4 ms·

If you read a book and later understand its plot but can only explain it in your own words, did you copy it? The model isn’t storing the book.

kxrm 1y ago
The model doesn't "understand its plot". So I am not sure this is a good analogy.
- ilikehurdles 1y ago
  To what extent connections in a neural network are analogous to connections between neurons in your brain is open to interpretation and study, but the point of the analogy is that in neither case is a copy being made.
  - jamiek88 1y ago
    Yeah but a copy IS made. A human just reads. The machine copies the full text then compresses a lossy copy in its weights. You keep dodging that with tortuous analogies of a human learning. I’m sure all these ‘clever’ questions would be useful if this trial was about humans but it’s not.
    - Workaccount2 1y ago
      Model training works roughly by feeding the model a text excerpt and then hiding the last word in the excerpt. The model is then asked to "guess" what the final word is. It will then move around it's weights until the guess sufficiently matches the actual token. Then the process repeats. The training material is used to play this guessing game to dial in it's weights. The training data is picked up, used as reference material for the game, and then discarded. It's hard to place this far from what humans do when reading, because both are using the information to mold their respective "brains" and both are doing an acquire, analyze, discard process. At no point is training data actually copied into the model itself, it's just run past the "eyes" of the model to play the training game.
      - __loam 1y ago
        This trial has nothing to with how the brain works and even if they did work the same, humans obviously have different legal rights than a computer.
  - amlib 1y ago
    I can arrange a series of bricks in many ways to try and build a wall but that doesn't mean I will automatically get a good result if my process (like a ML training algorithm) doesn't precisely arrange then in a manner that produces a rigid wall with the desired characteristics. In the same vein you can have a fancy neural network arranged by some fancy LLM training algorithm with gobs of data about a subject but current methods likely won't produce anything with the depth of "understanding" that a human can do. It's a crumbly wall that falls once you do any real inspection or put any real load into it.
mcny 1y ago
> If you read a book and later understand its plot but can only explain it in your own words, did you copy it? I think that is the center of the conversation. What does it mean for a computer to "understand"? If I wrote some code that somehow transformed the text of the book and never return the verbatim text but somehow modified the output, I would likely not be spared because the ruling will likely be my transformation is "trivial". Personally, I think we have several fixes we need to make: 1. Abolish the CFAA. 2. Limit copyright to a maximum of 5 years from date of production with no extension possible for any reason. 3. Allow explicit carveout in copyright for transformational work. Explicitly allow format shifting, time shifting, yada yada. 4. Prohibit authors and publishers from including the now obviously false statements like "No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording" bla bla bla in their works. 5. I am sure I am missing some stuff here. For brand protection, we already have trademark law. Most readers here already know this but We really should severe the artificial ties we have created between patents, trademarks, and copyright. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html
waynesonfire 1y ago
I just happen do read the Phoenix Technologies wikipedia page a few days ago. This company is known for developing BIOS software for computers. Maybe you've seen their logo when you first turn on your computer. In early computing, everything was closed sourced. Quoting the wikiepdia page, To develop a legal BIOS, Phoenix used a clean room design. Engineers read the BIOS source listings in the IBM PC Technical Reference Manual. They wrote technical specifications for the BIOS APIs for a single, separate engineer—one with experience programming the Texas Instruments TMS9900, not the Intel 8088 or 8086—who had not been exposed to IBM BIOS source code. The legal team at Phoenix deemed inappropriate to "recall source in their own words" for legal reasons. My non-legal intuition is that these companies training their models are violating copyright. But, the stakes are too high--it's too big to fail if you will. If we don't do it, then our competitors will destroy us. How do you reconcile that?
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  Perhaps Phoenix just looked at the potential adversary (IBM) and decided to approach the project in an exceedingly cautious way, knowing that IBM could litigate it forever if there were any plausible argument that they "copied" even a line of code.
- int_19h 1y ago
  You're right that if we want to have usable LLMs at all, there's no way around training them on copyrighted materials. So it has to be allowed, but in a way that compensates the original authors somehow. For example, every model provider has to publicly declare all works used for training, and then all inference providers offering that model have to collect a per-token tax that gets distributed to authors in proportion to their presence in the dataset (by the by, this could also be a way to fund websites like Wikipedia). But any such arrangement needs to be hammered out by the legislature. As laws are, I think it's pretty clear that infringement is happening.
triceratops 1y ago
You didn't copy it because you're a human. A computer can't "read" without copying. It's how it works.
freejazz 1y ago
Great question for a different litigation actually involving humans.

kxrm 1y ago

The model doesn't "understand its plot". So I am not sure this is a good analogy.

ilikehurdles 1y ago
To what extent connections in a neural network are analogous to connections between neurons in your brain is open to interpretation and study, but the point of the analogy is that in neither case is a copy being made.
- jamiek88 1y ago
  Yeah but a copy IS made. A human just reads. The machine copies the full text then compresses a lossy copy in its weights. You keep dodging that with tortuous analogies of a human learning. I’m sure all these ‘clever’ questions would be useful if this trial was about humans but it’s not.
  - Workaccount2 1y ago
    Model training works roughly by feeding the model a text excerpt and then hiding the last word in the excerpt. The model is then asked to "guess" what the final word is. It will then move around it's weights until the guess sufficiently matches the actual token. Then the process repeats. The training material is used to play this guessing game to dial in it's weights. The training data is picked up, used as reference material for the game, and then discarded. It's hard to place this far from what humans do when reading, because both are using the information to mold their respective "brains" and both are doing an acquire, analyze, discard process. At no point is training data actually copied into the model itself, it's just run past the "eyes" of the model to play the training game.
    - __loam 1y ago
      This trial has nothing to with how the brain works and even if they did work the same, humans obviously have different legal rights than a computer.
- amlib 1y ago
  I can arrange a series of bricks in many ways to try and build a wall but that doesn't mean I will automatically get a good result if my process (like a ML training algorithm) doesn't precisely arrange then in a manner that produces a rigid wall with the desired characteristics. In the same vein you can have a fancy neural network arranged by some fancy LLM training algorithm with gobs of data about a subject but current methods likely won't produce anything with the depth of "understanding" that a human can do. It's a crumbly wall that falls once you do any real inspection or put any real load into it.

mcny 1y ago

> If you read a book and later understand its plot but can only explain it in your own words, did you copy it? I think that is the center of the conversation. What does it mean for a computer to "understand"? If I wrote some code that somehow transformed the text of the book and never return the verbatim text but somehow modified the output, I would likely not be spared because the ruling will likely be my transformation is "trivial". Personally, I think we have several fixes we need to make: 1. Abolish the CFAA. 2. Limit copyright to a maximum of 5 years from date of production with no extension possible for any reason. 3. Allow explicit carveout in copyright for transformational work. Explicitly allow format shifting, time shifting, yada yada. 4. Prohibit authors and publishers from including the now obviously false statements like "No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording" bla bla bla in their works. 5. I am sure I am missing some stuff here. For brand protection, we already have trademark law. Most readers here already know this but We really should severe the artificial ties we have created between patents, trademarks, and copyright. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html

waynesonfire 1y ago

I just happen do read the Phoenix Technologies wikipedia page a few days ago. This company is known for developing BIOS software for computers. Maybe you've seen their logo when you first turn on your computer. In early computing, everything was closed sourced. Quoting the wikiepdia page, To develop a legal BIOS, Phoenix used a clean room design. Engineers read the BIOS source listings in the IBM PC Technical Reference Manual. They wrote technical specifications for the BIOS APIs for a single, separate engineer—one with experience programming the Texas Instruments TMS9900, not the Intel 8088 or 8086—who had not been exposed to IBM BIOS source code. The legal team at Phoenix deemed inappropriate to "recall source in their own words" for legal reasons. My non-legal intuition is that these companies training their models are violating copyright. But, the stakes are too high--it's too big to fail if you will. If we don't do it, then our competitors will destroy us. How do you reconcile that?

SoftTalker 1y ago
Perhaps Phoenix just looked at the potential adversary (IBM) and decided to approach the project in an exceedingly cautious way, knowing that IBM could litigate it forever if there were any plausible argument that they "copied" even a line of code.
int_19h 1y ago
You're right that if we want to have usable LLMs at all, there's no way around training them on copyrighted materials. So it has to be allowed, but in a way that compensates the original authors somehow. For example, every model provider has to publicly declare all works used for training, and then all inference providers offering that model have to collect a per-token tax that gets distributed to authors in proportion to their presence in the dataset (by the by, this could also be a way to fund websites like Wikipedia). But any such arrangement needs to be hammered out by the legislature. As laws are, I think it's pretty clear that infringement is happening.

triceratops 1y ago

You didn't copy it because you're a human. A computer can't "read" without copying. It's how it works.

freejazz 1y ago

Great question for a different litigation actually involving humans.