221–230 of 352 posts
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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.
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The counterargument to that is model training is impossible without making copies. That's not true for humans.
It's also true for humans, you memorize only parts of what you read and see but you still had to view the whole thing first. The computer model is working differently of course but functionally it's the same idea.
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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…
It's the same as a book or a film review, you can't get the film or the book back from it but the original material is still needed to produce it. Needing the original material isn't enough for claiming copyright infringement as we have existing counter examples
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The counterargument to that is model training is impossible without making copies. That's not true for humans.
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…
> Using software almost always involves creating copies, even though many of these copies only exist for a very short time. For example, executing a program means copying it from the hard disk into RAM so that the CPU can interpret the instructions. Because of this, the right to run a program is considered to fall under the copyright of the author.
For comparison, when a human looks at the letters, there is no copying.
Also, models can reproduce text verbatim which proves that they store it.
So it is unfair when ordinary folks got sued for this and Zuckerberg wants to get away with a million times larger violation. He must go directly to jail.
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The purpose of copyright is it progress the arts and sciences. Not to guarantee profit. Guaranteeing profit is just the way we encourage people to progress the arts and sciences. That is why so called derivative works are allowed (and even encouraged). If copyrighted material is ingested, modified or enhanced to add value, and then regurgitated that is legal, whereas copying it without adding value is not legal. If d…
Derivative works are not generally allowed in many jurisdictions. Try releasing a cover song without clearing it first etc. Even using a recognizable sample will bite you Derivative works are tolerated in some cases like some manga or fanfics but it is a gray area and whenever the author or publisher wants to pursue it it is their full right to do it. Many do pursue it (You can get inspired by something, and this is…
If the work is "derivative" in the legal sense it is copyrighted, and you may not create derivative works without the copyright holders permission.
What I should have said is that simply being inspired by a work or copying unprotectable elements (like facts or ideas) does not create a derivative work.
For example, if ChatGPT were to generate Star Wars, except with Dookies instead of Wookies, that might be illegal. If it were to learn what a spaceship is from Star Wars and then create something substantially new it would not. The key is is that it must not be substantially similar to the original. You must add enough value that it becomes something new, not just rehash the original.
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Yeah but a copy IS made. A human just reads. The machine copies the full text then compresses a lossy copy in its weights. You keep dodging that with tortuous analogies of a human learning. I’m sure all these ‘clever’ questions would be useful if this trial was about humans but it’s not.
Model training works roughly by feeding the model a text excerpt and then hiding the last word in the excerpt. The model is then asked to "guess" what the final word is. It will then move around it's weights until the guess sufficiently matches the actual token. Then the process repeats. The training material is used to play this guessing game to dial in it's weights. The training data is picked up, used as reference…
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> have been bankrupted for doing exactly this. Only if they seeded the data and some other entity downloaded it, i.e. they hosted the data. In a previous article I believe it was called out that Meta was being a leecher (not seeding back what they downloaded). It's the hosting that gets you, not the act of downloading it.
I would like to expand on this, since it seems to be a common misunderstanding. Lets imagine a hypothetical situation where one friend loans a book to another, who then makes a copy of it. The lender owns the book, and it is within his rights to loan it to whoever he wants. That is legal. Making this illegal would end libraries. The borrower is well within his rights to accept the book, and as the current owner he is…
But if you make books contents available online via some service that regurgitates its contents you would be totally sus because you can be considered in a business of selling derivative works.
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> 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).…
They are in no way compression algorithms. They can be modeled like that in the same way you can model humans as lossy compression algorithms. You would never use a human to backup your financial reports, but the human might be able to give a good overview. You would never use an LLM to backup your financial reports, but they might be able to give a good overview. AI training data is disposable. There is nothing that…
You can compress 20PB of text to 20Gb or even less, if input is super repetitive. So the same with images, if 50% of the images are cats then you learn how to represent the cat pixels with a few vectors and then you could represent all the cats int he world doing all possible cat actions.
But please have the courage to respond to this, when the AI is caught regurgitating the exact text from a popular book, the exact verses from a poem, the exact code function from some code , then how can you defend that is not memorizing things? If a human uses my poem(after they read it) and signs his name under it would you defend them?
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> have been bankrupted for doing exactly this. Only if they seeded the data and some other entity downloaded it, i.e. they hosted the data. In a previous article I believe it was called out that Meta was being a leecher (not seeding back what they downloaded). It's the hosting that gets you, not the act of downloading it.
I would like to expand on this, since it seems to be a common misunderstanding. Lets imagine a hypothetical situation where one friend loans a book to another, who then makes a copy of it. The lender owns the book, and it is within his rights to loan it to whoever he wants. That is legal. Making this illegal would end libraries. The borrower is well within his rights to accept the book, and as the current owner he is…
I download a torrent with movie that I didn't pay for. If I don't allow to seed it, then I don't get in trouble. If I let it seed either during the download process or after, I'd get a DMCA notice if that torrent/magnet link was getting tracked.
I don't need a hypothetical book, that is just how it works if I were to download illegally obtained documents/media.
As technical as people are in this thread, easy to tell when folks didn't have their parents wondering why they were getting scary letters from the ISP.