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Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

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Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#281

Post by freejazz »

Natsu wrote: post #233
freejazz wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can an AI express to you how van gogh affected it as an artist? I'm not sure that AI is "learning" the way we say humans are "learning," when humans learn and study art. Obviously there is no debate that you can input van gogh into a model and produce something van gogh-like as a result. But I've not seen anything that indicates that the AI is learning anything about van gogh at all. Perhaps it comes down to whether…

I think it's learning styles in a way that's at least partially analogous, because it comes out with things that are reasonably original and not in the training data. I'm sure an LLM can write you an essay like that for any artist you want, but I'm not all that convinced those are meaningful even with humans. > As to your hypothetical That's the thing, it's not a hypothetical, it's a past story from here on HN. Someo…

>I think it's learning styles in a way that's at least partially analogous, because it comes out with things that are reasonably original and not in the training data.

I don't think that is evidence that what it is doing is "learning".

>I'm sure an LLM can write you an essay like that for any artist you want, but I'm not all that convinced those are meaningful even with humans.

Well, it wouldn't be reflective of what the LLM thinks, so what is your point? If you are of the belief that humans don't have thoughts, I guess it's not a surprise you view things this way.

>That's the thing, it's not a hypothetical, it's a past story from here on HN. Someone did that, asking for copies of a famous painting (Girl with a Pearl Earring) and got highly derivative items out of the model and we had a debate over whether that even means anything, because that's both a simple description of the painting and the name of a famous work, so it makes it so it can be ambiguous whether you asked for "Girl with a Pearl Earring" or a girl with a pearl earring in the prompting.

You say derivative but without any reference to what it actually means... what about is derivative - that's the analysis that's happening in court. The analysis isn't "what you asked the LLM" because that's not dispositive to whether or not something is a copy.

>I agree that it looks like copyright infringement whether it's done by a human or AI, though. I guess a lot of people missed the prior discussion on HN.

Sorry I don't read every single thread about copyright on HN? This is the second posting I've seen on the RFC today. Give me a break!

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#282

Post by artninja1988 »

nostril wrote: post #163

Hi HN, I have been working on something directly related to AI and copyright. Would it be ok to point it out here? Recently The Pile was taken offline from The Eye by DMCA. One solution is to host it offshore, which we're calling The Nose: https://thenose.cc The technical security measures may be of interest to the audience here, so I'll be as detailed as possible. The following formula should be safe if you follow i…

You can try to join the EleuthorAI discord. They are the people that crated the pile iirc. It's very active and I think you would be able to get in touch there.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#283

Post by haldujai »

cwkoss wrote: post #220
haldujai wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. If you know your copyrighted material was in the training dataset is that not sufficient? 2. From a legal perspective do you actually have to prove it's embedded in the gradients? If I draw an exact copy of Mickey Mouse from memory and sell it I didn't think Disney had to prove I've ever actually seen Mickey Mouse before or point to where the image of him is embedded in my brain.

Disney has a trademark on Mickey mouse, but that does not mean that they automatically get copyright on all pictures of Mickey Mouse drawn by others (they don't)

Bad example on my part in that case. I thought some art is copyrighted or am I mistaken? If so replace Mickey Mouse with something copyrighted

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#284

Post by Ajedi32 »

gaganyaan wrote: post #241
Ajedi32 wrote: post #137

Much debate has been had about how existing copyright law applies to AI models. But once you get past that and start asking about how copyright should apply to AI models (as the copyright office is here) the answer in my mind becomes clear. Copyright, as defined in the U.S. Constitution, exists "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"[1]. I can think of no better modern example of "the Progress of Science…

Number 3 doesn't really make sense. I wouldn't get copyright if I told a human artist "draw a dog". Why would that change just because I'm telling an AI to do it?

I oversimplified that point a bit for brevity's sake, but I'd say I agree that some level of creative input from the human operator should be required in order for the work to be copyrightable. If I draw a black 100px*100px square in MS paint that's not copyrightable, nor should typing "dog" with a seed of "1" into Stable Diffusion be. But as soon as even the smallest level of creative input is involved, yeah it should be copyrightable.

Also, kinda beside the point, but:

> I wouldn't get copyright if I told a human artist "draw a dog".

If they were working for hire, yeah you absolutely would.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#285

Post by hakfoo »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #52
hakfoo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I tend to think the important part is the end product: was someone able to express their vision to the highest possible level of fidelity? In that regard, every new technology gets us closer-- the person who couldn't draw a circle can take a photo and doctor it in the GIMP until he's happy. The next frontier for this is to say "I can use AI to generate 200 permutations, and then take the ones I like best and furthe…

I guess I find it difficult to buy into the origins of art mattering too much because it often seems to turn into a game of academics arguing among each other over the interpretation of symbols. A particularly spiteful take on this would be that if your nuance is so delicate and obscure that a lay audience can't figure out your meaning, maybe it represents a failing in your ability to communicate.

I'm not sure where you got the "single variable" as "aesthetic value". Yes, it's possible that some people are trying to hit a specifically aesthetic goal, but others, their vision may be "the poster that finally convinces Aunt Frank to vote no on Proposition 23", or "the short story that expresses the feelings of loss I have for my beloved hamster", and the people trying to express these things were unable to create what they wanted from whole cloth.

At the end, it's still people making the decisions of what to release, whether directly, or by designing some sort of scoring mechanism to do it. It's similar to the curation choices in a museum collection-- they say something, even separate from the artifacts themselves.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#286

Post by fluidcruft »

tomrod wrote: post #245
fluidcruft wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phrases like "transformative way" are meaningless woospeak to me. Everything is a transformation. Sulpose I run a linear convolution on ten images and average them. Is the result "new"? Does it not contain the original images? Subspaces and mappings don't create anything "new" any more than SVD does. This is just playing digital Ship of Thesius.

> Phrases like "transformative way" are meaningless woospeak to me Fortunately we live in a society that supports specialization where something that is woospeak to a smart person can still be a very well understood topic. AI transformations are methodologically well documented, even if transparency of neural network node activations is yet to be fully formalized.

In that case, you'll surely be able to provide a citation that clearly distinguishes the differences between the ways of transformations performed by "AI" and the ways of transformations performed by compression.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#287

Post by fluidcruft »

KHRZ wrote: post #207
fluidcruft wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phrases like "transformative way" are meaningless woospeak to me. Everything is a transformation. Sulpose I run a linear convolution on ten images and average them. Is the result "new"? Does it not contain the original images? Subspaces and mappings don't create anything "new" any more than SVD does. This is just playing digital Ship of Thesius.

Congratulations, you just discovered that copyright is a weak and ill-defined concept.

I think that unless you can clearly show that an "AI" is not a form of compression, the question of copyright is orthogonal. The copyrights that apply to a zip file may be ill-defined concepts to you, but it's not really important to the core question which is: how are model weights different from a zip file? If you put unambiguously copyrighted content into a zip file, most people would agree that the copyright applies to the zip file. So by analogy if you put copyrighted content into model weights, the copyright applies to the model weights. Issues such as what constitutes fair use comes up, but fair use is permissible copyright infringement, not absence of copyright. And that's where the question of how lossy a compression algorithm has to be to be considered "fair use". In all likelihood it's the specifics of the use itself (rather than technology or method details used) that matters.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#288

Post by ryathal »

devsda wrote: post #132
Mathnerd314 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well "consuming" the code means copying it word for word into your source tree. The compilation process does mangle it a bit but usually you can find identical function names and so on, and the courts have ruled that object code is equivalent to source code for purposes of copyright. A different situation is you read a copyrighted news article and write the facts from it in your essay. Since the copyright of the news…

> A different situation is you read a copyrighted news article and write the facts from it in your essay. This is fine for actual facts(with some caveats) but how should it apply for creative works like a novel ?

The same way it does now. Simply having a character resurrect in a story doesn't violate copyright of the Bible; Game of Thrones; Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe; Harry Potter; Lord of the Rings; etc. Writing a Story About Luke Skywalker as a ten-year-old kid exploring Tatooine, is likely to run into problems.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#289

Post by freejazz »

bionhoward wrote: post #251
cj wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can appreciate how this line of thinking might be attractive. But IMO the human machine 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.

“It’s just a machine!” So are you!

Don't be obtusely misanthropic

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#290

Post by freejazz »

mjan22640 wrote: post #224
meowkit wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The value of copyright is going to vanish. There is enough public domain material to train models on and to avoid the problem altogether. There used to be professions like tinkerers, bards, clowns. The tinkerers disappeared when the society became modern. The clowns on the other hand managed to lobby for laws that put people into jail for heinous crimes like copying pictures, and survived longer. They are going to bi…

What you describe would result in the opposite - copyright will be incredibly valuable in a system where the vast majority of "creative works" are just regurgitations of past works in the public domain, churned out by machines. In such a world, none of that has a copyright anyway. Actual creative works, which do garner copyright, will then be that much more valuable, because they will continue to be a property right with a breadth of coverage to make them useful.
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