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AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

heathermeeker.com

11–20 of 705 posts

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#11
> But other than netting a hefty fee for the lawyers who bring the suit, what is the endgame, exactly?

Pay people whose works you want to extract value from, it is that easy… Unless the whole point of this "AI" bubble is to create monetary value for the companies and their shareholders without being held accountable. I do not mean that creating, configuring, tuning a model, or even compiling a massive dataset is not work, but it is the tiniest fraction of the work that went into whatever is present in the dataset.

> also, for software authors, prohibiting ML training would be antithetical to the Open Source Definition. So that probably won’t work.

A-ha, at one point I hope even AI zealots will be forced to acknowledge that the process is creating a derivative work and sure, train on my FOSS sources all you want, but the end result will need to abide by the licenses of all the sources browsed (have fun).

> As the tech industry celebrates the frothy emergence of machine learning in a time of economic doom and gloom, let’s hope this nascent field doesn’t sink because of the copyright iceberg looming ahead.

I am sorry to break this to the author, but not all fields and jobs need to exist. I have not seen much net positive from "AI" to society as a whole so far, with even less exciting things on the horizon.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#12
maybe one country or another will outlaw generative ai or ai art or media synthesis or whatever it ends up being called, but presumably they'll be left behind by rapid cultural and technical development in whatever countries don't

the cat is out of the bag, the worms are out of the can, the feathers have blown away in the wind

these developments seem very likely to be central to programming, all other kinds of engineering, conceptual art, scenography, costuming, technical illustration, and pornography, within a couple of years, even if (against all odds) development on the neural nets themselves makes no further progress; they enable you to do things in minutes that previously would have taken days, things which are core parts of the feedback loop driving these disciplines

if every country in the world except thailand bans it then within ten years all your kids will be secretly watching prohibited thai movies with software secretly written in thailand on surreptitiously thai-designed computers, riding thai bicycles

even if deepfakes mean that the most significant effect of ai art is enabling massive fraud, spam, and mitm attacks, banning it locally won't stop you from falling victim to it (fraud is already illegal) but just from developing effective defenses against it

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#13
post #3

The idea that it is copyright infringement if you train a neural network on copyright data means Waymo, Bing, Google are all illegal. If you include any copyrighted information in your web crawler neural network or if your training data for your autonomous software includes pictures of billboards or t-shirts or anything in the real world that is copyrighted you are a copyright infringer.

If you're a rideshare or cab driver and you also happen to see / recognize billboards nobody is going to hassle you for storing those in your neural net or suggest law should do so. If you're a designer and you take "billboards or t-shirts or anything in the real world that is copyrighted" as stored in your head as the basis for something you're working on, you will need to consider ways in which your derivative work…

actually google got sued for this in multiple countries already, as the article sort of mentions

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#14
> But the latest and greatest software trend–generative AI–is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law.

About time.

> If the AI industry is to survive, we need a clear legal rule that neural networks, and the outputs they produce, are not presumed to be copies of the data used to train them.

But they are compressed lossy copies of all that data! That's the whole point of noise/denoise functions that neural networks are based upon. The whole mathematical foundation of training a neural network is "teaching" it how to recognize and/or create copies of data stored in the training set.

> Otherwise, the entire industry will be plagued with lawsuits that will stifle innovation and only enrich plaintiff’s lawyers.

When you're willingly breaking already established law en masse for profit in hope no one cares enough, be it copyright law or any other, you're not an "innovator", you're a criminal. The fact that you're a tech giant or a Bay startup doesn't matter in this regard; the only thing that matters is the notable amount of time required for the justice system to catch up with your novel tools for laundering intellectual property.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#15

> Yes, that’s right, people crusading in the name of open source–a movement intended to promote freedom to use source code–are now claiming that a neural network, designed to save programmers the onus of re-inventing the wheel when they need code to perform programming tasks, is de facto unlawful. This is disingenuous... the issue for FOSS is the scrubbing the license off the code and then users not observing the ter…

They need to 1) release the model weights as open source, and 2) license code produced by the model as open source. It is a derivative work of open source code. This is 100% a large corporation abusing and undermining the open source ecosystem. They can play by the rules or properly license a training dataset. People seem really eager to shill for a megacorp.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#16
> Like a cruise ship heading for a scary iceberg, AI is in trouble, and the problems are mostly below the surface.

I'm not sure why the author is out here talking like a lawsuit brought by the author of Typography For Lawyers is going to bring down Microsoft like it's a foregone conclusion, but people are going to be training models on public data for personal gain from here out no matter what happens. The cat is out of the bag.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#18

Only speaking to the coding situation. It seems to me that if the "LLM Copilots" just observed the existing license there would be less of a problem here. Copilot, only recommend work based on $LICENSE or $LICENSE compatible license when I am working on $LICENSE code. What's the problem genius?

That only addresses part of the problem. Open source depends upon copyright in order to be enforceable. Copyright depends upon attribution. While I am confident that most (not all) open source authors would be happy if the license remains intact, what happens when someone infringes upon an open source license? Say that someone incorporates code generated by an AI based upon open source licenses into a closed source product.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#19
post #7
post #3

The idea that it is copyright infringement if you train a neural network on copyright data means Waymo, Bing, Google are all illegal. If you include any copyrighted information in your web crawler neural network or if your training data for your autonomous software includes pictures of billboards or t-shirts or anything in the real world that is copyrighted you are a copyright infringer.

I think it comes down to use. Web crawlers like Google are fine because they index the web and then the search engine directs users to the original source. If instead Google recycled all the content they crawled and hosted everything on google.com while scrubbing all attributions from the pages then they’d fall afoul of copyright law (specifically the moral rights [1]). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights

They already do though. I've read several articles about people's blogs plummeting after google adopted their text into an "info box", same as the Google News controversy a few years ago where newspapers lost traffic.

It's all bad. They really should pay the "little man" not just publishers with lawyer budgets - same with AI.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#20
It seems inevitable then that we soon will have various large models in competition, with differently sourced legally licensed large training datasets. And opt-in open-source ones. And they will one day all hopefully be as good or better than the current models are now.
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