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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

#341

Post by jacooper »

> 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 really shows you don't know the movement it self. People want credit, and sometimes put conditions to use their work(GPL and copyleft), and when the AI doesn't follow these guidelines, then its breaking these copyright laws.

Not everyone is willing to willy-nilly give their code for nothing.

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

#342

Post by dns_snek »

Panoramix wrote: post #285
Marazan wrote: post #277

"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.

That's backwards. Do you think these companies are actually willing to negotiate deals with each artist, content creator, website, and code repository? The scale of that alone would sink their business, not to mention the cost.

Worst case scenario - you're right, they're willing to go through that and the authors actually get paid something rather than nothing.

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

#343

Post by myshpa »

vages wrote: post #310
_Algernon_ wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

> 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.

Yes ... and because it's not a logically perfect system, its lifetime has to be limited. One day we should abolish copyright and find a better, more functional way to drive progress.

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

#344

Post by wnkrshm »

echelon wrote: post #104
jakelazaroff wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very curious that so many people adopted this position exactly when it became feasible for giant corporations to profit by mass producing laundered copyrighted works!

Those wanting AI to respect copyright are going to find that the big players will navigate copyright just fine. It's the small players that won't. They're advocating for institutional control over AI.

There are laws in the EU that only apply to large companies, like Facebook et. al. because they have much more power in certain spaces. Similar laws can be made for Disney vs. small studios, e.g. "if turnover is less than 100M EUR/month..." - I feel this is often proposed as a false dichotomy.

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

#345

Post by i_like_apis »

Taywee wrote: post #49

> 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. Otherwise, the entire industry will be plagued with lawsuits that will stifle innovation and only enrich plaintiff’s lawyers Or maybe, get this, how about people running AI only feed them information that they legally have the right to use? Ho…

You’re talking about training. Training is legal.

- If you bought the book, you can read it.

- If the book is free, you can read it.

- If the painting is in a museum, or on Wikipedia, you can visit it.

- If Bozo the clown says you’re not allowed to look at drawings he posted online, it’s ok. You still can.

Same for AI.

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

#346

Post by Guid_NewGuid »

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…

Exactly this. You can hold that the current copyright system is good and fine. That's a moral position that is, in my view, entirely deluded but internally consistent and not really worth having a discussion about. People who conclude that look at the world through a fundamentally incompatible lense for discussions between the other set to be productive.

Or you can (correctly) think it's a huge drag on innovation and human progress.

If you think the latter then hoping in this case for legal precedent to broaden the scope of copyright enforcement is just bizarre logic. This isn't a rule that already exists as such. The case will set a precedent (based on interpretation of existing law) for the future.

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

#347

Post by Dylan16807 »

b112 wrote: post #314
i_like_apis wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is superior, but it is absolutely still learning No, it is not. Memorization =! understanding. I can teach a parrot to spew the times table, good luck getting it to understand how to apply it. And a parrot is billions upon billions of times more capable than any current AI algos.

You don't need to understand something to go beyond memorization and copies.

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

#348

Post by PartiallyTyped »

b112 wrote: post #306
_Algernon_ wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is no copy pasting on diffusion models. All there is is searching for very probable regions in space [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34378500

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

#349

Post by hnlmorg »

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?

Plenty of people have been successfully sued if their work is too similar to existing content.

This isn’t a new concept that AI is throwing into contention, it’s literally just companies trying to side step copyright law because of “disruption”.

Source: I work for a company in this field and we do gain permission from creators before training our models on their content. It’s very possible to operate this way but a lot of companies simply choose not to.

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

#350

Post by LtWorf »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #221
LtWorf wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know from which weird country you're from, but in mine profiting from it changes things a lot.

It sounds like your country is the weird one. Try burning the complete works of Disney onto stacks of DVDs, then go down to your high street and hand them out. See how long you get away with that for.

Unless I do like millions of them, literally nothing would happen.
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