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If you require licensing fees for training data, you kill open source ML. That’s why it’s important for OpenAI to win the upcoming court cases. If they lose,

If you require licensing fees for training data, you kill open source ML. That’s why it’s important for OpenAI to win the upcoming court cases. If they lose, they’ll survive. But it will be the end of open model releases. To be clear, I don’t like the idea of companies profiting off of people’s work. I just like open source dying even less.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sillysaurusx 3y ago
Replying to a deleted comment: > It sounds as if you imply that would be bad. But what if it wasn't? Entirely possible. The early history of aviation was open source in the sense that many unlicensed people participated, and died. The world is strictly better with licensing requirements in place for that field. But no one knows. And if history is any guide for software, it seems better to err on freedoms that happen to have some downside rather then clamping down on them. One could imagine a world where BitTorrent was illegal. Or cryptography, or bitcoin.
- raverbashing 3y ago
  Are you really comparing licensing for a profession with licensing of IP?
  - sillysaurusx 3y ago
    It’s much the same. Only authorized people are allowed to do X. Since X costs a lot of money, by definition it can’t be open source. There are no hobbyist pilots that carry passengers without a license, and if there are, they’re quickly told to stop. Generative AI faces a real chance of having the same fate. Which means open source will look similar to these planes trying to compete with commercial aircraft: https://pilotinstitute.com/flying-without-a-license/ https://pilotinstitute.com/flying-without-a-license/ If you can think of a better example, I’d like to know though. I’ll use it in future discussions. It’s hard to think of good analogies when the tech has new social effects.
    - PeterStuer 3y ago
      If I fly a plane and crash, my passengers die. If I generate an image using a model whose training included some unlicensed imagery... Disney misses out on a fraction of a cent? There is a real reason why some professions are licenced and others are not. Your analogy is nonsensical. Not having a better one is irrelevant.
      - sillysaurusx 3y ago
        If training data requires licensing fees, ML practitioners will become a licensed field de facto, because no one in the open source world will have the resources to pursue it on their own. Perhaps a better analogy is movies. At least with acting, you can make your own movies, even if you’re on a shoestring budget. With ML, you quite literally can’t make a useful model. There’s not enough uncopyrighted data to do anything remotely close to commercial models, even in spirit.
        avisser 3y ago
        > If training data requires licensing fees, ML practitioners will become a licensed field de facto, You know the word "license" has multiple, dissimilar meanings, right?
deely3 3y ago
> If you require licensing fees for training data, you kill open source ML. kill open source ML -> decrease speed of improvements for some open source ML
- sillysaurusx 3y ago
  Sadly not. Making something illegal has social effects, not just legal effects. I’ve grown tired of being verbally spit on for books3. One lovely fellow even said that he hoped my daughter grows up resenting me for it. It being legal is the only guard against that kind of thing. People will still be angry, but they won’t be so numerous. Right now everyone outside of AI almost universally despises the way AI is trained. Which means you won’t be able to say that you do open source ML without risking your job. People will be angry enough to try to get you fired for it. (If that sounds extreme, count yourself lucky that you haven’t tried to assemble any ML datasets and release them. The LAION folks are in the crosshairs for supposedly including CSAM in their dataset, and they’re not even a dataset, just an index.)
  - multjoy 3y ago
    If everyone is unhappy with your rampant piracy, then perhaps that is a sign that you’re doing it wrong?
    - sillysaurusx 3y ago
      Perhaps. The reason I did it was because OpenAI was doing it, and it’s important for open source to be able to compete with ChatGPT. But if OpenAI’s actions are ruled illegal, then empirically open source wasn’t a persuasive enough reason to allow it.
    - 4bpp 3y ago
      Is there evidence that it's actually everyone or even close to everyone? The core innovation that the internet brought to harassment is that it is sufficient for some 0.0...01% of all people to take issue with you and be sufficiently dedicated to it for every waking minute of your life to be filled with a non-stop torrent of vitriol, as a tiny percentage of all internet users still amounts to thousands.
marcyb5st 3y ago
Is there a license that states: if you use this data for ML training you must open source model weights and architecture?
- sillysaurusx 3y ago
  It’s deeper than that. The basis of licensing is copyright. If the upcoming court cases rule in OpenAI’s favor, you won’t be able to apply copyright to training data. Which means you can’t license it. Or rather, you can, but everyone is free to ignore you. A license without teeth is no license at all. The GPL is only relevant because it’s enforceable in court. I’m sure some countries will try the licensing route though, so perhaps there you’d be able to make one. EDIT: I misread you, sorry. You’re saying that if OpenAI loses and license fees become the norm, maybe people will be willing to let their data be used for open source models, and a license could be crafted to that effect. Probably, yes. But the question is whether there’s enough training data to compete with the big companies that can afford to license much more. I’m doubtful, but it could be worth a try.
  - JAlexoid 3y ago
    >The GPL is only relevant because it’s enforceable in court. The irony of GPL, is that it's validity with respect to users is only now tested in court. https://www.dlapiper.com/en/insights/publications/2024/01/sfc-v-vizio-survives-motion-for-summary-judgment-on-third-party-beneficiary-issue https://www.dlapiper.com/en/insights/publications/2024/01/sf...
iamsaitam 3y ago
The point should be to kill training on unlicensed material. There needs to be regulation and tools to identify what was the training data. But as always, first comes the siphoning part, the massive extraction of value, then when the damage is done there will be the slow moving reparations and conservationism.
- cornel_io 3y ago
  A ton of us out here don't agree with your goals. I think these models are transformative enough that the value added by organizing and extracting patterns from the data outweighs the interests of the extremely diffuse set of copyright holders whose data was ingested. So regardless of the technical details of copyright law (which I still think are firmly in favor of OpenAI et al) I would strongly opposed any effort to tighten a legal noose here.
- JAlexoid 3y ago
  Agreed. And every software engineer writing code should pay 10% of their salary to the publishers of the books that they learned their programming skills from.
JoshTriplett 3y ago
> If you require licensing fees for training data, you kill open source ML. And likely proprietary ML as well, hopefully. (To be clear, I think AI is an absolutely incredible innovation, capable of both good and harm; I also think it's not unreasonable to expect it to play a safer, slower strategy than the Uber "break the rules to grow fast until they catch up to you" playbook.) I'm all for eliminating copyright. Until that happens, I'm utterly opposed to AI getting a special pass to ignore it while everyone else cannot. Fair use was intended for things like reviews, commentary, education, remixing, non-commercial use, and many other things; that doesn't make it appropriate for "slurp in the entire Internet and make billions remixing all of it at once". The commercial value of AI should utterly break the four-factor test. Here's the four-factor test, as applied to AI: "What is the character of the use?" - Commercial "What is the nature of the work to be used?" - Anything and everything "How much of the work will you use?" - All of it "If this kind of use were widespread, what effect would it have on the market for the original or for permissions?" - Directly competes with the original, killing or devaluing large parts of it Literally every part of the four-factor test is maximally against this being fair use. (Open Source AI fails three of four factors, and then many users of the resulting AI fail the first factor as well.) > If they lose, they’ll survive. That seems like an open question. If they lose these court cases, setting a precedent, then there will be ten thousand more on the heels of those, and it seems questionable whether they'd survive those. > To be clear, I don’t like the idea of companies profiting off of people’s work. I just like open source dying even less. You're positioning these as opposed because you're focused on the case of Open Source AI. There are a massive number of Open Source projects whose code is being trained on, producing AIs that launder the copyrights of those projects and ignore their licenses. I don't want Open Source projects serving as the training data for AIs that ignore their license.
- viraptor 3y ago
  > "How much of the work will you use?" - All of it That depends on the interpretation of "use", and it would be interesting to read what lawyers think. You learned the language largely from speech and copyrighted works. (All the stories, books, movies, etc. you ever read/heard) When you wrote this comment did you use all of them for that purpose? Is the case of AI different? To be clear that's a rhetorical question - I don't expect anyone here to actually have a convincing enough argument either way.
dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
That makes no sense. OpenAI must lose and it must not be possible to have proprietary models based on copyrighted works. It's not fair use because OpenAI is profiting from the copyright holders work and substituting for it while not giving them recompense. The alternative is that any models widely trained on copyrighted work are uncopyrightable and must be disclosed, along with their data sources. In essence this is forcing all such models to be open. This is the only equitable outcome. Any use of the model to create works has the same copyright issues as existing work creation, ie if substantially replicates an existing work it must be licenced.
- sillysaurusx 3y ago
  For what it’s worth, I agree with your second paragraph. But it would take legislation to enforce that. For now, it’s unclear that OpenAI will lose. Quite the opposite; I’ve spoken with a few lawyers who believe OpenAI is on solid legal footing, because all that matters is whether the model’s output is infringing. And it’s not. No one reads books via ChatGPT, and Dalle 3 has tight controls preventing it from generating Pokémon or Mario. All outcomes suck. The trick is to find the outcome that sucks the least for the majority of people. Maybe the needs of copyright holders will outweigh the needs of open source, but it’s basically guaranteed that open source ML will die if your first paragraph comes true.
  - dr_dshiv 3y ago
    Proposal: revenue from Generative AI should be taxed 10% for an international endowment for the arts. In exchange, copyright claims are settled.
    - Filligree 3y ago
      With a minimum rate, such that no-one can pretend they’re getting no income from it. We might apply that as a $5000 or so surcharge on AI accelerators capable of running the models, such as the 4090.
  - dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
benreesman 3y ago
The reality is always a dynamic tension between law, regulation, precedent, and enforceability. It is possible to strangle OpenAI without strangling AI: pmarca is anti-OpenAI in print, but you can bet your butt he hopes to invest in whatever replaces it, and he’s got access to information that like, 10 people do. A useful example would be the Napster Wars: the music industry had been rent seeking (taking the fucking piss really) for decades and technology destroyed the free ride one way or another. The public (led by the technical/hacker/maker public) quickly showed that short of disconnecting the internet, we were going to listen to the 2 good songs without buying the 8 shitty ones. The technical public doesn’t flex its muscles in a unified way very often, but when it does, it dictates what is and isn’t on the menu. The public wants AI, badly. They want it aligned by them within the constraints of the law (which is what “aligned” should mean to begin with). The public is getting what it wants on this: you can bet the rent. Whether or not OpenAI gets on board or gets run the fuck over is up to them. “You in the market for a Tower Records franchise Eduardo?”
- emadm 3y ago
  a16z are investors in openai
  - benreesman 3y ago
    I'd look again: https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1756803719327621141 https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1756803719327621141
pk-protect-ai 3y ago
I would say that GPT-3 and its successors have nothing to do with open source, and if OpenAI uses open source as a shield, then we are all doomed. I would distance myself and any open source projects from involvement in OpenAI court cases as far as possible. Yes, they have delivered some open source models, but not all of them. Their defense must revolve around fair use and purchased content if they use books and materials that were never freely available. It should be permissible to purchase a book or other materials once and use them for the training of an unlimited number of models without incurring licensing fees.
chasing 3y ago
> If you require licensing fees for training data, you kill open source ML. This is another one of those “well if you treat the people fairly it causes problems” sort of arguments. And: Sorry. If you want to do this you have to figure out how to do it ethically. There are all sorts of situations where research would go much faster if we behaved unethically or illegally. Medicine, for example. Or shooting people in rockets to Mars. But we can’t live in a society where we harm people in the name of progress. Everyone in AI is super smart — I’m sure they can chin-scratch and figure out a way to make progress while respecting the people whose work they need to power these tools. Those incapable of this are either lazy, predatory, or not that smart.
- sillysaurusx 3y ago
  "Ethical" in this case is a matter of opinion. The whole point of copyright was to promote useful sciences and arts. It’s in the US constitution. You don’t get to control your work out of some sense of fairness, but rather because it’s better for the society you live in. As an ML researcher, no, there’s basically no way to make progress without the data. Not in comparison with billion dollar corporations that can throw money at the licensing problem. Synthetic data is still a pipe dream, and arguably still a copyright violation according to you, since traditional models generate such data. To believe that this problem will just go away or that we can find some way around it is to close one’s eyes and shout "la la la, not listening." If you want to kill open source AI, that’s fine, but do it with eyes open.
  - chasing 3y ago
    Yes, it’s true that open source projects that cannot pay to license content owned by other people are at a disadvantage versus those who can. Open source projects cannot, for example, wholly copy code owned by other people. Also, beware of originalist interpretations of the Constitution. I believe there’s been about 250 years of law clarifying how copyright works, and, not to beat a dead horse, I don’t think it carves out a special exception for open source projects.
throw10920 3y ago
> If you require licensing fees for training data, you kill open source ML. I don't think this is true. There's a huge amount of public domain works, as well as stuff licensed under permissive copyleft licenses, that can be used. But, even if it did kill off open-source ML, it would still be necessary, because it's morally wrong to train ML models on copyrighted content without compensating the copyright owners (on their terms). As a content creator, I explicitly do not want or consent to any of my creative works being used to train ML models without having a licensing agreement through which I am financially compensated.
- sillysaurusx 3y ago
  I’m sympathetic, but currently the courts don’t agree. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39364447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39364447 Morals are different from the law, but you seek a legal remedy, and those aren’t going well.
  - throw10920 3y ago
    Doesn't the Ars Technica article of that post state that the courts have not rejected the claim of copyright infringement? > failed to provide evidence supporting any of their claims except for direct copyright infringement (emphasis mine) Where are the courts saying that models can be trained on copyrighted content? (I believe that it's possible but unless I'm missing something I don't see it in that Ars article)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

sillysaurusx 3y ago

Replying to a deleted comment: > It sounds as if you imply that would be bad. But what if it wasn't? Entirely possible. The early history of aviation was open source in the sense that many unlicensed people participated, and died. The world is strictly better with licensing requirements in place for that field. But no one knows. And if history is any guide for software, it seems better to err on freedoms that happen to have some downside rather then clamping down on them. One could imagine a world where BitTorrent was illegal. Or cryptography, or bitcoin.

raverbashing 3y ago
Are you really comparing licensing for a profession with licensing of IP?
- sillysaurusx 3y ago
  It’s much the same. Only authorized people are allowed to do X. Since X costs a lot of money, by definition it can’t be open source. There are no hobbyist pilots that carry passengers without a license, and if there are, they’re quickly told to stop. Generative AI faces a real chance of having the same fate. Which means open source will look similar to these planes trying to compete with commercial aircraft: https://pilotinstitute.com/flying-without-a-license/ https://pilotinstitute.com/flying-without-a-license/ If you can think of a better example, I’d like to know though. I’ll use it in future discussions. It’s hard to think of good analogies when the tech has new social effects.
  - PeterStuer 3y ago
    If I fly a plane and crash, my passengers die. If I generate an image using a model whose training included some unlicensed imagery... Disney misses out on a fraction of a cent? There is a real reason why some professions are licenced and others are not. Your analogy is nonsensical. Not having a better one is irrelevant.
    - sillysaurusx 3y ago
      If training data requires licensing fees, ML practitioners will become a licensed field de facto, because no one in the open source world will have the resources to pursue it on their own. Perhaps a better analogy is movies. At least with acting, you can make your own movies, even if you’re on a shoestring budget. With ML, you quite literally can’t make a useful model. There’s not enough uncopyrighted data to do anything remotely close to commercial models, even in spirit.
      - avisser 3y ago
        > If training data requires licensing fees, ML practitioners will become a licensed field de facto, You know the word "license" has multiple, dissimilar meanings, right?

deely3 3y ago

> If you require licensing fees for training data, you kill open source ML. kill open source ML -> decrease speed of improvements for some open source ML

sillysaurusx 3y ago
Sadly not. Making something illegal has social effects, not just legal effects. I’ve grown tired of being verbally spit on for books3. One lovely fellow even said that he hoped my daughter grows up resenting me for it. It being legal is the only guard against that kind of thing. People will still be angry, but they won’t be so numerous. Right now everyone outside of AI almost universally despises the way AI is trained. Which means you won’t be able to say that you do open source ML without risking your job. People will be angry enough to try to get you fired for it. (If that sounds extreme, count yourself lucky that you haven’t tried to assemble any ML datasets and release them. The LAION folks are in the crosshairs for supposedly including CSAM in their dataset, and they’re not even a dataset, just an index.)
- multjoy 3y ago
  If everyone is unhappy with your rampant piracy, then perhaps that is a sign that you’re doing it wrong?
  - sillysaurusx 3y ago
    Perhaps. The reason I did it was because OpenAI was doing it, and it’s important for open source to be able to compete with ChatGPT. But if OpenAI’s actions are ruled illegal, then empirically open source wasn’t a persuasive enough reason to allow it.
  - 4bpp 3y ago
    Is there evidence that it's actually everyone or even close to everyone? The core innovation that the internet brought to harassment is that it is sufficient for some 0.0...01% of all people to take issue with you and be sufficiently dedicated to it for every waking minute of your life to be filled with a non-stop torrent of vitriol, as a tiny percentage of all internet users still amounts to thousands.

marcyb5st 3y ago

Is there a license that states: if you use this data for ML training you must open source model weights and architecture?

sillysaurusx 3y ago
It’s deeper than that. The basis of licensing is copyright. If the upcoming court cases rule in OpenAI’s favor, you won’t be able to apply copyright to training data. Which means you can’t license it. Or rather, you can, but everyone is free to ignore you. A license without teeth is no license at all. The GPL is only relevant because it’s enforceable in court. I’m sure some countries will try the licensing route though, so perhaps there you’d be able to make one. EDIT: I misread you, sorry. You’re saying that if OpenAI loses and license fees become the norm, maybe people will be willing to let their data be used for open source models, and a license could be crafted to that effect. Probably, yes. But the question is whether there’s enough training data to compete with the big companies that can afford to license much more. I’m doubtful, but it could be worth a try.
- JAlexoid 3y ago
  >The GPL is only relevant because it’s enforceable in court. The irony of GPL, is that it's validity with respect to users is only now tested in court. https://www.dlapiper.com/en/insights/publications/2024/01/sfc-v-vizio-survives-motion-for-summary-judgment-on-third-party-beneficiary-issue https://www.dlapiper.com/en/insights/publications/2024/01/sf...

iamsaitam 3y ago

The point should be to kill training on unlicensed material. There needs to be regulation and tools to identify what was the training data. But as always, first comes the siphoning part, the massive extraction of value, then when the damage is done there will be the slow moving reparations and conservationism.

cornel_io 3y ago
A ton of us out here don't agree with your goals. I think these models are transformative enough that the value added by organizing and extracting patterns from the data outweighs the interests of the extremely diffuse set of copyright holders whose data was ingested. So regardless of the technical details of copyright law (which I still think are firmly in favor of OpenAI et al) I would strongly opposed any effort to tighten a legal noose here.
JAlexoid 3y ago
Agreed. And every software engineer writing code should pay 10% of their salary to the publishers of the books that they learned their programming skills from.

JoshTriplett 3y ago

> If you require licensing fees for training data, you kill open source ML. And likely proprietary ML as well, hopefully. (To be clear, I think AI is an absolutely incredible innovation, capable of both good and harm; I also think it's not unreasonable to expect it to play a safer, slower strategy than the Uber "break the rules to grow fast until they catch up to you" playbook.) I'm all for eliminating copyright. Until that happens, I'm utterly opposed to AI getting a special pass to ignore it while everyone else cannot. Fair use was intended for things like reviews, commentary, education, remixing, non-commercial use, and many other things; that doesn't make it appropriate for "slurp in the entire Internet and make billions remixing all of it at once". The commercial value of AI should utterly break the four-factor test. Here's the four-factor test, as applied to AI: "What is the character of the use?" - Commercial "What is the nature of the work to be used?" - Anything and everything "How much of the work will you use?" - All of it "If this kind of use were widespread, what effect would it have on the market for the original or for permissions?" - Directly competes with the original, killing or devaluing large parts of it Literally every part of the four-factor test is maximally against this being fair use. (Open Source AI fails three of four factors, and then many users of the resulting AI fail the first factor as well.) > If they lose, they’ll survive. That seems like an open question. If they lose these court cases, setting a precedent, then there will be ten thousand more on the heels of those, and it seems questionable whether they'd survive those. > To be clear, I don’t like the idea of companies profiting off of people’s work. I just like open source dying even less. You're positioning these as opposed because you're focused on the case of Open Source AI. There are a massive number of Open Source projects whose code is being trained on, producing AIs that launder the copyrights of those projects and ignore their licenses. I don't want Open Source projects serving as the training data for AIs that ignore their license.

viraptor 3y ago
> "How much of the work will you use?" - All of it That depends on the interpretation of "use", and it would be interesting to read what lawyers think. You learned the language largely from speech and copyrighted works. (All the stories, books, movies, etc. you ever read/heard) When you wrote this comment did you use all of them for that purpose? Is the case of AI different? To be clear that's a rhetorical question - I don't expect anyone here to actually have a convincing enough argument either way.

dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago

That makes no sense. OpenAI must lose and it must not be possible to have proprietary models based on copyrighted works. It's not fair use because OpenAI is profiting from the copyright holders work and substituting for it while not giving them recompense. The alternative is that any models widely trained on copyrighted work are uncopyrightable and must be disclosed, along with their data sources. In essence this is forcing all such models to be open. This is the only equitable outcome. Any use of the model to create works has the same copyright issues as existing work creation, ie if substantially replicates an existing work it must be licenced.

sillysaurusx 3y ago
For what it’s worth, I agree with your second paragraph. But it would take legislation to enforce that. For now, it’s unclear that OpenAI will lose. Quite the opposite; I’ve spoken with a few lawyers who believe OpenAI is on solid legal footing, because all that matters is whether the model’s output is infringing. And it’s not. No one reads books via ChatGPT, and Dalle 3 has tight controls preventing it from generating Pokémon or Mario. All outcomes suck. The trick is to find the outcome that sucks the least for the majority of people. Maybe the needs of copyright holders will outweigh the needs of open source, but it’s basically guaranteed that open source ML will die if your first paragraph comes true.
- dr_dshiv 3y ago
  Proposal: revenue from Generative AI should be taxed 10% for an international endowment for the arts. In exchange, copyright claims are settled.
  - Filligree 3y ago
    With a minimum rate, such that no-one can pretend they’re getting no income from it. We might apply that as a $5000 or so surcharge on AI accelerators capable of running the models, such as the 4090.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago

benreesman 3y ago

The reality is always a dynamic tension between law, regulation, precedent, and enforceability. It is possible to strangle OpenAI without strangling AI: pmarca is anti-OpenAI in print, but you can bet your butt he hopes to invest in whatever replaces it, and he’s got access to information that like, 10 people do. A useful example would be the Napster Wars: the music industry had been rent seeking (taking the fucking piss really) for decades and technology destroyed the free ride one way or another. The public (led by the technical/hacker/maker public) quickly showed that short of disconnecting the internet, we were going to listen to the 2 good songs without buying the 8 shitty ones. The technical public doesn’t flex its muscles in a unified way very often, but when it does, it dictates what is and isn’t on the menu. The public wants AI, badly. They want it aligned by them within the constraints of the law (which is what “aligned” should mean to begin with). The public is getting what it wants on this: you can bet the rent. Whether or not OpenAI gets on board or gets run the fuck over is up to them. “You in the market for a Tower Records franchise Eduardo?”

emadm 3y ago
a16z are investors in openai
- benreesman 3y ago
  I'd look again: https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1756803719327621141 https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1756803719327621141

pk-protect-ai 3y ago

I would say that GPT-3 and its successors have nothing to do with open source, and if OpenAI uses open source as a shield, then we are all doomed. I would distance myself and any open source projects from involvement in OpenAI court cases as far as possible. Yes, they have delivered some open source models, but not all of them. Their defense must revolve around fair use and purchased content if they use books and materials that were never freely available. It should be permissible to purchase a book or other materials once and use them for the training of an unlimited number of models without incurring licensing fees.

chasing 3y ago

> If you require licensing fees for training data, you kill open source ML. This is another one of those “well if you treat the people fairly it causes problems” sort of arguments. And: Sorry. If you want to do this you have to figure out how to do it ethically. There are all sorts of situations where research would go much faster if we behaved unethically or illegally. Medicine, for example. Or shooting people in rockets to Mars. But we can’t live in a society where we harm people in the name of progress. Everyone in AI is super smart — I’m sure they can chin-scratch and figure out a way to make progress while respecting the people whose work they need to power these tools. Those incapable of this are either lazy, predatory, or not that smart.

sillysaurusx 3y ago
"Ethical" in this case is a matter of opinion. The whole point of copyright was to promote useful sciences and arts. It’s in the US constitution. You don’t get to control your work out of some sense of fairness, but rather because it’s better for the society you live in. As an ML researcher, no, there’s basically no way to make progress without the data. Not in comparison with billion dollar corporations that can throw money at the licensing problem. Synthetic data is still a pipe dream, and arguably still a copyright violation according to you, since traditional models generate such data. To believe that this problem will just go away or that we can find some way around it is to close one’s eyes and shout "la la la, not listening." If you want to kill open source AI, that’s fine, but do it with eyes open.
- chasing 3y ago
  Yes, it’s true that open source projects that cannot pay to license content owned by other people are at a disadvantage versus those who can. Open source projects cannot, for example, wholly copy code owned by other people. Also, beware of originalist interpretations of the Constitution. I believe there’s been about 250 years of law clarifying how copyright works, and, not to beat a dead horse, I don’t think it carves out a special exception for open source projects.

throw10920 3y ago

> If you require licensing fees for training data, you kill open source ML. I don't think this is true. There's a huge amount of public domain works, as well as stuff licensed under permissive copyleft licenses, that can be used. But, even if it did kill off open-source ML, it would still be necessary, because it's morally wrong to train ML models on copyrighted content without compensating the copyright owners (on their terms). As a content creator, I explicitly do not want or consent to any of my creative works being used to train ML models without having a licensing agreement through which I am financially compensated.

sillysaurusx 3y ago
I’m sympathetic, but currently the courts don’t agree. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39364447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39364447 Morals are different from the law, but you seek a legal remedy, and those aren’t going well.
- throw10920 3y ago
  Doesn't the Ars Technica article of that post state that the courts have not rejected the claim of copyright infringement? > failed to provide evidence supporting any of their claims except for direct copyright infringement (emphasis mine) Where are the courts saying that models can be trained on copyrighted content? (I believe that it's possible but unless I'm missing something I don't see it in that Ars article)