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AI weights are not open “source”

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Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#261

Post by hnfong »

radarsat1 wrote: post #200
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…

> Weights probably aren't copyrightable in the US. ... is understood to require human authorship. Are you arguing here that because the weights come from an optimization program, they are not "human authored"? If so I find that to be a strange assertion. If I'm working every day on my model and training algorithm to ensure it produces the best weights possible to solve my problem, I would be very surprised for someon…

In addition to what you mentioned, I'd like to add that photos are copyrightable by the photographer, who merely tweaked some "hyper-parameters" (exposure, ISO, aperture, whatever) and decided when and where to press a button. If such "minimal" amounts of authorship is considered sufficient, I won't be as confident as GP to claim that training an LLM, which requires orders of magnitudes more hyperparameters, labor and capital investment, to be uncopyrightable due to lack of human authorship involved.

It might end up uncopyrightable due to other reasons, but probably not this.

Btw, the phone directories are quite different -- they're just compilation of raw factual public domain information. The LLM weights are anything but. In fact one of the leading theories as to why LLMs are not copyrightable is that they infringe upon the copyrights of the source training materials. (I also don't want to guess whether that argument holds)

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#262

Post by hnfong »

mirekrusin wrote: post #199
photonerd wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be down to contract/terms of service. You’d be in breach of that, not copyright

But is it enforceable? Companies can put in contracts all kind of nonsense, it doesn't mean all of it is unconditionally enforceable, right? Ie. if somebody creates company that sells milkshakes and they say you can't use them to feed employees of competing milkshakes companies - it wouldn't fly, would it?

Perhaps you're thinking of the EULA kind of situation. EULAs are probably not enforceable because they require the user to agree to additional terms after the main sale of contract is complete. It's considered a one-sided agreement because the user doesn't get anything in return (the contract of sale of the software already grants the right to use the software).

For LLMs it really depends on the situation. If it's presented in a EULA scenario, where you already bought the rights to use the LLM and ClosedAI gave you the EULA with additional terms afterwards, then the logic above applies. But then everyone knows EULAs aren't very enforceable these days, and nobody buys packaged software any more, so this scenario is quite unlikely these days.

So, if the clause is just one of the many conditions in their main contract of service, of which you had ample opportunity to review before purchasing/agreeing to use their service, then as long as the terms are legal (eg. don't contradict some law), parties are generally free to agree to whatever they want in a contract, and courts will generally uphold those terms.

"can't use them to feed employees of competing milkshakes companies" is probably enforceable. Sounds silly, but I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't be upheld. Unless there's antitrust factors involved.

"Can't use output of their API to train competitive models" is most likely enforceable. Unless there's antitrust factors involved. These kinds of terms are pretty common too. Nobody seriously thinks they're unenforceable per se.

Of course there are practical barriers to enforce a contract -- the aggrieved party has to discover the breach, gather sufficient evidence, and file a lawsuit. As an average Joe individual, you're probably not worrying about getting sued by a company for trivial breaches of service agreements. Most likely the service provider will just cut the service instead of spending thousands of dollars tracking you down (and risk taking a PR hit for going after the little guy). But between businesses, the risks of getting sued by a competitor is real, and no sane lawyer would advise the business to ignore such contract terms.

(Btw, I am not a lawyer. I've studied these things a bit though.)

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#263

Post by hnfong »

pfdietz wrote: post #105
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.

Copyright is for things that are the result of human creativity. If the weights come from running an algorithm on a training set (that one does not have a copyright to) then how can the weights then be copyrightable? They might be a derivative work, but that just means they infringe copyright, not that they are copyrightable themselves.

Think about copyrights of photos.

A photo is presumed to be copyrightable. Even horrible photos taken by somebody without any aesthetic sense are presumed to be copyrightable. The argument (AFAIK) is that the photographer chooses the time, location, object, and tweaks various settings of the camera (exposure, aperture, etc.), and these choices are considered sufficient for a photo to be copyrightable.

How about LLMs?

The hyperparameters of LLMs are hugely important in training LLMs, as is the choice of source training data. To me the "degrees of freedom" (and hence room for "creativity") in training LLMs are larger than that of a photographer taking a photo. And as of today, training a good LLM is probably objectively harder than taking a good photo, even if we forget about hardware costs for a moment.

It's easy to convince judges and juries that copying phone numbers into a phone book doesn't require human creativity. But we're talking about the most bleeding edge tech companies producing a bleeding edge new product here. I think it's going to be really hard to convince judges and juries that making this new shiny thing doesn't require human creativity. Maybe in say 20 years when even a 10 year old can train a LLM the situation might change, but as of today, quite unlikely IMHO.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#264

Post by hnfong »

wheelie_boy wrote: post #204
famouswaffles wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ensuring a model never outputs copyrighted content is unimportant and tangential. It's irrelevant. You don't look for a way to make humans output no copyrighted content, you address each time they do case by case. A model training being rendered fair use doesn't mean any of its output can be used for whatever regardless.

> you address each time they do case by case. That's what I listed as #1 - evaluate each individual output of the model to see if it violates copyright.

I think when GP says "address each time case by case", they mean "you sue them when they infringe", instead of "this human has an illegal brain because it remembers Taylor Swift's songs".

PS: your "#1" is really hard to do and I'd guess it is infeasible. Even Google (esp. Youtube) with their vast data capabilities, often gets it wrong.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#265

Post by justinjlynn »

Retric wrote: post #258
justinjlynn wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The output of a compiler (i.e. A translation program) is created via a prompt (the source code). The output object code is very much copyrighted. People keyword stuff their source code all the time (pragmas) in order to influence the generated output. Why does that object code deserve copyright protection except when the compiler is an AI model (i.e. A translation program)? Compilers use genetic algorithms and weight…

Multiple independently created compilers can directly translate source code to unoptimized machine code that works in a completely straightforward fashion based on the definition of the language. There’s a great deal of complexity involved in creating more optimized output, but the goal is to have functionally equivalent programs. There’s no way to map DALLE prompts into any kind of obvious picture from the input. Ev…

There is, the input is the description of the image so produced plus the hidden elements and parameters (randomness, etc) that users often don't see - with these there is a deterministic input to output relationship. The fitness of the model is in how closely the output matches what we expect to see from them given the inputs we give. That's the point of them. Models are compilers. The distinction is really only in the complexity and ambiguity of the language specifications they implement - not in any fundamental aspect of their function. There isn't a single person alive who understands how a non-trivial compiler works in its entirety, just as nobody really knows how LLMs work yet. That's not the point.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#266

Post by zitterbewegung »

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.

So it doesn't follow the logic that the output of a computer program can be copyrighted if the input can ? It must not be a transformative work?

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#267

Post by Retric »

justinjlynn wrote: post #265
Retric wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple independently created compilers can directly translate source code to unoptimized machine code that works in a completely straightforward fashion based on the definition of the language. There’s a great deal of complexity involved in creating more optimized output, but the goal is to have functionally equivalent programs. There’s no way to map DALLE prompts into any kind of obvious picture from the input. Ev…

There is, the input is the description of the image so produced plus the hidden elements and parameters (randomness, etc) that users often don't see - with these there is a deterministic input to output relationship. The fitness of the model is in how closely the output matches what we expect to see from them given the inputs we give. That's the point of them. Models are compilers. The distinction is really only in t…

That’s not “independently created” you’re suggesting reimplementing the output of a process not from first principles but from the output of the process. I can make a compiler in a programming language without it being a derivative work of any other compiler.

Further, people have programmed in languages before any compilers where created which worked after the compilers where created.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#268

Post by wizzwizz4 »

chottocharaii wrote: post #240
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then while the original image would be copyrightable the resulting derivative output would not. Excellent! I'll put the Inheritance Cycle through a synonymiser, and have a copyright-free (if somewhat degraded) version. Take that, Christopher Paolini! … wait. What you say might well be correct: the law is often foolish. But I'd imagine the creativity-free derivative work still counts as a derivative work of the orig…

Yes it'd be a derivative work owned by Paolini. Paolini would have copyright to the derivative work, to the extent that he has rights over derivative material. However, the prompter would have nothing

If I write a poem and put it into Stable Diffusion, how is what is produced not a derivative work of my poem? We can argue that it's a derivative work of many other things, but that doesn't make it not a derivative work of the poem.

One way it might not be is if Stable Diffusion is seem more like a hash algorithm than a synonymiser. But I don't see why it should, because there's a meaningful correspondence between the input and the output of the system.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#269

Post by justinjlynn »

Retric wrote: post #267
justinjlynn wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is, the input is the description of the image so produced plus the hidden elements and parameters (randomness, etc) that users often don't see - with these there is a deterministic input to output relationship. The fitness of the model is in how closely the output matches what we expect to see from them given the inputs we give. That's the point of them. Models are compilers. The distinction is really only in t…

That’s not “independently created” you’re suggesting reimplementing the output of a process not from first principles but from the output of the process. I can make a compiler in a programming language without it being a derivative work of any other compiler. Further, people have programmed in languages before any compilers where created which worked after the compilers where created.

The CPU is a compiler for programs written in the machine instruction set architecture the CPU claims to implement which happens to output real world effects just as a compiler outputs program code. So, no, you can't.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#270

Post by Retric »

justinjlynn wrote: post #269
Retric wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not “independently created” you’re suggesting reimplementing the output of a process not from first principles but from the output of the process. I can make a compiler in a programming language without it being a derivative work of any other compiler. Further, people have programmed in languages before any compilers where created which worked after the compilers where created.

The CPU is a compiler for programs written in the machine instruction set architecture the CPU claims to implement which happens to output real world effects just as a compiler outputs program code. So, no, you can't.

No all CPU’s aren’t a compiler. Words have meanings and you used them incorrectly.

Early CPU’s didn’t compile anything they directly executed the instruction pipeline.

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