Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI • Hacker News Board

Re: Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

#251

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 6:03 AM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #165

brookst wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not advocating copyrightable software, but it seems clear to me that if databases are copyrightable because they represent curation, then software must be too. Any line of code, probably not. But a program as a whole, sure. Otherwise I think you blow up music copyrights too, since a single note isn’t copyrightable and a song is just a bunch of individual notes. At some point, choosing, ordering, and organizing a coll…

"if databases are copyrightable because they represent curation, then software must be too." Circling back around to creative works, the process of making art is also one of curation, as had been amply demonstrated over 100 years ago by the Readymades of Marcel Duchamp.[1] The curation involved in prompt selection and selection of which AI-generated works/images to use should therefore be just as copyrightable as dat…

[deleted]

Re: Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

#252

Post by statop » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 6:06 AM UTC

visarga wrote: post #224

statop wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't AI, it's a glorified Xerox machine.

That form of AI has already been invented long ago, it's called simply Copy & Paste. GPT combines prompt, context and knowledge, it selects and adapts code. It even does problem solving: above average human rating on easy problems and 20% over humans on medium level problems. When did the xerox or parrot for that matter do that?

If you think copy and paste is artificial intelligence then there probably isn't much of a discussion to be had here.

Yes, very smart and talented people have released ground breaking and amazing tools leveraging massively trained ML models. The model is not problem solving or intelligent in any sense of the word (take it from oai: https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt)

"ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers..."

To be back on topic, I don't think some sweaty dude from the internet should be issued a copyright for typing "Minnie Mouse wearing a pikachu t-shirt!" into DALL-E and submitting the resulting image.

At the same time, I read a post like this one: https://andys.page/posts/how-to-draw and I have really no objection to copyright being assigned. I think the difference is the human authorship, and I think the Copyright Office has made a pretty good first swag.

Re: Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

#253

Post by News-Dog » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 6:06 AM UTC

telotortium wrote: post #121

basch wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the technology will decide the rhyming pattern, the words in each line, and the structure of the text. What if I generate it 50 times and cobble together a final product from the variants, choosing which line and word and rhyme I like from each sample? Where is the line between LLM and thesaurus/dictionary? The comic book the office rejected seems to me to have crossed a line of significant human editorial disc…

They allowed the comic book author to copyright the accompanying text and the overall arrangement of the images into a comic book, but not the images themselves.

Soup anyone?

  'Andy Warhol Copyright'

Re: Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

#254

Post by exodust » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 6:11 AM UTC

antibasilisk wrote: post #122

JCM9 wrote: post #53

So this effectively destroys any concept of AI digital art for sale. If there’s no way to protect it then there’s really nothing to own. It would be like trying to sell someone public domain content.

Digital art as a whole has already been made worthless by the creation of diffusion models, whether there is copyright on them really doesn't matter at that point, because pretty much any image that can be imagined is now trivial to produce in under a minute.

> pretty much any image that can be imagined is now trivial to produce

What? That's not true at all!

If you're talking about "art", most artists are fussy and want things exactly right. They will spend a long time tweaking the image, or combining different images, painting, processing, pixel-pushing to get the thing they imagined.

If you're talking about some random need for an image of a "horse with metal legs", and settle for whatever the AI spits out, and then call that "my valuable art", that's different.

Re: Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

#255

Post by pontifier » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 6:14 AM UTC

sgentle wrote: post #178

Waterluvian wrote: post #151

I would like the Copyright Office to delineate just how much effort is necessary for a work to possess “the traditional elements of authorship.” I type in MIDI instructions and play back a tune, but if I type in sentences it doesn’t count? Maybe they can measure entropy. Did you emit a sufficient amount of data to make the Music Box work, given the Copyright Office defined ratio? For every unit of data in your song,…

Here you go: https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-... 308.2 Creativity "A work of authorship must possess 'some minimal degree of creativity' to sustain a copyright claim. [...] '[T]he requisite level of creativity is extremely low.' Even a 'slight amount' of creative expression will suffice. 'The vast majority of works make the grade quite easily, as they possess some creative spark, 'no matte…

If I wave my camera around taking lots of pictures, and then find one that I really really like I can copyright it. If I generate a bunch of AI images and find one that I really really like, I think I should be able to copyright that too. In both, the creative spark comes from discerning what has value.

Re: Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

#256

Post by dotancohen » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 6:16 AM UTC

BarryMilo wrote: post #207

jxcole wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's possible that some generous person determines a sequence of prompts that generate, say novels, and then pipes these prompts into a program causing thousands or even millions of wholly varied novels to be generated in the public domain. I imagine this is what the OP meant.

I've been changing my mind a lot on AI these past few weeks. I don't think the price is what stops most people from reading books. People already have access to countless works they don't have time to read, adding a bunch of soulless ones to this seems like it won't change much.

As a (once avid) reader, the worrying part will be discovery. Why I was eight I could pick any book off the library shelf and it was interesting and enlightening. Today, the noise so outdrowns the signal that I have to rely on recommendations. Tomorrow, when both the books and the recommendations will be generated by bots outpacing human authors by orders of magnitude, I expect that quality new material will be impossible to find.

I pray that I am wrong.

Re: Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

#257

Post by dotancohen » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 6:19 AM UTC

techdragon wrote: post #246

FeepingCreature wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to explain: - provenance: the source or origin of something - providence: divine guidance.

Sometimes I think autocorrect needs a little divine guidance, it is remarkably bad at correcting anything to certain words I forget the spelling off, and sometimes it’s definitely got a bias in its “most likely word” and I’m not suggesting a prejudicial bias, just a bias that’s less than ideal for me, and it never seems to learn that i never use one word over the other spans just keeps suggesting the words I don’t wa…

I've caught my phone autocorrection replacing "you" with "U". I honestly believe that errors are intentionally introduced. Sometimes I even conjure up plausible-sounding theories as to why. "Engagement" is my current almost-plausible theory.

Re: Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

#258

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 6:26 AM UTC

RHSeeger wrote: post #227

EMIRELADERO wrote: post #3

> If a work's traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it. > For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the “traditional elements of authorship” are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user. Based on the Office's un…

I'm curious where the "line" is, though. If I do a web search for a term, I get various results. As I refine my search, the results get closer to what I want. Eventually, there comes a point where it's possible to recognize that there is "skill" associated with crafting a good web search. To some extent, the same is true of crafting what you tell the AI to generate for you; especially as AIs become more complex in wh…

[deleted]

Re: Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

#259

Post by 1attice » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 6:27 AM UTC

kromem wrote: post #169

1attice wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hadn't thought of that -- but yes, it very well might be the case. Let's say there's a 50% (extremely generous!) limit on AI contribution. An efficient company will operate close to that line, say, targeting a 49% AI contrib. (Remember how inexpensive AI contribution is in comparsion to human contribution. Market pressure will push people towards tenths of percentage points.) That means that Joey, your new intern,…

Something I've begun thinking about after playing with GPT-4 is that I could see within a year or so any of my new software development projects being a "no code" setup using comments to define functions and correct problem areas but leaving all actual code to the generative AI. In many ways software projects for years now have this issue. A decade ago when ruby on rails scaffolded out a project - is the result copyr…

> My value in software engineering isn't in typing up the loop, and less even in knowing that I'll need one. It's in knowing how to manage complexity across a broader cross integration of concerns. The way I'm doing that will change as technology advances, but it will still be some time before that part is automated too.

I think this is just normalcy bias on your part. The thing that GPT-4 does apparently works at most levels of complexity, certainly more than GPT-3.

It seems likely that, for sufficiently high N, GPT-N will enable your boss to, as you say, "manage complexity across a broad[er] cross integration of concerns".

There's nothing magical about "cross integration of concerns," any more than there was something magical about being able to use (say) `git rebase` correctly.

There is no reason to think that GPT-N won't be better at you for that, too.

Why would your boss pay you six figures when she can get the same deal for $20 a month?

Re: Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

#260

Post by techdragon » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 6:31 AM UTC

dotancohen wrote: post #257

techdragon wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I think autocorrect needs a little divine guidance, it is remarkably bad at correcting anything to certain words I forget the spelling off, and sometimes it’s definitely got a bias in its “most likely word” and I’m not suggesting a prejudicial bias, just a bias that’s less than ideal for me, and it never seems to learn that i never use one word over the other spans just keeps suggesting the words I don’t wa…

I've caught my phone autocorrection replacing "you" with "U". I honestly believe that errors are intentionally introduced. Sometimes I even conjure up plausible-sounding theories as to why. "Engagement" is my current almost-plausible theory.

I assumed there was learning heuristics in some layers of the software responsible for the autocorrect. But other than new words that turn up in my autocorrect that I know are new because they only entered common use or were coined recently, I generally just find the autocorrect to be stubbornly insistent on it’s likeliness ordering… or just utterly incompetent…

It’s really bad at the word, bureaucracy. It never suggests this word, no matter what combination of “beuro” “beauro” or anything else my brain might ineffectually grasp for when trying to remember the spelling. I can get it to suggest it as a possible replacement when I ask spellcheck to give me potentially correct words, but the layers of autocorrect that try to predict word even if it’s not spelled correctly, they are utterly unable to predict the word bureaucracy.