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Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

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Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#311
post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> 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 mean, if a human looked at a bunch of art, essays, etc. and then was able to produce similar works, we'd normally consider that "learning." What word would you use for being able to reproduce Picasso (or…

>I mean, if a human looked at a bunch of art, essays, etc. and then was able to produce similar works, we'd normally consider that "learning." What word would you use for being able to reproduce Picasso (or whomever) by looking at a bunch of examples?

Would we? What you described sounds a lot more like copying than learning. That's why I asked the question I originally did. Your whole perspective seems to be based on an ignorant and misanthropic view of the arts. That art students just go to school to look at things so they can then reproduce things that look like those things. It's a bit asinine and insulting.

>Also I don't think I have defined "think" or "experience" at all. But I'd point out that I don't see anything like a principled boundary around them or that we can point to something that humans do that AIs don't or can't do. It seems to fall back on something that looks like qualia or subjective internal experience and philosophy hasn't resolved that with respect to other humans... except by analogy. "I think the other humans are like me and I have subjective internal experience, so they probably have it to, rather than being p-zombies."

That's your burden to demonstrate as the person equivocating AI to humanity. You couldn't do it with "learning" without redefining learning, and you can't do it with "experience" or "think", without redefining those words either. Who is seriously advocating that LLMs are thinking and experiencing? I haven't seen anyone make those arguments.

>Sure, I'll agree that it's not even necessary to consider the works transformative or whatever.

That wasn't my point. A transformative analysis is one of the most fundamental elements of determining if something is a copy or not in copyright law. So I don't really have any idea what you are talking about with this one.

>FWIW, I don't think that AIs should be getting their own copyrights or anything like that, I'm just saying that the training data shouldn't forever taint the output no matter what's produced.

Yeah but your only argument for that is to redefine learning to pretend it's the same thing that humans are doing when that's clearly not the case.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#312
post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mean, if a human looked at a bunch of art, essays, etc. and then was able to produce similar works, we'd normally consider that "learning." What word would you use for being able to reproduce Picasso (or…

>I mean, if a human looked at a bunch of art, essays, etc. and then was able to produce similar works, we'd normally consider that "learning." What word would you use for being able to reproduce Picasso (or whomever) by looking at a bunch of examples? Would we? What you described sounds a lot more like copying than learning. That's why I asked the question I originally did. Your whole perspective seems to be based on…

> Yeah but your only argument for that is to redefine learning to pretend it's the same thing that humans are doing when that's clearly not the case.

What test can I do to differentiate them, then?

At first, you said they couldn't write an essay... but AIs can absolutely do that. The internal experience of even other people is unknowable and something we guess by analogy, so if you want me to agree you need some other actual test on measurable outputs to differentiate.

Otherwise this is all about qualia and there's no way to come to rational agreement.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can "hand paint" in Photoshop, but you can also assemble collages composed of bits and pieces of other copyrighted works and create a result that is still copyrightable. Why is the latter currently legal in your opinion?

if the things you're collaging can't be copyrighted because they lack human authorship, you can only copyright the arrangement, not the things you're arranging. If they have human authorship, its the original human artist's work you're collaging and now you're creating an unauthorized derivative work violating many copyrights.

Fortunately AI art can have human authorship if it is closely directed by a human.

> not the things you're arranging

You can if those things are closely directed by a human, using AI as a tool like photoshop is a tool.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#314
post #275
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I know anything I create is just going to be hoovered up and input into somebody's AI model so I do 99% of the work and they get 99% of the profit, perhaps I'm much less likely to progress Science and useful Arts by creating content in the first place. Perhaps you wouldn't but I, and apparently most of the scientific community who publish research, would (and do). The entitlement of people here feel towards thei…

I think you should spend some time thinking about the purpose of progress. Progress in and of itself is not useful, nor is it necessarily desirable. It's very easy to envision a society that is both more advanced than ours and profoundly worse in all meaningful aspects.

More people around here need to hear this.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#315

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…

The human brain is no different. It generates content from the things it learned.

Repost #4 I believe

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37305580

"I'll keep saying it every time this comes up. I LOVE being told by techbros that a human painstaking studying one thing at a time, and not memorizing verbatin but rather taking away the core concept, is exactly the same type of "learning" that a model does when it takes in millions of things at once and can spit out copyrighted code verbatim."

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#316
post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I mean, if a human looked at a bunch of art, essays, etc. and then was able to produce similar works, we'd normally consider that "learning." What word would you use for being able to reproduce Picasso (or whomever) by looking at a bunch of examples? Would we? What you described sounds a lot more like copying than learning. That's why I asked the question I originally did. Your whole perspective seems to be based on…

> Yeah but your only argument for that is to redefine learning to pretend it's the same thing that humans are doing when that's clearly not the case. What test can I do to differentiate them, then? At first, you said they couldn't write an essay... but AIs can absolutely do that. The internal experience of even other people is unknowable and something we guess by analogy, so if you want me to agree you need some othe…

You are being obtusely literal, as I did not ask you if they could write an essay. I asked you if they could express their feelings. There's no point in us conversing if you are going to respond this way, as it's disingenuous. I'd think you are capable of understanding the difference between the two. And I don't care if you agree with me or not, it's your burden to elevate AI to humanity, not mine, and you haven't done it here. Your perspective here seems to come from a life devoid of art and experience in things. For that, I'm sorry for you.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#317
post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah but your only argument for that is to redefine learning to pretend it's the same thing that humans are doing when that's clearly not the case. What test can I do to differentiate them, then? At first, you said they couldn't write an essay... but AIs can absolutely do that. The internal experience of even other people is unknowable and something we guess by analogy, so if you want me to agree you need some othe…

You are being obtusely literal, as I did not ask you if they could write an essay. I asked you if they could express their feelings. There's no point in us conversing if you are going to respond this way, as it's disingenuous. I'd think you are capable of understanding the difference between the two. And I don't care if you agree with me or not, it's your burden to elevate AI to humanity, not mine, and you haven't do…

> I asked you if they could express their feelings.

And I asked how we can test whether someone has actual feelings or any other kind of conscious internal experience. If it's "obvious" then why is there no consensus on the whole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie thing?

> There's no point in us conversing

I gave this conversation to an LLM to respond to.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#318
post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are being obtusely literal, as I did not ask you if they could write an essay. I asked you if they could express their feelings. There's no point in us conversing if you are going to respond this way, as it's disingenuous. I'd think you are capable of understanding the difference between the two. And I don't care if you agree with me or not, it's your burden to elevate AI to humanity, not mine, and you haven't do…

> I asked you if they could express their feelings. And I asked how we can test whether someone has actual feelings or any other kind of conscious internal experience. If it's "obvious" then why is there no consensus on the whole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie thing? > There's no point in us conversing I gave this conversation to an LLM to respond to.

I only said it was obvious that LLM's don't know anything about art past what you described, which you didn't dispute and was an obvious logicaly conclusion from your own explanation of what AI "learned".

>I gave this conversation to an LLM to respond to.

I'm not surprised, I repeatedly characterized your responses as obtuse, disingenuous, or ignorant. I'm not sure what you think you proved.

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#319
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sure. AI (more specifically, ML) is curve fitting, and more generally, objective function optimization. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curve_fitting

A projection is not compression, necessarily. And you'll find AI is a very poor compressor when used for such a purpose in all but the most trivial setups (e.g SVD matching input data rank, only reversible functions in neural network activation, etc.).

Re: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

#320
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some compression, yes, but the analogy oversimplifies. AI rerepresents input information in a transformative way (embedding, say) then creates new, derived and combined output from a new input (e.g prompt). It's not just lossy compression. It's potentially novel.

It’s compression + filtering. Nothing generative. Its output is like 99.99 % deterministic.

Linear regression is 100% deterministic after training and isn't lossless compression, but rather a linear projection of along a manifold in a (potentially transformed) input space.

So, maybe not just compression+filtering, if level of deterministic behavior is to be the gauge.

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