5 ms·

> let's not pretend that an LLM that autocompletes a couple lines from harry potter with 50% accuracy is some massive new avenue to piracy No one is claiming t

by pera 1y ago

> let's not pretend that an LLM that autocompletes a couple lines from harry potter with 50% accuracy is some massive new avenue to piracy No one is claiming this. The corporations developing LLMs are doing so by sampling media without their owners' permission and arguing this is protected by US fair use laws, which is incorrect - as the late AI researcher Suchir Balaji explained in this other article: https://suchir.net/fair_use.html https://suchir.net/fair_use.html

almosthere 1y ago
Yeah, that's literally the title of the article,and the premise of the first paragraph.
- Retric 1y ago
  The first paragraph isn’t arguing that this copying will lead to piracy. It’s referring to court cases where people are trying to argue LLM’s themselves are copyright infringing.
- pera 1y ago
  It's not literally the title of the article, nor the premise of its first paragraph, but since this was your interpretation I wonder if there is a misunderstanding around the term "piracy", which I believe is normally defined as the unauthorized reproduction of works, not a synonym for copyright infringement, which is a more broad concept.
cultureulterior 1y ago
It's not clear that it's incorrect.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Retric 1y ago
  I’ve yet to read an actual argument defending commercial LLM’s as fair use based on existing (edit:legal) criteria.
  - TeMPOraL 1y ago
    I'm yet to read an actual argument that it's not. Vibe-arguing "because corporations111" ain't it.
    - Retric 1y ago
      I’m looking for a link that does something like this but ends up supporting commercial LLM’s https://copyrightalliance.org/faqs/what-is-fair-use/ https://copyrightalliance.org/faqs/what-is-fair-use/ The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for non-profit educational purposes; (commercial least wiggle room) The nature of the copyrighted work; (fictional work least wiggle room) The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; (42% is considered a huge fraction of a book) and The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. (Best argument as it’s minimal as a piece of entertainment. Not so as a cultural icon. Someone writing a book report or fan fiction may be less likely to buy a copy. ) Those aren’t the only factors, but I’m more interested in the counter argument here than trying to say they are copyright infringing.
      - TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
        Copyright notices in books make it absolutely clear - you are not allowed to acquire a text by copying it without authorisation. If you photocopy a book you haven't paid for, you've infringed copyright. If you scan it, you've infringed copyright. If you OCR the scan, you've infringed copyright. There's legal precedent in going after torrenters and z-lib etc. So when Zuckerberg told the Meta team to do the same, he was on the wrong side of precedent. Arguing otherwise is literally arguing that huge corporations are somehow above laws that apply to normal people. Obviously some people do actually believe this. Especially the people who own and work for huge corporations. But IMO it's far more dangerous culturally and politically than copyright law is.
jiggawatts 1y ago
If you train a meat-based intelligence by having it borrow a book from a library without any sort of permission, license, or needing a lawyer specialised in intellectual property, we call that good parenting and applaud it. If you train a silicon-based intelligence by having it read the same books with the same lack of permission and license, it's a blatant violation of intellectual property law and apparently needs to be punished with armies of lawyers doing battle in the courts. Picture one of Asimov's robots. Would a robot be banned from picking up a book, flipping it open with its dexterous metal hands, and reading it? What about a cyborg intelligence, the type Elon is trying to build with Neuralink? Would humans with AI implants need licenses to read books, even if physically standing in a library and holding the book in their mostly meat hands? Okay, maybe you agree that robots and cyborgs are allowed to visit a library! Why the prejudice against disembodied AIs? Why must they have a blank spot in the vast matrices of their minds?
- xigoi 1y ago
  > If you train a meat-based intelligence by having it borrow a book from a library without any sort of permission, license, or needing a lawyer specialised in intellectual property, we call that good parenting and applaud it. If you’re selling your child as a tool to millions of people, I would certainly not call that good parenting.
  - jiggawatts 1y ago
    "Child actor" is a job where the result of the neural net training is sold to millions of people by the parents. To play the Devil's Advocate against my own argument: The government collects income taxes on neural nets trained using government-funded schools and public libraries. Seeing as how capitalists are positively salivating at the opportunity to replace pesky meat employees with uncomplaining silicon ones, perhaps a nice high maximum-marginal-rate tax on all AI usage might be the first big step towards UBI and then the Star Trek utopia we all dream of. Just kidding. It'll be a cyberpunk dystopia. You know it will.
    - almosthere 1y ago
Terretta 1y ago
> The corporations developing LLMs are doing so by sampling media without their owners' permission and arguing this is protected by US fair use laws The schools developing future labor are doing so by sampling media without their owners' permission ... Harry Potter's been required reading for a while. And while it may not be the most quoted, others are: any time we're supposed to understand a movie or TV character is "well read" they quote paragraphs from famous authors. This is what libraries used to be for, and what the Internet was supposed to be for: fill our brains with what's been published and hopefully we remember some of it. Should libraries be off limits to savants with eidetic memory? Why should learning from reading be off limits to the machine? // Reproducing the reading material for distribution is illegal for both man and machine. However, perhaps you're using a different definition of "use" in fair use, than the traditional "quote it". - the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and - the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. In general these are not thought to mean you can't use it as in learn from it, they are thought to mean you can't reproduce chunks, perform chunks, etc. I imagined it's well established that "learn" is not "use". So then where I find myself uncertain is whether learning, then responding about it, is learning + (hand waving) artificial intelligence, or whether it's just source (context) compression with prompted continuation to mine the context, and what density of words from the source in the continuation starts to be "use".

by pera 1y ago

almosthere 1y ago

Yeah, that's literally the title of the article,and the premise of the first paragraph.

Retric 1y ago
The first paragraph isn’t arguing that this copying will lead to piracy. It’s referring to court cases where people are trying to argue LLM’s themselves are copyright infringing.
pera 1y ago
It's not literally the title of the article, nor the premise of its first paragraph, but since this was your interpretation I wonder if there is a misunderstanding around the term "piracy", which I believe is normally defined as the unauthorized reproduction of works, not a synonym for copyright infringement, which is a more broad concept.

cultureulterior 1y ago

It's not clear that it's incorrect.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Retric 1y ago
I’ve yet to read an actual argument defending commercial LLM’s as fair use based on existing (edit:legal) criteria.
- TeMPOraL 1y ago
  I'm yet to read an actual argument that it's not. Vibe-arguing "because corporations111" ain't it.
  - Retric 1y ago
    I’m looking for a link that does something like this but ends up supporting commercial LLM’s https://copyrightalliance.org/faqs/what-is-fair-use/ https://copyrightalliance.org/faqs/what-is-fair-use/ The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for non-profit educational purposes; (commercial least wiggle room) The nature of the copyrighted work; (fictional work least wiggle room) The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; (42% is considered a huge fraction of a book) and The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. (Best argument as it’s minimal as a piece of entertainment. Not so as a cultural icon. Someone writing a book report or fan fiction may be less likely to buy a copy. ) Those aren’t the only factors, but I’m more interested in the counter argument here than trying to say they are copyright infringing.
    - TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
      Copyright notices in books make it absolutely clear - you are not allowed to acquire a text by copying it without authorisation. If you photocopy a book you haven't paid for, you've infringed copyright. If you scan it, you've infringed copyright. If you OCR the scan, you've infringed copyright. There's legal precedent in going after torrenters and z-lib etc. So when Zuckerberg told the Meta team to do the same, he was on the wrong side of precedent. Arguing otherwise is literally arguing that huge corporations are somehow above laws that apply to normal people. Obviously some people do actually believe this. Especially the people who own and work for huge corporations. But IMO it's far more dangerous culturally and politically than copyright law is.

jiggawatts 1y ago

If you train a meat-based intelligence by having it borrow a book from a library without any sort of permission, license, or needing a lawyer specialised in intellectual property, we call that good parenting and applaud it. If you train a silicon-based intelligence by having it read the same books with the same lack of permission and license, it's a blatant violation of intellectual property law and apparently needs to be punished with armies of lawyers doing battle in the courts. Picture one of Asimov's robots. Would a robot be banned from picking up a book, flipping it open with its dexterous metal hands, and reading it? What about a cyborg intelligence, the type Elon is trying to build with Neuralink? Would humans with AI implants need licenses to read books, even if physically standing in a library and holding the book in their mostly meat hands? Okay, maybe you agree that robots and cyborgs are allowed to visit a library! Why the prejudice against disembodied AIs? Why must they have a blank spot in the vast matrices of their minds?

xigoi 1y ago
> If you train a meat-based intelligence by having it borrow a book from a library without any sort of permission, license, or needing a lawyer specialised in intellectual property, we call that good parenting and applaud it. If you’re selling your child as a tool to millions of people, I would certainly not call that good parenting.
- jiggawatts 1y ago
  "Child actor" is a job where the result of the neural net training is sold to millions of people by the parents. To play the Devil's Advocate against my own argument: The government collects income taxes on neural nets trained using government-funded schools and public libraries. Seeing as how capitalists are positively salivating at the opportunity to replace pesky meat employees with uncomplaining silicon ones, perhaps a nice high maximum-marginal-rate tax on all AI usage might be the first big step towards UBI and then the Star Trek utopia we all dream of. Just kidding. It'll be a cyberpunk dystopia. You know it will.
  - almosthere 1y ago

Terretta 1y ago

> The corporations developing LLMs are doing so by sampling media without their owners' permission and arguing this is protected by US fair use laws The schools developing future labor are doing so by sampling media without their owners' permission ... Harry Potter's been required reading for a while. And while it may not be the most quoted, others are: any time we're supposed to understand a movie or TV character is "well read" they quote paragraphs from famous authors. This is what libraries used to be for, and what the Internet was supposed to be for: fill our brains with what's been published and hopefully we remember some of it. Should libraries be off limits to savants with eidetic memory? Why should learning from reading be off limits to the machine? // Reproducing the reading material for distribution is illegal for both man and machine. However, perhaps you're using a different definition of "use" in fair use, than the traditional "quote it". - the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and - the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. In general these are not thought to mean you can't use it as in learn from it, they are thought to mean you can't reproduce chunks, perform chunks, etc. I imagined it's well established that "learn" is not "use". So then where I find myself uncertain is whether learning, then responding about it, is learning + (hand waving) artificial intelligence, or whether it's just source (context) compression with prompted continuation to mine the context, and what density of words from the source in the continuation starts to be "use".