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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

#601

Post by dahart »

jonkho wrote: post #597
dahart wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating of the model does violate copyright if the model you create can reproduce someone else’s work. Your logic is faulty. Running the algorithm isn’t what causes the problem, so there is no implication that thought is the problem: this point is still a straw man argument. If it seems absurd, then shouldn’t you re-check your assumptions? > nor can it be reconstituted back to the work This is false. It has already…

How is creating the model in my brain not illegal (as in my thoughts are not illegal) yet if it’s in silicon it would be illegal? Please give a well reasoned answer. This is not a strawman no matter how many times you insist on using that label. Secondly you seem to be conflating the “tool itself” to “what the tool can do” to be strongly equivalent. I.e if the tool has the capability to violate laws, then the existen…

Distributing a model created using your brain is illegal, if the model violates copyright law. (Just like copying stuff without using neural networks in meat-space was already illegal.) If you create a program that reproduces copyrighted work, and distribute the program, then the distribution is illegal. That was the same answer I gave at the top. The brain vs silicon silliness is a strawman and has been all along because it doesn’t matter how your program was created, building and running it is not the illegal part under copyright law, distributing it is (and/or using material that you haven’t obtained legally).

> if the tool has the capability to violate laws, then the existence and distribution of the tool itself violates said law.

That’s right if you remove the word “existence”. Distribution of a NN model that violates copyright by reproducing copyrighted works is illegal. That part has been my point in this thread, it seems like you understand now and we agree.

It’s “existence” is not illegal under US Copyright Law unless you didn’t have the legal right to use the training material, and in that case it’s illegal to use the material whether you used a computer or your brain, it doesn’t matter how you created the neural network (or even whether you created a neural network), the violation there isn’t the act of creating the network, it’s the act of stealing and using material you don’t have permission to use.

This whole discussion would be a lot less frustrating for you if instead of making assumptions and logic arguments about brains and computers, you took some time to read the copyright legal code. https://www.copyright.gov/

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

#602

Post by bornfreddy »

arp242 wrote: post #237
bornfreddy wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans also (usually) remember where we saw something and can attribute the source. ML at this point doesn't do that.

I've been programming for 25 years. I really can't remember where I learned what for most of it.

I doubt you can reproduce some function you saw 20 years ago verbatim, either. If you could, you'd know the source too.

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

#603

Post by foota »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #589
foota wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hm, okay. In that case, I would say the first is a problem, and the second is also, but differently.

I think the objectionable thing about the second is that the AI knows everyone's styles, and so can use them in creating something new. Even if the AI is restricted to not be able to paint an image in a certain artist style (as the new version of stable diffusion is, for instance) and the art is unique, I think part of the problem is that the AI is still (presumably) leaning on the collective styles of everyone it has trained over.

If we can train an AI over a small dataset or maybe even a large dataset of old art, or some mix in between, and then maybe fine tune it wtih a snall sampling of modern art, then I believe it would be unobjectionable, as this is largely how humans do it.

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

#604

Post by jonkho »

dahart wrote: post #601
jonkho wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is creating the model in my brain not illegal (as in my thoughts are not illegal) yet if it’s in silicon it would be illegal? Please give a well reasoned answer. This is not a strawman no matter how many times you insist on using that label. Secondly you seem to be conflating the “tool itself” to “what the tool can do” to be strongly equivalent. I.e if the tool has the capability to violate laws, then the existen…

Distributing a model created using your brain is illegal, if the model violates copyright law. (Just like copying stuff without using neural networks in meat-space was already illegal.) If you create a program that reproduces copyrighted work, and distribute the program, then the distribution is illegal. That was the same answer I gave at the top. The brain vs silicon silliness is a strawman and has been all along be…

If you understand that the model is a tool, and that as a tool it can be used to generate activity that can violate laws and be used for other perfectly legal activities, then as a broad principle the distribution of said tool is not a violation of said laws.

Cars, phones, guns, knives (practically anything) can be used to generate activities that break the law. They are perfectly legal to distribute. The onus on the legality of the activity lies with the end user.

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

#605

Post by hooverd »

echelon wrote: post #87
Taywee wrote: post #49

> If the AI industry is to survive, we need a clear legal rule that neural networks, and the outputs they produce, are not presumed to be copies of the data used to train them. Otherwise, the entire industry will be plagued with lawsuits that will stifle innovation and only enrich plaintiff’s lawyers Or maybe, get this, how about people running AI only feed them information that they legally have the right to use? Ho…

> Or maybe, get this, how about people running AI only feed them information that they legally have the right to use? How is it a bad thing that somebody can't legally steal other peoples' work without their permission because of pesky copyright? On one extreme: "Unless you pay your annual Disney fee for having watched Disney films in early childhood, you will need to return your brain to us for processing. Disney wa…

The problem lies with AI artists wanting copyright for me but not for thee.

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

#606

Post by hooverd »

pigsty wrote: post #116
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…

It’s strange to me that there’s a lot of overlap between people who think AI training should require explicit consent for every piece of training data, and people who think copyright and patents are insanely restrictive in the music/movies/literature/software world. It’s also worrying that requiring consent to train an AI model will inevitably lead to requiring consent to make handmade art that’s a little too similar…

The issue I have with AI artists is they seem to love copyright again as soon as it comes to their works or their prompts.

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

#607

Post by freejazz »

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.

>Why should the law treat machines the same way as a human? Sounds like some corporate flim-flam to me.

It shouldn't, that's why arguments that the algorithm is learning, so it's doing the same thing that is legal for humans to do is completely fallacious, on top of it just being anthropomorphism.

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

#608

Post by throwaway675309 »

lelanthran wrote: post #550
kragen wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

of course people who agree to a contract are bound by its terms under common law; the question in the original article is what copyright law does or doesn't allow people to do without any sort of contract unfortunately you have descended from simply making vaguely ignorant comments to attacking me, which indicates that further engagement with you is unlikely to be useful to anyone

The license is the contract. Literally. And every nonFLOSS license and I've seen has restrictions on what the licensee can do with the material. Can you find one nonFLOSS license that doesn't have restrictions or limitations? I mean, you lead with obnoxious, then descended into condenscension, all while not realising that the whole point of the license is to restrict the licensee.

Until such a time as a license containing a clause about not being used for "training purposes", whatever the hell that means, actually shows up in court, then adding this to your license has all the legal teeth of saying that you must sacrifice your first born.

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

#609

Post by freejazz »

mattnewton wrote: post #536
arcbyte wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think this interpretation works if the code being generated is seen as essentially being retrieved by a lossy lookup function. But another interpretation is that the generic structure of the code was learned from the works, which is not copywritable. And that generic structure was used to synthesize new code, in much the same way a human who had seen a pattern in a proprietary codebase years ago was able to use tha…

You are just hiding the more complex argument behind the word "learned", which is not something in the normal understanding of the word that's attributed to a computer.

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

#610

Post by throwaway675309 »

phoe-krk wrote: post #31
CuriouslyC wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incorrect. Training images are used to generate a latent manifold which might not contain any of the images in the original training set to within a meaningful delta unless they're massively overrepresented or cliche.

This might be technically correct but doesn't seem to matter much in practice because of how many practical cases of NN outputting copyright-infriging content there are. These include examples in the recent lawsuits that made the rounds on HN. Either even the best specialists behind these NNs cannot make the NNs not contain data that is "massively overrepresented or cliche", or they are unwilling to.

"Many practical cases of NN outputting copyright-infriging content there are"

I have seen very few practical cases of generative models such as copilot and even less of a stable diffusion of reproducing original copyrighted works in exact detail, and the few that I did encounter were instructed torturously to do so, which strikes me as highly contrived.

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