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AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

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

#251

Post by sillysaurusx »

smolder wrote: post #246
arp242 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it will benefit "the little guys", because "the little guys" rarely have the resources and time to litigate in the first place, or lobby to lawmakers to make the details work in their favour. Copyright always benefits "the big corps". Everyone is so eager to get one up on Microsoft that they're forgetting the bigger picture.

The fact that the justice system is so inefficient that it doesn't serve people with less than a lawyers salary of money to waste isn't important to the conversation of whether it's fair or not for someone to ignore licensing and repackage your code as an "AI". If you want to talk about the big picture here, it's about privatizing gains and socializing losses, the goal of every bigcorp, which is just more reason to d…

Of course it’s material to the conversation whether people have resources in practice to use the tools of the justice system. It’s why small claims court is a powerful tool compared to a wrongful termination suit.

What you’re asking for is going to only benefit corporations. They’re the sole entities that will be able to afford the regulation you’re proposing.

It’s not even a hypothetical concern. Much of my notability came from books3, which contains almost 200,000 books, and is freely available to anyone. https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1320282149329784833?s=4...

I couldn’t train a GPT competitor without that. Neither could you. But corporations could.

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

#252

Post by mbgerring »

pigsty wrote: post #116
jeroenhd wrote: post #105

There's no part of AI that is being swallowed up by copyright. AI companies can ask for permission if they want to train their models on other people's works. It's not that hard, various image hosting sites have already added an opt-in/opt-out toggle to their services. Sites might even get away with using this stuff as compensation for free hosting. The fact of the matter is that the AI companies don't want to ask fo…

It’s strange to me that there’s a lot of overlap between people who think AI training should require explicit consent for every piece of training data, and people who think copyright and patents are insanely restrictive in the music/movies/literature/software world. It’s also worrying that requiring consent to train an AI model will inevitably lead to requiring consent to make handmade art that’s a little too similar…

I believe that adding data to an AI training data set should require explicit consent, and I derive that belief from being wrong about copyright laws in the 00’s. The artists that tried to stop filesharing were right, and the total collapse of musicians’ livelihoods in the streaming era proves them right. We have the chance now to correct the mistake we made then.

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

#253

Post by smolder »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #247
arp242 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it will benefit "the little guys", because "the little guys" rarely have the resources and time to litigate in the first place, or lobby to lawmakers to make the details work in their favour. Copyright always benefits "the big corps". Everyone is so eager to get one up on Microsoft that they're forgetting the bigger picture.

Thank you . It’s legitimately scary to read through these comments. It’s like watching everyone clamor for Stalin to be put in power: not even a good idea in the short term, let alone the long term.

Your backwards appeal to ideology is completely absurd. If it was Google training an AI on Microsoft's code, MS sycophants and PR people would be calling GOOG the rights-ignoring Stalin-loving communists.

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

#254

Post by foota »

usrbinbash wrote: post #240
pavlov wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books?” I’m not able to read billions of books in less than an hour. Even if we agree that machine learning is like human learning, scale commonly matters in law.

> scale commonly matters in law I am not a lawyer, so the following is only my opinion. Scale matters, but so does the legality of the thing that scales. Reading two dozen books by other authors, or studying hundreds of artworks, or visiting the museum of awesome statues every week, in order to get inspired for ones own novel/painting/scuplture, isn't illegal. So a lawsuit will have a really hard time argueing that i…

You make it sound like we should assume that getting inspiration from a few hundred or thousand art works that are very famous and highly public is the same as training over nearly every available public piece of art. I see no reason why that should be our null hypothesis.

Humans either learn art by being natural art geniuses, or by receiving instruction and learning through an iterative process (where, again, they might create thousands of art works, but nowhere near the scale here), which is very different.

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

#255

Post by arp242 »

imgabe wrote: post #236

An artist keeping their work out of AI models will be like one from previous generations keeping their work out of museums. It will be a great way to ensure your work is forgotten by history and has no influence on the next generation of art. Like it or not, you can’t stop people from copying strings of ones and zeros. Time to let go of primitive notions of copyright and embrace that we’re all one species and we bene…

I don't think that keeping your work out of AI will have any bearing on your work's success or lack thereof. It's not like people go "wow, great AI image, let's check out the 253,526 works this was synthesized from!" There is no publicity value in it.

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

#256

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

atmosx wrote: post #248
kirse wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI companies can ask for permission if they want to train their models on other people's works Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? Or observe paintings? Or listen to music? Do you ask for permission when you get new ideas from HN that aren't your own? Humans are constantly ingesting gobs of "copyrighted" insights that they eventually remix into their own creations without necessar…

> Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? I pay the books directly (cash, credit) or indirectly (school books via taxes). I do pay the louvre to observe the painting. I also pay to listen music in ads (YouTube) or via subscription (YT Music and Spotify).

But the datasets these tools are using are available to view for free. The AI isn't stealing physical books or paintings, it's viewing the same data that you or I can by sending an HTTP request, for free.

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

#257

Post by sillysaurusx »

smolder wrote: post #253
sillysaurusx wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you . It’s legitimately scary to read through these comments. It’s like watching everyone clamor for Stalin to be put in power: not even a good idea in the short term, let alone the long term.

Your backwards appeal to ideology is completely absurd. If it was Google training an AI on Microsoft's code, MS sycophants and PR people would be calling GOOG the rights-ignoring Stalin-loving communists.

Maybe, but it wouldn’t change the truth that the outcome of Microsoft restricting Google would benefit Microsoft, a trillion-dollar corporation, and not you or I. Nor anyone who isn’t a wealthy corporation.

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

#258

Post by usrbinbash »

wokwokwok wrote: post #241
usrbinbash wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but what the customers of AI people want isn't available under those terms. What the customers of AI want is accurate predictions of the models, and they can get that even if everyone demanding to get removed from the training set would be removed. The makers of generative AI could remove every living artist who wants to from the dataset, the model would still develop a general solution of color theory, composition…

Then do it! I swear when I see this argument because it makes me angry. You’re right, but they didnt , because they were too lazy and cheap to do it that way. …and that’s why people are angry, and rightly so. Fully licensed models are the future, and it’s both irritating and disappointing that we are where we are right now because the people training these models were too lazy to assemble a training dataset that wasn…

> but clearly from the lawsuits it isn’t ok

Well, a lawsuit isn't a decision, we will have to wait for the courts to decide wheter it's legally okay or not.

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

#259

Post by zarzavat »

errantmind wrote: post #224
jillesvangurp wrote: post #202

US copyright law only applies in the US. AI can be developed outside of the US where other laws apply. So, the US using the straight jacket of copyright law to stifle innovation would only cause AI companies to move their business; or non US companies stepping up. I don't think that's actually going to happen though. The stakes are too high for that and this case seems quite weak. Copyright law has its limitations. B…

>> US copyright law only applies in the US This isn't entirely true, due to various entangled trade agreements that require countries to respect each other's intellectual property as a prerequisite. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention

They require countries to respect each other's copyrights, not each other's copyright law. The US, for example, does not enforce EU database rights. Moreover, you can in EU copy a book made by a US author who died 80 years ago even if that copyright is still valid in the US. Local laws are enforced by local courts.

What the Berne Convention requires is that if I have a copyright in US it will be recognised in France, etc without having to re-register it in every country in the world.

There is no part of the Berne convention that will prevent people from training models on US copyrighted works outside of the US. That is entirely a matter for local jurisdiction.

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

#260

Post by usrbinbash »

foota wrote: post #254
usrbinbash wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> scale commonly matters in law I am not a lawyer, so the following is only my opinion. Scale matters, but so does the legality of the thing that scales. Reading two dozen books by other authors, or studying hundreds of artworks, or visiting the museum of awesome statues every week, in order to get inspired for ones own novel/painting/scuplture, isn't illegal. So a lawsuit will have a really hard time argueing that i…

You make it sound like we should assume that getting inspiration from a few hundred or thousand art works that are very famous and highly public is the same as training over nearly every available public piece of art. I see no reason why that should be our null hypothesis. Humans either learn art by being natural art geniuses, or by receiving instruction and learning through an iterative process (where, again, they m…

> which is very different.

Why is it different?

The only difference that matters, is scale. And again, if I want to argue that something done 10000000000 times is legally problematic, I have to be prepared to explain why doing it 10 times is problematic as well, only less so.

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