4 ms·

If I’m an author and I don’t want my work included in the corpus of text used for training ChatGPT, should I have that right? What about if I’m an artist and I

If I’m an author and I don’t want my work included in the corpus of text used for training ChatGPT, should I have that right? What about if I’m an artist and I don’t want my work included in the training data for an image generation model?

worik 2y ago
> I don’t want my work included in the corpus of text used for training ChatGPT, should I have that right? No You could choose not to publish, and be read If you are read you can be used to learn from
- angoragoats 2y ago
  Generative AI is not learning. Copyrights don’t depend on whether I choose to publish a particular work or not. Zuckerberg personally approved using pirated content to train a model. Is that OK too?
  - wiseowise 2y ago
    Yes.
  - Kiro 2y ago
    Absolutely. Abolish all copyright. I can't believe hackers have lost their pirating roots and have become copyright zealots instead.
    - xtracto 2y ago
      This!. Thing is you are preaching to the wrong choir, Hackernews roots were not about the "original" hacking, but more about Silicon Valley for profit entrepreneurs creating stuff for profit to heavy quotes "make the world a better place" and "democratization X". The real hackers were in usenet, /. and similar forums. Now, I'm too old and haven't found a good place. Information wants to be free, copyright is a last century millennium construct to earn money from invention. (Before copyright, people got paid by patrons to invent their stuff). Copyright should be left at the XX century door, and whoever wants to "monetize" their intellect should use methods for the XXI century.
      - angoragoats 2y ago
        At least in the United States, copyright has existed since the founding of the country, and the Constitution explicitly grants Congress the authority to regulate it. It’s not as recent as you make it out to be, and it’s not going away anytime soon. To the extent that there is a problem to be solved here, it must be solved within the context of copyright law.
    - angoragoats 2y ago
      Just wanted to respond to this point as well, to say that while this is a logically consistent stance, painting all hackers as pirates is unfair. Even Aaron Swartz, the subject of this post, made a distinction (both in his writing/talks and his actions) between academic, scientific, and judicial articles, which he believed should be free for everyone, and other copyrighted content such as books and movies. He seemed to take a softer stance on the latter. I am not a copyright zealot by any means, but I’m trying to keep an open mind regarding the seemingly knee-jerk “abolish all copyright” takes from certain people in the AI sphere.
  - starfezzy 2y ago
    IP is fake. What I mean is, all laws are fake, but while we have to follow some collective hallucination about magic words giving people authority—to keep society together—the specific delusion that we should enforce artificial scarcity by extending monopolies to patterns of information is uniquely silly.
  - worik 2y ago
    > Generative AI is not learning. Walks like a duck and quacks like a duck; I think it's a duck
    - angoragoats 2y ago
      No, it neither walks nor quacks like a duck. Once a model is trained, the weights are static unless you train it again. This is a huge practical difference between LLMs and humans. I need to give the LLM the context I want it to consider every single time I use it, because it doesn’t learn from past use at all, it just produces a plausible string of words based on its constant, unchanging set of weights.
627467 2y ago
You may have that right as long as you agree that others have the right to not care about your right when deciding to use "your" stuff however they want.
- kevingadd 2y ago
  The two halves of your statement contradict each other. What are you trying to say?
- angoragoats 2y ago
  Congratulations on not answering the question I asked, and at the same time saying something that makes no logical sense.
CaptainFever 2y ago
No, you should not have that right. Copyright allows you to sell artificial scarcity. AI does not replicate your work directly. So you can still sell your artificial scarcity even if it is trained on. At least you're acknowledging that training rights are a proposed expansion of current IP laws!
- angoragoats 2y ago
  > Copyright allows you to sell artificial scarcity. Not always. That’s more the domain of patents, honestly. > AI does not replicate your work directly. This is false, at least in certain cases. And even if it were always true, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t infringe copyright. > At least you're acknowledging that training rights are a proposed expansion of current IP laws! Yes, they are, emphasis on the “proposed,” meaning that I believe that training AI on copyrighted material without permission can be a violation of current copyright law. I don’t actually know if that’s how it should be, honestly. But as of right now I think entities like the New York Times have a good legal case against OpenAI.
  - CaptainFever 2y ago
    You are probably correct, legally. But given that we're talking about Aaron Swartz, who was legally in the wrong but morally (in the classic hacker's sense) in the right, I meant "copyright allows you to sell artificial scarcity" in the moral sense. I think fundamentally we have a difference in opinion on what copyright is supposed to be about. I hold the more classic hacker ideal that things should be free for re-use by default, and copyright, if there is any, should only apply to direct or almost-direct copies up to a very limited time, such as 10 years or so. (Actually, this is already a compromise, since the true ideal is for there to be no copyright laws at all.)
    - angoragoats 2y ago
      I generally agree with you about the desired use for copyright, but what gives me pause is the scale at which training AI models uses copyrighted material. I’m not sure there’s a precedent in the past to compare it to. And the result, despite many years and billions of dollars worth of work, is something that can’t even reliably reference or summarize the material it’s trained on.

worik 2y ago

> I don’t want my work included in the corpus of text used for training ChatGPT, should I have that right? No You could choose not to publish, and be read If you are read you can be used to learn from

angoragoats 2y ago
Generative AI is not learning. Copyrights don’t depend on whether I choose to publish a particular work or not. Zuckerberg personally approved using pirated content to train a model. Is that OK too?
- wiseowise 2y ago
  Yes.
- Kiro 2y ago
  Absolutely. Abolish all copyright. I can't believe hackers have lost their pirating roots and have become copyright zealots instead.
  - xtracto 2y ago
    This!. Thing is you are preaching to the wrong choir, Hackernews roots were not about the "original" hacking, but more about Silicon Valley for profit entrepreneurs creating stuff for profit to heavy quotes "make the world a better place" and "democratization X". The real hackers were in usenet, /. and similar forums. Now, I'm too old and haven't found a good place. Information wants to be free, copyright is a last century millennium construct to earn money from invention. (Before copyright, people got paid by patrons to invent their stuff). Copyright should be left at the XX century door, and whoever wants to "monetize" their intellect should use methods for the XXI century.
    - angoragoats 2y ago
      At least in the United States, copyright has existed since the founding of the country, and the Constitution explicitly grants Congress the authority to regulate it. It’s not as recent as you make it out to be, and it’s not going away anytime soon. To the extent that there is a problem to be solved here, it must be solved within the context of copyright law.
  - angoragoats 2y ago
    Just wanted to respond to this point as well, to say that while this is a logically consistent stance, painting all hackers as pirates is unfair. Even Aaron Swartz, the subject of this post, made a distinction (both in his writing/talks and his actions) between academic, scientific, and judicial articles, which he believed should be free for everyone, and other copyrighted content such as books and movies. He seemed to take a softer stance on the latter. I am not a copyright zealot by any means, but I’m trying to keep an open mind regarding the seemingly knee-jerk “abolish all copyright” takes from certain people in the AI sphere.
- starfezzy 2y ago
  IP is fake. What I mean is, all laws are fake, but while we have to follow some collective hallucination about magic words giving people authority—to keep society together—the specific delusion that we should enforce artificial scarcity by extending monopolies to patterns of information is uniquely silly.
- worik 2y ago
  > Generative AI is not learning. Walks like a duck and quacks like a duck; I think it's a duck
  - angoragoats 2y ago
    No, it neither walks nor quacks like a duck. Once a model is trained, the weights are static unless you train it again. This is a huge practical difference between LLMs and humans. I need to give the LLM the context I want it to consider every single time I use it, because it doesn’t learn from past use at all, it just produces a plausible string of words based on its constant, unchanging set of weights.

627467 2y ago

You may have that right as long as you agree that others have the right to not care about your right when deciding to use "your" stuff however they want.

kevingadd 2y ago
The two halves of your statement contradict each other. What are you trying to say?
angoragoats 2y ago
Congratulations on not answering the question I asked, and at the same time saying something that makes no logical sense.

CaptainFever 2y ago

No, you should not have that right. Copyright allows you to sell artificial scarcity. AI does not replicate your work directly. So you can still sell your artificial scarcity even if it is trained on. At least you're acknowledging that training rights are a proposed expansion of current IP laws!

angoragoats 2y ago
> Copyright allows you to sell artificial scarcity. Not always. That’s more the domain of patents, honestly. > AI does not replicate your work directly. This is false, at least in certain cases. And even if it were always true, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t infringe copyright. > At least you're acknowledging that training rights are a proposed expansion of current IP laws! Yes, they are, emphasis on the “proposed,” meaning that I believe that training AI on copyrighted material without permission can be a violation of current copyright law. I don’t actually know if that’s how it should be, honestly. But as of right now I think entities like the New York Times have a good legal case against OpenAI.
- CaptainFever 2y ago
  You are probably correct, legally. But given that we're talking about Aaron Swartz, who was legally in the wrong but morally (in the classic hacker's sense) in the right, I meant "copyright allows you to sell artificial scarcity" in the moral sense. I think fundamentally we have a difference in opinion on what copyright is supposed to be about. I hold the more classic hacker ideal that things should be free for re-use by default, and copyright, if there is any, should only apply to direct or almost-direct copies up to a very limited time, such as 10 years or so. (Actually, this is already a compromise, since the true ideal is for there to be no copyright laws at all.)
  - angoragoats 2y ago
    I generally agree with you about the desired use for copyright, but what gives me pause is the scale at which training AI models uses copyrighted material. I’m not sure there’s a precedent in the past to compare it to. And the result, despite many years and billions of dollars worth of work, is something that can’t even reliably reference or summarize the material it’s trained on.