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AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

heathermeeker.com

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

#521

Post by chasing »

> 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. The open source movement is wonderful in many ways, but its tendency to engage in legal maximalism to “protect” open source is sometimes disappointing.

This early paragraph is so bone-headed, so smugly demonizing, and misrepresents the situation so badly that I had to stop reading. This paragraph isn’t analysis, it’s propaganda.

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

#522

Post by readams »

jcelerier wrote: post #512
Levitz wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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'…

But you can still see the code and learn generally how to write code. Maybe you see a style of unit testing in a library, and decide to incorporate the techniques into your own code. This is not a copyright violation. It can't be, or all creative expression would be dead.

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

#523

Post by bryanrasmussen »

kirse wrote: post #121
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 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?

Of course not, and given my ability to train my mind on thousands of books in a few minutes and spit out a full book based on that training in whatever style one wants in a few minutes for that as well, it seems especially unfair that people act as though there might be a difference between the two situations.

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

#524

Post by dahart »

kirse wrote: post #121
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 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? […] Humans are constantly ingesting gobs of “copyrighted” insights

This comment fundamentally and dangerously misunderstands Copyright Law. Insights are not copyrighted, nor are they copyrightable. Copyright law controls who gets to distribute a specific “fixation” or performance of work. It is not, and never was about preventing the spread of ideas. Authors and artists have always intended for you to read/observe/listen to their work when you legally acquire a copy. They just want you to not copy it verbatim, but go do your own original work if you want to distribute or sell something.

The whole problem is that today’s NNs are specifically designed to remember and remix only the fixed performative parts of the work, and they, unlike humans, don’t understand the insights at all. They are just deterministic machines that copy and remix at a large scale. As such, it’s pretty clear the people training AI today should expect to have to ask permission before “training” (copying) other people’s work.

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

#525

Post by kragen »

lelanthran wrote: post #508
kragen wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

probably before rushing to categorize people into teams and ridicule those you think are on a different team from you, it would serve you well to understand the basic principles of the field you are commenting on so that you are in a position to assess the factual claims people are advancing

if you are failing to understand the factual claims, you have no hope of making sense of the normative claims for which you have such thirst

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

#526

Post by mauvia »

kirse wrote: post #121
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 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…

Training AI is closer to photographing an art gallery.

Training AI without permission is sneaking a camera into an art gallery without permission.

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

#527

Post by MagicMoonlight »

>Wahh wahh I can’t steal everyone’s data and profit off it.

That’s a big sad. Unfortunately that’s called the real world. You also can’t break into someone’s home and film a movie in their house without permission. That doesn’t mean movies are illegal.

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

#528

Post by chasing »

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.

Human minds can commit copyright infringement without realizing by it if they regurgitate parts of something someone has already created. Google “George Harrison.”

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

#529

Post by chasing »

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?

Software and human beings are two different sorts of things and should be treated differently.

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

#530

Post by jcelerier »

readams wrote: post #522
jcelerier wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'…

But you can still see the code and learn generally how to write code. Maybe you see a style of unit testing in a library, and decide to incorporate the techniques into your own code. This is not a copyright violation. It can't be, or all creative expression would be dead.

Don't be so sure of that: in music it's now established that getting too close from the "style" of another musician is a copyright violation: https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/what-s-going-on-another-ma...
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