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AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

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Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#371

Post by falcor84 »

biscuits1 wrote: post #208

"Is this what the pinnacle of human is? Lazy and greedy?" Selfishness, too. But if I follow the logic, and citations are added, how would one enforce a copyright claim if the creator is amorphous and all-knowing?

> how would one enforce a copyright claim if the creator is amorphous and all-knowing?

I love it! There's a great seed here for a short story about God being sued by a peer of his for copying some of her physical constants and not putting a proper copyright notice about it in our universe.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#372

Post by jaccola »

Bombthecat wrote: post #176
tancop wrote: post #171

if theres just one good thing coming out of ai its breaking copyright law forever. no one should be able to "own" ideas. royalties for commercial use is another thing and i support it but what we know as (non commercial) piracy and unlicensed fan art should be 100% legal

Yeah, I think we are at the point where copyright doesn't exist anymore, at least for AI

What? If I want to read Harry Potter or watch The Matrix an AI cannot produce something equally as good for me. So I need to pay those people, or break the law.

For lots of online knowledge/blogs I guess it is true but even here I often read explainer blogs because AI casts everything in a certain narrative/tone that isn’t always appropriate.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#373

Post by adamtaylor_13 »

I read the article, but I disagree. People are angry, and that's completely understandable. I believe it's a justifiable response to the huge upheaval happening. But being angry about LLMs does not magically transmute their output into "plagiarism".

It has always been possible to take someone's public work, put a twist on it, and then sell it as unique. (I'm not making a moral/ethical argument, only a legal one.) I have yet to see any evidence that LLMs are fundamentally different from that approach.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#374

Post by mplanchard »

samatman wrote: post #330
mplanchard wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t buy this argument. The tokens are useless without their context, which provides the probability distributions needed to make them useful. Sure you MIGHT not be able to get the book word for word, but it’s impossible to make a useful model without the whole book and all of the artistry that went into it, to guide the tokens in their expected output. Fair use generally does not cover commercial use, which this…

It's more complicated than that. Quite a bit more. Commercial use counts _against_ a fair use defense, but is not dispositive: it's not accurate at all to say it "generally does not cover" commercial use. This is the "purpose and character" test, one of four in contemporary (United States) fair use doctrine. Purpose and character also includes the degree to which a use is _transformative_. It's clear that the degree…

It is of course true that it is unsettled law, and that fair use is more complicated than my offhand comment suggested.

> Courts have never once accepted "it would be impossible for defendant to write his biography without reading plaintiff's" as valid, and it's been tried. The standard for plagiarism is higher than that.

This I think misses the thrust of my argument, though. Its hard to find an exact human analogy, because neither the technology nor the scale at which it operates is remotely human.

I see it less as “writing his biography without reading the plaintiff’s” and it’s more “using the same style and metaphors to make thousands of copies of very similar biographies, with certain bits tweaked,” like turning an existing work into mad lib.

I don’t know how the courts will eventually rule on it, but it certainly feels like theft to me.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#376

Post by samatman »

dwa3592 wrote: post #105
ghaff wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While there are no hard boundaries (and the attribution guardrails depend on the situation), people of course loosely--and even not so loosely--use information, ideas, and even expressions from others all the time and that's considered pretty normal. And, if you don't want that to happen, don't publish/disseminate something. Of course, if you quote a paragraph in a book, you're generally expected to attribute it.

>>Of course, if you quote a paragraph in a book, you're generally expected to attribute it. 100% agreed. >>While there are no hard boundaries (and the attribution guardrails depend on the situation), people of course loosely--and even not so loosely--use information. Exactly - I have not seen LLMs attributing their knowledge unless it's a legal or health related matter. Yesterday I asked the question[1] to claude and…

As an experiment, I ran this by A Certain Chatbot, but asking: who should I read to get a good answer to this question?

If you prefix the name of OpenAI's commercial offering's website to this string: "share/6a0f2a87-dba4-8328-a704-89b94fd0c121", you'll find an answer.

I don't know who you had in mind, how did it do?

All the elision is because there are filters to prevent low-effort slop-poasting, and I'm trying to evade them, hopefully while staying within the spirit of the site.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#377

Post by modriano »

nehal3m wrote: post #253
deaton wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an incredibly naive view of intellectual property. If you cannot own things you create, there is little incentive to create and share those things. Do you think any of your favorite movies and TV shows ever get made without copyright protections? Of course not, because money needs to change hands for those things to be funded.

This is naive in the opposite. Creators gonna create.

Creators can only create as long as they can sustain the costs of creating (including opportunity cost).

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#378

Post by throw1234567891 »

hajile wrote: post #264
kibwen wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We found our data in the outputs of their models but who can do anything about it... If the crawlers refuse to voluntarily respect your robots.txt, then you are well within your rights to poison their data.

robots.txt seems like it should be a legally-binding terms of service which would make them outright copyright infringing. Sue for $180,000 per infringement which should be calculated for each illegal API call.

Was your robots txt written by a lawyer? Does it hold up in the court?

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#379

Post by runarberg »

caconym_ wrote: post #294
nashashmi wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worthwhile ones would still be written. Even if they are not enjoyable. The dissemination of ideas from an activist perspective is uninhibitable

> The worthwhile ones would still be written. Citation needed, as well as your precise definition of "worthwhile". > Even if they are not enjoyable. Huh? > The dissemination of ideas from an activist perspective is uninhabitable Yes, I understand that anti-copyright activists want to abolish copyright.

You are arguing in theoreticals, so you should not be surprised if your answers are hypotheticals.

In reality most art is done because the artist has something to say, and the money they get from it is only motivating in as much as it enables the artist to do more art. So I would guess in a world without copyright protection we would just find other ways to pay artists and a very similar amount of art would be produced.

You can see an example of this e.g. in Iceland where the market is way to small for art aimed at the domestic market to make enough money solely by selling it (possible with music; rare with books; not possible with movies). Instead the state has an extensive “artist salary“ program, which pays artist regardless of how well the art they produce sells. Unsurprisingly Iceland produces a lot of art and has many working artists.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#380

Post by throw1234567891 »

gabbagool wrote: post #342
dvduval wrote: post #27

The broader problem of original sources not being given credit in a way that rewards them remains. Websites owners are paying to host their content so that spiders can come and crawl them and index it into the AI and then if they’re lucky, they might get a citation, but otherwise there’s very little reward for being a provider of content. And of course, this is something that’s getting worse and worse. Why look at a…

I agree with this whole heartedly. What's the point of even having copyright law at this point? What's even crazier to think about is that to use the latest versions of these models for which you supplied training data, you have to pay hundreds of dollars a month. I would love to get a settlement check proportional to my model weights. Even if it's $0.10, at least everyone out there will get what they're owed.

No, you don’t have to. There are open weight models you can download and use for free. Many people choose the subscription model but it’s not necessary. And latest doesn’t mean greatest, it’s just most up-to-date.
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