Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

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

When I say learning I mean something like "gaining new ability by studying how others did the same task, resulting in being able to produce novel output." I'm not quite sure what you are using the word to mean here, though I might agree that there are differences between what AIs do and what humans do, the question being what they are and whether they're important here.

I don't claim to know anything about the internal experience (if any) of an LLM writing such an essay and I can't really reason about that because I've never been an LLM, whereas I can at least relate to human experience. I think your assertion that it "wouldn't be reflective of what the LLM thinks" is a bit like saying that you don't think submarines are actually "swimming," as the saying goes, though. It may not "think" in human terms as we do, but it's certainly doing some kind of calculation that produces an equivalent output, so I have a lot of questions about whether we can say that on principle. We're well past passing the Turing test for a lot of things, either the original or censored form, these questions are getting less academic by the day.

> You say derivative but without any reference to what it actually means

We're talking about copyright law, so the meaning of derivative was borrowed from that, i.e. that AI model was producing works that could be reasonably thought to have infringed on the copyright of that painting when prompted for "a girl with a pearl earring" and this was held up to mean that AIs are just regurgitating training data and are therefore implicitly missing something essential to being an artist or what have you and all their work should be considered derivative works of the training data as far as copyright law is concerned.

Meanwhile, I'm saying that I think the AI should be judged about like a human artist would be to argue against the people who seem to want to say that the AI can't take input from copyrighted things without all of its output being tainted forever. We have no such requirement for humans and I don't see why it makes sense to add this new restriction on AIs specifically.

> Sorry I don't read every single thread about copyright on HN?

I'm not faulting you for not knowing, I'm faulting myself for assuming too much context and just trying to explain what I had in my head when writing that so you could understand how I came to think that. Hopefully this lets you see where I'm coming from.

>When I say learning I mean something like "gaining new ability by studying how others did the same task, resulting in being able to produce novel output." I'm not quite sure what you are using the word to mean here, though I might agree that there are differences between what AIs do and what humans do, the question being what they are and whether they're important here.

I think the dictionary definition is more than sufficient: "the acquisition of knowledge or skills through experience, study, or by being taught." This is what I mean by running with your own made up definition.

>I don't claim to know anything about the internal experience (if any) of an LLM writing such an essay and I can't really reason about that because I've never been an LLM, whereas I can at least relate to human experience. I think your assertion that it "wouldn't be reflective of what the LLM thinks" is a bit like saying that you don't think submarines are actually "swimming," as the saying goes, though. It may not "think" in human terms as we do, but it's certainly doing some kind of calculation that produces an equivalent output, so I have a lot of questions about whether we can say that on principle. We're well past passing the Turing test for a lot of things, either the original or censored form, these questions are getting less academic by the day.

You are the one redefining words like "think" and "experience" not me. I'm not playing that game at all. After all, you are the one that is equivocating these processes between humans and AI by coming up with your own, much more broad concoctions.

>We're talking about copyright law, so the meaning of derivative was borrowed from that, i.e. that AI model was producing works that could be reasonably thought to have infringed on the copyright of that painting when prompted for "a girl with a pearl earring" and this was held up to mean that AIs are just regurgitating training data and are therefore implicitly missing something essential to being an artist or what have you and all their work should be considered derivative works of the training data as far as copyright law is concerned.

I'm familiar with copyright law, I'm not sure you are. A work can be derivative in a number of ways, some are legal, some aren't. It's not a new thing that some uses by a machine can be infringing, and others, non-infringing. Why now must it be that machines should be analyzed the same as humans all of the sudden?

>Meanwhile, I'm saying that I think the AI should be judged about like a human artist would be to argue against the people who seem to want to say that the AI can't take input from copyrighted things without all of its output being tainted forever. We have no such requirement for humans and I don't see why it makes sense to add this new restriction on AIs specifically.

Yes, I understand that. But I asked why it should be judged as a human, and you are saying because it "learns". But that's only based upon your re-defining the concept of learning in order to make it inhuman. The only reasonable arguments I've seen that AI outputs should be copyrightable are based on them being a tool that an artist can use. What you are saying is just dressed up anthropomorphization.

> is the company running the model themselves not already publishing all of that work and profiting from it?

no, because the model is transformative enough that it cannot be said to be a derivative works of the training set.

The model is in essence a form of distilled information, extracted from the training set. Information cannot be copyrighted - only expressions can.

Therefore, a model producer should have the right to use any pre-existing work, in the same way a person can, to study and internally memorize and extract information.

The reproduction of any of the training set data constitutes a copyright violation, but this is not done by the owner of the model, but by an end user of the model.

That sounds like the source! Thanks.

> Consent, compensation, and credit.

I just want to quote you. Nothing I need to say. That’s it.