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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

#431

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

KaiserPro wrote: post #366
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…

> 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…

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

That doesn't seem to be universally true, but an end-game of capitalism. There are countless examples of artistry/sculpture/music that were created long before copyright existed and although they may have been "paid" for it previously, those cultural items can be appreciated without needing to pay someone for it.

There are also many contemporary cultural items that were created without monetary recompense that can also be enjoyed without needing to spend money.

> 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.

Your use of the word "stealing" is unnecessarily loaded and specifically means that the creator was deprived of physical ownership which would be incorrect.

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

#432

Post by davidashe »

Premise of the article is roughly: if all this litigation continues, the AI industry could collapse.

Serious naive question: How would that not be a desirable outcome for society? “AI” is becoming a scourge.

AI’s value-add that we truly need is just detecting cancer right? Obviously I don’t want anyone to die from cancer if they could be saved. But AI in cancer detection is a detection-rate booster: cancer can be detected without it. A non-AI process could try to recover some of the lost accuracy.

Weigh this against the misinformation potential of chatGPT, deepfake video fraud, discriminatory bias in ML model output, the surveillance potential of image recognition, addictive social media, the essential inscrutability of model output… (i could go on, but the research & reporting on AI as we have wielded it is voluminous)

So if litigation kills AI, isn’t that cause for celebration, on-balance?

Or shit, can’t we just legislate easier usage regulation for lifesaving medical data, so we can keep the cancer detection use cases and let the rest of the AI gold rush die?

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

#433

Post by 1248 »

pavlov wrote: post #199
visarga wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently worked on information extraction from 10K documents. GPT-3 needs about 7 days of operation in batch mode on one thread. It takes 40..70s to read one single document and report the extracted data. One MINUTE per page. But I think you meant GPT-3 has seen many books during training, not during inference. You should know that training on millions of books is not the only way GPT-3 learns. It is just the found…

> “You should know that training on millions of books is not the only way GPT-3 learns. It is just the foundation of its knowledge.” I’m not a lawyer, but to me it seems within the realm of possibility that a U.S. court eventually finds strongly in favor of the copyright holders, the Supreme Court agrees (because Big Tech has so few friends left), and OpenAI will be required to destroy the GPT-3 model and all copies…

[dead]

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

#434

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

RandomLensman wrote: post #270
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the datasets these tools are using are available to view for free. The AI isn't stealing physical books or paintings, it's viewing the same data that you or I can by sending an HTTP request, for free.

Could an AI view you for free in a street or even through a window? Does that imply it can use that view data to create advertising using your modified likeness, for example? Just because you can view something for free doesn't mean you can use it anyway you want.

I think that's an entirely different scenario. For one, I'm not displaying myself in my front window with the explicit intent of people viewing me. If you replace the AI in your example with a human taking a photograph, I would be equally appalled at the misuse of my image, and I'm very confident I'd have legal recourse to stop it.

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

#435

Post by raynr »

This may be of interest to this crowd. Singapore has explicitly set out exceptions to copyright infringement in its new copyright act. Sections 243 and 244 of the Copyright Act 2021 [0] permit copies of works to be made for "computational data analysis", provided certain conditions are met. It's not clear how this will pan out - the definition of "computational data analysis" is broad in some ways, narrow in others, and the conditions need to be tested against real world scenarios.

* * * * *

[0] https://sso.agc.gov.sg/Act/CA2021?WholeDoc=1&ProvIds=P15-#pr...

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

#436

Post by chii »

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…

> If that is the case, I hope new legislation will correct that oversight very quickly.

i hope that legislation is not introduced to prevent training, as this right would stifle progress.

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

#437

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

SonicTheSith wrote: post #399
Dylan16807 wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the definition of public repo that anyone is allowed to download and read it?

Nope, public repos have license, often open source licenses that state that you can freely use the code, or change it , but only if the resulting product will also be opensource. Other licenses such as the MIT license require that you name the original creator.

But no license (that I'm aware of) says "You are allowed to read this source code, but you may not produce work as a result of learning from it"; for a start, that would clearly be impractical to enforce.

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

#438

Post by chii »

hnlmorg wrote: post #393
avianlyric wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? Or observe paintings? Or listen to music? Yes, that’s exactly what happens when you buy a book, or pay for a music subscription. The work is in the public domain, then global permission to observe and copy the work is already granted. > Do you ask for permission when you get new ideas from HN that aren't your own? You don’t need to. It’s impli…

> You publish in public, you automatically grate licenses for the public to consume and transform it. No you don’t. That would fall under the category of “derivative work” which is still the intellectual property of the original author under most jurisdiction copyright laws. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work

Unless the resulting "derivative work" is sufficiently transformative. Which, i would argue, training an AI/ML is.

Therefore, using a training dataset does not constitute copyright violation.

If the AI outputted an exact copy (or a close enough copy, that the laymen would agree it's a copy), then that particular instance of the AI's output is in violation of copyright. The AI model itself violate any copyright.

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

#439

Post by jfk13 »

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.

> Nobody would sue you for copyright infringement if you memorized a book, song or movie in your head.

No, but what if you then produce "your own" rendition, or "remix", of that book, song or movie and offer it to the public? E.g. you memorize a collection of Taylor Swift's latest songs, and then start performing a medley of her hits in your local clubs, you may well find yourself in trouble.

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