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I don't agree because it creates this dilemma for creators: you need to put your work out there to get traction, but if you put your work out there and anything

by trimbo 2y ago

I don't agree because it creates this dilemma for creators: you need to put your work out there to get traction, but if you put your work out there and anything public is fair game, then it will be sampled by a computer and instantly recreated at scale. This might even happen without the operator knowing whose work is being ripped off. Commercial art producers have always ripped off minor artists. They would do it by keeping it very similar to the original but just different enough to avoid being sued. Despite this, I personally know two artists who have sued major companies who ripped off their work for ads, and both won million-plus settlements. Why would we embrace this now that a computer can do it and there's a level of deniability? I don't understand how this benefits anyone.

datavirtue 2y ago
My wife works in a studio with a gaggle of artists who all blatantly "rip each other off" constantly.
autoexec 2y ago
> but if you put your work out there and anything public is fair game, then it will be sampled by a computer and instantly recreated at scale. That's just how the internet works. Don't put something on the internet if you don't want it to be globally distributed and copied. > I personally know two artists who have sued major companies who ripped off their work for ads, and both won million-plus settlements. Ultimately "AI did it" should never be allowed to be used as an excuse. If a company pays for a marketing guy who rips off someone's work and they can be sued for it, then a company that pays for an AI that rips off someone's work should still be able to be sued for it.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- guerrilla 2y ago
  > That's just how the internet works. Don't put something on the internet if you don't want it to be globally distributed and copied. Or we could be ethical and encourage others to be ethical.
  - vasco 2y ago
    I see you're one of the ones that wouldn't download a car.
    - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
      I would share a car I had rights to, and download a car made free to me. Facebook would certainly sue me if it were their car, they should thus be held to that standard in my personal opinion.
    - schmorptron 2y ago
      We could make a distinction between individuals and companies doing it
    - guerrilla 2y ago
      Depends on the risk assesment but I'd say I'm a lot more like Robin Hood. Facebook is obviously Prince John.
  - orthecreedence 2y ago
    We can encourage profit-driven megacorps to be ethical? Sure, by abolishing them. Otherwise, you're just screaming into the void.
    - guerrilla 2y ago
      I think what I said is a prerequisite for that. There will be no structural changes without widespread cultural changes.
  - kaashif 2y ago
    Okay, but that doesn't change how the Internet works. Encouraging people to be ethical isn't actually a real way to prevent people copying photos you put up online.
- capital_guy 2y ago
  > That's just how the internet works. Don't put something on the internet if you don't want it to be globally distributed and copied. And if someone takes a picture of your artwork, or takes a picture of your person, and posts that to the internet without your consent? Have you given up your rights then? My answer: Absolutely not.
  - samatman 2y ago
    What AI does is much more like the Old Masters approach of going to a museum and painting a copy of a painting by some master whose technique they wish to learn. This has always been both legal, and encouraged. Or borrowing a thick stack of books from the library, reading them, and using that knowledge as the basis for fiction. That's a transformative work, and those are fine as well. My take is that training AI models is a bespoke copyright situation which our laws were never designed to handle, and finding an equitable balance will take new law. But as it stands, it's both legal and encouraged for a human to access a Web site (thereby making a copy) and learn from the contents of that website. That is, fundamentally, what happens when an LLM is trained on corpus data. The difference in scale becomes a difference in kind, but as I said, our laws at present don't really account for that, because they weren't designed to. LLMs sometimes plagiarize, which is not ok, but most people, myself included, wouldn't consider the dilemma satisfactorily resolved if improvements in the technology meant that never happened. Outside of that, we're talking about a new kind of transformative work, and those are legal.
    - 1oooqooq 2y ago
      Nice scapegoating Anthropomorphized. Correct analogy is like someone taking pictures of the paintings, going home and applying a photoshop filter, erasing the original signature and adding theirs. The law already covers that very much so.
    - pvaldes 2y ago
      > This has always been both legal, and encouraged. Not always. The copy must be easily identifiable as copy. An exact reproduction can't have the same dimensions as the original for example. Drawing just a person or a detail of the picture, or redoing the picture in a different context or style, is encouraged. Selling a full scale photo of the picture is forbidden. The copyright of famous art belongs to the museum.
- wpietri 2y ago
  > That's just how the internet works. Don't put something on the internet if you don't want it to be globally distributed and copied. You could make the same argument about paper. "That's just how photocopiers work! If you don't want your creations to be endlessly duplicated and sold, don't write them down!" Heck, you could make the same argument about leaving the house. "That's just how guns work! Don't go out in public if you don't want to take the risk of getting shot!" But it's a bad argument every time. That something is technically possible doesn't make it morally right. It's true that a big point of technology is to increase an individual's power. But I'd say that increased power doesn't diminish our responsibility for our actions. It increases it.
  - orthecreedence 2y ago
    > You could make the same argument about paper. Most paper doesn't come with Terms and Conditions that everything you write on it belongs to the paper company. I hate Facebook (with a fiery passion) but people gave them their data in exchange for the groundbreaking and unprecedented ability to make friends with another person (which has never been done before). It sucks, but don't use these "free" systems without understanding the sinister dynamics and incentives behind them. People make the same arguments about the NSA. "They aren't doing anything bad with the data their collecting about every US citizen." Well, at some point they will. Stop borrowing against future freedom for a tiny bit of convenience today.
    - wpietri 2y ago
      I think you're confusing a legal point (whether a T&C really gives Facebook any particular legal right in court) with the moral question of whether or not people should just roll over for large companies because of language we all, Facebook included, know that nobody ever reads. Even if FB's T&C made it clear they could do this (something I haven't seen proven), that at best means people would have a hard time suing as individuals. They can still get upset. They can still protest to the regulators and legislators whose job it is to keep these companies in line, and who create the legal context that gives a T&C document practical meaning.
  - autoexec 2y ago
- Buttons840 2y ago
  > That's just how the internet works. Don't put something on the internet if you don't want it to be globally distributed and copied. This is true for average people. Is it true for the wealthy? Is it true for Disney? Does our law acknowledge this truth and ensure equal justice for all?
  - autoexec 2y ago
    It's 100% true for everyone. You can't access anything at disney.com without making a copy of that thing. Disney can't access anything at yourdomain.whatever without making a copy of that thing. Whatever crimes either of you can get away with using your copies is another matter entirely. Any rights you had under the legal system you had before AI haven't gone away, neither have the disadvantages you have against the wealthy.
    - Buttons840 2y ago
      One of the comments you replied to was complaining that their work would be copied and used in training LLMs or other lucrative algorithms, and then you responded taking about how it's common to temporarily copy data into RAM to show a web page. Those are very different, and bringing up such technical minutia is not helpful to the discussion. If someone asks "how can I share my work online without it being copied?", "actually, you can't share it without people copying it into RAM" is not the answer they're looking for. That answer it too technical, too focused on minutia, and our laws recognize that.
      - autoexec 2y ago
        The point is that "copies" was never the problem. "sampled by a computer and instantly recreated at scale" is the expected outcome of publishing something publicly on the internet. Their problem was copyright infringement and like you said, our laws recognize that problem. We have an entire legal framework for dealing with companies that publish infringing copies of copyrighted works. None of that has changed with LLMs. If a company publishes something that violates copyright law they can be sued for it, it shouldn't matter if an AI was involved in the creation of what was published or not.
- trimbo 2y ago
  > That's just how the internet works. Don't put something on the internet if you don't want it to be globally distributed and copied Until now, this has been an acceptable tradeoff because there's some friction to theft. Directly cloning the work is easy, but that also means an artist can sue or DMCA. It also means the original artist's work can go more viral, which, despite the short-term downsides, can help their popularity long term. The important difference is that imitating an artist's style with new work used to take significant time (hours or days). With an LLM, it takes milliseconds, and that model will be able to churn out the likes of your work millions of times per day, forever. That's the difference, and why the dilemma is new. > Ultimately "AI did it" should never be allowed to be used an as an excuse With the exception of an LLM directly plagiarizing, the only way to prove it didn't is by not allowing it to train on something. LLMs are the sum of everything. We could say the same about humans, sure, we are a model trained on everything we've ever seen too. But humans aren't machines who can recreate stuff in the blink of an eye, with nearly perfect recall, at millions of qps.
  - autoexec 2y ago
    > With an LLM, it takes milliseconds, and that model will be able to churning out the likes of your work millions of times per day, forever. AI does cause a lot of problems in terms of scale. The good news is that if AI churns out millions of copies of your copyrighted works you're entitled to compensation for each and every copy. In addition to pushing out copies of copyrighted material, AI is also capable of writing up DMCA notices and legal paperwork. > With the exception of an LLM directly plagiarizing, the only way to prove it didn't is by not allowing it to train on something. LLMs copy everything and nothing at the same time. An AI's output should be held to the exact same standard as anyone else's output. If it's close enough to someone else's copyrighted work to be considered infringing then the company using that AI should be liable for copyright infringement the same way they would be if AI had never been involved. AI's ability to produce a large number of infringing works very quickly might even be what causes companies to be more careful about how they use it. Breaking the law at speeds approaching the speed of light isn't a good business model.
  - panarky 2y ago
    "That's just how the internet works" is nonsensical when AI is changing how the internet works. Just because the tradeoffs of sharing on the internet used to work before AI, doesn't mean those tradeoffs continue to be workable after AI. It's like having drones follow everyone around and publish realtime telephoto video of them because they have "no expectation of privacy" in public places. Maybe before surveillance tech existed, there was no expectation of privacy in public places, but now that surveillance tech exists, people naturally expect that high-res video of their every move won't be collected, archived and published even if they are in public.
Ukv 2y ago
> Why would we embrace this now that a computer can do it and there's a level of deniability? Generally I don't think people are arguing that copyright law should be more lenient to AI than it is to humans. If your work gets ripped off (a substantially similar copy not covered by fair use) you can sue regardless of tools used in its creation. Question would be whether machine learning, unlike human learning, should be treated as copyright infringement. There are differences and the law does not inherently need to treat them the same, but it could. As to why it should: I think there's huge benefit across a large range of industries to web-scale pretraining and foundation models, and I'd like it to remain accessible to open-source groups or smaller companies without huge data moats. Realistically I think the alternative would likely just benefit Getty/Universal with near-identical outcomes for most actual artists. When the very basis of copyright is for the "progress of sciences and useful arts", it seems backwards to use it in a way that would set back advances in language translation, malware/spam/DDoS filtering, defect detection, voice dictation/transcription, medical image segmentation, etc.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  > Question would be whether machine learning, unlike human learning, should be treated as copyright infringement. No, the question is whether those genAI we have around are mass copyrights violation machines or whether they "learn" and build non-violating work. And honestly, I have seen evidence pointing both ways. But the "copyrights protection" institutions are all quickly to decide the point dismissing any evidence on philosophical basis.
  - Ukv 2y ago
    > No, the question is whether those genAI we have around are mass copyrights violation machines or whether they "learn" and build non-violating work. I refer to the training process in question, which may or may not be be violating copyright, as "machine learning" since that's the common terminology. Question is whether that process is covered by fair use. Whether or not it actually "learn"s is not irrelevant, but I'd say more a philosophical framing than a legal one.
solardev 2y ago
Well, just as another perspective... I'm not convinced that the philosophy of copyright is a net positive for society. From a certain perspective, all art is theft, and all creativity builds upon preexisting social influences. That's how genres develop, periods, styles... and yes, blatant ripoffs and copycats too. If the underlying goal is to be able to feed creators, maybe society needs better funding models...? The current one isn't great anyway, with 99% of artists starving and 1% of them becoming billionaires. I'd much prefer something more like the model we have for some open-source projects, where an employer (or other sponsors) pays the living wage for the creator, but the resulting work is then reusable by all. Many works of the federal government are similarly funded, where a government employee is paid by your taxes but their resulting work automatically goes into the public domain without copyright. I don't buy the argument that nobody would make things if they weren't copyrightable/paid directly. Wikipedia, OSM, etc. are all living proof that many people will volunteer their time to produce creative things without any hope of ever getting paid. As a frequent contributor to those and also open-source code, Creative Commons photography, etc., a large part of the joy for me is seeing how my work gets reused, transformed, and sometimes stolen by others (credit is always nice, but even when they don't mention me, at least I know the work I'm doing is useful to people). But the difference for me is that I don't rely on those works to put food on the table. I have a day job and can afford to produce those works in my spare time. I wish all would-be creators would have such a luxury, either via an employer relationship or perhaps art grants and the such. I wonder how other societies handle this... back in the day, I guess there were rich patrons, while some communities sponsor their artists for communal benefit. Not sure what works best, but copyright doesn't have to be the only way society could see creative outputs.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  > I'm not convinced that the philosophy of copyright is a net positive for society. I'm ok with that. But the philosophy of copyrights is not under debate here. All that is being debated is if it should protect small people from big corporations too.
  - solardev 2y ago
    It's not? I thought we were talking about "AI SHOULD be trained on everything that is in the public sphere" and "[your work] will be sampled by a computer and instantly recreated at scale. [...] Commercial art producers have always ripped off minor artists". Isn't that all about copyright and the ability to make money off your creative works? When I put something on Wikipedia or any other commons, I don't worry about which other person, algorithm, corporation, or AI ends up reusing it. But if my ability to eat tomorrow depended on that, then I would very much care. Hence, copyright seems an integral part of people's ability to contribute creatively. My argument is that by detaching their income from the reusability of their work, we would be able to free more creators from that constraint. Under such a system, the little guy would never get rich off their work, but they wouldn't starve when a big corporation (or anyone else) rips them off either.
baby 2y ago
Who cares? Don't we want the most absolute intelligence to help human civilization? Credits and creators are below that.
- dewarrn1 2y ago
  Creators may disagree.
paxys 2y ago
There is either copyright violation or there isn't. Like you said, artists can still sue companies for copying their work, AI or not. If the work was transformative enough then, well, what's the problem?
mlazos 2y ago
> I don't agree because it creates this dilemma for creators: you need to put your work out there to get traction, but if you put your work out there and anything public is fair game, then it will be sampled by a computer and instantly recreated at scale. This might even happen without the operator knowing whose work is being ripped off. This is no different than the current day, copying already happens (as your friends have seen) AI makes it a little easier but the same legal frameworks cover this - I don’t see why AI stealing is any different than a person doing the same thing. The ability to copy with zero cost was incredibly disruptive and incredibly beneficial to society. Settled case law will catch up and hopefully arrive at the same conclusion it has for human copyright infringement (is it close enough to warrant a case)
jstummbillig 2y ago
This benefits actually everyone. If our combined creative work until this point is what turns out to be necessary to kick-start a great shot at abundance (and if you do not believe that, if it's all for nothing, why care at all about the money wasted on models?) it might simply be our societal moral obligation to endorse it -- just as is will be the model creators moral obligation to uphold their end of this deal. Interestingly, Andrej Karpathy recently described the data we are debating as more or less undesirable to build a better LLM and accidentally good enough to have made it work so far (https://youtu.be/hM_h0UA7upI?t=1045 https://youtu.be/hM_h0UA7upI?t=1045). We'll see about that.
- Guvante 2y ago
  I want to see any indication that abundance form AI would benefit man kind first. While I would love Star Trek society has been going very much towards Cyberpunk aesthetic aka "the rich hold all the power". To be precise AI models fundamentally need content to survive but they need so much content there is no price that makes sense. Allowing AI to monetize without enriching the people who allowed it to exist isn't a good path forward. And to be clear I do not believe there is a fundamental rift here. Shorten copyright to something reasonable like 20 years and in a decade AI will have access to all of the data it needs guilt free.
  - dyauspitr 2y ago
    There are glimpses. Getting a high score on an Olympiad means there is the possibility of being able to autonomously solve very difficult problems in the future.
grumbel 2y ago
> then it will be sampled by a computer and instantly recreated at scale. You don't need to train the AI on the work for that. You don't even need to show the AI the work itself. You can just give the AI a vague description of the work and it is able to replicate something very close to it. That's something you can try today, hand Claude or ChatGPT an image, let them describe the image, put that description into your favorite image generator. The output is a clean-room-clone of the original. It won't be a photocopy, but it will contain all the significant features that made up the original, even with surprisingly short descriptions of just a 100 words. Won't be long and you can hand the AI a movie trailer and the AI will build you the rest of the movie from it. > Why would we embrace this now that a computer can do it You can't stop it long term. That old "How To Draw an Owl"-meme is reality now. You give the AI some key points and it will fill in all the rest. The issue here isn't so much copyright, but that we'll be so flooded with content that it will be impossible for anybody to stand out. We might be heading towards the death of static content and heading into a world were everything is generated on the fly.
ruthmarx 2y ago
AI isn't ripping off anyone's work. Certainly if it is, it's doing so to a much lesser extent than commissioning an artist to do a piece in another artists style is.
roenxi 2y ago
Where the puck is about to be is very different from where it is. Generative AI hasn't cracked the creativity problem yet. It can generate new art but it can't develop its own style like a human can (from first principles, humans basically caricature high quality video feed). There is pretty good reason to believe that this will be a solved problem inside a decade. We're moving towards processing video and the power put behind model training keeps increasing. How much is a style worth when computers can just generate 1,000 of them at high speed? It is going to be cheap enough that legal protection is almost irrelevant; ripping off a style will probably be harder than just creating a new original one. We can wait a bit to find out where the equilibrium is before worrying about what the law should be.
- lolc 2y ago
  I'm not convinced machines can come up with styles like humans can. After all, a style will be judged by humans. How humans respond cannot be determined from previous styles.
dyauspitr 2y ago
It doesn’t recreate anything outside of edge cases you really have to go looking for. It will ingest and spit out the style though and I see nothing wrong with that. It’s basically what people do right now.
nxicvyvy 2y ago
Information wants to be free, man.

by trimbo 2y ago

datavirtue 2y ago

My wife works in a studio with a gaggle of artists who all blatantly "rip each other off" constantly.

autoexec 2y ago

> but if you put your work out there and anything public is fair game, then it will be sampled by a computer and instantly recreated at scale. That's just how the internet works. Don't put something on the internet if you don't want it to be globally distributed and copied. > I personally know two artists who have sued major companies who ripped off their work for ads, and both won million-plus settlements. Ultimately "AI did it" should never be allowed to be used as an excuse. If a company pays for a marketing guy who rips off someone's work and they can be sued for it, then a company that pays for an AI that rips off someone's work should still be able to be sued for it.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
guerrilla 2y ago
> That's just how the internet works. Don't put something on the internet if you don't want it to be globally distributed and copied. Or we could be ethical and encourage others to be ethical.
- vasco 2y ago
  I see you're one of the ones that wouldn't download a car.
  - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
    I would share a car I had rights to, and download a car made free to me. Facebook would certainly sue me if it were their car, they should thus be held to that standard in my personal opinion.
  - schmorptron 2y ago
    We could make a distinction between individuals and companies doing it
  - guerrilla 2y ago
    Depends on the risk assesment but I'd say I'm a lot more like Robin Hood. Facebook is obviously Prince John.
- orthecreedence 2y ago
  We can encourage profit-driven megacorps to be ethical? Sure, by abolishing them. Otherwise, you're just screaming into the void.
  - guerrilla 2y ago
    I think what I said is a prerequisite for that. There will be no structural changes without widespread cultural changes.
- kaashif 2y ago
  Okay, but that doesn't change how the Internet works. Encouraging people to be ethical isn't actually a real way to prevent people copying photos you put up online.
capital_guy 2y ago
> That's just how the internet works. Don't put something on the internet if you don't want it to be globally distributed and copied. And if someone takes a picture of your artwork, or takes a picture of your person, and posts that to the internet without your consent? Have you given up your rights then? My answer: Absolutely not.
- samatman 2y ago
  What AI does is much more like the Old Masters approach of going to a museum and painting a copy of a painting by some master whose technique they wish to learn. This has always been both legal, and encouraged. Or borrowing a thick stack of books from the library, reading them, and using that knowledge as the basis for fiction. That's a transformative work, and those are fine as well. My take is that training AI models is a bespoke copyright situation which our laws were never designed to handle, and finding an equitable balance will take new law. But as it stands, it's both legal and encouraged for a human to access a Web site (thereby making a copy) and learn from the contents of that website. That is, fundamentally, what happens when an LLM is trained on corpus data. The difference in scale becomes a difference in kind, but as I said, our laws at present don't really account for that, because they weren't designed to. LLMs sometimes plagiarize, which is not ok, but most people, myself included, wouldn't consider the dilemma satisfactorily resolved if improvements in the technology meant that never happened. Outside of that, we're talking about a new kind of transformative work, and those are legal.
  - 1oooqooq 2y ago
    Nice scapegoating Anthropomorphized. Correct analogy is like someone taking pictures of the paintings, going home and applying a photoshop filter, erasing the original signature and adding theirs. The law already covers that very much so.
  - pvaldes 2y ago
    > This has always been both legal, and encouraged. Not always. The copy must be easily identifiable as copy. An exact reproduction can't have the same dimensions as the original for example. Drawing just a person or a detail of the picture, or redoing the picture in a different context or style, is encouraged. Selling a full scale photo of the picture is forbidden. The copyright of famous art belongs to the museum.
wpietri 2y ago
> That's just how the internet works. Don't put something on the internet if you don't want it to be globally distributed and copied. You could make the same argument about paper. "That's just how photocopiers work! If you don't want your creations to be endlessly duplicated and sold, don't write them down!" Heck, you could make the same argument about leaving the house. "That's just how guns work! Don't go out in public if you don't want to take the risk of getting shot!" But it's a bad argument every time. That something is technically possible doesn't make it morally right. It's true that a big point of technology is to increase an individual's power. But I'd say that increased power doesn't diminish our responsibility for our actions. It increases it.
- orthecreedence 2y ago
  > You could make the same argument about paper. Most paper doesn't come with Terms and Conditions that everything you write on it belongs to the paper company. I hate Facebook (with a fiery passion) but people gave them their data in exchange for the groundbreaking and unprecedented ability to make friends with another person (which has never been done before). It sucks, but don't use these "free" systems without understanding the sinister dynamics and incentives behind them. People make the same arguments about the NSA. "They aren't doing anything bad with the data their collecting about every US citizen." Well, at some point they will. Stop borrowing against future freedom for a tiny bit of convenience today.
  - wpietri 2y ago
    I think you're confusing a legal point (whether a T&C really gives Facebook any particular legal right in court) with the moral question of whether or not people should just roll over for large companies because of language we all, Facebook included, know that nobody ever reads. Even if FB's T&C made it clear they could do this (something I haven't seen proven), that at best means people would have a hard time suing as individuals. They can still get upset. They can still protest to the regulators and legislators whose job it is to keep these companies in line, and who create the legal context that gives a T&C document practical meaning.
- autoexec 2y ago
Buttons840 2y ago
> That's just how the internet works. Don't put something on the internet if you don't want it to be globally distributed and copied. This is true for average people. Is it true for the wealthy? Is it true for Disney? Does our law acknowledge this truth and ensure equal justice for all?
- autoexec 2y ago
  It's 100% true for everyone. You can't access anything at disney.com without making a copy of that thing. Disney can't access anything at yourdomain.whatever without making a copy of that thing. Whatever crimes either of you can get away with using your copies is another matter entirely. Any rights you had under the legal system you had before AI haven't gone away, neither have the disadvantages you have against the wealthy.
  - Buttons840 2y ago
    One of the comments you replied to was complaining that their work would be copied and used in training LLMs or other lucrative algorithms, and then you responded taking about how it's common to temporarily copy data into RAM to show a web page. Those are very different, and bringing up such technical minutia is not helpful to the discussion. If someone asks "how can I share my work online without it being copied?", "actually, you can't share it without people copying it into RAM" is not the answer they're looking for. That answer it too technical, too focused on minutia, and our laws recognize that.
    - autoexec 2y ago
      The point is that "copies" was never the problem. "sampled by a computer and instantly recreated at scale" is the expected outcome of publishing something publicly on the internet. Their problem was copyright infringement and like you said, our laws recognize that problem. We have an entire legal framework for dealing with companies that publish infringing copies of copyrighted works. None of that has changed with LLMs. If a company publishes something that violates copyright law they can be sued for it, it shouldn't matter if an AI was involved in the creation of what was published or not.
trimbo 2y ago
> That's just how the internet works. Don't put something on the internet if you don't want it to be globally distributed and copied Until now, this has been an acceptable tradeoff because there's some friction to theft. Directly cloning the work is easy, but that also means an artist can sue or DMCA. It also means the original artist's work can go more viral, which, despite the short-term downsides, can help their popularity long term. The important difference is that imitating an artist's style with new work used to take significant time (hours or days). With an LLM, it takes milliseconds, and that model will be able to churn out the likes of your work millions of times per day, forever. That's the difference, and why the dilemma is new. > Ultimately "AI did it" should never be allowed to be used an as an excuse With the exception of an LLM directly plagiarizing, the only way to prove it didn't is by not allowing it to train on something. LLMs are the sum of everything. We could say the same about humans, sure, we are a model trained on everything we've ever seen too. But humans aren't machines who can recreate stuff in the blink of an eye, with nearly perfect recall, at millions of qps.
- autoexec 2y ago
  > With an LLM, it takes milliseconds, and that model will be able to churning out the likes of your work millions of times per day, forever. AI does cause a lot of problems in terms of scale. The good news is that if AI churns out millions of copies of your copyrighted works you're entitled to compensation for each and every copy. In addition to pushing out copies of copyrighted material, AI is also capable of writing up DMCA notices and legal paperwork. > With the exception of an LLM directly plagiarizing, the only way to prove it didn't is by not allowing it to train on something. LLMs copy everything and nothing at the same time. An AI's output should be held to the exact same standard as anyone else's output. If it's close enough to someone else's copyrighted work to be considered infringing then the company using that AI should be liable for copyright infringement the same way they would be if AI had never been involved. AI's ability to produce a large number of infringing works very quickly might even be what causes companies to be more careful about how they use it. Breaking the law at speeds approaching the speed of light isn't a good business model.
- panarky 2y ago
  "That's just how the internet works" is nonsensical when AI is changing how the internet works. Just because the tradeoffs of sharing on the internet used to work before AI, doesn't mean those tradeoffs continue to be workable after AI. It's like having drones follow everyone around and publish realtime telephoto video of them because they have "no expectation of privacy" in public places. Maybe before surveillance tech existed, there was no expectation of privacy in public places, but now that surveillance tech exists, people naturally expect that high-res video of their every move won't be collected, archived and published even if they are in public.

Ukv 2y ago

> Why would we embrace this now that a computer can do it and there's a level of deniability? Generally I don't think people are arguing that copyright law should be more lenient to AI than it is to humans. If your work gets ripped off (a substantially similar copy not covered by fair use) you can sue regardless of tools used in its creation. Question would be whether machine learning, unlike human learning, should be treated as copyright infringement. There are differences and the law does not inherently need to treat them the same, but it could. As to why it should: I think there's huge benefit across a large range of industries to web-scale pretraining and foundation models, and I'd like it to remain accessible to open-source groups or smaller companies without huge data moats. Realistically I think the alternative would likely just benefit Getty/Universal with near-identical outcomes for most actual artists. When the very basis of copyright is for the "progress of sciences and useful arts", it seems backwards to use it in a way that would set back advances in language translation, malware/spam/DDoS filtering, defect detection, voice dictation/transcription, medical image segmentation, etc.

marcosdumay 2y ago
> Question would be whether machine learning, unlike human learning, should be treated as copyright infringement. No, the question is whether those genAI we have around are mass copyrights violation machines or whether they "learn" and build non-violating work. And honestly, I have seen evidence pointing both ways. But the "copyrights protection" institutions are all quickly to decide the point dismissing any evidence on philosophical basis.
- Ukv 2y ago
  > No, the question is whether those genAI we have around are mass copyrights violation machines or whether they "learn" and build non-violating work. I refer to the training process in question, which may or may not be be violating copyright, as "machine learning" since that's the common terminology. Question is whether that process is covered by fair use. Whether or not it actually "learn"s is not irrelevant, but I'd say more a philosophical framing than a legal one.

solardev 2y ago

Well, just as another perspective... I'm not convinced that the philosophy of copyright is a net positive for society. From a certain perspective, all art is theft, and all creativity builds upon preexisting social influences. That's how genres develop, periods, styles... and yes, blatant ripoffs and copycats too. If the underlying goal is to be able to feed creators, maybe society needs better funding models...? The current one isn't great anyway, with 99% of artists starving and 1% of them becoming billionaires. I'd much prefer something more like the model we have for some open-source projects, where an employer (or other sponsors) pays the living wage for the creator, but the resulting work is then reusable by all. Many works of the federal government are similarly funded, where a government employee is paid by your taxes but their resulting work automatically goes into the public domain without copyright. I don't buy the argument that nobody would make things if they weren't copyrightable/paid directly. Wikipedia, OSM, etc. are all living proof that many people will volunteer their time to produce creative things without any hope of ever getting paid. As a frequent contributor to those and also open-source code, Creative Commons photography, etc., a large part of the joy for me is seeing how my work gets reused, transformed, and sometimes stolen by others (credit is always nice, but even when they don't mention me, at least I know the work I'm doing is useful to people). But the difference for me is that I don't rely on those works to put food on the table. I have a day job and can afford to produce those works in my spare time. I wish all would-be creators would have such a luxury, either via an employer relationship or perhaps art grants and the such. I wonder how other societies handle this... back in the day, I guess there were rich patrons, while some communities sponsor their artists for communal benefit. Not sure what works best, but copyright doesn't have to be the only way society could see creative outputs.

marcosdumay 2y ago
> I'm not convinced that the philosophy of copyright is a net positive for society. I'm ok with that. But the philosophy of copyrights is not under debate here. All that is being debated is if it should protect small people from big corporations too.
- solardev 2y ago
  It's not? I thought we were talking about "AI SHOULD be trained on everything that is in the public sphere" and "[your work] will be sampled by a computer and instantly recreated at scale. [...] Commercial art producers have always ripped off minor artists". Isn't that all about copyright and the ability to make money off your creative works? When I put something on Wikipedia or any other commons, I don't worry about which other person, algorithm, corporation, or AI ends up reusing it. But if my ability to eat tomorrow depended on that, then I would very much care. Hence, copyright seems an integral part of people's ability to contribute creatively. My argument is that by detaching their income from the reusability of their work, we would be able to free more creators from that constraint. Under such a system, the little guy would never get rich off their work, but they wouldn't starve when a big corporation (or anyone else) rips them off either.

baby 2y ago

Who cares? Don't we want the most absolute intelligence to help human civilization? Credits and creators are below that.

dewarrn1 2y ago
Creators may disagree.

paxys 2y ago

There is either copyright violation or there isn't. Like you said, artists can still sue companies for copying their work, AI or not. If the work was transformative enough then, well, what's the problem?

mlazos 2y ago

> I don't agree because it creates this dilemma for creators: you need to put your work out there to get traction, but if you put your work out there and anything public is fair game, then it will be sampled by a computer and instantly recreated at scale. This might even happen without the operator knowing whose work is being ripped off. This is no different than the current day, copying already happens (as your friends have seen) AI makes it a little easier but the same legal frameworks cover this - I don’t see why AI stealing is any different than a person doing the same thing. The ability to copy with zero cost was incredibly disruptive and incredibly beneficial to society. Settled case law will catch up and hopefully arrive at the same conclusion it has for human copyright infringement (is it close enough to warrant a case)

jstummbillig 2y ago

This benefits actually everyone. If our combined creative work until this point is what turns out to be necessary to kick-start a great shot at abundance (and if you do not believe that, if it's all for nothing, why care at all about the money wasted on models?) it might simply be our societal moral obligation to endorse it -- just as is will be the model creators moral obligation to uphold their end of this deal. Interestingly, Andrej Karpathy recently described the data we are debating as more or less undesirable to build a better LLM and accidentally good enough to have made it work so far (https://youtu.be/hM_h0UA7upI?t=1045 https://youtu.be/hM_h0UA7upI?t=1045). We'll see about that.

Guvante 2y ago
I want to see any indication that abundance form AI would benefit man kind first. While I would love Star Trek society has been going very much towards Cyberpunk aesthetic aka "the rich hold all the power". To be precise AI models fundamentally need content to survive but they need so much content there is no price that makes sense. Allowing AI to monetize without enriching the people who allowed it to exist isn't a good path forward. And to be clear I do not believe there is a fundamental rift here. Shorten copyright to something reasonable like 20 years and in a decade AI will have access to all of the data it needs guilt free.
- dyauspitr 2y ago
  There are glimpses. Getting a high score on an Olympiad means there is the possibility of being able to autonomously solve very difficult problems in the future.

grumbel 2y ago

> then it will be sampled by a computer and instantly recreated at scale. You don't need to train the AI on the work for that. You don't even need to show the AI the work itself. You can just give the AI a vague description of the work and it is able to replicate something very close to it. That's something you can try today, hand Claude or ChatGPT an image, let them describe the image, put that description into your favorite image generator. The output is a clean-room-clone of the original. It won't be a photocopy, but it will contain all the significant features that made up the original, even with surprisingly short descriptions of just a 100 words. Won't be long and you can hand the AI a movie trailer and the AI will build you the rest of the movie from it. > Why would we embrace this now that a computer can do it You can't stop it long term. That old "How To Draw an Owl"-meme is reality now. You give the AI some key points and it will fill in all the rest. The issue here isn't so much copyright, but that we'll be so flooded with content that it will be impossible for anybody to stand out. We might be heading towards the death of static content and heading into a world were everything is generated on the fly.

ruthmarx 2y ago

AI isn't ripping off anyone's work. Certainly if it is, it's doing so to a much lesser extent than commissioning an artist to do a piece in another artists style is.

roenxi 2y ago

Where the puck is about to be is very different from where it is. Generative AI hasn't cracked the creativity problem yet. It can generate new art but it can't develop its own style like a human can (from first principles, humans basically caricature high quality video feed). There is pretty good reason to believe that this will be a solved problem inside a decade. We're moving towards processing video and the power put behind model training keeps increasing. How much is a style worth when computers can just generate 1,000 of them at high speed? It is going to be cheap enough that legal protection is almost irrelevant; ripping off a style will probably be harder than just creating a new original one. We can wait a bit to find out where the equilibrium is before worrying about what the law should be.

lolc 2y ago
I'm not convinced machines can come up with styles like humans can. After all, a style will be judged by humans. How humans respond cannot be determined from previous styles.

dyauspitr 2y ago

It doesn’t recreate anything outside of edge cases you really have to go looking for. It will ingest and spit out the style though and I see nothing wrong with that. It’s basically what people do right now.

nxicvyvy 2y ago

Information wants to be free, man.