Live data from Hacker News

AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

heathermeeker.com

281–290 of 705 posts

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

#281
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…

It gets called plagiarism, and there are lots of lawsuits preventing this.

It's not plagiarism at all. The AI is trained on 5 billion images yet it stores only 4gb of data. Thus it is impossible that it stores the actual work. For any image that the AI generates, you can't point to any image in the training data that the image is derived from.

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

#282
This whole legal debate exists because of ambiguity. Open source licences were written before large-scale training became a thing.

Rather than settle this ambiguity on court, why not remove it altogether? Personally I think we should be adding new clauses to licences that either explicitly approve or prohibit the use of code for training of models.

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

#283
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…

1. An AI has a training set of one image and produces an exact replica. 2. An AI has a training set of every image in the world and produces an entirely unique work. Which do you have more of a problem with?

#2 is pretty interesting. After all, the purpose of copyright law is to encourage creative works. If we have machines that can generate creative works on demand with little effort, what purpose does copyright law serve?

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

#284

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…

How is it much different from a search index? it’s just a new interface to get at some info, rather than Google and Firefox, it already pre-browsed the web for you, and is displaying back the content. If the end user gleans some actual copyrighted work from the search they still need permission to use it, but it’s also likely it’s just a derivative, or the end user is just reading an example and learning from it at consumption time. Is a web crawler violating copyright? Or is it the user who sells a copyrighted image?

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

#285

"This training data is highly valuable" "ah, so you wish to pay for it?" "Lol no, ctrl-c, ctrl-v"

"This training data is available for free, but if you want to train your AI on it you need to pay" => Which means only Google, Microsoft, Meta and Disney will be able to train AIs.

Thanks to lawyers, a technology that had the promise to democratize art will be used by large corporations to enslave us further.

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

#286
post #121

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?

I think this is a specious analogy at best. The two are remarkably different contexts. AI can work at a significantly greater rate. There's also a very large question about whether for profit commercial software should be afforded the same leeway we give to ordinary human behaviour.

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

#287
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.

>Bing, Google ~~robots.txt~~ ai.txt for code repos? :P

robots.txt lacks nuance about copyright, it doesn't really serve the same purpose.

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

#288
post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm familiar with this line of reasoning, but I'm always struggling to understand the exact thing that humans can do that computers don't. Usually, the differentiation is that humans have e.g.

"true understanding"

I assume you mean the process of looking at an image and not just deriving patterns, but seeing that you are looking at a cat, that a cat is an "animal" which has "four legs and a tail" and that cats can be friendly towards you or aggressive, depending on your own behavior and theirs.

Neural Nets are certainly capable of the first two: classification and creating taxonomies. The last one I admit is tricky as it requires the Neural Net to be an entity within the observed world

"intellectual process"

the intellectual process is arguably exactly the process input->categorize and analyze->compile->produce output loop that we've modelled AI based upon

"creativity"

is the ability to create something truly new. This one seems obvious as Neural Nets only can derive patterns (plus maybe a random input) - but I would posit the question if any human ever created something truly new in the "apple pie from scratch" sense or if we've only ever created higher level works derived from existent things.

"consciousness"

this one is hard to grasp. I would argue that consciousness is the realization that one exists (in the descartian sense) - coupled with the desire to continue to do so. It is a quality that wouldn't make much sense for an output focused neural net like the one behind Stable Diffusion - but it might be a desirable trait in a decision making focused deep learning setup - similar to a self-healing cloud deployment.

"love/emotion"

This builds on the previous consciousness example. Not to sound like Rick Sanchez /some other cynic - but aren't these at their core adjustment mechanisms that help us further evolutionary goals like survival and continuation of our lineage. Wouldn't a decision making focused deep learning setup be more stable/have a higher uptime if it would facilitate its goal of "staying on" through a strong drive of survival/expansion?

The last two examples are where my point falls apart a bit. But I still stand by my general thesis: We are way too certain that our particular human way of processing information and "thinking" has some divine quality to it that isn't replicable in neural networks. Against that, I would argue that neural networks are largely the same mechanism we employ in our thinking and that they are just a couple of millenia in evolution behind, but are catching up at a multiple of the speed it took us to get to where we are now intellectually.

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

#289
post #244
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? Yes, you do need to buy books, which gives you permission to read them.

This is literally what the AI does as well. It didn't walk into a bookstore and steal all the books off the shelf, it read through material made available to it entirely legally.

The thing that authors are trying to argue here is that they should get to control what type of entity should be allowed to view the work they purchased. It's the same as going "you bought my book, but now that I know you're a communist, I think the courts should ban you from reading it".

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

#290
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? 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…

If you pirate a book, learn from it and then create something using the information you learned, would that creation constitute copyright infringement? If so how far does the tainting go? Once you put your eyes on something which you haven't purchased, all future works could potentially be inspired by that experience and should therefore be considered infringement, following your logic.
Post reply on HN