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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

#491

Post by marssaxman »

ehnto wrote: post #471
metacritic12 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of whether one agrees or not with paying creators of the training data, I think the deeper issue here is about societal wealth distribution and who gets paid for X now that X is being done very well by AIs. A less equitable world has Google or billionaires getting paid. A more equitable world has the artists. But I want to argue here that for purposes of this latter question, your proposal of copyright enf…

> Even if you get the system to work, what about future artists and writers? Are we just creating an entrenched historical group of creatives getting royalties forever? The flip side of this is that if we undermine paid creators until there's no incentive for them to create, then the AIs abilities stagnate on old data and we as a society drop or at least diminish the skillsets that could create new media. AI can gene…

> The flip side of this is that if we undermine paid creators until there's no incentive for them to create

The incentive to create is almost never financial. How many artists finance their creative efforts by working day jobs? Making a living as an artist is more about buying yourself the time to focus on making art than it is about making money. People will continue to create art, however they can, because they must.

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

#492

Post by bluefirebrand »

Levitz wrote: post #445
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 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…

Only if you assume that ML models should be treated as though they have the same rights and privileges as humans.

Personally I reject that. ML needs to be restricted heavily.

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

#493

Post by williamcotton »

ehnto wrote: post #471
metacritic12 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of whether one agrees or not with paying creators of the training data, I think the deeper issue here is about societal wealth distribution and who gets paid for X now that X is being done very well by AIs. A less equitable world has Google or billionaires getting paid. A more equitable world has the artists. But I want to argue here that for purposes of this latter question, your proposal of copyright enf…

> Even if you get the system to work, what about future artists and writers? Are we just creating an entrenched historical group of creatives getting royalties forever? The flip side of this is that if we undermine paid creators until there's no incentive for them to create, then the AIs abilities stagnate on old data and we as a society drop or at least diminish the skillsets that could create new media. AI can gene…

AI models need human creative decisions as part of the process of making art. This is consistent with current copyright law as well as contemporary art theories of authorship and practice…

Eg, Donald Judd’s works are these creative decisions and processes distilled to the most basic of sculptural form.

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

#494

Post by kragen »

jimbo9991 wrote: post #108
kragen wrote: 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…

I'm still troubled by some of the implications of the technology and think it would be a good idea to have some countries take a hard Luddite stance against AI, but that doesn't mean I think you are wrong. I have trouble with the assumption that what is good for efficiency and reducing human labor is necessarily good for us, but it does imply those that don't go along with the efficiency increases will be destroyed b…

i strongly agree with your first paragraph

i think the second paragraph is a bit myopic, like hunter-gatherers observing agriculture and worrying whether the next generation will be able to track prey through plowed fields, or will allow their hunting skills to decay because it's easier to get meat by trading with the agriculturalists

but that understates the case; ai (if this is really ai this time) is certainly a more significant innovation than agriculture, probably more significant than fire, on par with tools and language

still, that says nothing about its moral valence

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

#495

Post by talentedcoin »

Aerroon wrote: post #485
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. It's not that hard Yes, and then people say "no" or "pay me". End result of this is that the only ones with good AI models are megacorporations that will DRM the heck out of it. Years later those same artists will complain that they now have to pay $1000 a year to Disney/MS/Adobe to create art. Because these megacorporat…

> Copyright exists to encourage the creation of more art and to progress science. AI is clearly a helpful step in that direction. Humans learn from others' works. Should we make that illegal too?

I find it astonishing that people continue to make this argument. A machine is owned by someone, a human is not. Why should the law treat machines the same way as a human? Sounds like some corporate flim-flam to me.

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

#496

Post by Winsaucerer »

chii wrote: post #447
Winsaucerer wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hypothetic…

I assume you’re referring to US law here. Is there a handy place where these permitted restrictions are listed and described?

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

#497

Post by notahacker »

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…

Yeah, I think "we can't actually tell which bits of our model are derived from your work which we copied without your permission onto our system for training purposes probably makes AI companies more vulnerable rather than less. Other platforms like search and social media have successfully defended themselves by showing willingness to promptly remove copyrighted material, let copyright holders opt out of indexing or even negotiating stuff like ContentID so copyright holders get paid each time their work is used.

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

#498

Post by giaour »

jstummbillig wrote: post #377
KaiserPro wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You don't need to pay for or "borrow" anything to learn from copyrighted works. Nobody has had that expectation for years, and that is also not what copyright pertains to. It's not that AI breaks into libraries and isn't paying the fees. You can google an image of any great work of art and look at it for as long as you like, for free and take from it what you can and use all of that to create something else and get p…

> You can google an image of any great work of art and look at it for as long as you like, for free and take from it what you can and use all of that to create something else and get paid for that thing.

If the copyright on a given work of art is still active, those pictures were taken and are distributed with the permission of the copyright holder (or they're just pirated). That's one of the reasons it's much easier to find images of classic art (for which the copyright has expired) than it is to find images of contemporary art.

> You don't need to pay for or "borrow" anything to learn from copyrighted works.

What exactly do you think copyright is, and would you be surprised to learn that libraries have purchased the books on their shelves?

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

#499

Post by clnq »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #475
clnq wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you buy a book or some other artwork, it is implicitly assumed you will put it in your brain, or your meat neural net. And that your brain could produce something related to this content. It's not just assumed, it's celebrated when a work of art gathers fans who produce their own, inspired content. Not sure why it needs to be over-complicated or different for silicone neural nets. But I think it will get very ov…

Trademark and copyright already restrict what humans can do with others work. If too similar then it could prompt legal action.

The same could be applied to AI-generated work.

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

#500

Post by Aerroon »

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.

Even if what you say is true, the person using it is still asking for what they want. Some of these prompts get unique enough that it's unlikely somebody else is going to make another one like it.
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