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I think there is actually a good argument that an AI model is transformative, and that training a model is therefore not infringing of the copyright. (An analo
by retrac 3y ago
I think there is actually a good argument that an AI model is transformative, and that training a model is therefore not infringing of the copyright. (An analogy: if you rolled dice to select words randomly from the Lord of the Rings and rearranged them into a poem, it's not infringing the Lord of the Rings even if in a sense, every word was taken from that book.)
But you still have to get your hands on the copyrighted data legally. It might be legal to scan every book an institution owns, and train off it, so long as those scans are not distributed. But it is probably not legal to scrape copyrighted content off torrents - creating the copy to train with is infringing, even if the model's final product maybe isn't.
- seanhunter 3y agoYes agreed, and transformative use itself also has limitations. You don't have carte blanche to use something just because you think it's transformative, for example the Lynn Goldsmith vs Andy Warhol Foundation case over the "Orange Prince" work. https://copyrightalliance.org/warhol-decision-reins-transformative-fair-use/ https://copyrightalliance.org/warhol-decision-reins-transfor...
- fsckboy 3y agowhile there is a good argument that AI produces transformative outputs, it's refuted when the models are shown to regurgitate literal text, which they have. Then it just starts to look like a neural memorization agent, compressed storage algorithm, etc.
- bee_rider 3y agoDefinitely open to the idea, that couldn’t be the whole argument. I mean, my brain can output some quotes, but I’m not a compressed storage algorithm. Or at least I hope I’m not.
- zettabomb 3y agoI've seen examples of this, but they're nearly always isolated, rather difficult to obtain, and not in fact exact copies. You need to specifically ask for an exact copy, and then attempt to defeat the safeguards the model has in place to prevent this, and hope that it was "memorized" - which for the record is considered to be a flaw in the model as it's a reduction in information density and capability, compared to if that "memory" was used for something else. Good models seek to reduce this as much as possible. With the size of the datasets involve (see OP) this feels more like an understandable and reasonable issue to have.
- 7moritz7 3y agoThis very rarely happens, usually when trying hard to get it to regurgitate, and I don't think it has ever happened for anything longer than 2 paragraphs, or at most a short article. Certainly not something like a book or even the whole issue of a newspaper.
- fennecfoxy 3y agoYup, exactly. Passages from GoT appear because they're frequently referenced across the Internet, including the multiple wiki style sites for GoT fans, not necessarily because the LLM is regurgitating whole-book content it was trained on.