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AI weights are not open “source”

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Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#81

Post by staunton »

jrm4 wrote: post #64
version_five wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people are just upset because their local equilibrium has been disrupted and they think that means they lost a natural right. "You wouldn't look at a car and then remember what that looked like when someone asks you to draw another"

These are not bad arguments, but I don't think they're conclusive. I am a lawyer, and I could absolutely see this going the other way. "You can't make these machine things without literally feeding this copyrighted information into them, therefore they do contain a copy. You can see this by when they reproduce, e.g. the "getty images" deal." *this is not legal advice, dangit commenter person below

This is the first time I ever saw a comment including the text "I am a lawyer". Does that mean the comment technically contains "legal advice"?

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#82

Post by kfarr »

eigenket wrote: post #6
meindnoch wrote: post #2

According to whom? Weights are a type of program, which are interpreted by the neural network runtime. Same as Java bytecode interpreted by the JVM runtime.

x86 machine code is a type of program, which is interpreted by the processor, but distributing the binary of my program doesn't make it open source.

Bingo, did a ctrl+f to find binary as that seems like the closest analogy here.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#83

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

dragonwriter wrote: post #68
wahnfrieden wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IP itself violates a natural right (Yes the idea of rights is also unnatural and absent from visions such as anarchy)

Natural rights are a fiction to pretend that someone’s moral code is a privileged aspect of physical reality in a way every competing moral code is not.

That's going a bit far. They're just fictions that are privileged over certain other fictions--it's like how you can often cast magic missile in D&D but you can't usually cast expelliarmus, it comes down to which fiction we agree to inhabit.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#84

Post by [deleted] »

raincole wrote: post #56
throwaway98721 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it unestablished? Is a document not copyrightable based on its contents? Weights are just a different kind of a document.

> Is a document not copyrightable based on its contents? Yes, exactly. It's copyright 101. For example, if you write a random number generator, and print 10000 randon numbers in a document, it's not copyrightable. Even if you invented a specific random number generation algorithm, the document is still not copyrightable. Your code is copyrightable. Again it's just copyright 101. If any of above surprises you, maybe y…

[deleted]

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#85

Post by robomartin »

Can someone give me a legal answer to this?

People, from early school, all the way up to university, use copyrighted materials to learn various topics and obtain degrees. This trains our brains using the work of others.

The same is true as we navigate life. We learn various skills and subjects consuming the work of others.

And, yes, in the case of most people, we use that training to pursue various careers, obtain work and get paid for it.

How can there be a claim of infringement on the part of LLM's and not on every person who has ever used a book, website, article, video or publication to learn something?

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#86

Post by tedunangst »

jprete wrote: post #69
zitterbewegung wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I collect a set of copyright free data or public domain data would we conclude that the weights are also public domain?

No, that doesn’t follow at all. The argument is that either the training or the expression violated existing cooyrights through the making of unlicensed copies. It’s not based on open source licensing. Although OSS viral licensing may well apply if fair use is not a successful defense.

What copyright is violated by training on public domain data?

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#88

Post by AnimalMuppet »

realusername wrote: post #41
xg15 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Furthermore, if weights are copyrightable, wouldn't this make the issue of training data licenses even more urgent? IANAL, but if weights are IP, wouldn't they constitute a "derived work" of the training data?

That's also my understanding, either the weights are copyrightable and then all the models need explicit agreements for any work they include in it because models become derivatives or they are not copyrightable being just machine data (the most likely scenario in my opinion), they can't have it both ways.

"Transformative use".

The inputs could be copyrighted and the weights could be copyrighted if creating the weights from the inputs is (legally) regarded as a transformative use. And I think it could reasonably be considered to be transformative - the weights don't look anything like the input data.

Disclaimer: IANAL. So far as I know, no court has ruled on whether this qualifies as a transformative use. I take no position on how the courts will actually rule. I merely say that they could regard this as transformative use. (But see jerf's "creativity" argument for another hurdle that weights must pass to be copyrightable.)

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#89

Post by version_five »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #65
version_five wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people are just upset because their local equilibrium has been disrupted and they think that means they lost a natural right. "You wouldn't look at a car and then remember what that looked like when someone asks you to draw another"

IP itself violates a natural right (Yes the idea of rights is also unnatural and absent from visions such as anarchy)

Yeah I didn't even think that was controversial. I'd always been taught that copyright and patents exist to explicitly restrict what people can do by granting a monopoly to the owners in order to encourage invention and creative work.

Edit to add I'm not saying I agree with the justification or am trying to argue for it, only that the point above is commonly raised as the justification, implying that the intrusion on a person's rights is known and accepted.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#90

Post by bloak »

phantom784 wrote: post #72
realusername wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's also my understanding, either the weights are copyrightable and then all the models need explicit agreements for any work they include in it because models become derivatives or they are not copyrightable being just machine data (the most likely scenario in my opinion), they can't have it both ways.

I think there could be an argument that it's copyrightable but not a derivative work. If I read a few books about a subject as research, and then I write an article about the subject, it's my own copyright. The fact that I did research doesn't make it derivative of those books (correct me if I'm wrong, IANAL). Perhaps a model created from copyrighted material be treated in the same way?

> If I read a few books about a subject as research, and then I write an article about the subject, it's my own copyright.

Yes, because in that case you'd be the "author" doing "creative work".

> Perhaps a model created from copyrighted material be treated in the same way?

Who would be the author doing creative work in this case? The people who decided what training material to use? Perhaps, but it seems a stretch for the people who selected the training material to be authors but not the people who created the training material.

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