5 ms·

I think your analogy is a massive stretch. `wc` is neither generative nor capable of having market effect. Your second construction is generative, but likely w

I think your analogy is a massive stretch. `wc` is neither generative nor capable of having market effect. Your second construction is generative, but likely worse than a Markov chain model, which also did not have any market effect. We're talking about the models that have convinced every VC it can make a trillion dollars from replacing millions of creative jobs.

tpmoney 1y ago
It's not a stretch because I'm not claiming they're the same thing, I'm incrementally walking the tech stack to try and find where we would want to draw the line. If things something has to be generative in order to be a violation, that (for all but the most insane definitions of generative) clears `wc`, but what about publishing the DVD or BluRay encryption keys? Most of the "hacker" communities pretty clearly believe that isn't a violation of copyright. But is it a violation of copyright to distribute that key and also software that can use that key to make a copy of a DVD? If not, why? Is it because the user has to combine the key, with the software and specifically direct that software to make a copy of which the copy is a violation of copyright but not the software and key combination? If that's the combination of the decryption key and the software that can use that key to make a copy of a DVD is not a violation of copyright, does that imply that distributing a model and a piece of software separately that can use that model is also not a copyright violation? If it is a violation, what makes it different from the key + copy software combo? If we decide that generative is a necessary component, is the line just whenever the generative model becomes useful? That seems arbitrary and unnecessarily restrictive. Google Scholar is an instructive example here, a search database that scanned many thousands of copyright materials, digitized them and then made that material searchable to anyone and even (intentionally) displayed verbatim copies (or even images) of parts of the work in question. This is unquestionably useful for people, and also very clearly producing portions of copyrighted works. Should the court cases be revisited and Google Scholar shut down for being useful? If market effect is the key thing, how do we square that with the fact that a number of unquestionably market impacting things are also considered fair use. Emulators are the classic example here, and certainly modern retro gaming OSes like Recalbox or Retropie have measurable impacts on the market for things like nostalgia bait mini SNES and Atari consoles. And yet, the emulators and their OS's remain fair use. Or again, lets go back to the combination of the DVD encryption keys and something like handbrake. Everyone knows exactly what sort of copyright infringement most people do with those things. And there are whole businesses dedicated to making a profit off of people doing just that (just try and tell anyone with a straight face that Plex servers are only being used to connect to legitimate streaming services and stream people's digitized home movies). My point is that AI models touch on all of these sorts of areas that we have previously carved out as fair use, and AI models are useful tools that don't (despite claims to the contrary) clearly fall afoul of copyright law. So any argument that they do needs to think about where we draw the lines and what are the factors that make up that decision. So far the courts have found training an AI model with legally obtained materials and distributing that model to be fair use, and they've explained how they got to that conclusion. So an argument to the contrary needs to draw and different line and explain why the line belongs there.
- free_bip 1y ago
  If your argument is that all of these things somehow combine to make the specific case I mentioned in my original comment legal (which was "stealing the work of every single artist, living and dead, for the sole purpose of making a profit", and I'll add replacing artists in the process to that), then I'm not seeing it. You also seem to be talking about AI training more generally and not the specific case I singled out, which is important because this isn't a case of simply training a model on content obtained with consent - the material OpenAI and Stable Diffusion gathered was very explicitly without consent, and may have been done through outright piracy! (This came out in a case against Meta somewhat recently, but the exact origins of other company's datasets remain a mystery.) Now I explained in another comment why I think current copyright laws should be able to clearly rule this specific case as copyright infringement, but I'm not arrogant enough to think I know better than copyright attorneys. If they say it falls under fair use, I'm going to trust them. I'm also going to say that the law needs to be updated because of it, and that brings us full circle to why I disagree with the article in the first place.
  - tpmoney 11mo ago
    My argument is better framed that this: > "stealing the work of every single artist, living and dead, for the sole purpose of making a profit" is begging the question. The phrase "stealing" inherently presumes a crime has been committed when that is the very thing up for debate. The note that this is "for the sole purpose of making a profit" asks the reader to infer that one can not make a profit and also engage in fair use, and yet that is clearly not true. And that puts aside entirely that you're not referencing a "specific case" here, but generalizing to all forms of AI training. We can start by examining the "stealing" phrasing, noting that up until fairly recently it was an axiom in a lot of "hacker" places that "copying is not theft". It feels somewhat contradictory to me to find that now that it's our work that's being copied, suddenly a lot of hackers are very keen on calling it theft. We can note that a lot of our careers rest on the idea that copying is not prima facie a crime or theft. Certainly IBM wanted it to be so, and yet their BIOS was cloned and many of our careers were kickstarted (or at least kicked into high gear) by the consequences of that. Or how about the fact that despite what Apple would really like to be true, you can't stop people from copying your really cool idea from looking at it and making something similar. They couldn't win that battle against Microsoft, and they couldn't win it against Google or Samsung either. We can talk about the fact that there is a lot of disagreement that the dead should have any IP rights at all. Notably again many "hacker" spaces were quite vocal about how the various "lifetime+" IP laws were actually detrimental to creativity and society. Until recently it was the Walt Disney corporation in their pursuit of making a profit that was one of the largest advocates for copyrights to be extended long after the creator was dead and gone. We could also talk (again) about how many forms of fair use are pursued for "the sole purpose of making a profit". See the previous references to the IBM BIOS and the copying of Apple's GUIs. But there is also parody music like Weird Al, or Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music. We can look also to the previously mentioned Connectix Virtual Game Station and other emulators or to the Oracle V. Google lawsuits. We can look at how TiVo's entire business model was to enable millions of people to create copies of copyrighted material every day, automatically. Or Kelly v. Arriba Soft (which is basically why you can do an image search today) and Suntrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin (also relevant for the discussion re "the dead"). And again, most related to AI would be Authors Guild v. Google for the ingestion of thousands of copyrighted materials to in the pursuit of profit and creating the Google Scholar application. And application which I again note produces partial, but 100% faithful copies of that original work for the user and does so intentionally, something AI system actively try to avoid. Which is why I started by asking you to walk the tech stack. If you think the law needs to be updated or you disagree with the current rulings on this matter, I can certainly understand that. So where do you propose drawing the line? What are the specific items that you feel distinguish training an AI from the various other fair use cases that have come before. Why is Google Scholar scanning in thousands of copyrighted materials with the express purpose of both making those materials searchable and displaying copies of that material ok, but an AI scanning in books with the express purpose of creating new material not ok? Why is Android, Windows, Gnome, KDE and other GUIs so very clearly copying the style (if not the works) of Apple ok, but Stable Diffusion producing new art works copying styles not?

tpmoney 1y ago

It's not a stretch because I'm not claiming they're the same thing, I'm incrementally walking the tech stack to try and find where we would want to draw the line. If things something has to be generative in order to be a violation, that (for all but the most insane definitions of generative) clears `wc`, but what about publishing the DVD or BluRay encryption keys? Most of the "hacker" communities pretty clearly believe that isn't a violation of copyright. But is it a violation of copyright to distribute that key and also software that can use that key to make a copy of a DVD? If not, why? Is it because the user has to combine the key, with the software and specifically direct that software to make a copy of which the copy is a violation of copyright but not the software and key combination? If that's the combination of the decryption key and the software that can use that key to make a copy of a DVD is not a violation of copyright, does that imply that distributing a model and a piece of software separately that can use that model is also not a copyright violation? If it is a violation, what makes it different from the key + copy software combo? If we decide that generative is a necessary component, is the line just whenever the generative model becomes useful? That seems arbitrary and unnecessarily restrictive. Google Scholar is an instructive example here, a search database that scanned many thousands of copyright materials, digitized them and then made that material searchable to anyone and even (intentionally) displayed verbatim copies (or even images) of parts of the work in question. This is unquestionably useful for people, and also very clearly producing portions of copyrighted works. Should the court cases be revisited and Google Scholar shut down for being useful? If market effect is the key thing, how do we square that with the fact that a number of unquestionably market impacting things are also considered fair use. Emulators are the classic example here, and certainly modern retro gaming OSes like Recalbox or Retropie have measurable impacts on the market for things like nostalgia bait mini SNES and Atari consoles. And yet, the emulators and their OS's remain fair use. Or again, lets go back to the combination of the DVD encryption keys and something like handbrake. Everyone knows exactly what sort of copyright infringement most people do with those things. And there are whole businesses dedicated to making a profit off of people doing just that (just try and tell anyone with a straight face that Plex servers are only being used to connect to legitimate streaming services and stream people's digitized home movies). My point is that AI models touch on all of these sorts of areas that we have previously carved out as fair use, and AI models are useful tools that don't (despite claims to the contrary) clearly fall afoul of copyright law. So any argument that they do needs to think about where we draw the lines and what are the factors that make up that decision. So far the courts have found training an AI model with legally obtained materials and distributing that model to be fair use, and they've explained how they got to that conclusion. So an argument to the contrary needs to draw and different line and explain why the line belongs there.

free_bip 1y ago
If your argument is that all of these things somehow combine to make the specific case I mentioned in my original comment legal (which was "stealing the work of every single artist, living and dead, for the sole purpose of making a profit", and I'll add replacing artists in the process to that), then I'm not seeing it. You also seem to be talking about AI training more generally and not the specific case I singled out, which is important because this isn't a case of simply training a model on content obtained with consent - the material OpenAI and Stable Diffusion gathered was very explicitly without consent, and may have been done through outright piracy! (This came out in a case against Meta somewhat recently, but the exact origins of other company's datasets remain a mystery.) Now I explained in another comment why I think current copyright laws should be able to clearly rule this specific case as copyright infringement, but I'm not arrogant enough to think I know better than copyright attorneys. If they say it falls under fair use, I'm going to trust them. I'm also going to say that the law needs to be updated because of it, and that brings us full circle to why I disagree with the article in the first place.
- tpmoney 11mo ago
  My argument is better framed that this: > "stealing the work of every single artist, living and dead, for the sole purpose of making a profit" is begging the question. The phrase "stealing" inherently presumes a crime has been committed when that is the very thing up for debate. The note that this is "for the sole purpose of making a profit" asks the reader to infer that one can not make a profit and also engage in fair use, and yet that is clearly not true. And that puts aside entirely that you're not referencing a "specific case" here, but generalizing to all forms of AI training. We can start by examining the "stealing" phrasing, noting that up until fairly recently it was an axiom in a lot of "hacker" places that "copying is not theft". It feels somewhat contradictory to me to find that now that it's our work that's being copied, suddenly a lot of hackers are very keen on calling it theft. We can note that a lot of our careers rest on the idea that copying is not prima facie a crime or theft. Certainly IBM wanted it to be so, and yet their BIOS was cloned and many of our careers were kickstarted (or at least kicked into high gear) by the consequences of that. Or how about the fact that despite what Apple would really like to be true, you can't stop people from copying your really cool idea from looking at it and making something similar. They couldn't win that battle against Microsoft, and they couldn't win it against Google or Samsung either. We can talk about the fact that there is a lot of disagreement that the dead should have any IP rights at all. Notably again many "hacker" spaces were quite vocal about how the various "lifetime+" IP laws were actually detrimental to creativity and society. Until recently it was the Walt Disney corporation in their pursuit of making a profit that was one of the largest advocates for copyrights to be extended long after the creator was dead and gone. We could also talk (again) about how many forms of fair use are pursued for "the sole purpose of making a profit". See the previous references to the IBM BIOS and the copying of Apple's GUIs. But there is also parody music like Weird Al, or Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music. We can look also to the previously mentioned Connectix Virtual Game Station and other emulators or to the Oracle V. Google lawsuits. We can look at how TiVo's entire business model was to enable millions of people to create copies of copyrighted material every day, automatically. Or Kelly v. Arriba Soft (which is basically why you can do an image search today) and Suntrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin (also relevant for the discussion re "the dead"). And again, most related to AI would be Authors Guild v. Google for the ingestion of thousands of copyrighted materials to in the pursuit of profit and creating the Google Scholar application. And application which I again note produces partial, but 100% faithful copies of that original work for the user and does so intentionally, something AI system actively try to avoid. Which is why I started by asking you to walk the tech stack. If you think the law needs to be updated or you disagree with the current rulings on this matter, I can certainly understand that. So where do you propose drawing the line? What are the specific items that you feel distinguish training an AI from the various other fair use cases that have come before. Why is Google Scholar scanning in thousands of copyrighted materials with the express purpose of both making those materials searchable and displaying copies of that material ok, but an AI scanning in books with the express purpose of creating new material not ok? Why is Android, Windows, Gnome, KDE and other GUIs so very clearly copying the style (if not the works) of Apple ok, but Stable Diffusion producing new art works copying styles not?