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AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

heathermeeker.com

441–450 of 705 posts

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

#441

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.

You don't need to accept that license to download and read the code.

A license allows new uses that copyright would otherwise block. Some kinds of AI training are fully local and don't make the AI into a derivative work, so they don't need any attribution and you don't need to accept the license to distribute.

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

#442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This “ML learning is not like human learning” fallacy is all over the place lately. It’s stupid, and it should stop. Humans are capable of both facsimile and imitation. The fact that ML is able to perform facsimile far better than a human can is not evidence that this is “not the same” learning. Only that ML learning is superior . ML is far superior in feats of both imitation and facsimile.

Are you high? How is ML learning superior to human learning? If I show a 3 year old a single picture of a Tiger, and tell him this is a tiger, the child is able to recognize a Tiger fairly accurate in real life without further input. Though the child might say that a house cat is tiger,,,, ML learning needs millions of pictures to do the same, and still might mistake an elephant for a tiger... ML is nothing more than…

First off, your tone is bad.

ML is currently capable of the tiger case you mention. It’s generally called “few-shot” or “one-shot” learning. In the context of an image generation model, having never seen a tiger before, if you show it a few pictures of a tiger, it could immediately draw you thousands of tigers in any variation or scenario you can think of, which is way more than a child can do.

As for the need to train on millions of images for the base model, I believe you are trying to say something about “sample efficiency”, and how ML differs from the brain in this regard outside of the few/one-shot contexts (which ML is absolutely capable of). I would argue that sample efficiency of the brain is actually also quite low, much lower than people assume. It’s irrelevant to an argument that ML is not superior, because ML is clearly is capable of learning richer, more effective representations in a shorter wall time than we can, whether it is sample efficient or not. And in the sample efficient few/one-shot contexts (learning what a tiger looks like from one picture), it also outperforms humans in speed accuracy and creativity. It’s not even close.

As for classification errors, ML is capable of some errors we are not, actually by virtue of being superior at learning representations we are not even close to being capable of learning. But those are edge cases, and they are fixed by various means. In the main cases, ML outperforms humans in speed, accuracy and class complexity, all exponentially.

You said something about graph approximation but it doesn’t make a lot of sense. I’m talking about learning and you’re complaining that machine learning is not “logical reasoning”. Whether ML is currently capable of logical reasoning is another discussion. Certain models do demonstrate some types of it today.

“Graph approximation” is a type of learning task. ML is a billion times better than humans at it so it also doesn’t help you argue that ML isn’t superior (in that regard).

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

#443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Just because you can view something or free doesn't mean you can use it anyway you want. This whole thread really makes me want to pull my hair out. Difference between illegaly creating a (even temporary) copy of a copyrighted work (e.g. streaming a movie) vs. creating a derivative work of said copyrighted work: Two completely different things, with completely different legal outcomes. If OpenAI in any shape or for…

> anything that a computer does can be construed as making a copy.

but that's not the point of contention. The training data set has been granted the right to be distributed (by virtue of it being available for viewing already - it's not hidden or secret). The proof is that a human can already view it manually. Let's call this 'public'.

The question is, whether using this public training dataset constitutes creating a derivative work. Is the ML model sufficiently transformative, that the ML model is itself a new work and thus does not fall under the copyright of the original dataset?

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

#444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, the “good” models can’t reconstruct the image in detail. It’s considered a sign of “overfitting” if you reconstruct the input exactly. Even if you put the exact query that was associated with that image, you’ll get the weighted average (feature-wise) image associated with the query. This applies to all like machine learning models without loss of generality.

That doesn't mean I can't recover the image (or at least get really close to one) using a different query, does it? Edit: It's nonlinear after all.

Sure, but I could write a program to spew out an unbounded number of images containing random pixels. It could create an image that is identical to a copyrighted image, but if I just keep that image on my hard drive, have I violated copyright? I don't think I would be, but if I started distributing them, yes I would.

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

#445
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? 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 don’t need to. It’s implicitly assumed, by virtue of publishing in a public forum, that the author is providing permission for people read their comments and ideas, and remix them as they wish. That permission doesn’t include exact replication, but reading and understanding is assumed, otherwise why did the author publish it?

Following this logic, isn't training AI on Github or Deviantart 100% fair game then? It's not like OpenAI is infiltrating computers and reading hidden away data.

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

#446
post #12

maybe one country or another will outlaw generative ai or ai art or media synthesis or whatever it ends up being called, but presumably they'll be left behind by rapid cultural and technical development in whatever countries don't the cat is out of the bag, the worms are out of the can, the feathers have blown away in the wind these developments seem very likely to be central to programming, all other kinds of engine…

If it really turns out to be a problem then copyright holders are simply going to add in a not-licensed-for-training clause in all their licenses[1]. Sure, existing works already licensed can still be used, but at least both parties (copyright holders and AI trainers) won't have anything to argue about. [1] Anyone from CC reading this? Make it the default.

How are you planning on proving a particular licensed work was used in a sufficiently large model? One of the commonly mentioned issues with current ML is the inability to reverse the output to figure out 'how it got there'.

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

#447
post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

But it's not humans reading it, it's using it to train ML models. There are similarities between humans learning from books and ML models being trained on it, but there are also salient differences, and those differences lead to concerns. E.g., I am concerned about these large tech companies being the gatekeepers of AI models, and I would rather see the beneficiaries and owners of these models also be the many millio…

> You don't automatically have the right to take my content and do whatever you like with it.

actually you don't have the right to restrict the content, except as part of what's allowed in copyright law (those rights a spelt out - like distribution, broadcasting publicly, making derivative works).

specifically, you cannot have the right to restrict me from reading the works, and learning from it.

Imagine a hypothetical scenario - i bought your book, and counted the words and letters to compile some sort of index/table, and published that. Not a very interesting work, but it is transformative, and thus, you do not own copyright to my index/table. You cannot even prevent me from doing the counting and publishing.

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

#448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if humans from here on will only be paid to create stuff that an AI can't? I look forward to a life of horrific poverty

I don't think there is any defensible reason to have people at large suffer over AI advancement, without having a plan for making their lifes better. If AI takes jobs because it's simply superior at them, and that creates friction and anxiety until we have stuff figured out, that's of course sad and we should do our best to soften the process, but I think it's inevitable. The carriage must die. It seems obvious that…

In the anglo-saxon world, I have not seen significant successful program since the industrial revolution that has helped or softened the impact of a new process on an affected lump of people[1].

The weavers were left to rot when the automatic looms came in. (there were in flanders east england and northern france incredibly rich and influential class)

Furniture makers were left to rot when steam power tools came in

Farm labourer were left to starve when steam threshing/harvesting came in.

enclosure was another tragic note in england.

The green shirts were lobbying for "a share of the domestic profit" in the 20s-30s, in the 60s they were convinced that we were going to be working 2 hours a day by now, with robot servants cooking and cleaning for us, and no-one would be living in poverty. Even Orwell has written on this.

Instead we see productivity in the western[2] world dropping. Meaning for every human hour worked we make less money. because I suspect in part to the rise of servant-as-a-service jobs(food/shopping delivery/cleaning/elderly care etc etc) all of which are long hours and low paid.

[1] well, DDR everyone had a job, but lived in permapovety and were likely to be disappeared if you spoke out.

[2] specifically the US and UK, who appear to be snorting financial inequality by the metric fuckton

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

#449

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…

I’m going to wager that the percentage of people in our society who would like to extend copyright to restrict these tools, favoring the needs individual copyright holders over the needs of the public domain, is much smaller than you realize.

By the time this reaches judgment and goes through the appeals process there will be a vast industry of non-infringing uses that are clearly transformative and in fair use (Sony v Universal)

You cannot say that the person using ChatGPT to control the lights in their garage is infringing on anyone’s copyright in any manner whatsoever. The point of copyright is not to gain a permanent monopoly on certain speech. The point of copyright is not to make sure that people are fairly compensated for their work. Their work might be terrible but contain a good idea that is later reimagined in a better way (Baker v Seldon) but that’s for the market to decide.

The courts will probably concur that these models are fair-use and I will agree with their judgement.

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

#450

> "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 a…

If viewed like this, you could argue that with every single line of code open source devs are working towards:

1) SaaS AI people getting richer

2) Devs have less work in the future

I’m not sure if that’s a good development for the open source movement.

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