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Japan Goes All In: Copyright Doesn't Apply to AI Training

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Re: Japan Goes All In: Copyright Doesn't Apply to AI Training

#101

Post by ryandrake »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #39
dougmwne wrote: post #13

I think it’s a weak argument anyway. A pencil can be used to recreate copyrighted works. Why should a LLM be different? The legal responsibility always has been and should continue to be on the person publishing or making available the work. And at any rate, a country banning this tech will be missing the revolution. Protecting the buggy whip manufacturers and all that.

What's the difference between picking a cherry tomato from your streetside garden and eating it, and driving a combine harvester over your lawn and taking everything?

I'm not a lawmaker, but it's probably pretty hard to write a law that effectively distinguishes between "doing X" and "doing X at scale". As another commenter mentions, if you target the means of doing it (human doing X vs. machine doing X), someone will just use Mechanical Turk or something to hire 10,000 humans to do X.

If telling AI to study Spiderman and then output 10 pictures of Spiderman is illegal, how is that different from hiring 10,000 artists to study Spiderman, having them each do a drawing, and then hiring 100 talent judges to pick the top 10?

Re: Japan Goes All In: Copyright Doesn't Apply to AI Training

#102

Post by kaibee »

knome wrote: post #61
mjburgess wrote: post #22

This is just an end to copyright. There is no definition of "AI", it has always been a marketing term for monetising csci research. There is no difference between a lossy jpg, taking its pixels as weights, and the weights of a NN. So if i just zip up copyrighted images using a NN, then, what? They're public domain? Regulators here are miles away from understanding the implications -- this is what happens when you let…

This is little more than baseless fearmongering. "zip up copyrighted images using a nn" is trek level technobabble. that's not how NNs work. how the hell does it even connect to privacy? copyright isn't what makes it illegal to expose and have your medical records it's privacy violations, which this doesn't even touch

> "zip up copyrighted images using a nn" is trek level technobabble.

Look up 'overfitting', neural-network based compression, etc. or that paper that used zip compression as a neural-network basically. Farthest thing possible from being 'technobabble' once you understand how inextricably linked compression and 'understanding' is.

Re: Japan Goes All In: Copyright Doesn't Apply to AI Training

#103

Post by qingcharles »

throwitaway222 wrote: post #87

For all we know, in 5 years you could ask an AI to "reproduce the entire Supernatural TV show but change the character names, dialog and look just enough to bypass copyright issues - 7 seasons, 24 episodes each MP4 format"

Seven seasons? I thought you said reproduce the entire show? 37 seasons :D

Re: Japan Goes All In: Copyright Doesn't Apply to AI Training

#104

Post by wredue »

tensor wrote: post #37
asah wrote: post #9

So wait. If I encode something near-losslessly into a neural net then it's ok? Books and music are now free ?

Being able to train an AI is different than using it to reproduce copyright works verbatim. I could easily see a rule where you can train a model, but it's still on you to make sure that you don't use output from it that is too close to a copyright work. This to me seems like the right approach, and is not much different from what humans do. Humans are free to read whatever source material they want, but you can't su…

How can it possibly fall on you to verify your works?

The only possible way to do this is for companies to provide a list of all of their sources and for me to then automate verification and hope it works!

The real answer is that I should be able to control whether my information is used to train models or not, because we already know that models spit out verbatim results with generic queries and there’s just no way for a user to otherwise check this.

Re: Japan Goes All In: Copyright Doesn't Apply to AI Training

#105

Post by JKCalhoun »

paxys wrote: post #41

There is a distinction to be made between inputs and outputs when it comes to AI and copyright. Most people focus on the former, and discuss whether you can train an LLM on copyrighted works or not, but ultimately the issues really only manifest in the latter. An AI training itself on a million newspaper articles can be declared legal, sure, but what happens when it also starts spitting out the same articles with nea…

> nearly no modification

How much modification is enough modification? The courts can wrangle with that endlessly.

Re: Japan Goes All In: Copyright Doesn't Apply to AI Training

#106

Post by bee_rider »

criley2 wrote: post #84
bee_rider wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the work? Would you say it ought to be legal to distribute a really good prompt to generate a copyright character? What about an embedding?

I would say it ought to be as legal as distributing a "how to draw mickey mouse" tutorial or a "how to sing taylor swift song" video or perhaps even a "how to make a twitter clone" tutorial.

In that case it seems like it would be much easier to just make it legal to distribute the copyright material in the first place.

Re: Japan Goes All In: Copyright Doesn't Apply to AI Training

#107

Post by pclmulqdq »

night-rider wrote: post #72
badcppdev wrote: post #10

So I can see the logic in treating the inputs to the AI training data sets the same way we treat humans learning something. A potential downside is that AI systems can 'mechanise' the creation of material that potentially infringes copyright (in the same way that human generated content can infringe) But a potential upside is that we can 'mechanise' the process by which we judge whether new content infringes the copy…

Generative AI tweaks the original material such that it's modified beyond recognition, and non verbatim. A bit like how artists tweak other artist's work, put their own spin on it, and then pass it off as 'original'.

Except when it doesn't. See the NYT's lawsuit here - long runs of the training data are spit out verbatim.

Re: Japan Goes All In: Copyright Doesn't Apply to AI Training

#108

Post by amluto »

dougmwne wrote: post #13

I think it’s a weak argument anyway. A pencil can be used to recreate copyrighted works. Why should a LLM be different? The legal responsibility always has been and should continue to be on the person publishing or making available the work. And at any rate, a country banning this tech will be missing the revolution. Protecting the buggy whip manufacturers and all that.

> A pencil can be used to recreate copyrighted works.

This is a very weak argument.

A pencil, an empty USB stick, an LLM without weights, and a small child can all be used to reproduce copyrighted works. A USB stick with a copy of a movie on it, an LLM trained on a book, and a human that has watched a Disney film can all actually infringe copyright.

There's an issue beyond copyright, though. A lot of companies seem to think it's okay to train LLMs on data that they at least have no moral rights to and possibly have no legal rights to either. (A TOS saying that anyone posting anything privately, IMO, does not mean that the person posting it had rights to it, nor do I believe that fine print ought to give anyone rights to anyone else's private information.) And a person that read all your email and an LLM that has been trained on all your email can both easily infringe your rights to privacy.

Re: Japan Goes All In: Copyright Doesn't Apply to AI Training

#109

Post by jncfhnb »

LegitShady wrote: post #18
keikobadthebad wrote: post #14

Something else is going to have to give... copyright applies to artists and authors not in the sense they can't learn from other peoples' content, but that they can't plagiarize it. So either that end will have to stand the same for humans and AI, one way or the other.

humans and AI aren't the same. There's no reason to think it will have to be the same.

They do have to be the same because learning is not something you can constrain with law pragmatically. Style and structure is not protected and can be mimicked so it is trivial to do parallel construction for any stylistic ideal even if the law says you can’t train on the original. Society does not benefit from these extra steps.

Specific IP like characters are already perfectly well protected by copyright. It does not infringe on anything to learn about Batman.

Just “training for the heck of it” without any justification for limits besides hurting the artists feelings who put their art in public kinda sucks for them but the alternative is just saying that only but doing otherwise is just asking for only large corporations to be able to train. And it’s not like artists will be comped for that either. It’ll just be them losing out because they put it on a “free” platform.

Re: Japan Goes All In: Copyright Doesn't Apply to AI Training

#110

Post by jsmith45 »

lesuorac wrote: post #58
paxys wrote: post #41

There is a distinction to be made between inputs and outputs when it comes to AI and copyright. Most people focus on the former, and discuss whether you can train an LLM on copyrighted works or not, but ultimately the issues really only manifest in the latter. An AI training itself on a million newspaper articles can be declared legal, sure, but what happens when it also starts spitting out the same articles with nea…

> This is what the crux of NYT's lawsuit is about, and making laws about AI training isn't going to make a difference to that. The claims of NYT are more than just about training. They're claiming that as part of the ChatGPT software; it _looks up_ stuff in a database of articles. That is beyond _training_. If a human kept around a briefcase of NYT articles they didn't pay for and let you view them for a fee I think…

> If a human kept around a briefcase of NYT articles they didn't pay for and let you view them for a fee I think everybody would agree that's copyright infringement.

Sure. Slightly more interesting is if that same human with those same breifcases was taking money to answer questions and referenced those papers, but did not just provide the article or headlines, and might not even be paraphrasing the article at all. Is that okay?

To the extent it is merely paraphrasing articles, or outputting headlines that it just looked up, I agree that could well be infringement. If it more transformative processes those articles into something distinct, then it is not nearly as clear cut. The latter is arguably the intent of openAI, even if the current results might be closer top the former.

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