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Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

wired.com

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Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#201

Post by romanzubenko »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #72
Workaccount2 wrote: post #50

Let me make a clarifying statement since people confuse (purposely or just out of ignorance) what violating copyright for AI training can refer to: 1. Training AI on freely available copyright - Ambiguous legality, not really tested in court. AI doesn't actually directly copy the material it trains on, so it's not easy to make this ruling. 2. Circumventing payment to obtain copyright material for training - Unambiguo…

I have a weird controversial view on this in terms of how to legally do it, and that is, for your 1 model, you should be only required to buy a digital copy of the work, maybe publishers should make digital copies that are tailored for LLMs to churn through, but then price it at a reasonable rate, and make the format basically perfect for LLMs.

This is actually clever, let the market decide the price and the worth of each book for training. Pricing per model might be tricky, instead annual licensing for training might be better pricing structure. Very quickly all big publishers and big labs might find very precisely what the fair price is to pay per book/catalogue.

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#202

Post by crystal_revenge »

meta_ai_x wrote: post #152
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it have to be verbatim? Seriously, this I don't understand. If I produce a terrible shakycam recording of a film while sitting in a movie theater, it's not a verbatim copy, nor is it even necessarily representative of the original work -- muddied audio, audience sounds, cropped screen, backs of heads -- and yet it would be considered copyright infringement? How many times does one need to compress the JPEG b…

completely different scenarios. A pirated movie is marketed/sold as a copy of something, which is not fair use. An LLM just remembers/get inspired by what it consumes

> An LLM just remembers/get inspired by what it consumes

As mentioned in another comment, LLMs (and most popular machine learning algorithms) can be viewed, correctly, as compression algorithms which leverage lossy encoding + interpolation to force a kind of generalization.

Your argument is that a video wouldn't count as pirated if the compression used for the pirated copy was lossy (or at least sufficiently lossy). The closest real world example would be the cases where someone records a the filming of a movie on their phone then uploads it. Such a copy is lossy enough that you can't produce anything really like the original, but my most definitions is still considered copyright.

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#204

Post by dragonwriter »

thethimble wrote: post #69
triceratops wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI doesn't actually directly copy the material it trains on Of course it does. Large models are trained on gigantic clusters. How can you train without copying the material to machines in the cluster?

“Copy” is ambiguous here. Of course data is copied during training. That said, OP is referring to whether the resulting model is able to produce verbatim copies of the data.

> That said, OP is referring to whether the resulting model is able to produce verbatim copies of the data.

While a tool being used to create infringing copies of some other work (whether or not it is the source material used to create the tool, and whether or not the infringing material is also verbatim copies) is relevant to whether the tool vendor is liable for contributory infringement for the infringing use of the tool, the absence of a capacity for creating such copies isn't usually enough to say that copying to make the tool isn't infringing.

(That said, generative AI tools, including LLMs specifically, have been shown to have the capacity to make such copies, to the extent that vendors of hosted models are now putting additional checks on output to try to mitigate the frequency with which verbatim copies of substantial portions of training-set works are produced, so arguing that LLMs can't do that is silly.)

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#205

Post by spwa4 »

jayd16 wrote: post #126
nilsbunger wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s something called a substantive transformation test in copyright law. When you write a summary of a book, you don’t infringe on copyright because it’s a “substantial transformation”. This goes along with the idea that you can copyright the text but not the ideas it expresses. When model training reads the text and creates weights internally, is that a substantial transformation? I think there’s a pretty strong…

This is a leap in the argument. We've gone from the right to use a work to "unless the result is identical or close to it, we have full rights to all works.". Seems like a big gap there.

It's COPYright. It has to be very close to the original to be covered by copyright. Hence the name.

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#206

Post by stego-tech »

ijk wrote: post #91
stego-tech wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that "harm" as defined by copyright law is strictly limited to loss of sales due to breach of that copyright; it makes no allowment (that I know of) to livelihoods lost by the theft of the work indefinitely, as AI boosters suggest their tools can do (replace people). The way this court case is going, it's an uphill battle for the plaintiffs to prove concrete harm in that very narrow context, when the r…

A difficult, but not intractable problem: OLMoTrace claims to be able to trace from output to training data in seconds [1]. Notably, it can do this because OLMo itself was intentionally designed to be open and transparent [2]; it was trained on 4.6 trillion tokens of entirely open data (which you can download yourself) [3]. There's nothing stopping Meta or OpenAI from creating a similar tool, other than the obvious d…

I love it! Keeping this in my back pocket the next time someone claims that keeping accounting of training data and sourcing it isn't feasible or technically possible.

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#207

Post by Workaccount2 »

triceratops wrote: post #183
Workaccount2 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really true. Models train (in greatly simplified way) by being shown an excerpt and being told to guess the next token from the excerpt. They push around their weights until the token they output matches the next token in the excerpt. Then the excerpt is no longer needed. You can think of it like the article is loaded, the LLM plays this token guessing game through it, then the article is discarded. On the…

> by being shown an excerpt [of copyrighted material] How is this done? Are bits not written into RAM or disk? Are they not sent between machines in a training cluster? That's copying. > it is seemingly not far removed from how humans consume content Except that humans don't make full copies to RAM, or disk or paper.

The is a bar of usage built into the law, otherwise everyone who reads this wired article is violating copyright by making a full copy to their computer. Generally making non-lasting copies is fine, otherwise the internet wouldn't work.

AI doesn't need lasting copies to train, however I don't know what the actual implementation is. But if it's ruled that they can only use copyrighted data if it's not stored for more than the time it would take a human to consume, It wouldn't really cripple the models, but perhaps make training more logistically challenging.

It's important to understand that models are not data archives. They are statistical constructs made from getting quizzed, that uses human made content to generate the quiz questions.

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#208

Post by immibis »

stego-tech wrote: post #6
TimPC wrote: post #3

I think the headline is a bit misleading. Mets did pirate the works but may be entitled to use them under fair use. It seems like the authors are setting up for failure by making the case about whether the AI generation hinders the market for books. AI book writing is such a tiny segment what these models do that if needed Meta would simply introduce guard rails to prevent copying the style of an author and continue…

The problem is that "harm" as defined by copyright law is strictly limited to loss of sales due to breach of that copyright; it makes no allowment (that I know of) to livelihoods lost by the theft of the work indefinitely, as AI boosters suggest their tools can do (replace people). The way this court case is going, it's an uphill battle for the plaintiffs to prove concrete harm in that very narrow context, when the r…

Well, no, because all those file-sharing users used to get fined $250,000 or whatever, which is obviously much greater than the amount they would have paid for whatever they downloaded.

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#209

Post by immibis »

apercu wrote: post #30
TimPC wrote: post #3

I think the headline is a bit misleading. Mets did pirate the works but may be entitled to use them under fair use. It seems like the authors are setting up for failure by making the case about whether the AI generation hinders the market for books. AI book writing is such a tiny segment what these models do that if needed Meta would simply introduce guard rails to prevent copying the style of an author and continue…

> but may be entitled to use them under fair use. Why? Was it legal for me to download copyrighted songs from Limewire as "fair use" ? Because a few people were made examples of. I'm a musician, so 80% of the music I listen to is for learning so it's fair use, right? ;)

If you used it for fair-use purposes, it could well have been legal. The only way to find out for sure would be to have them sue you, and then successfully or unsuccessfully defend yourself with a fair use argument. Please keep in mind that the law is a kind of stochastic process; "how illegal" something is dependent on how many times someone is found liable for it, which is something that takes a bunch of lawsuits to actually know, and each lawsuit is unique. It's not a computer program where if(X && Y && !Z) then punishment(); (well it sort of is, but X and Y and Z aren't definite boolean values, but things that have to be estimated based on evidence). (I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice)

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#210

Post by immibis »

nadermx wrote: post #35
bgwalter wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The RIAA lawyers never had to demonstrate that copying a DVD cratered the sales of their clients. They just got high penalties for infringers almost by default. Now that big capital wants to steal from individuals, big capital wins again. (Unrelatedly, has Boies ever won a high profile lawsuit? I remember him from the Bush/Gore recount issue, where he represented the Democrats.)

Copyright infringement is not stealing[0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(19...

No, but the law treats it as bad as stealing when an individual copyright-infringes from a corporation, so why shouldn't it be as bad as stealing when a corporation copyright-infringes from an individual?

Of course, even this isn't enough, since corporations regularly steal (actually) from individuals, with near impunity.

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