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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

#691

Post by gitfan86 »

wwweston wrote: post #10
gitfan86 wrote: post #3

The idea that it is copyright infringement if you train a neural network on copyright data means Waymo, Bing, Google are all illegal. If you include any copyrighted information in your web crawler neural network or if your training data for your autonomous software includes pictures of billboards or t-shirts or anything in the real world that is copyrighted you are a copyright infringer.

If you're a rideshare or cab driver and you also happen to see / recognize billboards nobody is going to hassle you for storing those in your neural net or suggest law should do so. If you're a designer and you take "billboards or t-shirts or anything in the real world that is copyrighted" as stored in your head as the basis for something you're working on, you will need to consider ways in which your derivative work…

The creators of photoshop didn't build it intending that the output be used to create labels for counterfeit products. But that is what some people use it for.

The creators of stable diffusion didn't create it with the intent helping people infringe on copyrights either. But some people will use it for that purpose.

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

#692

Post by ForestCritter »

taylorius wrote: post #313
pvaldes wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? Or observe paintings? Or listen to music? The difference is that I buy books, pay for visiting museums and buy music in several formats, or pay it accepting to receive advertisement between songs. It Is expected that If I buy a book I will be allowed to read it without asking for a permission. What I don't do is copypasting paragraphs of other…

Presumably AI trainers aren't hacking into Amazon's servers to steal their copyrighted ebook files. All the data they use are publicly available to view by the AI, just as a human might view them. So I don't think your distinction is accurate. It think the question is to what degree are AI systems "inspired" by the content they are trained on, versus merely regurgitating it - to be honest, it's hard to draw a line be…

Getty and shutterstock images are watermarked and copyrighted as to not being reproduced, so , no, they are not confining themselves to copyright. Also, take 'AI' that is used currently to sell art on t-shirts for example, if you specify yellow eyes, it will show you examples of yellow eyes and you choose the one you want. The AI did not produce those samples. The AI did not learn to make pictures of yellow eyes. The AI produced samples of yellow eyes from it's repository of collected images that it did not make itself nor ask permission to use nor pay for.

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

#693

Post by ForestCritter »

If it were a question of learning...When you ask AI art programs for a sunset, AI does not produce a sunset, it pulls imagery from its data bank. It may manipulate it, filter it, add to it, but the image itself was created by somebody, whether by hand or by photography or software. AI is learning to pull imagery, manipulate and collage it, not create it. If the AI companies contented themselves with supplying there own imagery to manipulate I would not mind, but stealing from any artist that has ever had their art on a web page is really not ok. AI is not learning to paint or draw like 'so and so', AI is taking existing created imagery and regurgitating it. If you feel comfortable stealing from original content creators...

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

#694

Post by chii »

kube-system wrote: post #687
chii wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how is it different than selling a zip file containing millions of copyrighted works so you're saying that the digits of pi is violating copyright then?

Copyright law hinges on human element of the actions taking place, not on mathematical technicality. The digits of pi are not creative human expression, nor are they derived from human expression, they're a factual mathematical discovery. They can neither infringe on copyright, nor are they subject to it themselves.

So what differentiates the matrix of numbers in the AI model, vs digits of pi?

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

#695

Post by dTal »

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...

Important distinction - these lawsuits are about copying the "style" of a single song, not a musician's entire output.

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

#696

Post by anankaie »

usrbinbash wrote: post #689
crote wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, but can you prove that? I have a 1.9 GB mp4 file on my harddrive. It contains 2 hours and 15 minutes of 1080p video data at 24 fps. Assuming it was generated from 4096x2160 16-bit color depth source material, the "training data" was 10.32 TB. I bet I could even get a similar size reduction as LAION-2b if I recompressed it to 720p. Could I not also claim that I created an advanced AI model, which did not copy bu…

> Could I not also claim that I created an advanced AI model, which did not copy but learned patterns in the dataset? Such patterns would enable the video file to decode into a multitude of pictures not originally in the training data. Obviously, a video file cannot do that...it's just compressed data. Generative models however can generate things that are not in its training set. And of course, there is a fundamenta…

To expand a bit on this:

Relying solely "uncompressed" size does not a really good metric make (this is analogous to the raw input size of the LAION dataset): one could make a reasonable argument that there are not billions (1) of image-pairs that are effectively identical up to a minute shift. I would posit the correct basis would be the Shannon entropy of the "best fit" ordering (minimize inter-frame diff), versus the lossy-compressed video, and a similar "best fit" ordering for the LAION dataset vs. the model.

My suspicion is that one will find that the relative number of "smooth transition" pairs in LAION viz the whole will be very different from the video.

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(1) - Napkin math: There are about 194400 frames, so ~37 billion (37791165600) frame-pairs. Assuming you have runs of about 1 second between hard cuts throughout, so an incidence rate of 1/24 for non-smooth transitions, gives us about ~36 billion "smooth transition" frame-pairs. I think it is safe to assume "on the order of" 1 billion, then. This ignores long "action" scenes with significant variance in images throughout, but also ignores longer-than-1-second slower scenes, hence the order-of-magnitude shrink in the assumption as buffer.

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

#697

Post by Krasnol »

greysphere wrote: post #164
wvenable wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you describe for music is already outrageous -- why do you think that needs to be extended to everything? https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxepzw/musicians-algorithmic...

It takes work to create/identify/classify information, both in the economic and physics sense. That work should be allowed the same protections we do other forms of work. Your example is one where nearly no work was done, thus it doesn't deserve much value. "Let a = the set of all songs" doesn't help me find new songs I like. A songwriter does that work. Another artist that takes and uses and resells that work (witho…

> Your example is one where nearly no work was done, thus it doesn't deserve much value

You are aware that there is very expensive art out there where the artist did not much work. Like painting a canvas in one colour or throwing an item in the corner of a museum.

According to you, that would not deserve much value but it does have a lot value in reality.

In fact "value" is what somebody else gives to the piece of art.

A prompted AI artwork made by me may have more value to me than all the art in the Louvre.

The discussion here continues to turn around copies when it's not a copy those algorithms generate.

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

#698

Post by taylorius »

CBarkleyU wrote: post #686
taylorius wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? T…

> But the AI is (supposedly) not making a copy of your painting. You are mixing up the two things that I've mentioned in my original comment. You have to differentiate between creating a copy and creating a derivative work. Both of those things matter, when talking about AI, but the former is way more cut clear. >The question is - to what extent does the exact image of your painting remain within the AI's data matric…

I see what you're saying, though could you not say the same thing about the browser's internet cache? That copies the file from it's original server, to the user's local machine in order to display it efficiently.

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

#699

Post by chii »

taylorius wrote: post #698
CBarkleyU wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the AI is (supposedly) not making a copy of your painting. You are mixing up the two things that I've mentioned in my original comment. You have to differentiate between creating a copy and creating a derivative work. Both of those things matter, when talking about AI, but the former is way more cut clear. >The question is - to what extent does the exact image of your painting remain within the AI's data matric…

I see what you're saying, though could you not say the same thing about the browser's internet cache? That copies the file from it's original server, to the user's local machine in order to display it efficiently.

The poster is wrong about what constitutes a copy (for the purposes of distribution). The temporary copy that resides in your browser's memory, or local caches, aren't considered violations unless they are publicly accessible.

I would put the same criteria to the copy made for the purpose of AI training. As long as you have the right to view the image, you would also have the right to ingest that image using an algorithm.

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

#700

Post by ForestCritter »

smallerfish wrote: post #331
luxuryballs wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it much different from a search index? it’s just a new interface to get at some info, rather than Google and Firefox, it already pre-browsed the web for you, and is displaying back the content. If the end user gleans some actual copyrighted work from the search they still need permission to use it, but it’s also likely it’s just a derivative, or the end user is just reading an example and learning from it at c…

It's not displaying back the "content". It's training a model with statistics based on the writing that was either paid for by a site publisher in the hope of earning ad revenue, or contributed to the community for free. If a model was to add attributions to each of its answers, then perhaps the search engine analogy would hold. But, they don't (and right now, to my understanding, can't.)

The AI art models are scraping imagery made by human effort and skill and then more humans label and tag it so it can be indexed, ( because you can show a computer an image all day long and it still won't 'learn' what it is unless you tag it) and then another human puts in their wishlist of art they want (without any cost or effort to learn skill) and the 'AI' displays back a collage of the content from the wishlist. And then presto all sorts of merchandise are available with this art taken without permission from the people that made it. People do the physical action of creating imagery, AI indexes it.
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