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AI weights are not open “source”

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Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#211

Post by daniel-cussen »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #133
earleybird wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weights are data in the same way that instruction codes in memory is data.

Values for the variables do not the function make.

That's the least of it. In Lisp the distinction between code n data is blurred all the time. In F18 assembly i frequently have "double entendres" which are used as code or as literals depending on the entry point. I think at least once there was code and data in the same entry point. Assembly n Lisp are both homoiconic, after all. N verb at the end of the sentence, are you transliterating German, or a two-foot green Jedi master full of wisdom?

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#212

Post by londons_explore »

pmoriarty wrote: post #97
londons_explore wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a race for which test case gets to the supreme court first really...

...and the Supreme Court could rule however it likes. It doesn't matter what anyone else says, or what any law says, what any lawyer or other judge says. They could be completely biased, could completely ignore everyone and everything else and rule however they want. I'm almost surprised they still bother to write any kind of "legal reasoning" in their ruling and don't simply focus on what the ruling is rather than w…

Supreme court precedent seems to impact a lot of decisions...

Plenty of companies who have legal teams will keep an eye on the legal landscape of court decisions, and use them to decide if our T&C's or contracts need rewriting, or if any precedent puts us at legal risk.

Sure - the supreme court could overthrow its precedent anytime, but until it does, a lot of people will act as if what they say is the law.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#214

Post by c7b »

Imho the weights are the real meat for most typical models, you can run with them and continue training them with your own code. It's not even guaranteed that the original code would be very useful for that.

But if you are going to make that distinction, for which you can make a case I think, shouldn't you include a third dimension, 'data'? The code alone is hardly useful if you want to rebuild the weights, but all it tells you is that they're loading their proprietary data and then using PyTorch to set up and train the model. You can't reproduce anything using just that. So the real equivalent of open source would be imho either open weights, or open data plus code plus weights (the latter are arguably redundant, but still practical to include). Given that the size of that repo will typically be gigantic, I think open weights is the case we should really be focusing on. I'd rather have a paper explaining the model together with the weights, rather than code that I can't run anyway, if I'm designing an algorithm to continue training the model.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#215

Post by sharcnick »

rpodraza wrote: post #175
bskap wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then it's a derivative work and copyright law covers that too.

And you're basing this theory on what exactly?

Copyright law & the definition of a "derivative work." See e.g. 17 USC §§ 101 and 106. See also https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#216

Post by makeitdouble »

dllthomas wrote: post #188
Animats wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The complexity described seems to be resting on the unestablished idea that weights are copyrightable in the first place. Yes. Weights probably aren't copyrightable in the US. See Feist vs. Rural Telephone, in which the Supreme Court ruled that telephone directories are not copyrightable. The copyright clause in the Constitution ("To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to…

> Outputs from LLMs, machine generated art, and machine generated music probably are not copyrightable either. I don't have a strong sense of whether this is reasonable (I see arguments both ways) but I do think it's pretty strongly at odds with how we treat photographs. There are a bunch of photos on my phone where I unquestionably own the copyright, despite putting in much less creativity than I did for some AI ima…

On photography, the argument was condensed into "who pushed the button". We saw it with the monkey auto-portrait copyright fight where copyright was not granted to the photographer, and other nature photography using photo traps where the copyright stuck with the human basically because they were the last operator of the camera.

The interesting part is, those controversial case are pretty recent when the art of photography is century(ies?) old now. I wouldn't expect super clear guidelines regarding AI art before a few decades of weird cases fought tooth and nails in court.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#217

Post by pravus »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #128
jstanley wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

> Weights are literally numbers computed as output. They are not instructions.

They are instructions if you consider the LLM system itself to be a kind of weird, indirect virtual machine. Each number can be mapped to a set of instructions that are executed. Even your CPU uses numbers (machine codes) to execute.

Join me in saying: ...code is data is code is data is code is data...

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#218

Post by comfypotato »

deepsun wrote: post #206
Animats wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The complexity described seems to be resting on the unestablished idea that weights are copyrightable in the first place. Yes. Weights probably aren't copyrightable in the US. See Feist vs. Rural Telephone, in which the Supreme Court ruled that telephone directories are not copyrightable. The copyright clause in the Constitution ("To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to…

> Outputs from LLMs, machine generated art, and machine generated music probably are not copyrightable either. Let me put a straw man, and try to find a middle point, when the copyright argument stops being applicable: 1. A painting was done by an artist. 2. On a computer. 3. With a help from an image processor software. 4. Using some advanced filters, like super-resolution, that utilize computer vision techniques. L…

The distinction, defining your straw man, is simply that the image itself is generated by the “commissioned artist” that is the AI.

Even non-generative-AI inside Photoshop only mutates images. Generative AI is the source of images.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#219

Post by version_five »

saynay wrote: post #180
m4nu3l wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can't make these machine things without literally feeding this copyrighted information into them, therefore they do contain a copy. They don't necessarily do. Think about that. You can take some copyrighted material and transform the information contained in it (for instance a fictional book). You can then write a summary. The summary contains information that was present in the original but it has been transfo…

More over, you are clearly not in violation of copyright if you are talking about statistics about the material. In your example, printing out a "there were 7000 instances of the word 'the'" is certainly not a violation. A ML model is just a huge pile of these statistics. However, saying "the first word of the book is 'The'" would not be a violation, while repeating that for every word in the book, as a whole, would…

I agree with you but I think it's important to have some nuance. Imagine I build a statistical model for 10-word sequences (10-grams) and then I trained it on a single book. I probably could pick some starting words and get most of the book back from the "statistics" I compiled. If I trained the same model on a giant dataset, the one book would just contribute to the stats.

All that to say, the models have potential to memorize, but they don't, and if they do it's an undesirable failure mode, not some deliberate copying.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#220

Post by drdeca »

comfypotato wrote: post #218
deepsun wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Outputs from LLMs, machine generated art, and machine generated music probably are not copyrightable either. Let me put a straw man, and try to find a middle point, when the copyright argument stops being applicable: 1. A painting was done by an artist. 2. On a computer. 3. With a help from an image processor software. 4. Using some advanced filters, like super-resolution, that utilize computer vision techniques. L…

The distinction, defining your straw man, is simply that the image itself is generated by the “commissioned artist” that is the AI. Even non-generative-AI inside Photoshop only mutates images. Generative AI is the source of images.

Is it though? What of the e.g. choice of prompt, guidance scale, maybe a specification of a pose, etc.?

Or, is the distinction you are making based on there being an image before the model is used?

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