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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

#501

Post by flohofwoe »

judge2020 wrote: post #490
vb-8448 wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Exactly, the point is this one. Open-source doesn't mean liability free, you still have to comply to the license!

You don't if you are creating an entirely new work of art based solely on the knowledge and patterns you've learned from looking at other code, ie. a human learning to code by looking at millions of pages of code on GitHub; whether or not AI can learn in this way is the point of contention for AI art/code/chat generators.

If the AI "independently" comes up with a 1:1 copy of some piece of copyrighted code, would this be a copyright violation or not?

There's a reason why some programmers don't even look at proprietary source code leaks as to not accidentally introduce copyright violations into their own code.

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

#502

Post by albertzeyer »

I think this is indeed some dangerous development for AI, if such lawsuits are successful.

I don't really see why humans are treated different than a computer, for this case. A human also learns from lots of copyrighted material. It's not possible that whatever a human has seen or has heard, will have no influence whatsoever on the human brain. So by the argument here, everything what a human does, ever, is always derived work from everything he/she has ever seen in his life.

So, then another argument is, of course there needs to be some line. It's only derived work or breaks copyright if it is really similar enough. But if this is now the argument, where is the problem? We can just apply the same to the AI. Of course, this is somewhat ambiguous, where to draw the line, but it's just the same as for humans.

Another argument is, the AI has in total seen much more visual data or text, than any human ever could in his/her life, so that is how the AI is in any case different. But I don't really see, why is this relevant? Some humans are reading more books than others. So those who have read more books are in danger, at some point to have read too much books? Where is that line?

Another argument is, stochastic gradient descent works different than the human brain learning algorithm. I don't really see how the details of these technical difference are relevant here.

Another argument is, the human learning is much more efficient in terms of data. But I don't understand how this is relevant here. Isn't this actually an argument in favor of the AI regarding this topic?

Future research on AI might make the AI, its behavior and its learning, more similar to humans. But if we now have a law which says it cannot use public copyrighted data to learn, then the AI has a huge disadvantage to humans, because humans use such data all the time to learn.

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

#503

Post by rosmax_1337 »

Copyright law should simply be discarded for something that makes more sense. I think something like laws about attribution where feasible, making strictly false attribution unlawful, and easy ways to support the actual artists in question (i.e. tax reform) are better ways forward.

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

#504

Post by giaour »

brookst wrote: post #482
giaour wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Copyright expires, and new artists will create new (copyrightable) art in the future. Unless your assertion is that generative AI is so good no one will make art without it ever again?

If the proposed system works, I expect those entrenched artists will sue young human artists whose work shows signs of learning from previous art. The vast majority of music, books, and movies have clear influences.

The proposed system exists, and humans have had to work in it for some time now. People get routinely sued for copyright infringement if their work is too close to an existing work. The (successful) suit against George Harrison for "My Sweet Lord" is a good example of infringement via influence with no clear malicious intent.

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

#505

Post by TimPC »

If the AI wants to be exempt from being punished for training on copyrighted works the bare minimum standard is that it doesn’t accidentally copy and reproduce large portions of that work. There are quite a few examples of Stable Diffusion doing this so I think even that low bar is met. I think anyone sane doesn’t want to create AI immunity to copyright damages even when the network is “accidentally” producing copyrighted output. If you can’t adequately control your technology to avoid that case you shouldn’t get immunity to liability for your problematic outputs. I get that testing for every possibility is impossible and that neural net explainability is far behind neural net technology so it’s very hard to proactively identify and debug these technologies. But just because those are hard problems doesn’t give you the right to steal from copyright holders.

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

#506

Post by flohofwoe »

albertzeyer wrote: post #502

I think this is indeed some dangerous development for AI, if such lawsuits are successful. I don't really see why humans are treated different than a computer, for this case. A human also learns from lots of copyrighted material. It's not possible that whatever a human has seen or has heard, will have no influence whatsoever on the human brain. So by the argument here, everything what a human does, ever, is always de…

Agreed, AI needs to play by the same rules as humans. But this includes being held liable for obvious copyright violations (or any other sort of license violation) in court (the next question is who is liable, the company which offers the AI service, or the user of the AI service who commercially exploits the output which violates copyright).

This is the exact same progress that music sampling went through.

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

#507

Post by arcbyte »

RobotToaster wrote: post #368

> "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…

Co-Pilot generated code is based on works that come from a variety of licenses. The generated code therefore must be licensed according to the license the code it was derived from used. In many cases these licenses are not compatible and the generated code, being derived from copyrighted and licenses works, is in violation of copyright law.

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

#508

Post by lelanthran »

kragen wrote: post #480
lelanthran wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'. That's a different problem. Let's not get into the argument of "Just because the victim cannot prove something, we should remove the relevant laws." The current laws are sufficient; all that it…

laws that cannot be enforced in practice are bad laws; they work out to be a 007-style license to kill, but for businesses rather than people granting many such licenses is a recipe for social collapse

> laws that cannot be enforced in practice are bad laws;

Who said they couldn't be enforced? The argument from the pro-AI team is that we shouldn't have those laws in the first place.

I'm saying, let's keep the laws we already have because they already work quite nicely if the content creators don't want their work included in any training data set.

Rushing to make new laws because "Muh AI" is silly.

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

#509

Post by lelanthran »

kragen wrote: post #474
lelanthran wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can not share something publicly and then demand "xyz" can not view it. That's nonsense. Licenses have clauses on how the content may be used. Clauses along the lines of "The content may not be used for ..." are common. I dunno where you heard that once you release something the license clauses no longer apply, but it's wrong.

many of these clauses are legally unenforceable because you can violate them without infringing on any of the rights that copyright law grants exclusively to the copyright holder (who can license them)

> many of these clauses are legally unenforceable because you can violate them without infringing on any of the rights that copyright law grants exclusively to the copyright holder (who can license them)

That's news to Microsoft[1], who's shared source and various NDA licenses for the source code already has clauses restricting what you can do with it.

[1] I think the problem is that the pro-AI arguments are coming from people who are not aware that clauses in licenses restricting how the content is used is quite common. For example, you were obviously not aware that they were so common that almost every big tech and/or software company of the past and the present already have those clauses in, and those clauses have already been found to be enforceable!

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

#510

Post by judge2020 »

flohofwoe wrote: post #501
judge2020 wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't if you are creating an entirely new work of art based solely on the knowledge and patterns you've learned from looking at other code, ie. a human learning to code by looking at millions of pages of code on GitHub; whether or not AI can learn in this way is the point of contention for AI art/code/chat generators.

If the AI "independently" comes up with a 1:1 copy of some piece of copyrighted code, would this be a copyright violation or not? There's a reason why some programmers don't even look at proprietary source code leaks as to not accidentally introduce copyright violations into their own code.

> would this be a copyright violation or not?

It would be. When a human does this, does it invalidate the human's ability to create any new work at all? Should we chain up anyone who violated copyright by perfectly recalling someone's art in memory and re-drawing it from heart, since we cannot trust them to ever create an original work again?

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