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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

#301

Post by neovialogistics »

benced wrote: post #292

It’s interesting that we spent decades arguing against corporate IP control because it reduces the intellectual freedom of the human race but now that the corpus of data comes from everyday people instead of big companies (a direct effect of the internet democratizing the creation of content), people are suddenly pro IP control. It shows that a lot of people in this space only cared about standing up against corporat…

Perhaps standing up against corporations is itself a proxy for some even more deeply hidden system of human values. But what could human minds value, if not free and open IP or opposition to corporate entities?

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

#302

Post by est31 »

mattwad wrote: post #88
adrianN wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can instruct an AI to draw Mickey Mouse and infringe copyright and I can instruct a child to draw Mickey Mouse and infringe copyright.

The problem is there's no way a user will know whose copyright they are infringing when they ask AI to "paint a landscape." Maybe the AI needs to be able to print out a list of sources to provide attribution. That would be interesting.

Artists get inspired by others all the time, and if the results are far enough from each other, then nobody has a problem with that. In fact, pre copyright, the similarities used to be even larger. Art lives from the concept of taking ideas, and improving on them.

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

#303

Post by cactusplant7374 »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #290
pvaldes wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The AI doesn’t understand what it consumes. That is why the models still can’t add two numbers.

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

#304

Post by cycomanic »

thewanderer1983 wrote: post #196
pigsty wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right. Not that long ago artists were rallying against Disney and the Music Industry for weaponizing Copyright against Artistic Freedom. Now it seems some artists have decided to use the same tactic.

Microsoft is not an artist.

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

#305

Post by RandomLensman »

croon wrote: post #291
RandomLensman wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You just gave two examples of where both ends of the scale are illegal, which only strengthens the argument of GP. IANAL, and I'm not stating anything about the reality of the judicial system, but only following the logic of the argument.

My examples only were meant illustrate that scale is a well known "thing" in legal systems and I happened to pick things with two illegal endpoints (IANAL). You could look at other things like the need for permits for certain things as a function of size and use, if you want simple examples for scale mattering and legal endpoint(s).

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

#306

Post by b112 »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #290
pvaldes wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

We are not dealing with AGI here. Current trained models are basically just using copy and paste, to create "new" works.

There is zero creativity, zero art, zero original thought, zero newness.

When actual AGI happens, then your arguments mean something. Such as in, at least 50 or 100 years down the road.

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

#307

Post by MikusR »

fsckboy wrote: post #216
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…

thanks for sending your strawman in to do battle with his strawman. you don't need permission to train on books, but you do need to buy the books or take them from the library one at a time. "training" these machines so far is not like human learning as becomes apparent when they spit out source code that mirrors individual repositories. And you know that humans are required to both remix their own creations and foll…

There are free books (imagine the horror of people giving something away) and lots of out of copyright books.

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

#308

Post by i_like_apis »

cycomanic wrote: post #293
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…

However, AI learning is not the same as a person learning. The same way memorizing a book is not the same way as putting it into computer memory. Nobody would sue you for copyright infringement if you memorized a book, song or movie in your head. No the issue is a completely different matter if you made a copy on a harddrive.

It is superior, but it is absolutely still learning.

ML can do either facsimile or imitation far better than a human mind can.

You seem to be conflating both things and suggesting that ML only does facsimile, which is where the potential legal problems are.

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

#309

Post by b112 »

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…

in order to get inspired

But that never, ever, ever happens with current AI. it is not AGI. it is inspired by nothing, has no creativity, nada, ziltch.

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

#310

Post by vages »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #290
pvaldes wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The reason why you put your eyes on something is probably that someone had the hope of selling it to you. Or that someone paid for it on your behalf. The difference is that machine learning algorithms never (or rarely) leave a single penny in their training set creators’ pockets, turning “no income” into the default outcome.

Copyright law is not about logically perfect system, but creating a general environment in which artistic, academic and other creations can appear and benefit the general population.

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