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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

#581

Post by weregiraffe »

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? Or observe paintings? Or listen to music? Do you ask for permission when you get new ideas from HN that aren't your own?

AI is not a mind. A mind is a physical object, a brain inside a skull inside a person. An AI is a computer program.

And while a nerd who forgot how grass feels like might confuse the two, the courts won't.

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

#582

Post by zone411 »

bombolo wrote: post #548
kragen wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

your novel theory of extraterritorial jurisdiction will no doubt be very interesting to trips litigators afaik asahi v. superior court is still governing precedent in the usa though so it won't be of any interest to domestic litigators in the usa

Perhaps you can't read words? Extraterritorial jurisdiction? You sell stuff to country A, you comply with laws of country A. Which is why USA companies have to take GRPR into account. You make an illegal model for country A? Can't sell it there.

You wouldn't sell the model, you would sell its outputs. I can legally buy products made by factories in Bangladesh that would violate all sorts of laws if they were operating in the U.S. It will be for international trade agreements to determine.

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

#583

Post by dahart »

jonkho wrote: post #576
dahart wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to acquire the source material legally. You can be in violation of copyright for copying music you didn’t buy. If you acquire work legally, you’re legally allowed to make backup copies for yourself, if you don’t distribute it. You can be in violation of copyright if you distribute something you don’t have the copyrights for. Thoughts are never illegal wrt US Copyright Law. It’s a straw man to insist on makin…

> You have to acquire the source material legally. You can be in violation of copyright for copying music you didn’t buy. This is incorrect. As another poster mentioned, it is not illegal to read a stolen book. It is only illegal to steal the book. Secondly the source material is acquired legally since it is open to consumption on the open internet. Thirdly model does not contain “latent copies of the source material…

> By using a simple test (currently legal standard) that if I showed you the node weights

Nope, this is strawman and continuing to demonstrate a misunderstanding of Copyright Law. There is no such legal standard, where did you get that? If the network can reproduce a work, then it does in fact contain a latent copy. Arguing that you can’t see it by inspecting node weights is straw man. You cannot argue that you’re not copying music if you use a new compression algorithm and then suggest it’s distinct and derivative because nobody can read the raw compressed data. That’s not how Copyright Law works. If you can approximately re-perform someone else’s work, you’re in violation. This is true even if you have to run a black-box program to produce the output.

> no person even trained in the art can identify it to a specific piece of work

Ironically, you’re actually admitting that even AI researchers can’t prove the network won’t reproduce someone’s work.

The rest you seem to now be looking for a snarky gotcha, which if you don’t want to have a discussion, then I’m uninterested in discussing further. I made clear above and in a sibling comment that remixes are gray area, and this question is complicated. That said, even if AI people do acquire source material legally, they are in fact copying it and distributing it, and that part alone can potentially violate US Copyright Law. This isn’t even up for debate, so I don’t know why you’re attempting to suggest otherwise. The lawsuits mentioned in the article were brought on evidence that networks violated copyrights of specific existing works, and lots of people have found specific examples of violations.

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

#584

Post by foota »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #261
foota wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make it sound like we should assume that getting inspiration from a few hundred or thousand art works that are very famous and highly public is the same as training over nearly every available public piece of art. I see no reason why that should be our null hypothesis. Humans either learn art by being natural art geniuses, or by receiving instruction and learning through an iterative process (where, again, they m…

1. An AI has a training set of one image and produces an exact replica. 2. An AI has a training set of every image in the world and produces an entirely unique work. Which do you have more of a problem with?

That's a false dichotomy.

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

#585

Post by ok123456 »

avianlyric wrote: post #382
kirse wrote: 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…

>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.

Libraries exist.

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

#586

Post by Panoramix »

dns_snek wrote: post #342
Panoramix wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This training data is available for free, but if you want to train your AI on it you need to pay" => Which means only Google, Microsoft, Meta and Disney will be able to train AIs. Thanks to lawyers, a technology that had the promise to democratize art will be used by large corporations to enslave us further.

That's backwards. Do you think these companies are actually willing to negotiate deals with each artist, content creator, website, and code repository? The scale of that alone would sink their business, not to mention the cost. Worst case scenario - you're right, they're willing to go through that and the authors actually get paid something rather than nothing.

Each artist? They will just have to negotiate with (or acquire) a few major hosts like ArtStation and Flickr.

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

#587

Post by foota »

usrbinbash wrote: post #260
foota wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make it sound like we should assume that getting inspiration from a few hundred or thousand art works that are very famous and highly public is the same as training over nearly every available public piece of art. I see no reason why that should be our null hypothesis. Humans either learn art by being natural art geniuses, or by receiving instruction and learning through an iterative process (where, again, they m…

> which is very different. Why is it different? The only difference that matters, is scale. And again, if I want to argue that something done 10000000000 times is legally problematic, I have to be prepared to explain why doing it 10 times is problematic as well, only less so.

Would you give me a second of your time? What about 1 billion seconds of your time?

Could I have a dollar? What about a billion dollars?

The burden isn't on me to explain why something being scaled up by a billion is not the same.

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

#588

Post by jonkho »

dahart wrote: post #583
jonkho wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have to acquire the source material legally. You can be in violation of copyright for copying music you didn’t buy. This is incorrect. As another poster mentioned, it is not illegal to read a stolen book. It is only illegal to steal the book. Secondly the source material is acquired legally since it is open to consumption on the open internet. Thirdly model does not contain “latent copies of the source material…

> By using a simple test (currently legal standard) that if I showed you the node weights Nope, this is strawman and continuing to demonstrate a misunderstanding of Copyright Law. There is no such legal standard, where did you get that? If the network can reproduce a work, then it does in fact contain a latent copy. Arguing that you can’t see it by inspecting node weights is straw man. You cannot argue that you’re no…

My claim has always been that

1) the creating of the model is does not violate copyright. Claiming otherwise means running same algorithm in meatspace would violate copyright laws, which implies thoughts violates laws which is absurd.

2) distribution of the model does not violate copyright laws because the models themselves do not contain latent copies of the work. The model itself is not the work nor a recognizable copy of it nor can it be reconstituted back to the work. It is a tool more analogous to photoshop where the tool can be used to reproduce copyrighted work, yes, by the end user (where I believe the responsibility lies). But the tool itself is not copyrighted work. Microsoft word can be used to generate copyrighted books if I’m correct. Or I can hire smarter tool: a human writer to produce copyrighted works. Is the writer-for-hire illegal? Or his employability is illegal? Of course not. I believe the law will eventually take the position that AI model is a tool.

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

#589

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

foota wrote: post #584
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. An AI has a training set of one image and produces an exact replica. 2. An AI has a training set of every image in the world and produces an entirely unique work. Which do you have more of a problem with?

That's a false dichotomy.

I don't mean to suggest those are the only options, or that either one is even practical. The point is to determine where the objection lies: with the method or the outcome.

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

#590

Post by spoiler »

clejack wrote: post #427
spoiler wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help but feel like you're slightly anthropomorphising an algorithm. It's a really damn cool and powerful algorithm, don't get me wrong, but it's still not a person. At the end of the day, it's also not the algorithm "benefiting" from it, but the corporation using the algorithm. It's also a bit hypocritical, because if you did the same thing to them as a human (in this example let's say be a Tesla copycat) you…

I think the parent poster has the right idea. This is not just anthropomorphization; it's an analogy. They take away is contained in the first and last sentences. Derivation is key. Copyright protects original expressions, and copying means to reproduce (read and write) something. The analogy OP made is focused on the reading and writing done by humans and the reading and writing done by an algorithm. Algos like stab…

I guess. Imagine you're an artist, and you've created your career based around your unique art style. It gets you jobs as a concept artist, or whatnot (idk). Now, imagine there's a tool someone "trained" in a few hours to do what you you do, but withi seconds instead of hour or days. Is there any reason to pay you, ever again? Your hourly rate is surely going to be higher than their electricity bill for running the algorithm.

So, how do we protect you (as the artist) from this? Copyright, even if flawed, currently protects you from that

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