5 ms·

Teenagers with Limewire: pirates. OpenAI with terabytes: pioneers. Guess file size matters more than file type in the court of public opinion.

notyourwork 3y ago
What does piracy have to do with generative AI? I don’t understand your analogy.
- endisneigh 3y ago
  Useful generative AI is only possible by the same collection of copyrighted material previously deemed illegal. I imagine a model trained solely on material explicitly marked for AI use would be significantly worse.
  - ghshephard 3y ago
    On the flip side - almost (say, 99.99%) of Human Engineers, Artists, Technicians, Scientists, etc... have mental models trained on copyrighted material. Nobody (to my knowledge) has ever said that you can't train on copyrighted material - what you aren't allowed to do is copy or directly plagiarize. Something that all the generative systems are going to great pains to remove from their system where possible. Are they doing a perfect job - nope. But they'll get better, and this is good - copyrights are supposed to prevent replication, not use of their material.
    - jprete 3y ago
      Lots of people have said that it's illegal to train on copyrighted material without a license to it. Also, performance licenses for movies, plays, recorded music, and copyrighted scores are all required. The lack of copying is not relevant there, the performance alone can be infringing.
      - ghshephard 3y ago
        I'm intrigued - can you point me to any credible commentator or article that makes the argument "it's illegal to train on copyrighted material without a license to it" - that seems entirely contrary to the spirt (as I understand it) to copyright law, which is it grants you a right to copy. I like that you bring up music - almost every musician you have ever listened to (some exceptions of course) developed their talent by learning from others - chords, bridges, etc... And I'm just as certain that close to 0% of them had a "license to learn" from their material.
        jprete 3y ago
        I'm talking about ML training. I think human training is expressly covered by fair use (i.e. copying for educational purposes). Sorry for the confusion, I misread your comment.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      >Are they doing a perfect job - nope. But they'll get better I lost all optimism with tech hoping "they'll get better" quite a while ago. No, it's time to regulate them before they burn the bridge this time.
- teachinghacker 3y ago
  It uses a lot of copyrighted content without permission.
  - jonathankoren 3y ago
    What permission would be needed? It's READING it. Are there problems when it reproduces it verbatim? Absolutely, but that's not what the copyright maximalists are talking about. They're saying it's a violation of their right of reproduction when someone simply reads their work. I remember when people were upset that someone would (gasp!) link to their site without permission. Especially if it was a "deep link". Expanding copyright in this novel way obviously is going to lead to a whole slew of problems, least among which is going to be ensuring regulatory capture by the largest of the largest simply because only they will have the money to license reading. It's a shakedown by industries that no longer have a viable business model.
    - networkchad 3y ago
      [dead]
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      >What permission would be needed? It's READING it. and then storing it in a database, as shown by the ability to nearly replicate images with enough prompting before they band-aided a fix over it (which does not remove it from their database). It's clearly not just "reading". You can argue the same for a human mind, but it's a lot easier to peer into a mind of code for now (and honestly, by the time we can accurately read brainwaves LLM's won't even be in the top 10 of ethical concerns anyway). All that aside, web scraping has been legally contentious for over a decade. This mass scraping for commercial LLM usage is honestly making a horrible argument for that already dubious factor. >Expanding copyright in this novel way obviously is going to lead to a whole slew of problems, least among which is going to be ensuring regulatory capture by the largest of the largest simply because only they will have the money to license reading. It's probably for the best, since at that point at least the owners of the data are getting paid (though there's other grey areas to iron out. Especially with User-generated content being sold as if the site "owns it", while being legally exempt from being sued for hosting it). the opposite effect just means the corporations win indirectly instead of directly, with less money flowing around. A company that can outspend the competition can also out spend on hardware to process faster, scrape more, and polish he final effects. There's no endgame here where the corporation loses and the indies win, short of some absolutely radical policy changes.
- pengaru 3y ago
  Generative AI is computational plagiarism of diffuse - but still copyrighted, sources.
  - brigadier132 3y ago
    > computational plagiarism Plagiarism is copying without attribution. Transformative works do not qualify as plagiarism.
    - dylan604 3y ago
      when does it credit/attribute who/what/when/where the data it copied from?
      - brigadier132 3y ago
        You don't need to credit for a transformative work. LLMs don't regurgitate like you think they do.
        pengaru 3y ago
        > LLMs don't regurgitate like you think they do. "Copilot has been found to regurgitate long sections of licensed code without providing credit — prompting this lawsuit that accuses the companies of violating copyright law on a massive scale." https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/8/23446821/microsoft-openai-github-copilot-class-action-lawsuit-ai-copyright-violation-training-data https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/8/23446821/microsoft-openai...
        brigadier132 3y ago
        Like I said, they don't regurgitate the way you think they do. Doesn't mean it can't regurgitate data if it's overfit to the training data.
        johnnyanmac 3y ago
bestcoder69 3y ago
limewire teens were pioneers too
edmundsauto 3y ago
This is a shallow take. Teenagers are copying bits for their own gratification. OpenAI built a fascinating tool that enables other people to create things by transforming bits. Put another way, one group enables people to make things. The other does not.
- jprete 3y ago
  OpenAI built it for a combination of their own gratification and cold hard cash. What do you think motivates AI researchers? What do you think motivates OpenAI employees now? Sam Altman? Microsoft?
  - edmundsauto 3y ago
    I try not to guess what motivates complex animals such as humans when in an abstract discussion like “what motivates Sam Altman”. Do you have any inside knowledge of what motivates him or are you guessing because you have correlated things you don’t like with a company or individual?
    - ricc 3y ago
      I try not to guess what motivates complex animals such as humans when in an abstract discussion like “what motivates teenagers”. Do you have any inside knowledge of what motivates them or are you guessing because you have correlated things you don’t like with a certain demographic?
      - edmundsauto 3y ago
        Not trying to be inflammatory, but it's not really about teenagers, or about OpenAI's intentions. We can look at what they are doing. One group is downloading things other people made, sometimes transforming them - but we certainly haven't seen an explosion of remixes at the scale of OpenAI creations. The other group, OpenAI, makes tools that ingest copyrighted material and enable people to make a huge number of more complex transformations than the original "remix" culture, where the inputs are usually quite visible. FWIW, I don't even really think the content pirates have as terrible a name as in GP's comment. I certainly have no criticism of them, especially considering that's how I got my start in technology. It's fine, it's just not as cool or as widespread as GenAI.

notyourwork 3y ago

What does piracy have to do with generative AI? I don’t understand your analogy.

endisneigh 3y ago
Useful generative AI is only possible by the same collection of copyrighted material previously deemed illegal. I imagine a model trained solely on material explicitly marked for AI use would be significantly worse.
- ghshephard 3y ago
  On the flip side - almost (say, 99.99%) of Human Engineers, Artists, Technicians, Scientists, etc... have mental models trained on copyrighted material. Nobody (to my knowledge) has ever said that you can't train on copyrighted material - what you aren't allowed to do is copy or directly plagiarize. Something that all the generative systems are going to great pains to remove from their system where possible. Are they doing a perfect job - nope. But they'll get better, and this is good - copyrights are supposed to prevent replication, not use of their material.
  - jprete 3y ago
    Lots of people have said that it's illegal to train on copyrighted material without a license to it. Also, performance licenses for movies, plays, recorded music, and copyrighted scores are all required. The lack of copying is not relevant there, the performance alone can be infringing.
    - ghshephard 3y ago
      I'm intrigued - can you point me to any credible commentator or article that makes the argument "it's illegal to train on copyrighted material without a license to it" - that seems entirely contrary to the spirt (as I understand it) to copyright law, which is it grants you a right to copy. I like that you bring up music - almost every musician you have ever listened to (some exceptions of course) developed their talent by learning from others - chords, bridges, etc... And I'm just as certain that close to 0% of them had a "license to learn" from their material.
      - jprete 3y ago
        I'm talking about ML training. I think human training is expressly covered by fair use (i.e. copying for educational purposes). Sorry for the confusion, I misread your comment.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >Are they doing a perfect job - nope. But they'll get better I lost all optimism with tech hoping "they'll get better" quite a while ago. No, it's time to regulate them before they burn the bridge this time.
teachinghacker 3y ago
It uses a lot of copyrighted content without permission.
- jonathankoren 3y ago
  What permission would be needed? It's READING it. Are there problems when it reproduces it verbatim? Absolutely, but that's not what the copyright maximalists are talking about. They're saying it's a violation of their right of reproduction when someone simply reads their work. I remember when people were upset that someone would (gasp!) link to their site without permission. Especially if it was a "deep link". Expanding copyright in this novel way obviously is going to lead to a whole slew of problems, least among which is going to be ensuring regulatory capture by the largest of the largest simply because only they will have the money to license reading. It's a shakedown by industries that no longer have a viable business model.
  - networkchad 3y ago
    [dead]
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >What permission would be needed? It's READING it. and then storing it in a database, as shown by the ability to nearly replicate images with enough prompting before they band-aided a fix over it (which does not remove it from their database). It's clearly not just "reading". You can argue the same for a human mind, but it's a lot easier to peer into a mind of code for now (and honestly, by the time we can accurately read brainwaves LLM's won't even be in the top 10 of ethical concerns anyway). All that aside, web scraping has been legally contentious for over a decade. This mass scraping for commercial LLM usage is honestly making a horrible argument for that already dubious factor. >Expanding copyright in this novel way obviously is going to lead to a whole slew of problems, least among which is going to be ensuring regulatory capture by the largest of the largest simply because only they will have the money to license reading. It's probably for the best, since at that point at least the owners of the data are getting paid (though there's other grey areas to iron out. Especially with User-generated content being sold as if the site "owns it", while being legally exempt from being sued for hosting it). the opposite effect just means the corporations win indirectly instead of directly, with less money flowing around. A company that can outspend the competition can also out spend on hardware to process faster, scrape more, and polish he final effects. There's no endgame here where the corporation loses and the indies win, short of some absolutely radical policy changes.
pengaru 3y ago
Generative AI is computational plagiarism of diffuse - but still copyrighted, sources.
- brigadier132 3y ago
  > computational plagiarism Plagiarism is copying without attribution. Transformative works do not qualify as plagiarism.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    when does it credit/attribute who/what/when/where the data it copied from?
    - brigadier132 3y ago
      You don't need to credit for a transformative work. LLMs don't regurgitate like you think they do.
      - pengaru 3y ago
        > LLMs don't regurgitate like you think they do. "Copilot has been found to regurgitate long sections of licensed code without providing credit — prompting this lawsuit that accuses the companies of violating copyright law on a massive scale." https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/8/23446821/microsoft-openai-github-copilot-class-action-lawsuit-ai-copyright-violation-training-data https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/8/23446821/microsoft-openai...
        brigadier132 3y ago
        Like I said, they don't regurgitate the way you think they do. Doesn't mean it can't regurgitate data if it's overfit to the training data.
        johnnyanmac 3y ago

bestcoder69 3y ago

limewire teens were pioneers too

edmundsauto 3y ago

This is a shallow take. Teenagers are copying bits for their own gratification. OpenAI built a fascinating tool that enables other people to create things by transforming bits. Put another way, one group enables people to make things. The other does not.

jprete 3y ago
OpenAI built it for a combination of their own gratification and cold hard cash. What do you think motivates AI researchers? What do you think motivates OpenAI employees now? Sam Altman? Microsoft?
- edmundsauto 3y ago
  I try not to guess what motivates complex animals such as humans when in an abstract discussion like “what motivates Sam Altman”. Do you have any inside knowledge of what motivates him or are you guessing because you have correlated things you don’t like with a company or individual?
  - ricc 3y ago
    I try not to guess what motivates complex animals such as humans when in an abstract discussion like “what motivates teenagers”. Do you have any inside knowledge of what motivates them or are you guessing because you have correlated things you don’t like with a certain demographic?
    - edmundsauto 3y ago
      Not trying to be inflammatory, but it's not really about teenagers, or about OpenAI's intentions. We can look at what they are doing. One group is downloading things other people made, sometimes transforming them - but we certainly haven't seen an explosion of remixes at the scale of OpenAI creations. The other group, OpenAI, makes tools that ingest copyrighted material and enable people to make a huge number of more complex transformations than the original "remix" culture, where the inputs are usually quite visible. FWIW, I don't even really think the content pirates have as terrible a name as in GP's comment. I certainly have no criticism of them, especially considering that's how I got my start in technology. It's fine, it's just not as cool or as widespread as GenAI.