6 ms·

Humans acquire a significant amount of knowledge (or get trained on) by learning from the work of others. If companies can face legal repercussions for training

Humans acquire a significant amount of knowledge (or get trained on) by learning from the work of others. If companies can face legal repercussions for training models on materials from elsewhere, a similar argument could be made for individuals.

coffeecloud 2y ago
To me it sounds like this argument is claiming that "training models" is legally equivalent to "training humans". So are there other examples of a human being allowed to do something where a machine made by a human is not allowed to do that thing? I am allowed to go to a movie and remember every detail and tell it to my friends, but my camcorder is not allowed to do that.
- slavik81 2y ago
  If you redrew The Lion King frame by frame from memory, it would still be copyright infringement if you redistributed it to your friends. The difference is how similar your recreation is to the original, not whether it was done by a human or by a machine.
  - epoxia 2y ago
    Funnily enough, The Lion King is a property that has its own controversy of plagiarism of a different animation, Kimba The White Lion. But, I guess if Disney does it it's okay...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - jncfhnb 2y ago
    If you drew it shittily from memory it would still be copyright infringement. As would retelling it. Discoverability of the infringement and the irrelevance of the violation is the reason you don’t get sued
  - j0hnyl 2y ago
    Punish for the re-drawing, not the memorizing.
p1necone 2y ago
This argument seems ridiculous to me but it's hard to explain exactly why. People are people, LLMs are... not people - it seems pretty obvious to me that humans learning from seeing things is a basic fact of nature, and that someone feeding petabytes of copyrighted material into an AI model to fully automate generation of art is obviously copyright infringement. I can see the argument making more sense if we actually manage to synthesize consciousness, but we don't have anything anywhere near that at the moment.
- yieldcrv 2y ago
  That’s not obvious to me. I suppose it depends on your familiarity with copyright law, as opposed to the noun copyright. I typically don't find oft repeated concepts to have any bearing on the legal reality.
- gedy 2y ago
  > LLMs are... not people Of course, but LLMs are tools used by people - they don't just spit out Taylor Swift songs or whatever automatically and wipe out human jobs. The laws we have already apply to people (whom use any tool they want) and what they do with creations, and whether copyright applies or whatever.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  >and that someone feeding petabytes of copyrighted material into an AI model to fully automate generation of art is obviously copyright infringement. It becomes a little less obvious when you learn that the models which had petabytes of images "go into it" are <10GB in size. You have 5 million artists on one hand saying "My art is in there being used" and you have a 10GB file full of matrix vectors saying "There are no image files in here" on the other. Both are kind of right. ish. sort of.
  - 627467 2y ago
    is distributing a zip file of copyrighted material infringement? if it is I guess the argument is distributing this <10GB model that can _unzip_ into copyrighted material is infringement. disclaimer: I'm just devil advocating. I don't believe this discussion is productive. the time for IP protection to be necessary for social good has gone and now it's just a time wasting idea
CatWChainsaw 2y ago
I didn't realize you could train yourself on a lifetime's worth of YT videos every single day. (If salty sally had a problem with this statement, it's in the other articles on the HN front page right now, gf) The storage, recall, and scale required have always made this interpretation laughable - or rather, the kind of argument that seeks to privilege tools (and corporations) over people.
silver_silver 2y ago
That human would become another artist whereas the model could potentially replace the entire industry. There’s a comparison to the Industrial Revolution to be made but it’s not one which convinces me. Making artistic dream jobs even more impossible to land is so cynical and shallow. It’s like building a supermarket in Yosemite.
- paulddraper 2y ago
  > There’s a comparison to the Industrial Revolution to be made but it’s not one which convinces me. Why not?

coffeecloud 2y ago

To me it sounds like this argument is claiming that "training models" is legally equivalent to "training humans". So are there other examples of a human being allowed to do something where a machine made by a human is not allowed to do that thing? I am allowed to go to a movie and remember every detail and tell it to my friends, but my camcorder is not allowed to do that.

slavik81 2y ago
If you redrew The Lion King frame by frame from memory, it would still be copyright infringement if you redistributed it to your friends. The difference is how similar your recreation is to the original, not whether it was done by a human or by a machine.
- epoxia 2y ago
  Funnily enough, The Lion King is a property that has its own controversy of plagiarism of a different animation, Kimba The White Lion. But, I guess if Disney does it it's okay...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- jncfhnb 2y ago
  If you drew it shittily from memory it would still be copyright infringement. As would retelling it. Discoverability of the infringement and the irrelevance of the violation is the reason you don’t get sued
- j0hnyl 2y ago
  Punish for the re-drawing, not the memorizing.

p1necone 2y ago

This argument seems ridiculous to me but it's hard to explain exactly why. People are people, LLMs are... not people - it seems pretty obvious to me that humans learning from seeing things is a basic fact of nature, and that someone feeding petabytes of copyrighted material into an AI model to fully automate generation of art is obviously copyright infringement. I can see the argument making more sense if we actually manage to synthesize consciousness, but we don't have anything anywhere near that at the moment.

yieldcrv 2y ago
That’s not obvious to me. I suppose it depends on your familiarity with copyright law, as opposed to the noun copyright. I typically don't find oft repeated concepts to have any bearing on the legal reality.
gedy 2y ago
> LLMs are... not people Of course, but LLMs are tools used by people - they don't just spit out Taylor Swift songs or whatever automatically and wipe out human jobs. The laws we have already apply to people (whom use any tool they want) and what they do with creations, and whether copyright applies or whatever.
Workaccount2 2y ago
>and that someone feeding petabytes of copyrighted material into an AI model to fully automate generation of art is obviously copyright infringement. It becomes a little less obvious when you learn that the models which had petabytes of images "go into it" are <10GB in size. You have 5 million artists on one hand saying "My art is in there being used" and you have a 10GB file full of matrix vectors saying "There are no image files in here" on the other. Both are kind of right. ish. sort of.
- 627467 2y ago
  is distributing a zip file of copyrighted material infringement? if it is I guess the argument is distributing this <10GB model that can _unzip_ into copyrighted material is infringement. disclaimer: I'm just devil advocating. I don't believe this discussion is productive. the time for IP protection to be necessary for social good has gone and now it's just a time wasting idea

CatWChainsaw 2y ago

I didn't realize you could train yourself on a lifetime's worth of YT videos every single day. (If salty sally had a problem with this statement, it's in the other articles on the HN front page right now, gf) The storage, recall, and scale required have always made this interpretation laughable - or rather, the kind of argument that seeks to privilege tools (and corporations) over people.

silver_silver 2y ago

That human would become another artist whereas the model could potentially replace the entire industry. There’s a comparison to the Industrial Revolution to be made but it’s not one which convinces me. Making artistic dream jobs even more impossible to land is so cynical and shallow. It’s like building a supermarket in Yosemite.

paulddraper 2y ago
> There’s a comparison to the Industrial Revolution to be made but it’s not one which convinces me. Why not?