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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

#511

Post by kitanata »

If your AI is capable of reproducing part or whole of a bit of content it was trained on, then your AI is subject to copyright. Training an AI to create derivative works, does not absolve you of violating the copyright of the authors your AI is building derivative works from. If this is too much of a legal burden for you, then don’t train your AI on work it may create derivative forms from.

It’s a pretty simple problem. The folks claiming it is not either are being intentionally disingenuous or honestly do not understand the legal definition of derivative works in copyright. It’s settled law.

You could… you know either a) don’t train on works you don’t have a license to or b) use some sort of adversarial training to ensure that the AI doesn’t replicate the work it is trained on.

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

#512

Post by jcelerier »

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…

> Following this logic, isn't training AI on Github or Deviantart 100% fair game then?

Unlike forum comments, GitHub code generally has an explicit license attached which you'd have to respect - you know, for instance by giving attribution to every MIT-licensed source that was used.

And even then, let's say someone releases a book with all your HN comments: you are definitely entitled to sue them for copyright. Here's some info from the BBS era, which is still relevant today: https://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html

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

#513

Post by bluefirebrand »

joxel wrote: post #379
avianlyric wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> would that creation constitute copyright infringement? No, obviously not, as that would clearly be unworkable and ridiculous. Mainly because we have a very unclear understanding of human creativity, and there’s no way to analyse an individuals mind to understand how they created an idea. Additionally copyrights reach generally stops at the point of “transformation”, once you take any idea an transform it “enough” i…

You see how you’re introducing a viewpoint and assuming it’s true — you’re just saying “humans can create things” and “ai can’t create things”. You don’t even address the possibility that the AI itself is a tool of the human who created it to create things.

I think in order to justify "the AI is a tool that a human is using, just like a paintbrush" you would have to have to define what meaningful creative process that the human has followed while using the tool.

In my opinion things like selecting a training dataset and then writing prompts are not creative processes they are mechanical processes. Input in, output out, with barely any interaction from the human.

Consider when you commission an artist to make a painting. You give them a "prompt" by explaining what you want. Maybe you even give a "training dataset", a few examples similar to the look and feel of the result you want.

Then they go off and make something. They show you in process stuff and you make suggestions so the next version they show you is closer to what you want. This repeats until you are both happy. Then you own the drawing. Because you paid them for it.

In this case however it's absolutely clear that you did not create the work. You had input into the creation, but the artist was not a tool you are using to realize your own creative vision. They are the creator, you're a customer for them.

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

#514

Post by flohofwoe »

judge2020 wrote: post #510
flohofwoe wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Copyright is (mostly) not about copying for your own use, but about commercial exploitation. This topic has been discussed to death since at least the Sony Walkman. Nothing of this is new or different just because an algorithm is now involved.

If you copy for your own use only, that's totally fine - or at most a legal greyzone, in the end nobody will care about such personal use copies. If you use AI to generate pretty pictures to hang up in your home, totally fine too.

As soon as you start making money with this stuff though it becomes an actual problem.

It's really as simple as that.

Even the 'generative art aspect' has already been settled long ago when music sampling became popular and required a legal framework.

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

#518

Post by xbar »

wolframhempel wrote: post #250
_ph_ wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key point is: an AI calls itself an intelligence but this so far is quite a bit of marketing. A human is considered an intelligent being. Where a process of creating new things happen. They are based on true learning and not just reproduction. And where they have been just reproduction, of course it went to the courts.

I'm really unsure if there is a qualitative difference between a human looking at lots of images, deriving patterns and recompiling them into a new image or a computer doing the same.

Do you think there is there a qualitative difference between the human and the computer?

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

#519

Post by okamiueru »

GaggiX wrote: post #483
okamiueru wrote: post #142

I'm hooked on Stable Diffusion. It's the most impressive sudden leaps in technology in my 30 or so years of being old enough to understand it. Much of the power it has, is based on the material it is trained on, and I'm very appreciative of the work and effort that was made in order to make it what it is. And, it's only getting started. That said... I get it. Huggingface are working on a diffusion based model for mus…

Where do you read that Huggingface is training a music model? I think you're confusing it with Harmonai.

You're right. I was confusing them. The disconnect between the discussion and approach to training music models and image models still applies, although the hypocrisy I implied does not. Harmonai are approaching it sensibly. Huggingface and most other image diffusion models developers are not.

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

#520

Post by Aerroon »

talentedcoin wrote: post #495
Aerroon wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Copyright is not about protecting people. The purpose of copyright is:

>To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

The purpose of copyright is not to protect the authors, it is to promote the progress of science and art.

The current situation for AI image generation is pretty much the only way these technologies will be available to everyone. Most other paths will simply lead to billion dollar corporations acting as gatekeepers to this technology. Megacorps can afford to hire artists to generate specific art for their AI models, everyone else cannot.

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