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Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

federalregister.gov

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Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#81

Post by ZoomerCretin »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #63
ZoomerCretin wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would copyrightability of AI generated work affect its profitability? Owning a copyright gives you the exclusive right to copy and sell a work. If no one owns the copyright for a work, no one has the _exclusive_ right to copy and sell that work.

Well, then an AI generated hollywood movie could just be copied and distributed for free.

I'd assume it would only apply to the parts generated by AI, and not the whole movie. But of course you'd have to rely on the studios telling you which parts are generated, if they tell you at all.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#82

Post by cj »

meowkit wrote: post #56
rickmode wrote: post #14

I believe we first need to answer the question of whether the copyright of the AI model’s source text or images affects the output. My opinion — and note I’m a software engineer, not a lawyer — is that an AI, being a statistical model and not generally intelligent, should not be allowed to disregard the copyright of its source material. This would, I think, require the AI’s creator to secure a license for all of its…

My opinion as a SWE who is dating a lawyer (joke, not a serious qualification but it does provide some insight): Generative models traverse and interpolate high dimensional state spaces. These state spaces are created from input data. I would argue people do the exact same thing - the first main difference is we can use novel inputs (e.g. we can use images or words to develop our music/temporal state spaces and vice…

I can appreciate how this line of thinking might be attractive.

But IMO the humanmachine comparison doesn't lend itself much credence. We shouldn't assume that just because a human is allowed to do something, a machine is automatically allowed to do the same thing, too. I think some care should be taken when considering if we allow machines to have the same privileges as humans.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#83

Post by [deleted] »

rickmode wrote: post #14

I believe we first need to answer the question of whether the copyright of the AI model’s source text or images affects the output. My opinion — and note I’m a software engineer, not a lawyer — is that an AI, being a statistical model and not generally intelligent, should not be allowed to disregard the copyright of its source material. This would, I think, require the AI’s creator to secure a license for all of its…

[deleted]

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#84

Post by kevinmchugh »

gnopgnip wrote: post #31
rickmode wrote: post #14

I believe we first need to answer the question of whether the copyright of the AI model’s source text or images affects the output. My opinion — and note I’m a software engineer, not a lawyer — is that an AI, being a statistical model and not generally intelligent, should not be allowed to disregard the copyright of its source material. This would, I think, require the AI’s creator to secure a license for all of its…

Is there any precedent where copyright was focused on the input rather than the final published work?

Remixes, generally?

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#85

Post by paxys »

rickmode wrote: post #14

I believe we first need to answer the question of whether the copyright of the AI model’s source text or images affects the output. My opinion — and note I’m a software engineer, not a lawyer — is that an AI, being a statistical model and not generally intelligent, should not be allowed to disregard the copyright of its source material. This would, I think, require the AI’s creator to secure a license for all of its…

> is that an AI, being a statistical model and not generally intelligent, should not be allowed to disregard the copyright of its source material

But then you are just shifting the problem forward by an inch. What happens when tomorrow someone declares that their model is generally intelligent and is therefore allowed to disregard copyright when training just like a person can?

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#86

Post by shagie »

jj999 wrote: post #60
carom wrote: post #32

There are three copyright issues here; datasets, model weights, and model outputs. Dataset copyright is pretty well defined and things can often be used under fair use. Fair use decisions are done with a four prong test and really decided by the courts on a case-by-case basis. Model weights cannot currently be copyrighted. They are the output of a mechanical process over the dataset. However, software faced a similar…

Who do you think should hold the copyright on the model weights, the copyright holders of the individual works comprising the dataset or the ones who assembled the dataset?

I don't think that model weights are copyrightable.

They're a mathematical transformation of the source material.

As a trivial example, applying gray = .299 r + .587 g + .114 b to a pixel is also a mathematical transformation but it doesn't create a new copyright.

And thus, the model is a mathematical transformation and a derivative work of its source material.

However I am also of the opinion that the resulting model is sufficiently transformative and fills a different purpose than the source material and so the model is not infringing.

From the Perfect 10 case against Google and Amazon:

> …We conclude that the significantly transformative nature of Google's search engine, particularly in light of its public benefit, outweighs Google's superseding and commercial uses of the thumbnails in this case. … We are also mindful of the Supreme Court's direction that "the more transformative the new work, the less will be the significance of other factors, like commercialism, that may weigh against a finding of fair use."

That was dealing with thumbnails being used in search and it was found that thumbnails being used for search was sufficiently transformative and applied to a different purpose that Google's use didn't infringe.

I believe that a model is even more transformative given that bar.

That doesn't mean that the output of the model isn't infringing, but that's a human with agency creating and publishing that output which is a different artifact to be considered than the model weights.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#87

Post by porknChps »

hakfoo wrote: post #39
vouaobrasil wrote: post #18

We as a society have a relatively healthy setup for people to create art and content. Sure there are problems, but on the whole it mostly works. What AI will do is destroy that by removing the profitability of creating that content. Although generative AI operates on a similar principle to a human being exposed to a large number of artworks, it does so at a speed blindingly faster, enabling it to outcompete humans at…

I don't want to see AI copyright, but that's more an extension of not wanting to see any copyright. A lot of it comes down to creativity as a process, or as a product. It feels like many people tend to view creativity-- especially capital-A Art-- as a process-- it should be arduous and require skill and be an exclusive club. I've seen people be very hostile to pre-AI digital technology because it lowers the bar-- wit…

Yeah changes to copyright are the solution. Not unenforceable rules around AI.

Local LLMs are going to make enforcement impossible.

Unless corporations and government collude to lockdown the frame buffer, a user at home can build a corpus from their own gameplay footage and train an AI to make new environments for those entities (working on such a setup now, modeling AI vectors with an open source engine’s geometry primitives and shader language).

The output space for visual content is much smaller than language which has to understand context.

Visual outputs we find acceptable for forming spatial understanding are much more limited. There’s only so much nuance to geometry and color gradient to be layered on before a virtual space is an unintuitive psychedelic miasma.

People have favorites and will use them to extend them.

The Constitution offers an opening for copyright change. It protects works “for a limited time”. Anything encumbered by copyright for an average person entire life span was effectively copyrighted forever.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#88

Post by quickthrower2 »

idle_zealot wrote: post #23
rickmode wrote: post #14

I believe we first need to answer the question of whether the copyright of the AI model’s source text or images affects the output. My opinion — and note I’m a software engineer, not a lawyer — is that an AI, being a statistical model and not generally intelligent, should not be allowed to disregard the copyright of its source material. This would, I think, require the AI’s creator to secure a license for all of its…

Is intelligence really a factor here? Say I use the same training set as one of these LLMs, copyright protected text and all, and use it to derive a compression algorithm that uses very little space to store tokens and token sequences that are common in that huge collection of text. The resulting compression scheme includes some sort of statistical artifact derived from that copyrighted text. Is that allowed? And if…

LLMs are generative though not just compressive

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#89

Post by 8note »

rickmode wrote: post #14

I believe we first need to answer the question of whether the copyright of the AI model’s source text or images affects the output. My opinion — and note I’m a software engineer, not a lawyer — is that an AI, being a statistical model and not generally intelligent, should not be allowed to disregard the copyright of its source material. This would, I think, require the AI’s creator to secure a license for all of its…

Why is being a statistical model relevant?

The simplest statistical model is an average. Why would the average pixel rgba of a bunch of images invoke the copyright of those images?

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