16 ms·

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 firm

by 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.
      - soulofmischief 3y ago
        It's a tough issue to correlate to physical goods, especially when you realize that people sometimes donate books.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - MacsHeadroom 3y ago
        "In 2012, the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) held in UsedSoft GmbH v. Oracle International Corp that the first sale doctrine applies to used copies of [intangible goods] downloaded over the Internet and sold in the European Union." [0] Arguably the U.S. courts are in the wrong here. We can only hope first sale doctrine is extended to digital goods in the U.S. in the future, as it has been in the EU for over a decade. [0] https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1193&context=nulr https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewconten...
    - sandworm101 3y ago
      >> the authors did not benefit from my secondary market transaction. But they did. The presence of a secondary market for used books increased the value of some new books. People buy them knowing that they might one day recoup some costs by selling them. Would people pay more, or less, for a new car if they were told they could never sell or trade it away as a used car?
      - soulofmischief 3y ago
        Gee I don't know, but I'm glad that digital goods do not incur the same material costs as a car. "You wouldn't download a car", we've come full circle.
- huimang 3y ago
  How many books can you write per second? How how many books per second can you read to influence and change your personal style? I don't think any person who actually has worked on anything creative in their life would compare a personal style to a model that can output in nearly any style at extreme speeds. And even if you're inspired by a specific author, invariably what happens is it becomes mix of yourself + those influences, not a damn near-copy. With visual mediums it's even worse, because you have to take the time [months, years] to specialize in that specific medium/style.
  - sandworm101 3y ago
    >> How many books can you write per second? On my laptop, using modern tools backed by AI? ... many. >> How how many books per second can you read to influence and change your personal style? Thanks now to AI, hundreds. I can plug the output of the book-reading AI into the input of the tool I use to write my books and thereby update my personal style to incorporate all the latest trends. Blame the idiots who are paying me for my books.
    - californical 3y ago
      This is clearly a bad-faith response to the point that the GP was making
    - rangerelf 3y ago
      So, zero. You yourself: zero. You completely ignored the premise of the question.
      - c0pium 3y ago
        You should read the response more carefully. Generative models are just tools. If I use one to write a story it’s no less a story that I wrote than if I’d chiseled it into a Persian mountainside.
        OOPMan 3y ago
- bluefirebrand 3y ago
  We shouldn't hold individual humans and ML models to the same standards, because ML models themselves are products capable of mass production and individual humans are not even remotely at the same scale. If you write that book, chances are you will gain some fans that are also fans of other authors in that genre. If ML models write that genre, they can flood that genre so full that human artists won't be able to complete. It's not even a remotely equivalent scenario
  - csallen 3y ago
    Computers and machines have been capable of mass production for decades, and humans have used them as tools. In the past 170 years, these tools of mass production have already diminished many thousands of professions that were staffed by people who had to painstakingly craft things one at a time. Why is art some special case that should be protected, when many other industries were not? Why should we kill this technology to protect existing artistic business models, when many other technologies were allowed to bloom despite killing other existing business models? Nobody can really answer these questions.
    - bluefirebrand 3y ago
      > Why is art some special case that should be protected, when many other industries were not? It shouldn't be. As soon as someone makes an AI that can produce it's own artwork without requiring ingesting every piece of stolen artwork it can, then I'm on board. But as long as it needs to be trained on the work of humans it should not be allowed to displace those people it relied on to get to where it is. Simple as that.
      - csallen 3y ago
        Are there any humans that can produce artwork without ingesting inspiration from other art? Do you know any artists that lived in a box their whole life and never saw other art? Do you know any writers who'd never read a book? Are they any human artists who can't, if requested, draw or write something that's a copy of some other person's drawings or writings? Also, FYI, you can't steal digital artwork. You can only commit copyright infringement, which is not the same crime as theft, because theft requires depriving the owner of something in their possession.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  Put differently - if you perfectly memorise Harry Potter, write it down into a book and sell it, you'll get into trouble.
  - philomath_mn 3y ago
    Right, I don't think anyone disagrees with that. The question is about someone/something writing a book _influenced_ by Harry Potter -- do they owe JK Rowling royalties?
    - halostatue 3y ago
      That depends on a variety of factors. You may find yourself in trouble if you write about a wizard boy called Perry Hotter going to Elkwood school of magic and he ends up with two sidekicks (a smarter girl and a redhead boy). It could be argued quite convincingly that stories like Brooks's Shannara and Eddings's Belgariad are LOTR with the serial numbers filed off — but there is more than enough difference in how various pieces work for those series to make them unique creations that do not infringe on the properties or cover too much the story. (Although I cringe at putting the execrable Belgariad books in any class with either LOTR or Shannara.) The "best" modern example of this is the 50 Shades series. These are Twilight fan fiction (it is acknowledged as such) with the vampire bits filed off. They are inspired by Twilight, but they are not identifiably Twilight in the end. It might be hard to tell the quality of writing from that which an LLM can produce, and frankly Anne Rice did it all better decades before (both vampires and BSDM). Humans can be influenced by writers, artists, etc. LLMs cannot. They can produce statistically approximated mishmashes of the original works themselves, but there is no act or spark of creation, insight, or influence going on that makes the sort of question you’re asking silly. LLMs are just math. Humans may be just chemistry, but there’s qualia that LLMs do not have any more than `fortune` does.
      - visarga 3y ago
        > Humans can be influenced by writers, artists, etc. LLMs cannot. This is literally wrong, LLMs are influenced by their users. And people can input new ideas, facts and explore new directions by choosing how they interact with the LLM. A LLM writing a book all on its own start to finish would be a different story, the output would be derived 100% from its training set. A LLM being prompted with a book chapter would risk borrowing too much. But if you prompt a LLM without copy pasting protected content in the prompt, then you are the main influence. And LLMs can explore outside their training distribution in this way, helped by humans. Many people think a trained LLM is frozen, but they do in-context-learning, they can even acquire new concepts/words and properly use them in the same session. They don't keep the memory of this until retraining, but that doesn't mean they are locked up. There is plenty of space in the buffer you can use to add new material after training. This kind of thinking is like saying you can't drive a nail unless you own a licensed hammer, if someone is using his shoe to drive a nail will be in infringement. Maybe the shoe is also a hammer if the user so says.
- RobRivera 3y ago
  I feel like the keyword is 'almost' and then you begin pulling on that thread: How closely is this the case? What blind spots exist? How do you measure this? What is the capacity for original idea generation does the human mind have and how does it inspire a unique spin to it? This is one of those areas where 'thought experiments' are never going to pass muster against genuine experiments with metrics, trial, and robist scientific research. But with the stakes as they are, I dont have faith there exists a good faith dialogue in this arena.
- ska 3y ago
  There are two problems with this (very common) line of argument. First, the law is pretty clear that yes if your story is too similar to another work, they have rights. Second, it's not at all obvious we can or should generalize from "what a human can do" and "what a bunch of computers can do" in areas like this.
- tedivm 3y ago
  Is your mishmash going to be a literal statistical model built on top of those other stories?
- rspoerri 3y ago
  I hope you payed for the book you read. If openai would pay usage fees for the training material per user its generating content for - it would never be profitable - artist would be fine off. But even all the shares are owned by people who have given this system none of it‘s knowledge.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >If openai would pay usage fees for the training material per user its generating content for - it would never be profitable In that case, good? I thought if nothing else, these past year or two would teach companies about sinking money into unsustainable businesses and then price gauging later (i know it won't, the moment interest rates fall we are back to square one). If it isn't profitable, scale down the means of production (which may include paying C class executives one less yatch per year, tragic), charge more upfront to the customers, or work out better deals with your 3rd parties (which is artists in this case). I also find some scheudenfredre in that these companies are trying to sell "less enployees" to other companies but would also benefit from said scaling down as they throw out defenses of "we can't afford to pay every copyright" .
- kelnos 3y ago
  You are not an AI model, and AI models are not human authors, so your comparison is invalid and question irrelevant.
- MrVandemar 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. But it's also going to be affected by the teachers you had in pre-school, the people you hang around with, your relatives, films you've seen, adverts you watched, good memories and bad memories of events. You bring your lived experience to your story, and not just a mish-mash of stories in a particular genre, but everything. Whereas when you train a model, you know the exact input, and that exact input may be 100% copyright material.
- bergen 3y ago
  Did you read the books with the intent to incorporate their ideas into your head and profit of this?
  - data-ottawa 3y ago
    That’s basically the education system’s goal. However, AI models require copying and reproducing copyrighted works, whereas when I read I book I’m not copying it and I’ve secured some sort of license to use it. The collection, mass copying, and redistribution of work to create these models seems quite obviously to be a violation on IP laws.
- apersona 3y ago
  You are not a machine. Have you noticed that authors and artists love sharing their inspirations? Let's say you're an up-and-coming author. In an interview, you list your sources of inspiration. Using your logic, why does the creative community celebrate you and your inspirations instead of crying foul like they are with LLMs?
fortran77 3y ago
> I firmly believe that training models qualifies as free use Can you explain what you mean by "qualifies as free use?" I've never heard that term before.
- halostatue 3y ago
  The poster probably meant "fair use", which is an American term of copyright law. The UK, Canada, and other commonwealth countries have a concept known as "fair dealing" which is similar to, but different than fair use[1]. EU copyright law has explicitly permitted uses[2] which are exceptions to copyright restrictions. Research is one of them, but requires explicit attribution. [1] https://library.ulethbridge.ca/copyright/fairdealing/#s-lib-ctab-15624603-2 https://library.ulethbridge.ca/copyright/fairdealing/#s-lib-... [2] https://www.ippt.eu/legal-texts/copyright-information-society-directive/article-5 https://www.ippt.eu/legal-texts/copyright-information-societ...
- kopecs 3y ago
  I would be reasonably confident they mean "fair use" [1] instead. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
kopecs 3y ago
> I firmly believe that training models qualifies as free use. I think it falls under research, and is used to push the scientific community forward. I don't think this is as cut-and-dry and you make it out here. If I train a model on, say, every one of New York Times' and release it for free and it finds use as a way of circumventing their paywall I have difficulty justifying that as fair use/fair dealing. The purpose/character of the model should indeed be a factor but certainly not nearly as dispositive a one as I think you're suggesting. To the extent that training the model serves a research purpose I think that the general use / public release of the trained model does not in general serve the same research purpose and ought to have substantially lower protection on the basis of, e.g., the effect on the original work(s) in the market.
- jacobr1 3y ago
  Wouldn't that depend on the use case? If you just had the model regenerate articles that roughly approximate its source material that is much a more clear cut violation of a paywall. But if you use that data as general background knowledge to synthesize aggregative works such a history of the vietnam war, or trends in musical theatre in the 1980s relative the 1970s, or shifts in the language usage of formal honorifics, then that seems to me to be clearly fair-use categories. There are gray areas, such as aggregating the opinions of a certain op-ed writer over a short timeframe that while it might produce a novel work, is basically is mixmash of recent articles. But would that be unfair, especially if not done in the original authors style? These technical distinctions like these probably will matter in whatever form regulation eventually ends up becoming.
  - kopecs 3y ago
    Yes, I think this is a rather fact-specific inquiry. My main point is that the research/commercial distinction is not the only factor (and not even the most important one). > if you use that data as general background knowledge to synthesize aggregative works such a history of the vietnam war, or trends in musical theatre in the 1980s relative the 1970s, or shifts in the language usage of formal honorifics, then that seems to me to be clearly fair-use categories I don't think this is clear. If someone were to train a model on several books about the Vietnam War and then publish my own model-created book on history of the Vietnam War, I would be inclined to say that that is infringement. And if they changed the dataset to include a plurality of additional books which happen to not be about Vietnam, I don't think that changes the analysis substantially. I think it is hard to earnestly claim that in that instance the output (setting aside the model itself, which is also a consideration) is transformative, and so I would think, absent more specific facts, that all four fair use factors are against it.
shadowgovt 3y ago
I think it's worth noting that one of the things that makes this question so vexing is that this topic really is pretty novel. We've only had a few machines like this in history and almost no legal precedent around how they should be treated. I can't remember anyone ever bringing suit over a Markov chain engine, for example, and fabricating one is basically "baby's first introductory 'machine intelligence' project" these days (partially because the output sucks, so nobody has ever felt they have something to lose from competing with a Markov engine). Existing copyright precedent serves this use-case poorly, and so the question is far more philosophical than legal; there's a good case to be made that there's no law clearly governing this kind of machine, only loose-fit analogies that degenerate badly upon further scrutiny.
kansface 3y ago
> The reason that AI models are generating content similar to other people's work is because those models were explicitly trained to do that. Ah, just like humans who train against the output of other humans. AI models are not fundamentally different in kind in this regard, only scope, and even that isn't perfectly obvious to me a priori.
- KuriousCat 3y ago
  Going by this logic, why is OpenAI forbidding use of the content it generates for training other models?
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    Well, mostly because of corporate greed of ownership. But the underlying issue is that Ai training in AI is a recipe for ruining the entire training set. At least in these early stages.
    - KuriousCat 3y ago
      Not just greed, they want to silence copyright holders whose works they freely use and at the same time prevent others from using theirs. It is like having different set of rules for them. I don't believe training itself is ruining anything, it is the proposed model of value capture and marginalizing content creators that poses greater threat.
      - spookie 3y ago
        Yes, you've condensed the problem in display quite well here. It's not even just hypocrisy, but also short sighted behaviour. Artists will learn to not trust the web, if they haven't already. The greatest time to train a model was yesterday, eventually no novel ideas, expressions, art will prosper on the "open" web. Just a regurgitation of some statistical idea of words, and pixels.
  - throwup238 3y ago
    They can write whatever they want in their Terms of Service. That's the logic. That doesn't mean that courts will meaningfully enforce it for them.
vorticalbox 3y ago
One could argue that you're paying for the resources required to run the model rather than paying for the using the model.
- bergen 3y ago
  Depends, some models are not freely available and in that case you pay very much for access to the model
chx 3y ago
> I firmly believe that training models qualifies as fair use There's a hell lot of money to be made from this belief so of course the HN crowd will hold it. Some of us here who have been around the copyright hustle for a little longer laugh at this bitterly and pray that the courts and/or Doctorow's activism saves us. But there's so much money to be made from automatized plagiarism and the forces against are so weak, the hope is not much. The world will be a much, much poorer place once all the artists this view exploits will stop making art because they need to make a living. See https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1744422377113501998 https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1744422377113501998 and https://i.imgur.com/zOOcPCi.jpg https://i.imgur.com/zOOcPCi.jpg
- c0pium 3y ago
  Generative models are just a tool. Artists are mad because this tool empowers other people, who they view as less talented, to make art too. The camera and 1-hour film developing didn’t destroy oil paintings, it just enabled more people to have control over what was on their walls.
  - eek2121 3y ago
    No, I have to disagree here. I'm not an artist, but I respect the creations of others. OpenAI does not. They could have trained on free data, but it did not want to because it would cost more (finding humans to find/sanction said data, etc).
  - romwell 3y ago
    >Generative models are just a tool. Sure. It's just a tool. That need other people's art to work. If it's "just a tool" in and of itself, then there's no problem keeping it away from other people's art. >The camera and 1-hour film developing didn’t destroy oil paintings Because the copyright laws were extended to include photographic reproduction of art as something you need to obtain a permission (and a license) for. The same needs to happen for generative AI. A photocopy machine is just a tool too. So is the printing press.
    - 3y ago
c0pium 3y ago
That’s literally what human artists do, and how they work. Art is iteratively building on the work of others. That’s why it’s so easy to trace its evolution.
williamcotton 3y ago
So what about the fact that these cartoons look like Keith Haring meets Cathy Guisewite meets Scott Adams? These cartoons are artistically derivative. They are obviously not derivative from the perspective of copyright as style is an idea, not an expression. These models were not trained on just the cartoonist in question, nor just their inspirations. The intent was to train on all images and styles. The expression of the idea using these models is not going to match the expression of the idea of all images, even those conforming to a certain bounded prompt. For the life of me I can't get DALL-E or Stable Diffusion to produce anything like Cat and Girl nor anything coherent for the above mentioned inspirations. DALL-E flat out refuses to create things in the style of the above and Stable Diffusion has insane looking outputs, overwhelmed by Herring. Most importantly, copyright is concerned with specific works that specifically infringe and whose damages are either statute or based on quantifiable earnings from infringement. Copyright does not cover all works, especially when again, the intent is to learn all styles that rarely, if at all, reproduces direct expressions. The only point at which these images are directly copied are when in the machine's memory, which has already has case law for allowance, followed by back propagation that begins the process of modifying the direct copies for the underlaying formal qualities. It seems like a lot of people are going to be upset when the courts rule eventually rule in favor of the training and use of these models, if not only because the defendant has a lot of resources to throw at a legal team.
- jazzyjackson 3y ago
  your argument is that it's not infringing because they copied everything at once? I get that there's case law on copying in memory on the input side not being infringing but can't for the life of me understand how they get away with not paying for it. At least libraries buy the books before loaning them out, OpenAI and midjourney presumably pirated the works or otherwise ignored the license of published works and just say "if we found it on the internet it's fair game"
  - williamcotton 3y ago
    Libraries loan out specific books!
  - 3y ago

by tedivm 3y ago

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.
    - soulofmischief 3y ago
      It's a tough issue to correlate to physical goods, especially when you realize that people sometimes donate books.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - MacsHeadroom 3y ago
      "In 2012, the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) held in UsedSoft GmbH v. Oracle International Corp that the first sale doctrine applies to used copies of [intangible goods] downloaded over the Internet and sold in the European Union." [0] Arguably the U.S. courts are in the wrong here. We can only hope first sale doctrine is extended to digital goods in the U.S. in the future, as it has been in the EU for over a decade. [0] https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1193&context=nulr https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewconten...
  - sandworm101 3y ago
    >> the authors did not benefit from my secondary market transaction. But they did. The presence of a secondary market for used books increased the value of some new books. People buy them knowing that they might one day recoup some costs by selling them. Would people pay more, or less, for a new car if they were told they could never sell or trade it away as a used car?
    - soulofmischief 3y ago
      Gee I don't know, but I'm glad that digital goods do not incur the same material costs as a car. "You wouldn't download a car", we've come full circle.
huimang 3y ago
How many books can you write per second? How how many books per second can you read to influence and change your personal style? I don't think any person who actually has worked on anything creative in their life would compare a personal style to a model that can output in nearly any style at extreme speeds. And even if you're inspired by a specific author, invariably what happens is it becomes mix of yourself + those influences, not a damn near-copy. With visual mediums it's even worse, because you have to take the time [months, years] to specialize in that specific medium/style.
- sandworm101 3y ago
  >> How many books can you write per second? On my laptop, using modern tools backed by AI? ... many. >> How how many books per second can you read to influence and change your personal style? Thanks now to AI, hundreds. I can plug the output of the book-reading AI into the input of the tool I use to write my books and thereby update my personal style to incorporate all the latest trends. Blame the idiots who are paying me for my books.
  - californical 3y ago
    This is clearly a bad-faith response to the point that the GP was making
  - rangerelf 3y ago
    So, zero. You yourself: zero. You completely ignored the premise of the question.
    - c0pium 3y ago
      You should read the response more carefully. Generative models are just tools. If I use one to write a story it’s no less a story that I wrote than if I’d chiseled it into a Persian mountainside.
      - OOPMan 3y ago
bluefirebrand 3y ago
We shouldn't hold individual humans and ML models to the same standards, because ML models themselves are products capable of mass production and individual humans are not even remotely at the same scale. If you write that book, chances are you will gain some fans that are also fans of other authors in that genre. If ML models write that genre, they can flood that genre so full that human artists won't be able to complete. It's not even a remotely equivalent scenario
- csallen 3y ago
  Computers and machines have been capable of mass production for decades, and humans have used them as tools. In the past 170 years, these tools of mass production have already diminished many thousands of professions that were staffed by people who had to painstakingly craft things one at a time. Why is art some special case that should be protected, when many other industries were not? Why should we kill this technology to protect existing artistic business models, when many other technologies were allowed to bloom despite killing other existing business models? Nobody can really answer these questions.
  - bluefirebrand 3y ago
    > Why is art some special case that should be protected, when many other industries were not? It shouldn't be. As soon as someone makes an AI that can produce it's own artwork without requiring ingesting every piece of stolen artwork it can, then I'm on board. But as long as it needs to be trained on the work of humans it should not be allowed to displace those people it relied on to get to where it is. Simple as that.
    - csallen 3y ago
      Are there any humans that can produce artwork without ingesting inspiration from other art? Do you know any artists that lived in a box their whole life and never saw other art? Do you know any writers who'd never read a book? Are they any human artists who can't, if requested, draw or write something that's a copy of some other person's drawings or writings? Also, FYI, you can't steal digital artwork. You can only commit copyright infringement, which is not the same crime as theft, because theft requires depriving the owner of something in their possession.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
madeofpalk 3y ago
Put differently - if you perfectly memorise Harry Potter, write it down into a book and sell it, you'll get into trouble.
- philomath_mn 3y ago
  Right, I don't think anyone disagrees with that. The question is about someone/something writing a book _influenced_ by Harry Potter -- do they owe JK Rowling royalties?
  - halostatue 3y ago
    That depends on a variety of factors. You may find yourself in trouble if you write about a wizard boy called Perry Hotter going to Elkwood school of magic and he ends up with two sidekicks (a smarter girl and a redhead boy). It could be argued quite convincingly that stories like Brooks's Shannara and Eddings's Belgariad are LOTR with the serial numbers filed off — but there is more than enough difference in how various pieces work for those series to make them unique creations that do not infringe on the properties or cover too much the story. (Although I cringe at putting the execrable Belgariad books in any class with either LOTR or Shannara.) The "best" modern example of this is the 50 Shades series. These are Twilight fan fiction (it is acknowledged as such) with the vampire bits filed off. They are inspired by Twilight, but they are not identifiably Twilight in the end. It might be hard to tell the quality of writing from that which an LLM can produce, and frankly Anne Rice did it all better decades before (both vampires and BSDM). Humans can be influenced by writers, artists, etc. LLMs cannot. They can produce statistically approximated mishmashes of the original works themselves, but there is no act or spark of creation, insight, or influence going on that makes the sort of question you’re asking silly. LLMs are just math. Humans may be just chemistry, but there’s qualia that LLMs do not have any more than `fortune` does.
    - visarga 3y ago
      > Humans can be influenced by writers, artists, etc. LLMs cannot. This is literally wrong, LLMs are influenced by their users. And people can input new ideas, facts and explore new directions by choosing how they interact with the LLM. A LLM writing a book all on its own start to finish would be a different story, the output would be derived 100% from its training set. A LLM being prompted with a book chapter would risk borrowing too much. But if you prompt a LLM without copy pasting protected content in the prompt, then you are the main influence. And LLMs can explore outside their training distribution in this way, helped by humans. Many people think a trained LLM is frozen, but they do in-context-learning, they can even acquire new concepts/words and properly use them in the same session. They don't keep the memory of this until retraining, but that doesn't mean they are locked up. There is plenty of space in the buffer you can use to add new material after training. This kind of thinking is like saying you can't drive a nail unless you own a licensed hammer, if someone is using his shoe to drive a nail will be in infringement. Maybe the shoe is also a hammer if the user so says.
RobRivera 3y ago
I feel like the keyword is 'almost' and then you begin pulling on that thread: How closely is this the case? What blind spots exist? How do you measure this? What is the capacity for original idea generation does the human mind have and how does it inspire a unique spin to it? This is one of those areas where 'thought experiments' are never going to pass muster against genuine experiments with metrics, trial, and robist scientific research. But with the stakes as they are, I dont have faith there exists a good faith dialogue in this arena.
ska 3y ago
There are two problems with this (very common) line of argument. First, the law is pretty clear that yes if your story is too similar to another work, they have rights. Second, it's not at all obvious we can or should generalize from "what a human can do" and "what a bunch of computers can do" in areas like this.
tedivm 3y ago
Is your mishmash going to be a literal statistical model built on top of those other stories?
rspoerri 3y ago
I hope you payed for the book you read. If openai would pay usage fees for the training material per user its generating content for - it would never be profitable - artist would be fine off. But even all the shares are owned by people who have given this system none of it‘s knowledge.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >If openai would pay usage fees for the training material per user its generating content for - it would never be profitable In that case, good? I thought if nothing else, these past year or two would teach companies about sinking money into unsustainable businesses and then price gauging later (i know it won't, the moment interest rates fall we are back to square one). If it isn't profitable, scale down the means of production (which may include paying C class executives one less yatch per year, tragic), charge more upfront to the customers, or work out better deals with your 3rd parties (which is artists in this case). I also find some scheudenfredre in that these companies are trying to sell "less enployees" to other companies but would also benefit from said scaling down as they throw out defenses of "we can't afford to pay every copyright" .
kelnos 3y ago
You are not an AI model, and AI models are not human authors, so your comparison is invalid and question irrelevant.
MrVandemar 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. But it's also going to be affected by the teachers you had in pre-school, the people you hang around with, your relatives, films you've seen, adverts you watched, good memories and bad memories of events. You bring your lived experience to your story, and not just a mish-mash of stories in a particular genre, but everything. Whereas when you train a model, you know the exact input, and that exact input may be 100% copyright material.
bergen 3y ago
Did you read the books with the intent to incorporate their ideas into your head and profit of this?
- data-ottawa 3y ago
  That’s basically the education system’s goal. However, AI models require copying and reproducing copyrighted works, whereas when I read I book I’m not copying it and I’ve secured some sort of license to use it. The collection, mass copying, and redistribution of work to create these models seems quite obviously to be a violation on IP laws.
apersona 3y ago
You are not a machine. Have you noticed that authors and artists love sharing their inspirations? Let's say you're an up-and-coming author. In an interview, you list your sources of inspiration. Using your logic, why does the creative community celebrate you and your inspirations instead of crying foul like they are with LLMs?

fortran77 3y ago

> I firmly believe that training models qualifies as free use Can you explain what you mean by "qualifies as free use?" I've never heard that term before.

halostatue 3y ago
The poster probably meant "fair use", which is an American term of copyright law. The UK, Canada, and other commonwealth countries have a concept known as "fair dealing" which is similar to, but different than fair use[1]. EU copyright law has explicitly permitted uses[2] which are exceptions to copyright restrictions. Research is one of them, but requires explicit attribution. [1] https://library.ulethbridge.ca/copyright/fairdealing/#s-lib-ctab-15624603-2 https://library.ulethbridge.ca/copyright/fairdealing/#s-lib-... [2] https://www.ippt.eu/legal-texts/copyright-information-society-directive/article-5 https://www.ippt.eu/legal-texts/copyright-information-societ...
kopecs 3y ago
I would be reasonably confident they mean "fair use" [1] instead. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

kopecs 3y ago

> I firmly believe that training models qualifies as free use. I think it falls under research, and is used to push the scientific community forward. I don't think this is as cut-and-dry and you make it out here. If I train a model on, say, every one of New York Times' and release it for free and it finds use as a way of circumventing their paywall I have difficulty justifying that as fair use/fair dealing. The purpose/character of the model should indeed be a factor but certainly not nearly as dispositive a one as I think you're suggesting. To the extent that training the model serves a research purpose I think that the general use / public release of the trained model does not in general serve the same research purpose and ought to have substantially lower protection on the basis of, e.g., the effect on the original work(s) in the market.

jacobr1 3y ago
Wouldn't that depend on the use case? If you just had the model regenerate articles that roughly approximate its source material that is much a more clear cut violation of a paywall. But if you use that data as general background knowledge to synthesize aggregative works such a history of the vietnam war, or trends in musical theatre in the 1980s relative the 1970s, or shifts in the language usage of formal honorifics, then that seems to me to be clearly fair-use categories. There are gray areas, such as aggregating the opinions of a certain op-ed writer over a short timeframe that while it might produce a novel work, is basically is mixmash of recent articles. But would that be unfair, especially if not done in the original authors style? These technical distinctions like these probably will matter in whatever form regulation eventually ends up becoming.
- kopecs 3y ago
  Yes, I think this is a rather fact-specific inquiry. My main point is that the research/commercial distinction is not the only factor (and not even the most important one). > if you use that data as general background knowledge to synthesize aggregative works such a history of the vietnam war, or trends in musical theatre in the 1980s relative the 1970s, or shifts in the language usage of formal honorifics, then that seems to me to be clearly fair-use categories I don't think this is clear. If someone were to train a model on several books about the Vietnam War and then publish my own model-created book on history of the Vietnam War, I would be inclined to say that that is infringement. And if they changed the dataset to include a plurality of additional books which happen to not be about Vietnam, I don't think that changes the analysis substantially. I think it is hard to earnestly claim that in that instance the output (setting aside the model itself, which is also a consideration) is transformative, and so I would think, absent more specific facts, that all four fair use factors are against it.

shadowgovt 3y ago

I think it's worth noting that one of the things that makes this question so vexing is that this topic really is pretty novel. We've only had a few machines like this in history and almost no legal precedent around how they should be treated. I can't remember anyone ever bringing suit over a Markov chain engine, for example, and fabricating one is basically "baby's first introductory 'machine intelligence' project" these days (partially because the output sucks, so nobody has ever felt they have something to lose from competing with a Markov engine). Existing copyright precedent serves this use-case poorly, and so the question is far more philosophical than legal; there's a good case to be made that there's no law clearly governing this kind of machine, only loose-fit analogies that degenerate badly upon further scrutiny.

kansface 3y ago

> The reason that AI models are generating content similar to other people's work is because those models were explicitly trained to do that. Ah, just like humans who train against the output of other humans. AI models are not fundamentally different in kind in this regard, only scope, and even that isn't perfectly obvious to me a priori.

KuriousCat 3y ago
Going by this logic, why is OpenAI forbidding use of the content it generates for training other models?
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  Well, mostly because of corporate greed of ownership. But the underlying issue is that Ai training in AI is a recipe for ruining the entire training set. At least in these early stages.
  - KuriousCat 3y ago
    Not just greed, they want to silence copyright holders whose works they freely use and at the same time prevent others from using theirs. It is like having different set of rules for them. I don't believe training itself is ruining anything, it is the proposed model of value capture and marginalizing content creators that poses greater threat.
    - spookie 3y ago
      Yes, you've condensed the problem in display quite well here. It's not even just hypocrisy, but also short sighted behaviour. Artists will learn to not trust the web, if they haven't already. The greatest time to train a model was yesterday, eventually no novel ideas, expressions, art will prosper on the "open" web. Just a regurgitation of some statistical idea of words, and pixels.
- throwup238 3y ago
  They can write whatever they want in their Terms of Service. That's the logic. That doesn't mean that courts will meaningfully enforce it for them.

vorticalbox 3y ago

One could argue that you're paying for the resources required to run the model rather than paying for the using the model.

bergen 3y ago
Depends, some models are not freely available and in that case you pay very much for access to the model

chx 3y ago

> I firmly believe that training models qualifies as fair use There's a hell lot of money to be made from this belief so of course the HN crowd will hold it. Some of us here who have been around the copyright hustle for a little longer laugh at this bitterly and pray that the courts and/or Doctorow's activism saves us. But there's so much money to be made from automatized plagiarism and the forces against are so weak, the hope is not much. The world will be a much, much poorer place once all the artists this view exploits will stop making art because they need to make a living. See https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1744422377113501998 https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1744422377113501998 and https://i.imgur.com/zOOcPCi.jpg https://i.imgur.com/zOOcPCi.jpg

c0pium 3y ago
Generative models are just a tool. Artists are mad because this tool empowers other people, who they view as less talented, to make art too. The camera and 1-hour film developing didn’t destroy oil paintings, it just enabled more people to have control over what was on their walls.
- eek2121 3y ago
  No, I have to disagree here. I'm not an artist, but I respect the creations of others. OpenAI does not. They could have trained on free data, but it did not want to because it would cost more (finding humans to find/sanction said data, etc).
- romwell 3y ago
  >Generative models are just a tool. Sure. It's just a tool. That need other people's art to work. If it's "just a tool" in and of itself, then there's no problem keeping it away from other people's art. >The camera and 1-hour film developing didn’t destroy oil paintings Because the copyright laws were extended to include photographic reproduction of art as something you need to obtain a permission (and a license) for. The same needs to happen for generative AI. A photocopy machine is just a tool too. So is the printing press.
  - 3y ago

c0pium 3y ago

That’s literally what human artists do, and how they work. Art is iteratively building on the work of others. That’s why it’s so easy to trace its evolution.

williamcotton 3y ago

So what about the fact that these cartoons look like Keith Haring meets Cathy Guisewite meets Scott Adams? These cartoons are artistically derivative. They are obviously not derivative from the perspective of copyright as style is an idea, not an expression. These models were not trained on just the cartoonist in question, nor just their inspirations. The intent was to train on all images and styles. The expression of the idea using these models is not going to match the expression of the idea of all images, even those conforming to a certain bounded prompt. For the life of me I can't get DALL-E or Stable Diffusion to produce anything like Cat and Girl nor anything coherent for the above mentioned inspirations. DALL-E flat out refuses to create things in the style of the above and Stable Diffusion has insane looking outputs, overwhelmed by Herring. Most importantly, copyright is concerned with specific works that specifically infringe and whose damages are either statute or based on quantifiable earnings from infringement. Copyright does not cover all works, especially when again, the intent is to learn all styles that rarely, if at all, reproduces direct expressions. The only point at which these images are directly copied are when in the machine's memory, which has already has case law for allowance, followed by back propagation that begins the process of modifying the direct copies for the underlaying formal qualities. It seems like a lot of people are going to be upset when the courts rule eventually rule in favor of the training and use of these models, if not only because the defendant has a lot of resources to throw at a legal team.

jazzyjackson 3y ago
your argument is that it's not infringing because they copied everything at once? I get that there's case law on copying in memory on the input side not being infringing but can't for the life of me understand how they get away with not paying for it. At least libraries buy the books before loaning them out, OpenAI and midjourney presumably pirated the works or otherwise ignored the license of published works and just say "if we found it on the internet it's fair game"
- williamcotton 3y ago
  Libraries loan out specific books!
- 3y ago