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I'm not sure I understand your question. It's reasonably clear that transformers get caught reproducing material that they have no right to. The kind of thing t

I'm not sure I understand your question. It's reasonably clear that transformers get caught reproducing material that they have no right to. The kind of thing that would potentially result in a lawsuit if you did it by hand. It's less clear whether taking vast amounts of copyrighted material and using it to generate other things rises to the level of copyright violation or not. It's the kind of thing that people would have prevented if it had occurred to them, by writing terms of use that explicitly forbid it. (Which probably means that the Web becomes a much smaller place.) Your comment seems to suggest that writers and artists have absolutely no conceivable stake in products derived from their work, and that it's purely a misunderstanding on their part. But I'm both a computer scientist and an artist and I don't see how you could reach that conclusion. If my work is not relevant then leave it out.

gruez 1y ago
>I'm not sure I understand your question. It's reasonably clear that transformers get caught reproducing material that they have no right to. The kind of thing that would potentially result in a lawsuit if you did it by hand. Is that a problem with the tool, or the person using it? A photocopier can copy an entire book verbatim. Should that be illegal? Or is it the problem that the "training" process can produce a model that has the ability to reproduce copyrighted work? If so, what implication does that hold for human learning? Many people can recite an entire song's lyrics from scratch, and reproducing an entire song's lyrics verbatim is probably enough to be considered copyright infringement. Does that mean the process of a human listening to music counts as copyright infringement?
- empath75 1y ago
  Let's start with I think a case that everyone agrees with. If I were to take an image, and compress it or encrypt it, and then show you data file, you would not be able to see the original copyrighted material anywhere in the data. But if you had the right computer program, you could use it to regenerate the original image flawlessly. I think most people would easily agree that distributing the encrypted file without permission is still a distribution of a copyrighted work and against the law. What if you used _lossy_ encryption, and can merely reproduce a poor quality jpeg of the original image? I think still copyright infringement, right? Would it matter if you distributed it with an executable that only rendered the image non-deterministically? Maybe one out of 10 times? Or if the command to reproduce it was undocumented? Okay, so now we have AI. We can ignore the algorithm entirely and how it works, because it's not relevant. There is a large amount of data that it operates on, the weights of the model and so on. You _can_ with the correct prompts, sometimes generate a copy of a copyrighted work, to some degree of fidelity or another. I do not think it is meaningfully different from the simpler example, just with a lot of extra steps. I think, legally, it's pretty clear that it is illegally distributing copyrighted material without permission. I think calling it an "ai" just needlessly anthropomorphizes everything. It's a computer program that distributes copyrighted work without permission. It doesn't matter if it's the primary purpose or not. I think probably there needs to be some kind of new law to fix this situation, but under the current law as it exists, it seems to me to be clearly illegal.
  - gruez 1y ago
    >Okay, so now we have AI. We can ignore the algorithm entirely and how it works, because it's not relevant. There is a large amount of data that it operates on, the weights of the model and so on. You _can_ with the correct prompts, sometimes generate a copy of a copyrighted work, to some degree of fidelity or another. Suppose we accept all of the above. What does that hold for human learning?
    - empath75 1y ago
      If a human were to reproduce, from memory, a copyrighted work, that would be illegal as well, and multiple people have been sued over it, even doing it unintentionally. I'm not talking about learning. I'm talking about the complete reproduction of a copyrighted work. It doesn't matter how it happens.
      - gruez 1y ago
        >I'm not talking about learning. I'm talking about the complete reproduction of a copyrighted work. It doesn't matter how it happens. In that case I don't think there's anything controversial here? Nobody thinks that if you ask AI to reproduce something verbatim, that you should get a pass because it's AI. All the controversy in this thread seems to be around the training process and whether that breaks copyright laws.
        empath75 1y ago
        No -- the controversy is also over whether distributing the weights and software is a copyright violation. I believe that is. The copyrighted material is present in the software in some form, even if the process for regenerating it is quite convoluted.
        gruez 1y ago
        It's not as clear-cut as you think. The courts have held that both google thumbnails and google books are fair use, even though they're far closer to verbatim copies than an AI model.
Workaccount2 1y ago
My comment is about training models, not model inference. Most artists can readily violate copyright, that doesn't me we block them from seeing copyright.
- gitremote 1y ago
  The judgement was about model inference, not training.
  - Workaccount2 1y ago
    >"But making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content" This can only be referring to training, the models themselves are a rounding error in size compared to their training sets.
tensor 1y ago
If I write a math book, and you read it, then tell someone about the math within it. You are not violating copyright. In fact, you could write your OWN math book, or history book, or whatever, and as long as you're not copying my actual text, you are not violating copyright. However, when an LLM does the same, people now what it to be illegal. It seems pretty straightforward to apply existing copyright law to LLMs in the same way we apply them to humans. If the actual text they generate is substantially similar to a source material that it would constitute a copyright violation if a human were to have done it, then it should be illegal. Otherwise it should not. edit: and in fact it's not even whether an LLM reproduces text, it's wether someone subsequently publishes that text. The person publishing that text should be the one taking on the legal hit.
- rrook 1y ago
  That mathematical formulas already cannot be copyrighted makes this a kinda nonsense example?
  - tensor 1y ago
    Math textbooks have words in them. Do you think math books are just bunches of formulas?
mr_toad 1y ago
> It's the kind of thing that people would have prevented if it had occurred to them, by writing terms of use that explicitly forbid it. The AI companies will likely be arguing that they don’t need a license, so any terms of use in the license are irrelevant.

gruez 1y ago

>I'm not sure I understand your question. It's reasonably clear that transformers get caught reproducing material that they have no right to. The kind of thing that would potentially result in a lawsuit if you did it by hand. Is that a problem with the tool, or the person using it? A photocopier can copy an entire book verbatim. Should that be illegal? Or is it the problem that the "training" process can produce a model that has the ability to reproduce copyrighted work? If so, what implication does that hold for human learning? Many people can recite an entire song's lyrics from scratch, and reproducing an entire song's lyrics verbatim is probably enough to be considered copyright infringement. Does that mean the process of a human listening to music counts as copyright infringement?

empath75 1y ago
Let's start with I think a case that everyone agrees with. If I were to take an image, and compress it or encrypt it, and then show you data file, you would not be able to see the original copyrighted material anywhere in the data. But if you had the right computer program, you could use it to regenerate the original image flawlessly. I think most people would easily agree that distributing the encrypted file without permission is still a distribution of a copyrighted work and against the law. What if you used _lossy_ encryption, and can merely reproduce a poor quality jpeg of the original image? I think still copyright infringement, right? Would it matter if you distributed it with an executable that only rendered the image non-deterministically? Maybe one out of 10 times? Or if the command to reproduce it was undocumented? Okay, so now we have AI. We can ignore the algorithm entirely and how it works, because it's not relevant. There is a large amount of data that it operates on, the weights of the model and so on. You _can_ with the correct prompts, sometimes generate a copy of a copyrighted work, to some degree of fidelity or another. I do not think it is meaningfully different from the simpler example, just with a lot of extra steps. I think, legally, it's pretty clear that it is illegally distributing copyrighted material without permission. I think calling it an "ai" just needlessly anthropomorphizes everything. It's a computer program that distributes copyrighted work without permission. It doesn't matter if it's the primary purpose or not. I think probably there needs to be some kind of new law to fix this situation, but under the current law as it exists, it seems to me to be clearly illegal.
- gruez 1y ago
  >Okay, so now we have AI. We can ignore the algorithm entirely and how it works, because it's not relevant. There is a large amount of data that it operates on, the weights of the model and so on. You _can_ with the correct prompts, sometimes generate a copy of a copyrighted work, to some degree of fidelity or another. Suppose we accept all of the above. What does that hold for human learning?
  - empath75 1y ago
    If a human were to reproduce, from memory, a copyrighted work, that would be illegal as well, and multiple people have been sued over it, even doing it unintentionally. I'm not talking about learning. I'm talking about the complete reproduction of a copyrighted work. It doesn't matter how it happens.
    - gruez 1y ago
      >I'm not talking about learning. I'm talking about the complete reproduction of a copyrighted work. It doesn't matter how it happens. In that case I don't think there's anything controversial here? Nobody thinks that if you ask AI to reproduce something verbatim, that you should get a pass because it's AI. All the controversy in this thread seems to be around the training process and whether that breaks copyright laws.
      - empath75 1y ago
        No -- the controversy is also over whether distributing the weights and software is a copyright violation. I believe that is. The copyrighted material is present in the software in some form, even if the process for regenerating it is quite convoluted.
        gruez 1y ago
        It's not as clear-cut as you think. The courts have held that both google thumbnails and google books are fair use, even though they're far closer to verbatim copies than an AI model.

Workaccount2 1y ago

My comment is about training models, not model inference. Most artists can readily violate copyright, that doesn't me we block them from seeing copyright.

gitremote 1y ago
The judgement was about model inference, not training.
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  >"But making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content" This can only be referring to training, the models themselves are a rounding error in size compared to their training sets.

tensor 1y ago

If I write a math book, and you read it, then tell someone about the math within it. You are not violating copyright. In fact, you could write your OWN math book, or history book, or whatever, and as long as you're not copying my actual text, you are not violating copyright. However, when an LLM does the same, people now what it to be illegal. It seems pretty straightforward to apply existing copyright law to LLMs in the same way we apply them to humans. If the actual text they generate is substantially similar to a source material that it would constitute a copyright violation if a human were to have done it, then it should be illegal. Otherwise it should not. edit: and in fact it's not even whether an LLM reproduces text, it's wether someone subsequently publishes that text. The person publishing that text should be the one taking on the legal hit.

rrook 1y ago
That mathematical formulas already cannot be copyrighted makes this a kinda nonsense example?
- tensor 1y ago
  Math textbooks have words in them. Do you think math books are just bunches of formulas?

mr_toad 1y ago

> It's the kind of thing that people would have prevented if it had occurred to them, by writing terms of use that explicitly forbid it. The AI companies will likely be arguing that they don’t need a license, so any terms of use in the license are irrelevant.