AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law • Hacker News Board

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

#611

Post by freejazz » Sun, Jan 22, 2023, 10:30 PM UTC

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…

It's not an analogy because it doesn't analogize "learning" which is the thing that's being used as a defense. It hides any criticism of learning by implying that it's the same learning that humans do. That's not an analogy, it's just bullshit. It's bullshit word salad. A really tiny salad, here.

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

#612

Post by freejazz » Sun, Jan 22, 2023, 10:32 PM UTC

danielbln wrote: post #424

kmac_ wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The anthropomorphisation of the ML baffles me. This is not AI but a large ML model trained on often proprietary data. The whole discussion is ridiculous. There should be a lineage of model data so we should know what's the original source (at least for the "core" of the answer) in form of citations. I assume that the model loose that information during the training and that would be quite hard as everything is mixed…

Is it really that baffeling? Take ChatGPT, a model specifically fine tuned on dialog interactions to seem more human like. Of course people are going to anthropomorphise it. And the whole thing about it not being AI but an ML model, I think we can let that one go. It didn't stop the term cloud computing ("it's just someone else's server") and it won't stop the term AI from being used for this tech.

It's baffling because it's being done by people who would otherwise insist on technical correctness and rebut any argument otherwise with "well, how do humans think?"

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

#613

Post by spoiler » Sun, Jan 22, 2023, 10:37 PM UTC

sdfhbdf wrote: post #598

spoiler wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

No. You cannot copyright an abstract style. Process is not copyrightable.

Sorry, I realise how my comment was a bit confusing. I kinda butchered my point.

I guess my point is more ethical than legal.

Sure, another artist could copy your style, but they would still need to study it for a long time (composition, palette, perspective, grading, line work, etc) to get an accurate understanding of it. They also needed to have spent years training their hand-eye coordination, as well as art theory to achieve it. Whether it's ethical is debatable, but they've earned their skills. And they'd still take a while to produce it, so they earned their money.

If someone without training just asked a computer program to produce "dragon in style of X" then this means people can sidestep artists to create works.

One could be smug and say "work smart not hard" here, but it creates a tricky situation.

What if people start pulling down their works or not posting them for fears a megacorp will crawl their works without permission?

What if someone asks for the same piece (by describing it as a prompt and saying "in the style of X"); is that plagiarism or copytheft?

What will happen to the models in this case? Do they become "inbred" over time?

What becomes of artists? It will no longer be a viable career (especially digital artists) for them. I know most artist enjoy the process more than selling the art, but the process won't put food on the table.

I guess it's a lot of what ifs too here, but they're not unlikely scenarios.

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

#614

Post by yazzku » Sun, Jan 22, 2023, 11:01 PM UTC

spunker540 wrote: post #85

yazzku wrote: post #63

This post reflects the author's very poor understanding of neural networks, software licenses and copyright law, and borders on misinformation. Please share this kind of shit on Twitter instead. If your AI is spitting derivative works or straight-up verbatim copies of the original, stripped of a license, and given the original license even allows derivative works, then yes, you better lawyer up. This applies to both…

I don’t think it’s a big deal if your AI spits out copyrighted images. My scanner, camera phone, photoshop etc can also easily spit out copyrighted images. It’s ok if I just print them out for my wall at home, but if I try to sell them it becomes a problem. So then I guess these new AI models are only problematic if someone tries to sell them (as its essentially selling copyrighted works) but an open source model is…

> but if I try to sell them it becomes a problem

What do you think Microsoft is doing with Copilot and everyone's code on Github? They didn't spend millions of dollars and several weeks of training just for the amusement.

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

#615

Post by taylorius » Sun, Jan 22, 2023, 11:02 PM UTC

CBarkleyU wrote: post #461

chii wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> anything that a computer does can be construed as making a copy. but that's not the point of contention. The training data set has been granted the right to be distributed (by virtue of it being available for viewing already - it's not hidden or secret). The proof is that a human can already view it manually. Let's call this 'public'. The question is, whether using this public training dataset constitutes creating…

>but that's not the point of contention. The training data set has been granted the right to be distributed (by virtue of it being available for viewing already - it's not hidden or secret). The proof is that a human can already view it manually. Let's call this 'public'. This is wrong. My paintings are publicly available (especially going by your definition [which I'm confused by the origin of?]). Taking a photograp…

But the AI is (supposedly) not making a copy of your painting. It is ingesting it, and adjusting it's internal "model of what a good painting looks like" to accommodate the information it gleaned from your work. This seems more similar to what a human might do, when they draw inspiration from another's work. The question is - to what extent does the exact image of your painting remain within the AI's data matrices? That, no-one knows for sure.

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

#616

Post by mountainriver » Sun, Jan 22, 2023, 11:11 PM UTC

chasing wrote: post #579

mountainriver wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It kinda is, but from what I’ve seen the developers against this are highly egotistical and having a meltdown that the skills that make them special and on some level famous are becoming obsolete

What a gross and hateful (and false) way to frame this…

It's not false, I'm describing my experience, which I said

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

#617

Post by unusualmonkey » Sun, Jan 22, 2023, 11:29 PM UTC

freejazz wrote: post #600

usrbinbash wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The issue is a completely different matter if you made a copy on a harddrive. But there are no copies. For example, the LAION-2b training data is a total of 240 TB. The pruned SD model based on this dataset, is less than 5GB. The data isn't copied into the models, it is used to teach the models, letting them learn patterns in the dataset.

You are just anthropomorphizing the model by calling it teaching and then implicitly equating that it's the same thing happening in the human mind. That's your burden to establish when you say it's the same.

Actually, isn't the burden of the plaintiffs to prove their copyrights are being violated?

Whether or not it's identical to human brains isn't the matter, they'd need to prove how a small 5GB model trained from a huge dataset infringes their rights specifically.

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

#618

Post by chasing » Sun, Jan 22, 2023, 11:34 PM UTC

mountainriver wrote: post #616

chasing wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a gross and hateful (and false) way to frame this…

It's not false, I'm describing my experience, which I said

Sorry. Let me correct:

What a gross and hateful way to frame this, especially given your apparently limited experience…

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

#619

Post by unusualmonkey » Sun, Jan 22, 2023, 11:35 PM UTC

manholio wrote: post #311

i_like_apis wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this about jealousy then? Or it’s just too fast so let’s stop it?

It's about a law designed by humans to give everyone a chance to make a living and contribute to the common good. You think you have found a loophole in that law that lets you use that work for free and deny author's any compensation. Bear in mind, AI is not making artists or creative types obsolete - that would be fair game, just like computers made human calculators obsolete. No, this is about abusing other people'…

Copyright never guaranteed anyone compensation, nor is it loophole to not pay for copyright just because you saw and learned from something in the public domain.

If using someone else work for learning is infringement, then that's going to cause a lot of difficulty for all artists. Try making a rock song without listening to rock, or paint some modern art without viewing it etc.

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

#620

Post by ehnto » Sun, Jan 22, 2023, 11:38 PM UTC

marssaxman wrote: post #491

ehnto wrote: post #471

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? The flip side of this is that if we undermine paid creators until there's no incentive for them to create, then the AIs abilities stagnate on old data and we as a society drop or at least diminish the skillsets that could create new media. AI can gene…

> The flip side of this is that if we undermine paid creators until there's no incentive for them to create The incentive to create is almost never financial. How many artists finance their creative efforts by working day jobs? Making a living as an artist is more about buying yourself the time to focus on making art than it is about making money. People will continue to create art, however they can, because they mus…

I agree that people wouldn't stop making art. Sorry to shift the goalposts here: I do think that there are types of art that are not created except for commercial reasons, and that body of work is what I would expect to get displaced by AI. In fact it already is, Advertising creative media is one example, it's an industry I am involved in and we are already seeing Dall-E and ChatGPT getting used for quickly concepting ideations for clients etc. I would expect an AI to get worse at meeting commercial needs over time because of what I said in my original comment. Or at least for commercial creative media to stagnate if it could only use AI (because no one is making commercial media just for fun).

This is all stuff I am actively thinking about since it is impacting me right now, so I appreciate the discussion and would be happy to be wrong.