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There have been copyright office rulings saying that ML model output is not copyrightable, so that last part of the suggested license seems a bit strange, since

by pabs3 2y ago

There have been copyright office rulings saying that ML model output is not copyrightable, so that last part of the suggested license seems a bit strange, since the rulings could preclude it for code at some point. Also, it remains to be seen whether copyright law will outright allow model training without a license, or if there will be case law to make it fair use in the USA, or if models will be considered derivative works that require a license to prepare, or what other outcome will happen.

candiddevmike 2y ago
How can AI code be added to any kind of open source license, or would it just be that code that isn't covered under the license (since it's effectively public domain?)?
- ranger_danger 2y ago
  In most cases it would just be added like all other code as if it was proper/allowed until someone brought a civil suit with enough evidence to claim they had no permission to use the code AND it somehow damaged them, which could be quite difficult and prohibitively expensive. So I would argue in most cases people will get away with it. We must remember that the only person's opinion that matters on what's actually illegal or not is a judge's.
bee_rider 2y ago
It seems like AI companies are making a major bet on the idea that the output of their models can be licensed and used in products.
mvdtnz 2y ago
What does copyright have to do with it? It's about distribution.
ranger_danger 2y ago
> There have been copyright office rulings saying that ML model output is not copyrightable Source? If you're referring to Thaler v. Perlmutter, I would argue that is an incorrect assessment. > The court held that the Copyright Act requires all eligible works to be authored by a human being. Since Dr. Thaler listed the Creativity Machine, a non-human entity, as the sole author, the application was correctly denied. The court did not address the argument that the Constitution requires human authorship, nor did it consider Dr. Thaler's claim that he is the author by virtue of creating and using the Creativity Machine, as this argument was waived before the agency. If someone had instead argued that they themselves were the author by means of instructing an LLM to generate the output based on a prompt they made up, plus the influence of prior art (the pretrained data), which you could also argue is not only what he probably did anyway (but argued it poorly), but in a way is also how humans make art themselves... that would be a much more interesting decision IMO.

by pabs3 2y ago

candiddevmike 2y ago

How can AI code be added to any kind of open source license, or would it just be that code that isn't covered under the license (since it's effectively public domain?)?

ranger_danger 2y ago
In most cases it would just be added like all other code as if it was proper/allowed until someone brought a civil suit with enough evidence to claim they had no permission to use the code AND it somehow damaged them, which could be quite difficult and prohibitively expensive. So I would argue in most cases people will get away with it. We must remember that the only person's opinion that matters on what's actually illegal or not is a judge's.

bee_rider 2y ago

It seems like AI companies are making a major bet on the idea that the output of their models can be licensed and used in products.

mvdtnz 2y ago

What does copyright have to do with it? It's about distribution.

ranger_danger 2y ago

> There have been copyright office rulings saying that ML model output is not copyrightable Source? If you're referring to Thaler v. Perlmutter, I would argue that is an incorrect assessment. > The court held that the Copyright Act requires all eligible works to be authored by a human being. Since Dr. Thaler listed the Creativity Machine, a non-human entity, as the sole author, the application was correctly denied. The court did not address the argument that the Constitution requires human authorship, nor did it consider Dr. Thaler's claim that he is the author by virtue of creating and using the Creativity Machine, as this argument was waived before the agency. If someone had instead argued that they themselves were the author by means of instructing an LLM to generate the output based on a prompt they made up, plus the influence of prior art (the pretrained data), which you could also argue is not only what he probably did anyway (but argued it poorly), but in a way is also how humans make art themselves... that would be a much more interesting decision IMO.