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

Now is the time to give LLMs access to the ACM digital library

cacm.acm.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 185 posts

Re: Now is the time to give LLMs access to the ACM digital library

#81

Post by kelnos »

20k wrote: post #63
hparadiz wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suddenly it's "copyright infringement" to count the amount of times one word occurs after another word. I find this whole thing so amusing.

AI has the capacity to exactly reproduce its training data, just because something is a transformed representation does not mean that it isn't copying it in some fashion. The JPEG format 'just' counts the frequencies in an 8x8 block of pixels, and yes that's 100% copyright infringement

I have the capacity to exactly reproduce things I've read as well, but it's not automatically copyright infringement if I do so.

> and yes that's 100% copyright infringement

Says what court of law?

I'm kinda getting tired of this stuff. I'm someone who has been, and still to some extent is, uncomfortable with the possibility of copyright/license laundering in LLMs, but they way you are making your argument is incredibly off-putting and not sympathetic. You're throwing out wild assertions about the law that are not supported by... anything, really.

Re: Now is the time to give LLMs access to the ACM digital library

#82

Post by kelnos »

20k wrote: post #72
hparadiz wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The courts don't agree with you and I don't either. Now what?

Courts have ordered AI models to remove song lyrics from their training data, they most definitely do not agree with you

Source on that?

Re: Now is the time to give LLMs access to the ACM digital library

#83

Post by joshka »

Cynddl wrote: post #32

As a researcher with many articles in the ACM library, I have to say this is a masterclass in hypocrisy. Obviously, lawyers can decipher the terms of ACM publishing contracts and Creative Commons licences to determine if this will be acceptable or not. But ACM is not a company, it's a non-profit founded in 1947 to represent scientists. I would be surprised if a majority of ACM members were to say yes should we ask th…

How do you square away the idea that you do science for the increase in knowledge of human kind, but then say that a particular use of that knowledge is verboten?

I get the copyright aspect of this and I'm not arguing that here. I'm more asking about the moral / ethical idea of choosing who can benefit from your science.

Obviously there are the moral / ethical arguments about AI in general here to weigh against - those have been hashed out significantly elsewhere, and I'm not interested in debating them. What I'm asking about here is the impact on science by sharing it with tooling that distributes it in ways not generally considered when originally written.

A quick check of your post history suggests the frame that you work in strongly is privacy related research (observation - may be wrong). I'm curious how that impacts what you wrote here generally.

(Just to be perfectly clear, I'm not arguing your points here, trying to understand them better)

Re: Now is the time to give LLMs access to the ACM digital library

#84

Post by hparadiz »

kelnos wrote: post #81
20k wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI has the capacity to exactly reproduce its training data, just because something is a transformed representation does not mean that it isn't copying it in some fashion. The JPEG format 'just' counts the frequencies in an 8x8 block of pixels, and yes that's 100% copyright infringement

I have the capacity to exactly reproduce things I've read as well, but it's not automatically copyright infringement if I do so. > and yes that's 100% copyright infringement Says what court of law? I'm kinda getting tired of this stuff. I'm someone who has been, and still to some extent is, uncomfortable with the possibility of copyright/license laundering in LLMs, but they way you are making your argument is incredi…

There's way too much hand waving on this topic. It is legal to produce copywritten work. If I draw Pikachu the drawing is mine. Legally. I am simply unable to make money on it. I can give it away if I want with zero liability. I could even hang the drawing up in my restaurant as a decoration. No big deal. What I can't do is use that drawing as my mascot or branding. We have an entirely separate process to determine if you are infringing on a copyright / trademark by using it to sell something. That's why whether or not an LLM can produce a picture of Pikachu is largely irrelevant. It's what you do with it that matters. Even more interestingly if I draw a picture of Pikachu and then the Pokemon Company decides they wanna use that specific picture they actually would have to pay ME for the copyright to use it.

Re: Now is the time to give LLMs access to the ACM digital library

#85

Post by 20k »

kelnos wrote: post #81
20k wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI has the capacity to exactly reproduce its training data, just because something is a transformed representation does not mean that it isn't copying it in some fashion. The JPEG format 'just' counts the frequencies in an 8x8 block of pixels, and yes that's 100% copyright infringement

I have the capacity to exactly reproduce things I've read as well, but it's not automatically copyright infringement if I do so. > and yes that's 100% copyright infringement Says what court of law? I'm kinda getting tired of this stuff. I'm someone who has been, and still to some extent is, uncomfortable with the possibility of copyright/license laundering in LLMs, but they way you are making your argument is incredi…

You reproducing something does not have the same legal status as a tool reproducing something, as you are a human

>Says what court of law?

If you turn a png into a jpeg, and distribute it, that's copyright infringement. There isn't a court in the land that wouldn't find you guilty of that

Re: Now is the time to give LLMs access to the ACM digital library

#86

Post by 20k »

hparadiz wrote: post #78
20k wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Courts have ordered AI models to remove song lyrics from their training data, they most definitely do not agree with you

derivative work & fair use. end of. Not only are you not winning this one but I'm gonna laugh at you the entire time.

Ok, but courts haven't made those rulings yet so good luck with that

Re: Now is the time to give LLMs access to the ACM digital library

#87

Post by 20k »

kelnos wrote: post #80
20k wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI reproduces copyrighted work exactly in many cases, so it clearly infringes copyright in this sense The output of it is also a derivative work, and derivative works also infringe copyright. Its only not a problem if you ignore copyright entirely Humans are the only entities that get to enjoy special idea-learning-exemptions, not AI

Are you a lawyer that has tested this in court, or is this just what you want the reality to be? As someone with lots of open source code out there that has likely been used as LLM training data, I'm very sympathetic to this point of view, but that doesn't seem to be the legal reality. Much of this has not been fully tested in court, but it seems likely that LLM training is not copyright infringement, as long as the…

I mean, its theoretically possible that a court might rule that if an LLM outputs an exact or lightly modified piece of copyrighted work, that it won't be copyright encumbered. We'll end up in a situation where copyright doesn't exist anymore, because you can always claim that its been laundered through an AI. This seems terribly unlikely to me, because 1:1 transformations (eg copying an image into memory) are already established to count as making a copy for legal purposes, there's strong precedent around piracy

There's also been court cases where material has been found to be infringingly used, eg song lyrics, so the case where copyright ceases to exist doesn't seem to be coming through yet, thankfully. It'd be the most staggering upheaval of copyright of all time if this doesn't turn out to be true

Re: Now is the time to give LLMs access to the ACM digital library

#88

Post by 20k »

visarga wrote: post #77
20k wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI code generation often outputs exact copies of code that exists in the wild. I've seen it output chunks from research papers unprompted as well, its a big problem, or blending two papers together in a salad AI works also clearly aren't transformative in many cases. If you ask it a question about a paper, it'll quote bits of the paper at you. That serves as an exact substitute of the original work. If you ask it for…

As long as it is not substantially similar to training set it should be OK to reuse ideas. Ideas should not be protected by copyright or we can't create anything. We should not accept "vibe copyrights". Everyone treats the human user of the AI as furniture, but they steer the whole process into unique directions.

Under the law, machines are not able to create copyright, and basic human involvement is not enough to change this. Eg if you click a button saying "go", that won't create copyrightable content

You can use all the ideas you want, but AI cannot because its not a person, and does not enjoy the same protection under the law. The copyright holders by and large did not agree to you using their content like this

If we enable this, people won't create anything because all their work will immediately be stolen by the AI models. Copyright partially exists to promote the creation of new content, because theft disincentivises novel creation

Re: Now is the time to give LLMs access to the ACM digital library

#89

Post by bonoboTP »

kelnos wrote: post #79
bonoboTP wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you sign off your copyright to ACM then? If you kept the copyright and prevented others from distributing your work, you could be the sole distributor and negotiate the price with the AI company yourself.

Because if you don't publish in academia, you might as well be dead. And the terms for most places to publish are similar. It's a racket.

Ok, then next question is why are you in academia? To share knowledge with humanity, bring the Promethean light to the mortals or something I guess. But then if they use it for productive things that make money, that's too smelly, that's too practical, too dirty, or what?

Re: Now is the time to give LLMs access to the ACM digital library

#90

Post by bonoboTP »

hparadiz wrote: post #84
kelnos wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the capacity to exactly reproduce things I've read as well, but it's not automatically copyright infringement if I do so. > and yes that's 100% copyright infringement Says what court of law? I'm kinda getting tired of this stuff. I'm someone who has been, and still to some extent is, uncomfortable with the possibility of copyright/license laundering in LLMs, but they way you are making your argument is incredi…

There's way too much hand waving on this topic. It is legal to produce copywritten work. If I draw Pikachu the drawing is mine. Legally. I am simply unable to make money on it. I can give it away if I want with zero liability. I could even hang the drawing up in my restaurant as a decoration. No big deal. What I can't do is use that drawing as my mascot or branding. We have an entirely separate process to determine i…

Let's not mix copyright and trademark in mixed phrases like "infringing on a copyright / trademark". The two are very different concepts with different goals.

The main question in the "AI image generator generates a Pikachu image" is whether the AI company serving that image generator to you is violating the copyright or not. Because they make money when doing so (API / subscription cost), and so it's like selling images of Pikachu. The user is likely in the clear as long as they don't go on sell that Pikachu further. But the AI company sold the Pikachu image to the user.

Post reply on HN