I wonder if cave painters had notions of copyright, like hey don’t copy my animal drawing.
Pretty sure they did.
On what basis?
AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law
21–30 of 705 posts
Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law
#22The 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.
Most training cases are covered by fair use. The problem is when the work is licensed with specific clauses about derivative works. The weights are a derivative work of the open source code on which they were trained.
Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law
#23> 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…
> dump MS monorepo in there for public use
Here's a little(?)-known fact: the leaked Windows XP source code is hosted right on GitHub. Has anyone tried typing some win32 API function prototypes and seeing if Copilot fills in the function bodies? I'm not a Copilot user or I'd try it myself.
Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law
#24> 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 ne…
Transgressors, perhaps, but not criminals. AI, especially generative AI, are not lossy copies but rather synthesizers.
If anything, your comment highlights the need to evolve IP norms and laws.
Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law
#25> 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 ne…
How are you using the word “copy”? It doesn’t seem to match the standard meaning. For instance, most people would not consider a brief summary of a movie’s plot to be a “copy” of that movie, or protected under copyright.
Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law
#26> 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 ne…
De minimis is a longstanding defense in copyright law. If you are copying very little from very many works, as is the case when you turn multiple petabytes into a few gigabytes of neural network weights, you are in the clear. The problem arises when models overfit and spit out almost perfect copies of the training data.
Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law
#27> 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 ne…
I found all this to be very odd take coming from something entitled "copyleft currents". You summarized some of the points quite well.
> So, all neural network developers, get ready for the lawyers, because they are coming to get you.
This is just dumb.
Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law
#28> 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 ne…
Incorrect. Training images are used to generate a latent manifold which might not contain any of the images in the original training set to within a meaningful delta unless they're massively overrepresented or cliche.
Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law
#29I have no clues about laws and stuff and as a software engineer, I'd say please replace me by machines i dont care all the contrary, let's go.
But please, please, protect art making from machines. These paints made in those caves werent done during work hours, it was probably the first forms of leasure our ancestors experienced. The first forms of enjoyment in the rude life of early humans. I think there is some higher order aspect to art that's related to our essential well being.
All Im saying is protect it; im not saying AI shouldnt be used. It could certainly render art making even more fun. Maybe limit the resolution of generated pictures for example.
Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law
#30> 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 ne…
How are you using the word “copy”? It doesn’t seem to match the standard meaning. For instance, most people would not consider a brief summary of a movie’s plot to be a “copy” of that movie, or protected under copyright.
If you have an image, then train a neural network on that image, then use the neural network to reconstruct that image in detail, then the NN by definition contains enough information used to reconstruct that image - hence, a copy.
With NNs trained on thousands or millions of data entries, this concept becomes fuzzy in the same way as you described - a short summary likely wouldn't be considered a copy, just like a 64x64 generated thumbnail wouldn't be considered in the same way a 4096x4096 hi-res image.