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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

#271

Post by arp242 »

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…

The justice system is not going to change any time soon, and you can't ignore it. So that is the reality in which we must operate. Besides, it's not as simple as "the justice system sucks", because much of the time it's just a matter of not wanting the headache, and lawsuits will bring headaches in any justice system.

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

#272

Post by RandomLensman »

usrbinbash wrote: post #260
foota wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nothing new. People differentiate between genocide and murder, for example, or poisoning water supply vs an individual poisoning. Criminal law in quite a few places definitely has scale considerations.

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

#274

Post by _ph_ »

wolframhempel wrote: post #250
_ph_ wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key point is: an AI calls itself an intelligence but this so far is quite a bit of marketing. A human is considered an intelligent being. Where a process of creating new things happen. They are based on true learning and not just reproduction. And where they have been just reproduction, of course it went to the courts.

I'm really unsure if there is a qualitative difference between a human looking at lots of images, deriving patterns and recompiling them into a new image or a computer doing the same.

Currently there is definitely a wide gap because the current "AI" are completely incapable of a real intellectual process. Wheras humans can develop a true understanding and consequently it is an actual learning and not memorizing process. Of course there are overlaps and consequently from time to time there are law suits about copyright infringements by artists.

The pure fact that Stable Diffusion tends to produce 3 legged humans shows the complete lack of understanding of its doings.

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

#275

Post by jsemrau »

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 very possible that a judge will rule that AI models do not violate copyright.

Somehow we have managed to come full circle to the first episode of HBO's Silicon Valley.

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

#276

Post by dariosalvi78 »

I think that this cannot be stopped, copyright or not, the tool is too powerful and too useful. But I understand the moral dilemma: why would I, as a creator, be happy if someone is using my work to basically put me out of work?

I think that the solution is easier than it seems. The real value websites like Getty provide is not the image in itself, but the labelling. Put the labels under a paywall and problem solved.

For source code it's more complicated, but I guess that you could somewhat limit access to commit comments.

In any case, the genie is out of the bottle.

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

#278

Post by noobermin »

kirse wrote: post #121
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…

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…

This tired argument is very much like the "corporations are people" argument that convinces corporate lawyers and judges but literally no one else. Any lay person can tell a corporation is not a person, mostly because the power imbalance, the difference in their abilities and physical constraints, and while a lot of these arguments can be reasoned through the recognition of such is intuitive.

Most people looking at AI can tell it is not like a mind or an artist, because of certain intuitive arguments which boil down to their surprising ability and their bizarre faults (drawing hands is still a struggle for most models) and current limits (you have to hack prompts instead of asking naturally due to their current limits). You can reason about people using these arguments because they are people, but you cannot use it when applying it to NN because they are not.

I'd argue that the moment you start using the "people are AIs" argument, and you are then implying the converse is true "AIs are people," then you are assuming that there is some bidirectional here, and thus other qualities you assign to people, like, "people have rights" and "people deserve to be paid for their labor" and "people have rights to the work of their own hands" then must apply to AIs. And, therefore, the AI tools you are using deserve to be treated with the respect and dignity you had to treat artists and developers with before, and thus, should be paid for the work they create. That is, if they learned and created art in the same ways people create art. Just as we do not have that nursery does not own the art a child born there creates, or a university doesn't own the art an artist who studied there creates, you cannot make the argument that the work an AI creates is that of the "owner" or "trainer" of a model unless you are arguing slavery is in fact okay in this day and age. All of this of course hinges on the supposition that AIs are people, and that they learn as people do.

So, you cannot have it both ways. You cannot keep treating AIs as people in your arguments, but then deny them agency that is due to people. The only way this is is that you deep down do not believe they are people, or that you think people do not deserve rights or deserve compensation for the work of their own hands.

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

#279

Post by pvaldes »

kirse wrote: post #121
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…

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? Or observe paintings? Or listen to music?

The difference is that I buy books, pay for visiting museums and buy music in several formats, or pay it accepting to receive advertisement between songs.

It Is expected that If I buy a book I will be allowed to read it without asking for a permission.

What I don't do is copypasting paragraphs of other books to write a new book and claim that is mine. Is a different situation.

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

#280

Post by rhdunn »

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…

Copyright is a good thing. The issue with copyright is that it has been extended too long, from 20+20 years (the latter of which is a manual extension) to 95 years (for publication) and life+70/80/100 years for the author. -- I understand extending copyright to keep up with extended lifespans, but it should be something like 30+30 or 40+40.

The copyright terms means that for Life+70 countries only works where a) the author died before 1953 and where the works were published before 1928 are in the public domain.

An AI training on a given work should comply with the law and with copyrights, just like anyone else. It should also respect the license or other terms the works were released under. -- You could easily silo the data by license, and have a different model per license.

Patents should be a good thing (they allowed inventions to be published instead of being kept secret). However, it is easy for large companies to get patents on trivial things, write overly broad patents, and collate a large number of patents in a domain. That means trying to innovate or compete in a highly patented field like audio or video compression is difficult.

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