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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

#651

Post by dns_snek »

Panoramix wrote: post #586
dns_snek wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1) That only applies to images, and crucially 2) content on those websites is published under various licenses that often require attribution, payment, or stipulate non-commercial use.

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

#652

Post by ehnto »

welshwelsh wrote: post #622
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…

>if we undermine paid creators I'm not even slightly concerned about that. 1. Art is better when it's not paid. Real artists have day jobs that pay the bills and they create art to express their ideas, not to make money. 2. Paid art isn't going away, it will just change. Certain skillsets will be forgotten, like how landscape painting was replaced by photography. But talented artists will leverage AI tools to create…

> Art is better when it's not paid. Real artists have day jobs that pay the bills and they create art to express their ideas, not to make money.

Trying to define who "real" artists are is a folly for the ages. It is the dream of many artists that they get paid for their art, and many achieve it. The starving artist is a mythos of pain and suffering, a good story but hardly good for art. Some of the best composers from history were paid, some of the most influential artists were from wealthy families. They were able to focus on their work without fear of money and because of this they could excel in techique and execution, which allowed them to produce some of the highest forms of their art in history.

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

#653

Post by sensanaty »

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…

I can't quite place why I despise this line of reasoning/argument, but boy do I absolutely despise this line of reasoning.

Are we really going to play devil's advocate so much that we consider these early day A"I" tools as equivalent to humans? I personally have absolutely 0 qualms about treating humans and these ML tools as completely separate entities governed by completely different laws. AI SHOULD be heavily restricted, we're already headed not towards any sort of apocalyptic singularity, but a singularity of pure, endless spam spewing forth from every orifice of the internet and elsewhere.

If these megacorps behind this AI push want it to succeed, then they should be paying for access to the images/texts/music/videos/whatever they're trying to harvest en masse. I couldn't care less if an AI learns the same way a human does or any other anthropomorphising the AI crowd want to gaslight everyoen with.

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

#654

Post by sinity »

It's not in any danger, unless US is truly r-d. And if so, if EU somehow isn't that stupid, they won't reverse rules they already made about data mining & scrapping. Which explicitly allow ML stuff. Also Japan - and they did it specifically to not hinder AI tech, few years ago.

If everyone is somehow this r-d, there's China also.

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

#655

Post by usrbinbash »

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.

I am not anthropomorphizing anything, because this is literally what happens. The model is taught, by having its predictions tested against examples, how images work.

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

#656

Post by usrbinbash »

foota wrote: post #587
usrbinbash wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The question isn't if a scaled up thing is the same, the question is if a legal thing scaled up suddenly becomes illegal for no other reason than being scaled up.

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

#657

Post by sinity »

kirse wrote: post #177
pavlov wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books?” I’m not able to read billions of books in less than an hour. Even if we agree that machine learning is like human learning, scale commonly matters in law.

I’m not able to read billions of books in less than an hour. I think you underestimate the sheer volume of data + conclusions the brain ingests and processes on a daily basis, primarily through unconscious experience.

GPT-3 is learning from ridiculously dense data through.

Also, about volume of data processed by the brain: https://gwern.net/Differences

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

#658

Post by sinity »

noobermin wrote: post #278
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…

This tired argument is very much like the "corporations are people" argument that convinces corporate lawyers and judges but literally no one else. Any lay person can tell a corporation is not a person, mostly because the power imbalance, the difference in their abilities and physical constraints, and while a lot of these arguments can be reasoned through the recognition of such is intuitive. Most people looking at A…

> "corporations are people" argument that convinces corporate lawyers and judges but literally no one else.

Ok, I just have to link this here; https://youtu.be/dKFunwOzEos?t=711

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

#659

Post by RandomLensman »

welshwelsh wrote: post #621
RandomLensman wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could an AI view you for free in a street or even through a window? Does that imply it can use that view data to create advertising using your modified likeness, for example? Just because you can view something for free doesn't mean you can use it anyway you want.

Yes, of course. It could even create advertising using my unmodified likeness, and that wouldn't be a problem. A person's appearance in public is public domain, you don't need permission to use it.

Definitely not simply the case in every jurisdiction.

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

#660

Post by BeFlatXIII »

okamiueru wrote: post #566
BeFlatXIII wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The music industry should be like visual arts, not the other way around. Do we want more inane lawsuits based on vague similarities?

No, no, I agree about the insane lawsuits for similar sounding music. The popular music is mostly regurgitated stuff anyways. But the equivalent here would be "Penny Lane as if composed by Michael Jackson and sung by Taylor Swift". My example is bad, because I stopped following popular music a decade or two ago. But replace the deceased artists with living ones. My point probably should be made clearer. You know how…

Thank you for articulating the split between the users of AI models and the owners of the models. I like using the models in the manner of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and from that perspective, all the arguments about artists’ moral rights are nothing more than regulatory mumbo-jumbo and sour grapes. However, I do strongly agree that there is something morally icky about companies such as “Open”AI and HuggingFace making bank off the training data they’ve scraped. That’s why I prefer Stable Diffusion and its clones, as it lets us run it locally without someone making money in a pay-per-prompt (or, worse, monthly subscription) model. Democratize AI to anyone with a strong enough computer or don’t do it at all.
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