7 ms·

You’re applying a double standard to LLM’s and human creators. Any human writer or artist or filmmaker or musician will be influenced by other people’s works, e

You’re applying a double standard to LLM’s and human creators. Any human writer or artist or filmmaker or musician will be influenced by other people’s works, even while those works are still under copyright.

cmiles74 2y ago
I don't see how this is a double standard. Comparing a person interacting with their culture is not comparable in any way. IMHO, it's kind of a wacky argument to make.
- crazygringo 2y ago
  Can you elaborate on how it's not comparable? It seems obvious to me that it is -- they both learn and then create -- so what's the difference? If I can hire an employee who draws on knowledge they learned from copyrighted textbooks, why can't I hire an AI which draws on knowledge it learned from copyrighted textbooks? What makes that argument "wacky" in your eyes?
  - homarp 2y ago
    most probably your employee actually 'paid' for their textbook.
  - tekno45 2y ago
    you're asking why you have to treat people differently than you treat tools and machines.
    - crazygringo 2y ago
      Well obviously not in general. But when it comes to copyright law specifically, yes absolutely. That is the question I'm asking.
      - salawat 2y ago
        You're not going to get an answer you find agreeable, because you're hoping for an answer that allows you to continue to treat the tool as chattel, without conferring to it the excess baggage of being an individuated entity/laborer. You're either going to get: it's a technological, infinitely scalable process, and the training data should be considered what it is, which is intellectual property that should be being licensed before being used. ...or... It actually is the same as human learning, and it's time we started loading these things up with other baggage to be attached to persons if we're going to accept it's possible for a machine to learn like a human. There isn't a reasonable middle ground due to the magnitude of social disruption a chattel quasi-human technological human replacement would cause.
        philwelch 2y ago
        No, you’re missing the point of copyright. The point of copyright is to protect an exclusive right to copy, not the right to produce original works influenced by previous works. If an LLM produces original works that are influenced by the training data, that is not a violation of copyright. If it reproduces the training data verbatim, it is.
        dijksterhuis 2y ago
        i weirdly agree with you, but also want to point out that “influenced by the training data” is doing some very heavy lifting there. exactly how the new work is created is important when it comes to derivative works. does it use a copy of the original work to create it, or a vague idea/memory of the original work’s composition? when i make music it’s usually vague memories. i’d argue that LLMs have an encoded representation of the original work in their weights (along with all the other stuff). but that’s the legal grey area bit. is the “mush” of model weights an encoded representation of works, or vague memories?
        philwelch 2y ago
        I don’t really think it matters because you can just compare the output to the input and apply the same standard, treating the process between the two as a black box.
  - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
    One is a collection of highly dithered data generated by machines paid for by a business in order to financially gain from the copyrighted works in order to replace any future need for copyrighted text books. The other is a person learning from a copyrighted textbook in the legally protected manner, and whom and use the textbook was written for.
  - groby_b 2y ago
    Unless you are making an argument for personhood, one is a machine, the other is a human. Different standards apply, end of discussion.
  - cmiles74 2y ago
    I don't think this question really makes any sense... In my opinion, it's kind of mish-mashing several things together. "Can you elaborate on how it's not comparable?" The process of individual people interacting with their culture is a vastly different process than that used to train large language models. In what ways to you think these processes have anything in common? "It seems obvious to me that it is -- they both learn and then create -- so what's the difference?" This doesn't seem obvious to me (obviously)! Maybe you can argue that an LLM "learns" during training, but that ceases once training is complete. For sure, there are work-arounds that meet certain goals (RAG, fine-tuning); maybe your already vague definition of "learning" could be stretched to include these? Still, comparing this to how people learn is pretty far-fetched. AFAICT, there's no literature supporting the view that there's any commonality here; if you have some I would be very interested to read it. :-) Do they both create? I suspect not; an LLM is parroting back data from it's training set. We've seen many studies showing that tested LLMs perform poorly on novel problem sets. This article was posted just this week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42565606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42565606 The court is still out on the copyright issue, for the perspective of US law we'll have to wait on this one. Still, it's clear that an LLM can't "create" in any meaningful way. And so on and so forth. How is hiring an employee at all similar to subscribing to an OpenAI ChatGPT plan? Wacky indeed!
    - crazygringo 2y ago
      Obviously, on the inside, the process that a person goes through in learning and creating, and the process that a LLM goes through in learning and creating, is very different. Nobody will dispute that. But if they're learning from the same kinds of materials, and producing the same kind of output, then obviously the comparison can be made. And your idea that LLM's don't create seems obviously false. So I have to conclude the two seem comparable, and someone would have to show why different legal principles around copyright ought to apply, when it's a simple question of input/output. Why should it matter if it's a human or algorithm doing the processing, from a copyright perspective? Nothing "wacky" about the question at all.
- rob_c 2y ago
  That's a little simplistic. You're almost trying to say blank and white sands gray can't be compared which is a bit weird. Strangely like the situation itself. The question is just looked to how can we guarantee a model is influenced rather than memorising an input? And then is a human who is influenced simply relying on a faulty or less than perfect memory?
dijksterhuis 2y ago
as a human being, and one that does music stuff, i don’t download terabytes of other peoples works from the internet directly into my brain. i don’t have verbatim reproductions of people’s work sitting around on a hard disk in my stomach/lungs/head/feet. LLMs are not humans. They’re essentially a probabilistic compression algorithm (encode data into model weights/decode with prompt to retrieve data).
- philwelch 2y ago
  Do you ever listen to music? Is your music ever influenced by the music that you listen to? How do you imagine that works, in an information-theoretical sense, that fundamentally differs from an LLM? Depending on how much music you've listened to, you very well may have "downloaded terabytes" of it into your brain. Your argument is specious.
  - dijksterhuis 2y ago
    i do listen to music. i listen to it on apple music. i pay money to apple for this. some of that money that i pay to apple goes to the rights holders of that music for the copying and performance of their work through my speakers. that’s a pretty big difference to how most LLMs are trained right there! i actually pay original creators some money. - i am a human being. you cannot reduce me down to some easy information theory. an LLM is a tool. an algorithm. with the same random seed etc etc it will get the same results. it is not human. you put me in the same room as yesterday i’ll behave completely differently. - i have listened to way more than terabytes of music in my life. doesn’t mean i have the ability to regurgitate any of it verbatim though. i’m crap at that stuff. LLMs seem to be really good at it though.
  - cmiles74 2y ago
    Information on how large language models are trained is not hard to come by, there are numerous articles that cover this material. Even a brief skimming of this material will make it clear that the training of large language models is materially different in almost every way from how human beings "learn" and build knowledge. There are still many open questions around the process of how humans collect, store, retrieve and synthesize information. There is little mystery to how large language models function and it's clear that their output is parroting back portions of their training data, the quality of output degrades greatly when novel input is provided. Is your argument that people fundamentally function in the same way? That would be a bold and novel assertion!
_DeadFred_ 2y ago
Human creators don't store that 'influence' in a digital machine accessible format generated directly from the copyrighted content though. Although with the 'good new everyone, we built the torment nexus' trajectory of AI my guess is at this point AI companies would just incorporate actual human brains instead of digital storage if that was the requirement.
- galangalalgol 2y ago
  Does that imply that if we invent brain upload technology, that my weights have every conflicting license and patent for everything I can quote or create? I don't like that precedent. I have complete rights over my noggin's contents. If I do quote a NYT article in it's entirely, that vould be infringement, but not copying my brain itself.
- philwelch 2y ago
  Your argument boils down to “we don’t know how brains work”, and it is a non-sequitur. It isn’t a violation of copyright law to create original works under the creative influence of works still under copyright.

cmiles74 2y ago

I don't see how this is a double standard. Comparing a person interacting with their culture is not comparable in any way. IMHO, it's kind of a wacky argument to make.

crazygringo 2y ago
Can you elaborate on how it's not comparable? It seems obvious to me that it is -- they both learn and then create -- so what's the difference? If I can hire an employee who draws on knowledge they learned from copyrighted textbooks, why can't I hire an AI which draws on knowledge it learned from copyrighted textbooks? What makes that argument "wacky" in your eyes?
- homarp 2y ago
  most probably your employee actually 'paid' for their textbook.
- tekno45 2y ago
  you're asking why you have to treat people differently than you treat tools and machines.
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    Well obviously not in general. But when it comes to copyright law specifically, yes absolutely. That is the question I'm asking.
    - salawat 2y ago
      You're not going to get an answer you find agreeable, because you're hoping for an answer that allows you to continue to treat the tool as chattel, without conferring to it the excess baggage of being an individuated entity/laborer. You're either going to get: it's a technological, infinitely scalable process, and the training data should be considered what it is, which is intellectual property that should be being licensed before being used. ...or... It actually is the same as human learning, and it's time we started loading these things up with other baggage to be attached to persons if we're going to accept it's possible for a machine to learn like a human. There isn't a reasonable middle ground due to the magnitude of social disruption a chattel quasi-human technological human replacement would cause.
      - philwelch 2y ago
        No, you’re missing the point of copyright. The point of copyright is to protect an exclusive right to copy, not the right to produce original works influenced by previous works. If an LLM produces original works that are influenced by the training data, that is not a violation of copyright. If it reproduces the training data verbatim, it is.
        dijksterhuis 2y ago
        i weirdly agree with you, but also want to point out that “influenced by the training data” is doing some very heavy lifting there. exactly how the new work is created is important when it comes to derivative works. does it use a copy of the original work to create it, or a vague idea/memory of the original work’s composition? when i make music it’s usually vague memories. i’d argue that LLMs have an encoded representation of the original work in their weights (along with all the other stuff). but that’s the legal grey area bit. is the “mush” of model weights an encoded representation of works, or vague memories?
        philwelch 2y ago
        I don’t really think it matters because you can just compare the output to the input and apply the same standard, treating the process between the two as a black box.
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  One is a collection of highly dithered data generated by machines paid for by a business in order to financially gain from the copyrighted works in order to replace any future need for copyrighted text books. The other is a person learning from a copyrighted textbook in the legally protected manner, and whom and use the textbook was written for.
- groby_b 2y ago
  Unless you are making an argument for personhood, one is a machine, the other is a human. Different standards apply, end of discussion.
- cmiles74 2y ago
  I don't think this question really makes any sense... In my opinion, it's kind of mish-mashing several things together. "Can you elaborate on how it's not comparable?" The process of individual people interacting with their culture is a vastly different process than that used to train large language models. In what ways to you think these processes have anything in common? "It seems obvious to me that it is -- they both learn and then create -- so what's the difference?" This doesn't seem obvious to me (obviously)! Maybe you can argue that an LLM "learns" during training, but that ceases once training is complete. For sure, there are work-arounds that meet certain goals (RAG, fine-tuning); maybe your already vague definition of "learning" could be stretched to include these? Still, comparing this to how people learn is pretty far-fetched. AFAICT, there's no literature supporting the view that there's any commonality here; if you have some I would be very interested to read it. :-) Do they both create? I suspect not; an LLM is parroting back data from it's training set. We've seen many studies showing that tested LLMs perform poorly on novel problem sets. This article was posted just this week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42565606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42565606 The court is still out on the copyright issue, for the perspective of US law we'll have to wait on this one. Still, it's clear that an LLM can't "create" in any meaningful way. And so on and so forth. How is hiring an employee at all similar to subscribing to an OpenAI ChatGPT plan? Wacky indeed!
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    Obviously, on the inside, the process that a person goes through in learning and creating, and the process that a LLM goes through in learning and creating, is very different. Nobody will dispute that. But if they're learning from the same kinds of materials, and producing the same kind of output, then obviously the comparison can be made. And your idea that LLM's don't create seems obviously false. So I have to conclude the two seem comparable, and someone would have to show why different legal principles around copyright ought to apply, when it's a simple question of input/output. Why should it matter if it's a human or algorithm doing the processing, from a copyright perspective? Nothing "wacky" about the question at all.
rob_c 2y ago
That's a little simplistic. You're almost trying to say blank and white sands gray can't be compared which is a bit weird. Strangely like the situation itself. The question is just looked to how can we guarantee a model is influenced rather than memorising an input? And then is a human who is influenced simply relying on a faulty or less than perfect memory?

dijksterhuis 2y ago

as a human being, and one that does music stuff, i don’t download terabytes of other peoples works from the internet directly into my brain. i don’t have verbatim reproductions of people’s work sitting around on a hard disk in my stomach/lungs/head/feet. LLMs are not humans. They’re essentially a probabilistic compression algorithm (encode data into model weights/decode with prompt to retrieve data).

philwelch 2y ago
Do you ever listen to music? Is your music ever influenced by the music that you listen to? How do you imagine that works, in an information-theoretical sense, that fundamentally differs from an LLM? Depending on how much music you've listened to, you very well may have "downloaded terabytes" of it into your brain. Your argument is specious.
- dijksterhuis 2y ago
  i do listen to music. i listen to it on apple music. i pay money to apple for this. some of that money that i pay to apple goes to the rights holders of that music for the copying and performance of their work through my speakers. that’s a pretty big difference to how most LLMs are trained right there! i actually pay original creators some money. - i am a human being. you cannot reduce me down to some easy information theory. an LLM is a tool. an algorithm. with the same random seed etc etc it will get the same results. it is not human. you put me in the same room as yesterday i’ll behave completely differently. - i have listened to way more than terabytes of music in my life. doesn’t mean i have the ability to regurgitate any of it verbatim though. i’m crap at that stuff. LLMs seem to be really good at it though.
- cmiles74 2y ago
  Information on how large language models are trained is not hard to come by, there are numerous articles that cover this material. Even a brief skimming of this material will make it clear that the training of large language models is materially different in almost every way from how human beings "learn" and build knowledge. There are still many open questions around the process of how humans collect, store, retrieve and synthesize information. There is little mystery to how large language models function and it's clear that their output is parroting back portions of their training data, the quality of output degrades greatly when novel input is provided. Is your argument that people fundamentally function in the same way? That would be a bold and novel assertion!

_DeadFred_ 2y ago

Human creators don't store that 'influence' in a digital machine accessible format generated directly from the copyrighted content though. Although with the 'good new everyone, we built the torment nexus' trajectory of AI my guess is at this point AI companies would just incorporate actual human brains instead of digital storage if that was the requirement.

galangalalgol 2y ago
Does that imply that if we invent brain upload technology, that my weights have every conflicting license and patent for everything I can quote or create? I don't like that precedent. I have complete rights over my noggin's contents. If I do quote a NYT article in it's entirely, that vould be infringement, but not copying my brain itself.
philwelch 2y ago
Your argument boils down to “we don’t know how brains work”, and it is a non-sequitur. It isn’t a violation of copyright law to create original works under the creative influence of works still under copyright.