Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The current state of the theory that GPL propagates to AI models

shujisado.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 314 posts

Re: The current state of the theory that GPL propagates to AI models

#161

Post by tpmoney »

twoodfin wrote: post #24
zamadatix wrote: post #6

The article goes deep into these two cases deemed most relevant but really there are a wide swath of similar cases all focused around defining sharper borders than ever around what is essentially the question "exactly when does it become copyright violation" with plenty of seemingly "obvious" answers which quickly conflict with each other. I also have the feeling it will be much like Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc…

Ideally, Congress would just settle this basket of copyright concerns, as they explicitly have the power to do—and have done so repeatedly in the specific context of computers and software.

I've pitched this idea before but my pie in the sky hope is to settle most of this with something like a huge rollback of copyright terms, to something like 10 or 15 years initially. You can get one doubling of that by submitting your work to an official "library of congress" data set which will be used to produce common, clean, and open models that are available to anyone for a nominal fee and prevent any copyright claims against the output of those models. The money from the model fees is used to pay royalties to people with materials in the data set over time, with payouts based on recency and quantity of material, and an absolute cap to discourage flooding the data sets to game the payments.

This solution to me amounts to an "everybody wins" situation, where producers of material are compensated, model trainers and companies can get clean, reliable data sets without having to waste time and energy scraping and digitizing it themselves, and model users can have access to a number of known "safe" models. At the same time, people not interested in "allowing" their works to be used to train AIs and people not interested in only using the public data sets can each choose to not participate in this system, and then individually resolve their copyright disputes as normal.

Re: The current state of the theory that GPL propagates to AI models

#162

Post by mr_toad »

phplovesong wrote: post #25

We need a new license that forbids all training. That is the only way to stop big corporations from doing this.

Fair use doesn’t need a license, so it doesn’t matter what you put in the license.

Generally speaking licenses give rights (they literally grant license). They can’t take rights away, only the legislature can do that.

Re: The current state of the theory that GPL propagates to AI models

#163

Post by tpmoney »

basilgohar wrote: post #82
michaelmrose wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't? You have to break the law to get it. It's publicly available like your TV is if I were to break into your house and avoid getting shot.

That isn't even remotely a sensible analogy. Equating copyright violation with stealing physical property is an extremely failed metaphor.

One of the craziest experiences in this "post AI" world is to see how quickly a lot of people in the "information wants to be free" or "hell yes I would download a car" crowds pivoted to "stop downloading my car, just because its on a public and openly available website doesn't make it free"

Re: The current state of the theory that GPL propagates to AI models

#164

Post by mr_toad »

psychoslave wrote: post #70
munchler wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic, humans would also be prevented from “training” on (i.e. learning from) such code. Hard to see how this could be a valid license.

Isn’t it the very reason why we need cleanroom software engineering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanroom_software_engineering

If a human reads code, and then reproduces said code, that can be a copyright violation. But you can read the code, learn from it, and produce something totally different. The middle ground, where you read code, and produce something similar is a grey area.

Re: The current state of the theory that GPL propagates to AI models

#165

Post by voxl »

quotemstr wrote: post #147
bwfan123 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometime, LLMs actually generate copyright headers as well in their output - lol - like in this PR which was the subject of a recent HN post [1] https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369/files#diff-062dbbe... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46039274

So what? I can probably produce parts of the header from memory. Doesn't mean my brain is GPLed.

There is a stupid presupposition that LLMs are equivalent to human brains which they clearly are not. Stateless token generators are OBVIOUSLY not like human brains even if you somehow contort the definition of intelligence to include them

Re: The current state of the theory that GPL propagates to AI models

#166

Post by tpmoney »

Orygin wrote: post #37
James_K wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would such a license fall under the definition of free software? Difficult to say. Counter-proposition: a license which permits training if the model is fully open.

My next project will be released under a GPL-like license with exactly this condition added. If you train a model on this code, the model must be open source & open weights

In light of the fact that the courts have found training an AI model to be fair use under US copyright law, it seems unlikely this condition will have any actual relevance to anyone. You're probably going to need to not publicly distribute your software at all, and make such a condition a term of the initial sale. Even there, it's probably going to be a long haul to get that to stick.

Re: The current state of the theory that GPL propagates to AI models

#167

Post by m463 »

froh wrote: post #141
Orygin wrote: post #74

Great article but I don't really agree with their take on GPL regarding this paragraph: > The spirit of the GPL is to promote the free sharing and development of software [...] the reality is that they are proceeding in a different vector from the direction of code sharing idealized by GPL. If only the theory of GPL propagation to models walks alone, in reality, only data exclusion and closing off to avoid litigation…

> The spirit of the GPL is the freedom of the user, not the code being freely shared. who do you mean by "user"? the spirit is that the person who actually uses the software also has the freedom to modify it, and that the users recovering these modifications have the same rights. is that what you meant? and while technically that's the spirit of the GPL, the license is not only about users, but about a _relationship_…

I don't think you understand the GPL.

> "the user is allowed to do with the software"

The GPL does not restrict what the user does with the software.

It can be USED for anything.

But it does restrict how you redistribute it. You have responsibilities if you redistribute it. You must provide the source code, and pass on the same freedoms you received to the users you redistribute it to.

Re: The current state of the theory that GPL propagates to AI models

#168

Post by tpmoney »

LtWorf wrote: post #151
amszmidt wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't the difficult, a license that forbids how the program is used is a non-free software license. "The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0)."

But training an AI on a text is not running it.

And distributing an AI model trained on that text is neither distributing the work nor a modification of the work, so the GPL (or other) license terms don't apply. As it stands, the courts have found training an AI model to be a sufficiently transformative action and fair use which means the resulting output of that training is not a "copy" for the terms of copyright law.

Re: The current state of the theory that GPL propagates to AI models

#169

Post by mr_toad »

graemep wrote: post #50
xgulfie wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the current norm that the trillion dollar companies have lobbied for is that you can train on copyrighted material all you want so that's the reality we are living in. Everything ever published is all theirs.

I am really surprised that media businesses, which are extremely influential around the world, have not pushed back against this more. I wonder whether they are looking at cost savings that will get from the technology as a worthwhile trade-off.

Several media companies have sued OpenAI already. So far, none have been successful.

Re: The current state of the theory that GPL propagates to AI models

#170

Post by quotemstr »

voxl wrote: post #165
quotemstr wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what? I can probably produce parts of the header from memory. Doesn't mean my brain is GPLed.

There is a stupid presupposition that LLMs are equivalent to human brains which they clearly are not. Stateless token generators are OBVIOUSLY not like human brains even if you somehow contort the definition of intelligence to include them

Even if they are not "like" human brains in some sense, are they "like" brains enough to be counted similarly in a legal environment? Can you articulate the difference as something other than meat parochialism, which strikes me as arbitrary?
Post reply on HN