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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

#361

Post by usrbinbash »

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.

> The issue is a completely different matter if you made a copy on a harddrive.

But there are no copies. For example, the LAION-2b training data is a total of 240 TB. The pruned SD model based on this dataset, is less than 5GB.

The data isn't copied into the models, it is used to teach the models, letting them learn patterns in the dataset.

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

#362

Post by Dylan16807 »

noobermin wrote: post #278
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…

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 A…

Most people aren't asking for copyright on the AI output, though.

Also animals can be trained and make outputs and nobody accuses them of copyright infringement. That's a much better analogy here than leaping to the idea of treating one of these models like a human.

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

#364

Post by iinnPP »

barnabee wrote: post #317
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…

I’m very against IP laws and controls in pretty much all their forms. I think if we tried to calculate the cost to humanity of the things that don’t happen or aren’t created, are very expensive to do, or are restricted to people and companies with the right “rights” we’d uncover a tremendous tragedy. In addition to the first order effects (you can’t do X or have to pay to do Y), there are huge chilling effects on use…

This is also the opinion I reached after thinking about it for quite some time.

I am, a wee bit, shocked people believe there can be impactful legislation on this. As if politicians who have been unable to curb PIRACY in any real sense would now be able to tackle an even tougher problem. This is despite well funded lobbying groups. Even large corps enable piracy without consequences.

Further, the government frequently indicates a concern that China will beat the US at AI.

There is an extremely bumpy ride coming for a group of people that have never had to deal with an unavoidable bumpy ride. I look forward to an increasingly logical viewpoint from people being struck by reality. Not maliciously, but societally.

AI has indeed removed the "need" for copyright. Let Mickey die.

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

#365

Post by avianlyric »

myshpa wrote: post #343
vages wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Copyright at its heart is fine. The original objectives, allowing people to hold a short-term monopoly on their ideas, so they can fund further ideas, and the manner in which they’re achieved is perfectly fine.

Where goes wrong, is when individuals and cooperation believe that such monopolies should be indefinite, and pushed the monopolies beyond the lifetime of the author. A dead author can’t produce new works, so it’s now clear how allowing such long monopolies increases the amount of creative work produced.

The original primary objective of copyright was to create an environment to could produce an endless supply of public work, freely available to all. It’s only abuses of copyright over the past 50 years that have destroyed objective, and ironically it’s copyright holders like Disney that really starting to suffer the consequences.

Winding back copyright durations to better balance the public and private interests would go a long way to resolving many of our issues with copyright today.

> Yes ... and because it's not a logically perfect system, its lifetime has to be limited.

It’s also worth pointing out that no system of law is “perfectly logical”. It’s almost certainly impossible to produce a perfectly logic system because humans are inherently illogical, and binding them into a perfectly logical system of law would almost certainly produce more injustices.

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

#366

Post by KaiserPro »

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

yes, thats why I pay a fee to buy/borrow one (or someone pays the fee in the case of a library.)

> listen to music

again money is exchanged.

> Humans are constantly ingesting gobs of "copyrighted" insights that they eventually remix into their own creations without necessarily reimbursing the original source(s) of their creativity.

yes, and so long as they are not derived works, its not a problem.

Copyright is there to allow you and me to develop things and make money from it. It is there to stop people stealing our work, which may have taken years to develop and sell it for a profit with none of the risk.

Large corperations have abused this to make monster profits.

Google have spent billions to try and persuade us that copyright is evil, because they didn't want to pay content producers to host their work (ie music and movies on youtube and local news site)

The issue is this, I might have made a website that tells users how to make a specific type of metal work. I have a free ebook, and I run courses. I have spent many years to to perfect the art, create the tutoring content, recording videos. its advertising supported, and people are asked to consider buying a course, to support the creator.

The AI company comes along and scrapes all the content, allows people to regurgitate it, with more or less accuracy.

The creator now gets less traffic, less money and now cant afford to create more content.

The AI people now skim all the money, and the consumer gets less useful information.

Culture isn't free. Someone is paying for it, and if you stop paying them, then it doesn't get created.

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

#367

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#368

Post by RobotToaster »

>"The Co-Pilot suit is ostensibly being brought in the name of all open source programmers. 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."

Maybe people wouldn't be so angry about an AI trained on mostly open source code if said AI was open source, and not a proprietary SaaS.

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

#369

Post by kmac_ »

spoiler wrote: post #212
wolframhempel wrote: post #209

I think the underlying question is one of "degrees of derivation". There's a famous Carl Sagan quote: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe” which hints at the problem: Nothing is created in a vacuum. Let's compare what Stable Diffusion does with what Franz von Holzhausen, head of design at Tesla, does. Franz didn't come into existence out of nothing and knew how to design…

I can't help but feel like you're slightly anthropomorphising an algorithm. It's a really damn cool and powerful algorithm, don't get me wrong, but it's still not a person. At the end of the day, it's also not the algorithm "benefiting" from it, but the corporation using the algorithm. It's also a bit hypocritical, because if you did the same thing to them as a human (in this example let's say be a Tesla copycat) you…

The anthropomorphisation of the ML baffles me. This is not AI but a large ML model trained on often proprietary data. The whole discussion is ridiculous. There should be a lineage of model data so we should know what's the original source (at least for the "core" of the answer) in form of citations. I assume that the model loose that information during the training and that would be quite hard as everything is mixed together.

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

#370

Post by i_like_apis »

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’re talking about facsimile, which is a product of memorization, which is a type of learning. And it is not the only type of learning AI is capable of.

AI, like humans, is capable of both imitation and facsimile. It is far superior at both feats.

Your fallacy is that you are noticing AI is superior at facsimile and erroneously assuming it is “not learning”. You are also ignoring the other amazing learning feats of imitation in front of you.

Parrots are lovely animals, but it’s unclear what you think you’ve accomplished by bringing them up. The fact that they are capable of more than just memorization does not differentiate them from advanced AI models, which are rapidly gaining all sorts of abilities.

Polly the parrot would have a hard time producing a picture of Elmo with a light saber in a Superman costume riding a dragon on the moon in the style of Rembrandt (in under 300ms, at least). I also know a parrot couldn’t write a 500 word story about the image.

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