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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

#631

Post by kitanata »

rockemsockem wrote: post #575
kitanata wrote: post #511

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 probl…

You seem to be very confident that you know exactly how the law is going to be interpreted in this case. If I were you I'd moderate that confidence a bit to cover the possibility that you are not in fact the top legal scholar you seem to think you are. I could see this go either way. There's the argument you put forth, and then there's the argument that a text to image model is a transformative work. You can use copy…

When AI spits out verbatim the works of an author which it is trained on, that is not transformational, that is plagiarism. Whether it is done by an AI or a human is immaterial. Now we can argue over hundreds of hypothetical situations where AI does produce transformational work that isn’t a derivative, and we would agree that AI can and often does produce transformational work, but that is not what we are arguing over today. We are talking about the cases where AI isn’t transformational and where it is producing derivative works. To claim that AIs never produce derivative works or that all output from an AI is only transformative is foolish when we have countless counter examples popping up every other day.

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

#632

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#633

Post by snickerbockers »

kdnvk wrote: post #627
snickerbockers wrote: post #171

I'd be far more amenable to corporations training their AI on my content of those exact same corporations hadn't spent the last two decades aggressively defending their own IP with DRM and multi-million dollar lawsuits. So they can go fuck themselves, or alternatively they can make their super advanced AI reproduce my copyright statement and license every time it copies my code. Which shouldn't be difficult at all.

Which corporations are you referring to?

mostly Microsoft but i'm sure there's plenty of hypocrisy coming from the others too.

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

#634

Post by snickerbockers »

nhchris wrote: post #545
snickerbockers wrote: post #171

I'd be far more amenable to corporations training their AI on my content of those exact same corporations hadn't spent the last two decades aggressively defending their own IP with DRM and multi-million dollar lawsuits. So they can go fuck themselves, or alternatively they can make their super advanced AI reproduce my copyright statement and license every time it copies my code. Which shouldn't be difficult at all.

Your stance, if it becomes law, guarantees that only the giant corporations you hate will be able to negotiate licenses to train their AI. It guarantees that libre AI tools will be left far behind. Is that what you want?

i think it's arrogant and selfish to assume that everybody has a stake in AI research. i want the license that the software i create (which has nothing to do with AI) to be obeyed.

anyways, there's a lot of ways that AI researchers could engage with IP owners to come up with a fair way to use their work, but nobody's making that effort. If my content is part of an AI's training set (and especially if that AI has a tendency to output excerpts of its own training set verbatim, as github's copilot has been shown to do) then it's not unreasonable to set terms and conditions, which could restrict how the content is used for training and what sort of compensation (if any) I deserve.

I'm of the opinion that it's time for new versions of GPL and CC licenses to be created which will enumerate how content can be used for AI training.

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

#635

Post by jonkho »

dahart wrote: post #625
jonkho wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While it’s true that knives and guns have both legal and illegal uses, it’s another straw man in this context, irrelevant to both neural networks and copyright law. In the case of neural networks, you’re distributing the copied material along with the tool, in the form of network weights, thus breaking the law by distribution whenever the network can reproduce significant portions of any of its individual training sa…

> That statement is incorrect, the logic is flawed. Just because a tool has both legal and illegal uses does not necessarily have any bearing whatsoever on whether the tool’s distribution is legal. Tools that are illegal to distribute can have legal uses, and that does not make them legal to distribute.

Making statements and assuming the truth without reason nor evidence nor examples to back it up. Logical fallacy of begging the question. You have also not reasoned how freely available information is “illegal” to read/index/store amongst other things.

Not here to win you over. The audience can see how weak your position is. My last response here.

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

#636

Post by happymellon »

Panoramix wrote: post #281
happymellon wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gets called plagiarism, and there are lots of lawsuits preventing this.

It's not plagiarism at all. The AI is trained on 5 billion images yet it stores only 4gb of data. Thus it is impossible that it stores the actual work. For any image that the AI generates, you can't point to any image in the training data that the image is derived from.

Why are you talking about AI?

This was about the humans consuming other people's content.

> Humans are constantly ingesting gobs of "copyrighted" insights that they eventually remix into their own creations without necessarily reimbursing the original source(s) of their creativity.

If humans make stuff that is too close to someone else's source materials then it is considered plagiarism and not "inspired by".

> For any image that the AI generates, you can't point to any image in the training data that the image is derived from.

Why can't you point to the Getty Images watermark that it is quite happy to reproduce? Isn't that surely evidence that it doesn't actually understand what it is reproducing?

> The AI is trained on 5 billion images yet it stores only 4gb of data. Thus it is impossible that it stores the actual work.

I have also seen billions of images, therefore I cannot be actually store the real images in my head and thus nothing I paint could ever be considered plagiarism. That's brilliant, I think there are a few law firms defending artists who would be looking to hire you.

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

#637

Post by rickydroll »

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…

> If you believe AI can create and transform ideas, then you need lobby for the law to recognise that ability, but right now, only natural humans have that ability according to the law

My experience with ML tools like co-pilot is why I reject copyright claims on ML systems. there are a tool that generated original work based on my instructions not unlike a paintbrush, photoshop, or a CNC machine. My instructions were based on my exposure to copyrighted works.

I use co-pilot as an accessibility device enabling me to write code again. like with speech recognition co-pilot is a force multiplier IF you change how you work. If you keep using the habits formed by typing, you will get shit results.

The end result of the shift in how I work is now I know how to tell co-pilot how to write code in my style. My co-pilot generated code is no less my code than what I generate by hand. Co-pilot acts as an extension of my brain, not my fingers.

Is my co-pilot generated code copyrightable? I say yes because it is the result of this human's creation and instruction.

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

#638

Post by rickydroll »

jcelerier wrote: post #530
readams wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

and this ruling will prove to be a disaster for music creation as there will be fewer copyright free spaces for music as time goes on.

a similar ruling will also be a disaster for software as our tools of expression are very restricted. code is based on boolean algebra and predicate calculus, practice guides like design patterns and books teaching algorithms and data structures.

there are lots of ways to write bad code and only a few for good, correct code. Recognizing this led me to replicating known working code, code I had created, for multiple employers. so who's copyright did I intentionally violate?

I think we are attacking the wrong problem WRT ML and copyright. to me, ML shows the foundation on which copyright is built is a lie. we should use ML to break copyright for code.

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

#639

Post by yosame »

_ph_ wrote: post #232
wolframhempel wrote: post #209

I think the underlying question is one of "degrees of derivation". There's a famous Carl Sagan quote: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe” which hints at the problem: Nothing is created in a vacuum. Let's compare what Stable Diffusion does with what Franz von Holzhausen, head of design at Tesla, does. Franz didn't come into existence out of nothing and knew how to design…

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 guess the question is, what exactly is "true learning" and why is that impossible for a machine to achieve?

Keep in mind, we don't know how humans learn either (on a neurological level). It might end up being that we stumbled onto the same general idea, using matrices and linear algebra instead of neurones, synapses and neurotransmitters.

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

#640

Post by yosame »

Groxx wrote: post #595
chii wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How much of that is going back to the copyright holders whose work their service derives value from ? how much of the earnings of the student of art goes to the textbook authors, paintings and learning materials he used to get to where he is today?

Derivative works are their own things (when sufficiently derivative). And AIs are not humans - using an algorithm does not automatically remove the copyright. See also "I uploaded a movie to youtube but it's upside down, why did it get taken down".

But that's because the movie is still recognisable. Using an algorithm doesn't automatically remove copyright, but if the algorithm transforms the data to a point where it can't be recognised as the original work, then it isn't breaking copyright.
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