredible amount of value all hinging on other people's work at a massive scale, without paying for their materials. Take all the non-public domain work off Netflix and Netflix doesn't have the same value they have today, so Netflix must pay for content it uses. Same goes for OpenAI imho.

nulld3v 3y ago
Assume I agree that copyright holders should be compensated for their works (because I do in some sense). How would this compensation work? Let's say a portion of profits from LLMs that were trained on copyrighted work should be sent to the copyright holders. How would we allocate which portion of the profits go to which creators? The only "fair" way here would be if we could trace how much a specific work influenced a specific output but this is currently impossible and will likely remain impossible for quite some time.
- deleted 3y ago
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- jprete 3y ago
  This is what licensing negotiations are for. One doesn't get to throw up their hands and say "I don't know how to fairly pay you so I won't pay you at all".
  - cwkoss 3y ago
    Your argument is ridiculous, because it could identically be applied to "every human artist should have to pay a license to every artist whose work they were inspired by". That would obviously be a horrible future, but megacorps like Disney would love it.

kevincrane 3y ago

I agree with the other commenters about the scale of this “deriving inspiration from others” is where this feels wrong. It feels similar to the ye olden debates on police surveillance. Acquiring a warrant to tail a suspect, tapping a single individual’s phone line, etc all feels like very normal run-of-the-mill police work that no one has a problem with. Collating your behavior across every website and device you own from a data broker is fundamentally the same thing as a single phone’s wiretap, but it obviously feels way grosser and more unethical because it scales way past the point of what you’d imagine as being acceptable.

derangedHorse 3y ago
In that example it's not the scale that makes it right or wrong, the scale of people impacted just affects the degree of wrongs that have been committed. > Acquiring a warrant to tail a suspect, tapping a single individual’s phone line, etc all feels like very normal run-of-the-mill police work that no one has a problem with. If acquiring a warrant is the basic action being scaled, I'd be okay with that ethically if it was done under, what I define as, reasonable pretenses. Regardless of how it scales, I still think it would be the right thing to do assuming the pretenses for the first action could be applied to everyone wiretapped. Now if I thought the base action was morally wrong (someone was tailed or wiretapped without proper pretenses), I'd think it's wrong regardless of the scale. The number of people it affected might impact how wrong I saw it, but not whether it was right or wrong to.

freejazz 3y ago

>But we are allowed to use copyrighted content Well, not exactly. Certain uses are fair. The question is does OpenAI's use count as fair. I don't think your immediate response comes close to addressing that question despite your conviction it does otherwise. Also, clothing designs are copyrightable. The conviction expressed by some participants in this debate is exhausting in light of their familiarity with actual copyright law.

melagonster 3y ago

a lot of popular AIy tool is designed to mimic a specific artist's style. human is not permitted to draw so similar graph.

IanCal 3y ago

I do think it's worth remembering there's a difference between "legal" and "good". It's entirely legal for me to leave the pub every time it comes up to my round. It's legal for me to get into a lift and press all the buttons. It's not unreasonable I think for people to be surprised at what is now possible. I'm personally shocked at the progress in the last few years - I'd not have guessed five years ago that putting a picture online might result in my style being easily recreated by anyone for the benefit mostly of a profitable company.

cmiles74 3y ago

The artist in the article clearly states that his work was free to use only if it was not used to make a profit, those were the terms of their license. In the artist's opinion, OpenAI violated that license by training their tool on their work and then selling that tool. This artist doesn't complain about work similar to their own being generated, and their artwork is very clearly not clothing.

sandworm101 3y ago
>> In the artist's opinion, OpenAI violated that license... So? Why does the author's opinion even enter into the equation? Authors cannot claim ownership beyond the bounds of copyright. If what AI is doing qualifies as fair use, the artist cannot do anything about it. I'm sure that lots of artists would not want anyone to lampoon or criticize their work. They cannot stop such things. I'm sure lots of artists would never want anyone to ever create anything in any way similar to their work. They cannot do that either.
- cmiles74 3y ago
  It is not clear that training an LLM falls under "fair use". We are then left with the license of the work, in this case that license forbids re-selling the work for a profit. It is the artist's license for their work at issue, not their opinion.
  - scheeseman486 3y ago
    If the legality is ambiguous then we're left with an impending court decision. Fair use is an affirmative defense, considered case by case.
Vvector 3y ago
> "...clearly states that his work was free to use only if it was not used to make a profit" Replace "use" with "copy". No one may copy the work to make a profit. Fair Use has long been an exemption to copyright, with Learning an example of Fair Use. But no one expected AIs to learn so quickly. I don't think it is clear either way, and will end up in SCOTUS. Free and redistribute the material

voidhorse 3y ago

Sorry, but these arguments by analogy are patently ridiculous. We are not talking about the eons old human practice of creative artistic endeavor, which yes, is clearly derivative in some fashion, but which we have well established practices around. We are discussing a new phenomenon of mass replication or derivation by machine at a scale impossible for a single individual to achieve by manual effort. Further, artists tend to either explicitly or implicitly acknowledge their priors in secondary or even primary material, much like one cites work in an academic context. Also, the claim: >But if I take your work and compare it to millions of other people's work... Is ridiculous. A. you haven't, nor will you ever actual do this. B. This is never how the system of artistic practice up to this point has worked precisely because this sort of activity is beyond the scale of human effort. In addition, plagiarism exists and is bad. There's no reason that concept can be extended and expanded to include stochastic reproduction at scale. If you feel artists shouldn't have a say and a future in which capital concentrates even further into the hands of a few technological elite who make their money off of flouting existing laws and the labor of thousands, by all means. But this argument that somehow by analogy to human behavior companies should not be responsible for the vast use of material without permission is absolutely preposterous. These are machines owned by companies. They are not human beings and they do not participate in the social systems of human beings the way human beings do. You may want to consider a distinction in the rules that adequately reflects this distinction in participatory status in a social system.

derangedHorse 3y ago
So your argument is predicated on the scale of inspired work being the problem? > They are not human beings and they do not participate in the social systems of human beings the way human beings do I don't think this adds anything to the argument besides you using this as a reason analogies with humans can't be used to compare the specific concept of inspired works? I don't think this holds up. Algorithms participating in social systems has nothing to do with whether inspired works have a moral claim to existence for some. The fact that your ethics system values the biological classification of the originator of inspired works is something that can't be reconciled into a general argument. I could make the claim that the prompt engineer is the artist in this case. > capital concentrates even further into the hands of a few technological elite who make their money off of flouting existing laws That can be said by the development of any technology. Fear of capital concentration is more a critique on capitalism than it is on technological development.

scythe 3y ago

>But we are allowed to use copyrighted content. We are not allowed to copy copyrighted content. We are allowed to view and consume it, to be influenced by it, and under many circumstances even outright copy it. It's important to consider in any legalistic argument over copyright that, unlike conventional property rights which are to some degree prehistoric, copyright is a recent legal construct that was developed for a particular economic purpose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property#History The existing standards of fair use are what they are because copyright was developed with supporting the art industry as an intentional goal, not because it was handed down from the heavens or follows a basic human instinct. Ancient playwrights clipped each others' ideas liberally; late medieval economists observed that restricting this behavior seemed to encourage more creativity. Copyright law is a creation of humans, for humans, and is subordinate to moral and economic reasoning, not prior to it.

ls612 3y ago
Copyright only makes any sense for goods with a high fixed cost of production and low to zero marginal cost. Any further use beyond solving that problem is pure rent seeking behavior Also, with computers being functional copyright has become a tool of social control; any function in a physical object can be taken away from you at a whim with no recourse so long as a computer can be inserted into the object. Absent a major change in how society sees copyright I envision a very bleak totalitarian future arising from this trend.
- Ferret7446 3y ago
  No, copyright only makes sense insofar that it provides a net positive value for society: that it promotes/protects more creativity leading to economic output than it prevents. That is, does the amount of creative/economic output dissuaded by allowing AI (preventing people who would not be able to or not want to create art if they couldn't get paid) exceed the creative/economic output of letting people develop and use such AIs?
  - ls612 3y ago

thomastjeffery 3y ago

Copyright is a bad idea in the first place, and should just be thrown out entirely; but that isn't the whole picture here. If OpenAI is allowed to be ignorant of copyright, then the rest of us should be allowed, too. The problem is that OpenAI (alongside a handful of other very large corporations) gets exclusive rights to that ignorance. They get to monopolize the un-monopoly. That's even worse than the problem we started with.

davidguetta 3y ago

Same for patents

BobaFloutist 3y ago

Let's say I'm an artist. I have, thus far, distributed my art for consumption without cost, because I want people to engage with and enjoy it. But, for whatever reason, I have a deep, irrational philosophical objection to corporate profit. I want to preclude any corporation from ever using my art to turn a profit, when at all possible. I have accepted that in some sense, electrical and internet corporations will be turning a profit using my work, but cannot stomach AI corporations doing so. If I cannot preclude AI corporations from turning a profit using my work, I will stop producing and distributing my work. Do you think it's reasonable for me to want some legal framework that allows me to explicitly deny that use of my work? Because I do.

shadowgovt 3y ago
When you put it that way, I think you just laid out the case for creating a Copyleft for art.
- Tijdreiziger 3y ago
  A copyleft license is enforced by copyright. That’s the reason others can’t simply ignore the license.

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Lerc 3y ago

I think there is a case to be made when AI models do produce copies. For instance, I think the NYT have a right to have an issue with the near verbatim recall of NYT articles. It's not clear cut though, when these models produce copies, they are not functioning as intended. Legally that might produce a quagmire, is it fair use when you intend to be transformative but by accident it isn't? Does it matter if you have no control over which bits are not transformative? Does it matter if you know in advance that some bits will be non transformative but you don't know which ones. I presume there are people working on research relating to how to prevent output of raw training data, what is the state of the art in this area? Would it be sufficient to prevent output of the training data or should the models be required to have no significant internal copies of training examples?

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miohtama 3y ago

Copying is not illegal, but publishing. You can have as many private copies as you wish for any content.

chlorion 3y ago

>We are allowed to view and consume it, to be influenced by it, and under many circumstances even outright copy it. People keep saying this but it's actually much more complicated, and in many cases you can't view copyrighted content. An example, MicroSoft employees are not permitted to view or learn from an open source (GPL-2) terminal emulator: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10462#issuecomment-873515286 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10462#issuecomm... Another example is proprietary software that may have it's source available, either intentionally or not. If you view this and then work on something related to it, like WINE for example, you are definitely at risk of being successfully sued. If you worked at MicroSoft and worked on Windows, you would not be able to participate in WINE development at all without violating copyright. If you viewed leaked Windows source code you also would not be able to participate in WINE development. An interesting question that I have, is whether training on proprietary, non-trade-secret sources would be allowed. Something like unreal engine, where you can view the source but it's still proprietary. Another question is whether training on leaked sources of proprietary and private but non-trade-secret code, like source dumps of Windows is legal.

shkkmo 3y ago
Your link isn't very clear, but I think your are talking about the "clean room design" strategy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design The way this works is they way many of us are arguing that AI and copyright should work. Vieiwing (or training on) copyrighted work isn't copyright infringement. What can be copyright infringement is using an employee who has viewed (or a model that was trained on) copyrighted work to create a duplication of that work. In most of the examples of infringing output that I've seen, the prompt is pretty explicit in its request to duplicate copyrighted material. Models that produce copyrighted content when not explicitly asked for will have trouble getting traction among users who are concerned about the risk of infringement (such the examples you listed.) I also see this approach opening an opportunity for models that acquire specific licenses for the content they train on that would grant licenses to the users of the model to duplicate some or all of the copyrighted works. The responsibility for how a model is used should rest primarily on the user, not the model trainers.

petsfed 3y ago

>I have some, but diminishing sympathy for artists screaming about how AI generates images too similar to their work. Yes, the output does look very similar to your work. But if I take your work and compare it to the millions of other people's work, I'd bet I can find some preexisting human-made art that also looks similar to your stuff too. Just like the rest of AI, if your argument is "humans can already do this by hand, why is it a problem to let machines do it?", its because you are incorrectly valuing the labor that goes into doing it by hand. If doing X that has potentially negative side effect Y, then the human labor to accomplish X is the principle barrier to Y, which can be mitigated via existing structures. Remove the labor barrier, and the existing mitigation structures cease to be effective. The fact that we never deliberately established those barriers is irrelevant to the fact that our society expects them to be there.

tracerbulletx 3y ago

Copyright is just made up for pragmatic purposes. To incentive creation. It does not matter if training models is not the same as reproducing something exactly if we wish to decide that it's unfair or even just desirable for economic incentive to disallow it, then we are free to make that decision. The trade offs are fairly profound in both directions I think and likely some compromise will need to be made that is fair to all parties and does not cripple economic and social progress.

eslaught 3y ago

> ... as it didn't kill off the fashion industry. Clothes are inherently consumable goods. If you use them, they will wear out. If you do not use them, they still age over time. You cannot "copy" a piece of clothing without a truly astonishing amount of effort. Both the processes, and the materials, may be difficult or impossible to imitate without a very large investment of effort. Compare this to digital art: You can copy it literally for free. Before AI, at least you had to copy it mostly verbatim (modulo some relatively boring transforms, like up/down-scaling, etc.). That limited artist's incomes, but not their future works. But in a post-AI world, you can suck in an artist's life's work, and generate an unlimited number of copycats. Right now, the quality of those might be insufficient to be true replacements, but it's not hard to imagine we'll be in a world not so far off when it will be sufficient, and then artists will be truly screwed.

Animats 3y ago
> You cannot "copy" a piece of clothing without a truly astonishing amount of effort. Sure you can. There's a whole industry making knockoffs.
- mftrhu 3y ago
  GP compared copying a piece of clothing to copying digital art. I'd say that setting up a factory to make knockoffs - or even "just" buying a sewing machine, finding and buying the right fabric, laying out the piece you want to copy, tracing it, cutting the fabric, sewing it, and iterating until it comes out right - would qualify as "a truly astonishing amount of effort" for a person.
  - Animats 3y ago
    You can outsource. Look for "knockoff clothing manufacturers".
    - mftrhu 3y ago
      Yes. Now you - a generic person without any specific skills - just have to search for someone who is willing to sew knockoff clothing to your specification, ship them the item, and wait for them to get back to you - a month or longer, probably, as they are likely based in China and shipping things by boat - while hoping that your cursory search led you to an honest knockoff manufacturer, who won't just take your money and disappear. I'd say that it still qualifies as a "truly astonishing amount of effort" when compared to the right-clicking and pressing save method of copying digital art.

kiba 3y ago

AI doing things that human laboriously learned and inspired from is just different. After all, sheer quantity can be its own quality, especially with AI learning. Now, i am worried about companies like OpenAI monopolizing technology through making their technology proprietary. I think their output should be public domain and copyright should only apply to human authors if they should be at all.

pxoe 3y ago

people and companies are copying copyrighted content when they're using datasets that contain copyrighted content (which also repackage and distribute copyrighted content - not just as links but as actual works/images too), download linked copyrighted content, and store that copyrighted content. plenty of copies created and stored, it seems to me. and like, what, do you think they're trying their damnedest to keep datasets clean and to not store any images in the process? how do you think they retrain on datasets over and over? it's really simple - by storing terabytes of copyrighted content. for ease of use, of course - why download something over and over, if you can just download it and keep it. and if they really wanted to steer clear of copyright infringement, if there's truly "no good solution" (which is bullshit for compute, oh, they can compute everything but not that part) - why can't they just refrain from recklessly scraping everything, if something were to just 'slip in'? like, if you know it's kinda bad, just don't do the thing, right? well, maybe copyright infringement is just acceptable to them. if not the actual goal. what they generate is kinda irrelevant - there's plenty of copyright infringement happening even before any training were to be done. assembling of datasets and bad datasets containing copyrighted content are the start and the core of the copyright problems. there's a really banal thing at the core of this, and it's just a multi-TB storage filled with pirated works.

logifail 3y ago

> We are allowed to view and consume it, to be influenced by it, and under many circumstances even outright copy it. In theory: sure In practice: not really, especially when you're small and the other side is big and has lots of lawyers and/or lawmakers in their pockets. Disney ("In 1989, for instance, the company even threatened to sue three Florida daycare centers unless they removed murals featuring some of its characters") and Deutsche Telekom[1][2] ("the company's actions just smack of corporate bully tactics, where legions of lawyers attempt to hog natural resources — in this case a primary color — that rightfully belong to everyone") are just two examples that spring to mind. [0] https://hls.harvard.edu/today/harvard-law-i-p-expert-explains-how-disney-has-influenced-u-s-copyright-law-to-protect-mickey-mouse-and-winnie-the-pooh/ https://hls.harvard.edu/today/harvard-law-i-p-expert-explain... [1] https://www.dw.com/en/court-confirms-deutsche-telekoms-right-to-pink/a-968525 https://www.dw.com/en/court-confirms-deutsche-telekoms-right... [2] https://futurism.com/the-byte/tmobile-legal-rights-obnoxious-pink-color https://futurism.com/the-byte/tmobile-legal-rights-obnoxious...

bugglebeetle 3y ago

> This is why clothing doesn't qualify for copyright. No matter how original you think your clothing seems, someone in the last many thousands of years of fashion has done it before. Most every fashion company has a legal team that reviews print and pattern, as well as certain other aspects of design, relative to any source of inspiration. My husband works in the industry and has to send everything he does for review in this way. I’m not sure where you got the idea that there are no IP protections for fashion, but this is untrue.

pointlessone 3y ago

If training a model is fair use than model output should also fallow fair use criteria. The very first thing you can find on the internet about fair use is Wikipedia article on the topic. It lists a bunch of factors to decide whether something is fair use. The very first one has a quote from an old copyright case: > [A] reviewer may fairly cite largely from the original work, if his design be really and truly to use the passages for the purposes of fair and reasonable criticism. On the other hand, it is as clear, that if he thus cites the most important parts of the work, with a view, not to criticise, but to supersede the use of the original work, and substitute the review for it, such a use will be deemed in law a piracy. Most use of LLMs and image generation models do not produce criticism of their training data. The most common use is to produce similar works. You can find this very common “trick” to get a specific style of output to add “in style of <artist>”. Is this a direct way "to supersede the use of the original work”? You can certainly see how other factors more or less put gen ai output into the grey zone. The fact that clothing doesn’t qualify for copyright doesn’t mean text and images don’t. Or if you advocate that they don’t then you pretty much advocate for abolishment of copyright because those are the major areas of copyright applicability at the moment. Which is a stance to have but you’d probably be better to actually say that because saying that copyright applies to some images and text but not others is a much harder position to defend.

tripzilch 3y ago

OP's argument was about right and wrong, not about legal and illegal. There's a difference. You'd have to argue the entirety, everything about copyright law being ethical, to make your version of the argument.

a_vanderbilt 3y ago

I feel the emotionally charged nature of the topic prevents a lot of rational discussion from taking place. That's totally understandable too, it's the livelihood for some of those involved. Unless we start making specific regulations for Generative AI, current copyright law is pretty clear: you can't call your art a Picasso, but you can certainly say it was inspired by Picasso. The difference is that GAI can do it much faster and cheaper. The best middle ground in my opinion is to allow GAI to train on copyrighted data, but the output cannot be copyrighted, and the model weights creating it can't be copyrighted either. Any works modified by a human attempting to gain copyright protection should have to fulfill the requirements to be substantiative and transformative just as fair use requires now.