5 ms·

We are talking about the rights of the humans training the models and the humans using the models to create new things. Copyright only comes into play on publi

We are talking about the rights of the humans training the models and the humans using the models to create new things. Copyright only comes into play on publication. It's only concerned about publication of the models and publication of works. The machine itself doesn't have agency to publish anything at this point.

MyOutfitIsVague 1y ago
It's not only publication, otherwise people wouldn't be able to be successfully sued for downloading and consuming copyrighted content, it would only be the uploaders who get into trouble.
- HappMacDonald 1y ago
  Do you have any links to cases where people were sued for downloading and consuming content without also uploading (eg, bittorent), hosting, sharing the copyrighted works, etc?
  - MyOutfitIsVague 1y ago
    There were the famous napster cases, the kids and old ladies that got sued by the RIAA for using limewire to download some music. There is also the fact that copyright holders will pressure your ISP into sending threatening letters and shutting off your Internet for piracy, even without you seeding. I haven't gotten the impression that you are in the clear for pirating as long as you don't distribute.
  - lavezzi 1y ago
    There's tonnes, this is a baffling question.
bgwalter 1y ago
Does the distinction matter? If humans build a machine that uses so much oxygen that the oxygen levels on earth drop by half, can they say: "Humans are allowed to breathe, so our machine is too, because it is operated by humans!"
- TeMPOraL 1y ago
  Yes, and then the response would be, "what have you done, we now need to pass laws about oxygen consumption where before we didn't". Point being, laws aren't some God-ordained rules, beautiful in their fractal recursive abstraction, perfectly covering everything that will ever happen in the universe. No, laws are more or less crude hacks that deal with here and now. Intellectual property rights were questionable from the start and only got worse; they've been barely keeping up with digital media in the past couple decades, and they're entirely ill-equipped to deal with generative AI. This is a new situation, and laws need to be updated to cover it.
  - palmotea 1y ago
    > Yes, and then the response would be, "what have you done, we now need to pass laws about oxygen consumption where before we didn't". Except in this case, we already have the equivalent of "laws about oxygen consumption": copyright. > Intellectual property rights were questionable from the start and only got worse; they've been barely keeping up with digital media in the past couple decades, and they're entirely ill-equipped to deal with generative AI. The laws are not "entirely ill-equipped to deal with generative AI," unless your interests lie in breaking them. All the hand-waving about the laws being "questionable" and "entirely ill-equipped" is just noise. Under current law OpenAI, Google, etc. have no right to cheap training data, because someone made that data and may have the reasonable interest in getting paid for their efforts. Like all businesses, those companies would ideally like the law to be unfairly biased towards them: to protect them when they charge as much as they can, but not protect anyone else so they can pay as little as possible.
    - TeMPOraL 1y ago
      > Under current law OpenAI, Google, etc. have no right to cheap training data, because someone made that data and may have the reasonable interest in getting paid for their efforts. That's the thing though: intuitively, they do - training the model != generating from the model, and it's the output of a generation that violates copyright (and the user-supplied prompt is a crucial ingredient in getting the potentially copyrighted material to appear). And legally, that's AFAIK still an open question. > Like all businesses, those companies would ideally like the law to be unfairly biased towards them: to protect them when they charge as much as they can, but not protect anyone else so they can pay as little as possible. That's 100% true. I know that, I'm not denying that. But in this particular case, I find my own views align with their case. I'm not begrudging them for raking in heaps of money offering generative AI services, because they're legitimately offering value that's at least commensurate (IMHO it's much greater) to what they charge, and that value comes entirely from the work they're uniquely able to do, and any individual work that went into training data contributes approximately zero to it. (GenAI doesn't rely on any individual work in training data; it relies on the breadth and amount being a notable fraction of humanity's total intellectual output. It so happens that almost all knowledge and culture is subject to copyright, so you couldn't really get to this without stepping on some legal landmines.) (Also, much like AI companies would like the law to favor them, their opponents in this case would like the law to dictate they should be compensated for their works being used in training data, but compensated way beyond any value their works bring in, which in reality is, again, approximately zero.)
spacemadness 1y ago
Sounds like we’re talking about the right of AI company founders and people on HN to acquire wealth from creative works due to some weak argument concerning similarity to the human mind and creation of art. Since we’ve now veered into armchair philosophy territory, I think one could argue that the way human memory works and creates, both physically and mentally, from inspiration is vastly different from how AI works. So saying they’re the same and that’s it is both lazy and takes interesting questions off the table to squash debate.
palmotea 1y ago
>>> Despite that, Humans can read a book, get inspiration, and write a new book and not be litigated against. >> The fatal flaw in your reasoning: machines aren't humans. You can't reason that a machine has rights from the fact a human has them. Otherwise it's murder to recycle a car. > We are talking about the rights of the humans training the models and the humans using the models to create new things. Then that's even easier, because that prevents appeals to things humans do, like learning, from muddying the waters. If "training the models" entails loading up copyrighted works into your system (e.g. encoded them during training), you've just copied them into a retrieval system and violated copyright based on established precedent. And people have prompted verbatim copyrighted text out of well-known LLMs, which makes it even clearer. And then to defend LLM training you're left with BS akin to claiming an ASCII encoded copy of a book not a copyright violation, because the book is paper and ASCII is numbers.
moralestapia 1y ago
>Copyright only comes into play on publication. Nope. You have a right to not publish any work that you own. This is protected by Copyright law. Copyright covers you from the moment you create some sort of original work (in a tangible medium).

MyOutfitIsVague 1y ago

It's not only publication, otherwise people wouldn't be able to be successfully sued for downloading and consuming copyrighted content, it would only be the uploaders who get into trouble.

HappMacDonald 1y ago
Do you have any links to cases where people were sued for downloading and consuming content without also uploading (eg, bittorent), hosting, sharing the copyrighted works, etc?
- MyOutfitIsVague 1y ago
  There were the famous napster cases, the kids and old ladies that got sued by the RIAA for using limewire to download some music. There is also the fact that copyright holders will pressure your ISP into sending threatening letters and shutting off your Internet for piracy, even without you seeding. I haven't gotten the impression that you are in the clear for pirating as long as you don't distribute.
- lavezzi 1y ago
  There's tonnes, this is a baffling question.

bgwalter 1y ago

Does the distinction matter? If humans build a machine that uses so much oxygen that the oxygen levels on earth drop by half, can they say: "Humans are allowed to breathe, so our machine is too, because it is operated by humans!"

TeMPOraL 1y ago
Yes, and then the response would be, "what have you done, we now need to pass laws about oxygen consumption where before we didn't". Point being, laws aren't some God-ordained rules, beautiful in their fractal recursive abstraction, perfectly covering everything that will ever happen in the universe. No, laws are more or less crude hacks that deal with here and now. Intellectual property rights were questionable from the start and only got worse; they've been barely keeping up with digital media in the past couple decades, and they're entirely ill-equipped to deal with generative AI. This is a new situation, and laws need to be updated to cover it.
- palmotea 1y ago
  > Yes, and then the response would be, "what have you done, we now need to pass laws about oxygen consumption where before we didn't". Except in this case, we already have the equivalent of "laws about oxygen consumption": copyright. > Intellectual property rights were questionable from the start and only got worse; they've been barely keeping up with digital media in the past couple decades, and they're entirely ill-equipped to deal with generative AI. The laws are not "entirely ill-equipped to deal with generative AI," unless your interests lie in breaking them. All the hand-waving about the laws being "questionable" and "entirely ill-equipped" is just noise. Under current law OpenAI, Google, etc. have no right to cheap training data, because someone made that data and may have the reasonable interest in getting paid for their efforts. Like all businesses, those companies would ideally like the law to be unfairly biased towards them: to protect them when they charge as much as they can, but not protect anyone else so they can pay as little as possible.
  - TeMPOraL 1y ago
    > Under current law OpenAI, Google, etc. have no right to cheap training data, because someone made that data and may have the reasonable interest in getting paid for their efforts. That's the thing though: intuitively, they do - training the model != generating from the model, and it's the output of a generation that violates copyright (and the user-supplied prompt is a crucial ingredient in getting the potentially copyrighted material to appear). And legally, that's AFAIK still an open question. > Like all businesses, those companies would ideally like the law to be unfairly biased towards them: to protect them when they charge as much as they can, but not protect anyone else so they can pay as little as possible. That's 100% true. I know that, I'm not denying that. But in this particular case, I find my own views align with their case. I'm not begrudging them for raking in heaps of money offering generative AI services, because they're legitimately offering value that's at least commensurate (IMHO it's much greater) to what they charge, and that value comes entirely from the work they're uniquely able to do, and any individual work that went into training data contributes approximately zero to it. (GenAI doesn't rely on any individual work in training data; it relies on the breadth and amount being a notable fraction of humanity's total intellectual output. It so happens that almost all knowledge and culture is subject to copyright, so you couldn't really get to this without stepping on some legal landmines.) (Also, much like AI companies would like the law to favor them, their opponents in this case would like the law to dictate they should be compensated for their works being used in training data, but compensated way beyond any value their works bring in, which in reality is, again, approximately zero.)

spacemadness 1y ago

Sounds like we’re talking about the right of AI company founders and people on HN to acquire wealth from creative works due to some weak argument concerning similarity to the human mind and creation of art. Since we’ve now veered into armchair philosophy territory, I think one could argue that the way human memory works and creates, both physically and mentally, from inspiration is vastly different from how AI works. So saying they’re the same and that’s it is both lazy and takes interesting questions off the table to squash debate.

palmotea 1y ago

>>> Despite that, Humans can read a book, get inspiration, and write a new book and not be litigated against. >> The fatal flaw in your reasoning: machines aren't humans. You can't reason that a machine has rights from the fact a human has them. Otherwise it's murder to recycle a car. > We are talking about the rights of the humans training the models and the humans using the models to create new things. Then that's even easier, because that prevents appeals to things humans do, like learning, from muddying the waters. If "training the models" entails loading up copyrighted works into your system (e.g. encoded them during training), you've just copied them into a retrieval system and violated copyright based on established precedent. And people have prompted verbatim copyrighted text out of well-known LLMs, which makes it even clearer. And then to defend LLM training you're left with BS akin to claiming an ASCII encoded copy of a book not a copyright violation, because the book is paper and ASCII is numbers.

moralestapia 1y ago

>Copyright only comes into play on publication. Nope. You have a right to not publish any work that you own. This is protected by Copyright law. Copyright covers you from the moment you create some sort of original work (in a tangible medium).