Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI asks White House for relief from state AI rules

finance.yahoo.com

141–150 of 845 posts

Re: OpenAI asks White House for relief from state AI rules

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like how this "freedom to learn" should apply to models, but not real people..

It already applies to real people, doesn't it? I.e. if you read a book, you're not allowed to start printing and selling copies of that book without permission of the copyright owner, but if you learn something from that book you can use that knowledge, just like a model could.

These AI models are just obviously new things. They aren’t people, so any analogy about learning from the training material and selling your new skills is off base.

On the other hand, they aren’t just a copy of the training content, and whether the process that creates the weights is sufficiently transformative as to create a new work is… what’s up for debate, right?

Anyway I wish people would stop making these analogies. There isn’t a law covering AI models yet. It is a big industry at this point, and the lack of clarity seems like something we’d expect everybody (legislators and industry) to want to rectify.

Re: OpenAI asks White House for relief from state AI rules

#142
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We started with libraries and books, now you're moving the goalposts to websites. Sidenote: I wouldn't even be mad if OpenAI built robots to go into all of the libraries and read all of the books. That would be amazing!

I started with libraries. OpenAI started with the internet. The argument for both is identical, your objection is specific to libraries. IIRC, Google already did your sidenote. Or started to, may have had legal issues.

> The argument for both is identical

How so? I don't have to pay to read most websites. To read most books I have to pay (or a library has to pay and I have to wait to get the book).

> IIRC, Google already did your sidenote

Not quite. They had to chop the spines off books and have humans feed them into scanners. I'm talking about a robot that can walk (or roll) into a library, use arms to take books off the shelves, turn the pages and read them without putting them into a scanner.

Re: OpenAI asks White House for relief from state AI rules

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure you can, you could take a physical book, and painstakingly copy each page at a time, that is totally fair use.

Citation needed.

You can make copies of things. You just can’t distribute them

Re: OpenAI asks White House for relief from state AI rules

#144
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard rumblings about some sort of system where power is shared equally across three branches of government with checks and balances to ensure one branch doesn't go rogue and just do whatever they want. Forget what they called it, united something or other.

Well, the people who designed that system were very skeptical of political parties in general, and thought they could be avoided. Turns out that this isn't true, and once you have parties, they can in fact capture all three branches of government, and then those "checks and balances" kinda stop working.

Yeah, I think that is unfortunately the fate of all political systems.

Maybe our AI overlords will do a better job this time if they are unconstrained from any lawful oversight. I mean, one can hope...

Re: OpenAI asks White House for relief from state AI rules

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation needed.

You can make copies of things. You just can’t distribute them

You're repeating upthread comments. And no, you can't. There's an archival exception for electronic media. If you want to make copies of physical media you either:

1. Can't

Or

2. Rely on fair use to protect you (archival by individuals isn't necessarily fair use)

Re: OpenAI asks White House for relief from state AI rules

#148
post #133

I heard the theory that Elon Musk has a significant control over the current US government. They're not best pals with Sam Altman. This seems like it might be a good way to see how much power Elon actually has over the government?

I think we are beyond the "theory" phase by now. Just yesterday I saw the president of a country advertising the products of a private company (Trump making an obvious marketing ploy for Tesla). How can this ever be acceptable?

> How can this ever be acceptable?

Because the only people capable of holding him accountable won't do it.

The system is broken. The US Government/Constitution depends too much on the assumption that people will do the right thing.

Re: OpenAI asks White House for relief from state AI rules

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does apply to people? When you read a copy of a book, you can't be sued for making a copy of the book in the synapses of your brain. Now, if you have eidetic memory and write out large chunks of the book from memory and publish them, that's what you could be sued for.

This is not about memory or training. The LLM training process is not being run on books streamed directly off the internet or from real-time footage of a book. What these companies are doing is: 1. Obtain a free copy of a work in some way. 2. Store this copy in a format that's amenable to training. 3. Train their models on the stored copy, months or years after step 1 happened. The illegal part happens in steps 1 an…

But making copies for yourself, without distributing them, is different than making copies for others. Google is downloading copyrighted content from everywhere online, but they don't redistribute their scraped content.

Even web browsing implies making copies of copyrighted pages, we can't tell the copyright status of a page without loading it, at which point a copy has been made in memory.

Re: OpenAI asks White House for relief from state AI rules

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure you can, you could take a physical book, and painstakingly copy each page at a time, that is totally fair use.

Citation needed.

It seems reasonably within the bounds described by fair use, but nobody's ever tested that particular constellation of factors in a lawsuit, so there's no precedent - hand copying a book, that is.

17 U.S.C. § 107 is the fair use carveout.

Interestingly, digitizing and copying a book on your own, for your own private use, has also not been brought to court. Major rights holders seem to not want this particular fair use precedent to be established, which it likely would be, and might then invalidate crucial standing for other cases in which certain interpretations of fair use are preferred.

Digitally copying media you own is fair use. I'll die on that hill. It doesn't grant commercial rights, you can't resell a copy as if it were the original, and so on, and so forth.

There's even a good case to be made that sharing a digitally copied work purchased legally, even to millions of people, 5 years after a book is first sold - for a vast majority of books, after 5 years, they've sold about 99.99% of the copies they're going to sell.

By sharing after the ~5 year mark, you're arguably doing marketing for the book, and if we cultivated a culture of direct donation to authors and content creators, it invalidates any of the reasons piracy is made illegal in the first place.

Right now publishers, studios, and platforms have a stranglehold on content markets, and the law serves them almost exclusively. It is exceedingly rare for the law to be invoked in defending or supporting an author or artist directly. It's very common for groups of wealthy lawyers LARPing as protectors of authors and artists to exploit the law and steal money from regular people.

Exclusively digital content should have a 3 year protected period, while physical works should get 5, whether it's text, audio, image, or video.

Once something is outside the protected period, it should be considered fair game for sharing until 20 years have passed, at which point it should enter public domain.

Copyright law serves two purposes - protecting and incentivizing content creators, and serving the interests of the public. Situations where a bunch of lawyers get rich by suing the pants off of regular people over technicalities is a despicable outcome.

Post reply on HN