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AI weights are not open “source”

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Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#121

Post by chongli »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #116
horsawlarway wrote: post #109

If anything - this entire conversation just highlights (Over and Over and Over and Over again) how absolutely bonkers abusive our current copyright laws are. The vast majority of small individuals are compelled by contract to surrender their rights to large corporations. Those large corporations then abuse the ever loving fuck out of those rights. The express intent of copyright is now a sad joke. Personally - I'm pr…

There is also the whole patent / copyright trolling issue too. The fact that $BIG_CORP can hire armies of lawyers to freeze competitors and beat them to market by filing frivolous lawsuits is yet another example of insanity in the whole system.

I recently watched the documentary Fire in the Blood (2013) [1] about the use, by big pharma, of patents and WIPO to obstruct access to affordable antiretrovirals (ARVs) in Africa during the worst years of the AIDS epidemic, leading to over ten million deaths. All of this when the African market for these medications represented less than 1% of the total market, in dollars. It’s absolutely infuriating!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_in_the_Blood_(2013_film)

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#122

Post by [deleted] »

jrm4 wrote: post #43
ndriscoll wrote: post #33

The complexity described seems to be resting on the unestablished idea that weights are copyrightable in the first place. If they're not, then presumably "available weights", "ethical weights", and "open weights" are all the same: open weights. Either your weights are under NDA and presumably considered to be a trade secret, or they are public, and the words in your "license" mean absolutely nothing? That seems like…

Exactly. A lot of the difficulty here is how they skip is the hugely important issue: An entirely reasonable, if not fully tested, statement is the following: Every single one of these AI weight things itself is a result of unencumbered, massive, law-breaking, right-violating copyright infringement -- accordingly, it's extremely difficult to say anything morally justifiable or authoritative about anyone elses "rights…

[deleted]

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#123

Post by hcks »

jrm4 wrote: post #43
ndriscoll wrote: post #33

The complexity described seems to be resting on the unestablished idea that weights are copyrightable in the first place. If they're not, then presumably "available weights", "ethical weights", and "open weights" are all the same: open weights. Either your weights are under NDA and presumably considered to be a trade secret, or they are public, and the words in your "license" mean absolutely nothing? That seems like…

Exactly. A lot of the difficulty here is how they skip is the hugely important issue: An entirely reasonable, if not fully tested, statement is the following: Every single one of these AI weight things itself is a result of unencumbered, massive, law-breaking, right-violating copyright infringement -- accordingly, it's extremely difficult to say anything morally justifiable or authoritative about anyone elses "rights…

> is a result of unencumbered, massive, law-breaking, right-violating copyright infringement

Is there an official ruling? Or is it just a Reddit-style over exaggeration?

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#124

Post by drdaeman »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #116
horsawlarway wrote: post #109

If anything - this entire conversation just highlights (Over and Over and Over and Over again) how absolutely bonkers abusive our current copyright laws are. The vast majority of small individuals are compelled by contract to surrender their rights to large corporations. Those large corporations then abuse the ever loving fuck out of those rights. The express intent of copyright is now a sad joke. Personally - I'm pr…

There is also the whole patent / copyright trolling issue too. The fact that $BIG_CORP can hire armies of lawyers to freeze competitors and beat them to market by filing frivolous lawsuits is yet another example of insanity in the whole system.

It's a problem with legal system (not unique to any specific country, mind you, the problem is global), not patent or copyright system specifically. It grew incredible amounts of complexity so pro se became a sad joke in all but simplest cases, and there's no incentive to fix it - quite the opposite, everyone in the system is all for keeping the status quo, because it generates money.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#125

Post by floomk »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #78
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.

There is also a (IMO less likely, but still conceivable) scenario where weights ARE copyrightable, but represent fair use of the training data on grounds of being "sufficiently transformative".

Sadly this seems to be the most likely considering how the US is ran

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#126

Post by floomk »

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?

That's because you are human and have rights that a computer program doesn't

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#127

Post by pulvinar »

svachalek wrote: post #100
visarga wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is a result of unencumbered, massive, law-breaking, right-violating copyright infringement Why? Copyright covers expression not information, AIs can learn information from any source regardless of copyright. They should just not regurgitate copyrighted content, that's all. And much of what organic content is online is common knowledge, thus can't be copyright-controlled.

When the web was young, there was a lot of information considered "public" like criminal record, marriage records, birth certificates, property records, etc. But those were still fairly veiled because of the amount of effort required to see them. Suddenly these were getting blasted all over the internet because now that was an easy thing to do, and everyone had to rethink what "public" meant. I suspect we're going to…

Not sure about criminal records, but the other records are generally still public. Not blasted all over, but there if you know where to look.

Not that we really had all that much privacy in the past, as anyone who's browsed old newspapers knows.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#128

Post by slowmovintarget »

jstanley wrote: post #17
slowmovintarget wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weights are data, not a type of program. A computer program is a set of instructions that may be executed. Weights are values that may be loaded by a program, but are not a program in and of themselves.

It's a very difficult distinction to make. Would you consider a Python program to be data rather than program just because it is text input to the python interpreter instead of machine code for the CPU?

It is not at all a difficult distinction.

Weights are literally numbers computed as output. They are not instructions. The semantics of those numbers even when emplaced (loaded) in an artificial neural net is such that they do not execute. They are not instructions. LLM engines and diffusers perform searches where the weights are used to calculate additional output.

Is source code, like Python text, data? Yes. All code is data. But not all data are source code.

If I gave you a web request log, you would not assert it is a program. If I gave you a CSV file with time-series values from a sensor, you would not assert it is a program. If I hand you a database of contact information, you would not assert it is a program. Weight files are the equivalent of CSV files. They are are a dump of parameter values computed from training.

They are not a program.

The definition of computer program is well worn. So is the definition of source code, and the definition of parameters. Weights are parameters.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#129

Post by slowmovintarget »

graypegg wrote: post #18
slowmovintarget wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weights are data, not a type of program. A computer program is a set of instructions that may be executed. Weights are values that may be loaded by a program, but are not a program in and of themselves.

They’re not data though, they’re coefficients. They are the only thing that significantly differentiates one model from another. If I told you the economy can be accurately modelled by GDP(x) = Ax + B But I don’t define A And B for you because it’s proprietary, you haven’t learned anything other than what you can glean from the structure of the model itself (it’s linear, there’s only a single input etc) If most of th…

The nature of the data as proprietary or not, important or not, is not relevant.

Parameters, or actual arguments, are values; data. Not instructions.

Valuable data is still data. It's significance doesn't magically turn it into source code.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#130

Post by slowmovintarget »

programmarchy wrote: post #22
slowmovintarget wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weights are data, not a type of program. A computer program is a set of instructions that may be executed. Weights are values that may be loaded by a program, but are not a program in and of themselves.

This is a distinction without a difference. Code is data and data is code.

All source code is data. Not all data is source code. Data may be encoded, but that doesn't make it source code either.
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