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AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

heathermeeker.com

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

#61

Post by anonymousab »

Arainach wrote: post #33
keikobadthebad wrote: post #2

> 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…

Microsoft has never had a monorepo. There's a Windows monorepo, and a monorepo for chunks of Office, but even now that many teams are on Git they're still very much different repos with different build tools, different code search (maybe they fixed some of that in the last few years but none of my friends there have mentioned it if so), different coding standards, and more.

> There's a Windows monorepo,

That's mostly what folks are referring to. We can't really take Microsoft at their word about systems like copilot if they're unwilling to trust it with their crown jewel.

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

#62

Post by blondin »

i do not defend copilot for training on private repositories. or ignoring licenses.

but, to me, there is a big flaw in these lawsuits. if we need to shut down these AI technologies, then our entire education field is in danger. the same arguments should apply to our education field.

educating AI is the same as educating ourselves.

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

#63

Post by yazzku »

This post reflects the author's very poor understanding of neural networks, software licenses and copyright law, and borders on misinformation. Please share this kind of shit on Twitter instead.

If your AI is spitting derivative works or straight-up verbatim copies of the original, stripped of a license, and given the original license even allows derivative works, then yes, you better lawyer up. This applies to both software, art, or any copyright-protected work. Legality aside, it is also shitty and on the lower end of morals to abuse people's work/art in this way. AI systems that don't fuck with people and their work are perfectly fine. Stop fucking with people and you won't need lawyers.

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

#64

Post by belorn »

rubinelli wrote: post #26
phoe-krk wrote: post #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 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.

Copyright doesn't have an explicit size, but rather uses size as one of many indicators.

For example, I could take a massive 8k video and covert it into a very small 144p youtube video. Am I in the clear simply because the output is tiny compared to the input? Similar I could take a huge studio master copy of a song and convert it to a very small and rather compressed (distorted) mp3.

I partially agree that some of the problem is when perfect copies are spit out by the models, but I do think there is a bigger problem. Copyright is a complex concept that can't be defined exclusively by a single metric like size, and any mathematically definition will in the end be killed if large copyright holders feel threatened by it.

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

#65

Post by Krasnol »

phoe-krk wrote: post #30
thewakalix wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 6…

> If you have an image, then train a neural network on that image, then use the neural network to reconstruct that image in detail

I haven't seen that happening since the discussion started. Most of the complains I saw aimed at things like "it stole my style" not "it reproduced my art".

Do you have any examples?

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

#66

Post by Hoasi »

lost_tourist wrote: post #55
throwanem wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On what basis?

Human nature. We haven't changed that much in the past 50k years or so. Some people are very altruistic and giving, others not so much. An artist might club you over the head for stealing his techniques and ideas and copying them into a new portion of the cave or rock wall, others would have taught you and approved of your work.

> An artist might club you over the head for stealing his techniques and ideas and copying them into a new portion of the cave or rock wall, others would have taught you and approved of your work.

Exactly. Same back then as today.

An insecure cave person would be protective of their cave painting turf. A well-adjusted cave person (also likely more talented) would be sharing ideas and resources or have other work for/with them.

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

#67

Post by Jiejeing »

blondin wrote: post #62

i do not defend copilot for training on private repositories. or ignoring licenses. but, to me, there is a big flaw in these lawsuits. if we need to shut down these AI technologies, then our entire education field is in danger. the same arguments should apply to our education field. educating AI is the same as educating ourselves.

No, because we happen to not be computer programs (or I hope so at least).

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

#68

Post by Turing_Machine »

phoe-krk wrote: post #30
thewakalix wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 6…

> to reconstruct that image in detail

Pretty much none of these systems "reconstruct an image in detail".

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

#70

Post by CuriouslyC »

Taywee wrote: post #56
CuriouslyC wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying to legislate model training is impossible and stupid. At worst some copyright holders will sue a company because a model is biased and produces close-enough replicas of something under copyright. Model builders will respond by penalizing models that reproduce copyright images too closely, and better curating data sets to avoid bias, at which point the issue will be moot.

I don't want anybody to feed any of my work into a model at all without following all the terms of the licenses of my work. If my work is used to generate, via a computer program, a derived output, then you need to follow my licenses. People keep pretending that AI is the exact same thing as a human learning, but it's really a lot more like a fancy compiler with highly non-deterministic output. AI is not a human.

I wouldn't be surprised if these large language models have an interior life that is more rich than many humans I've met who barely seem cognizant of their surroundings.
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