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US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

theregister.com

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Re: US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

#131

Post by nickpsecurity »

hatenberg wrote: post #107

Big Tech: We shouldn’t pay, each individual piece of content is worth basically nothing. Also Big Tech: We added 300.000.000 users worth of GTM because we trained in the 10 specific anime movies of Studio Ghibli and are selling their style.

"Pretraining data us worth basically nothing."

(Raises $10 billion based on estimated worth of the resulting models.)

"We can't share the GPT4 prettaining data or weights because they're trade secrets that generate over a billion in revenue for us."

I'll believe they're worth nothing when (a) nobody is buying AI models or (b) AI companies stop using the copyrighted works to train models they sell. So far, it looks like they're lying about the worth of the training data.

Re: US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

#132

Post by gitremote »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #105

I have yet to see someone explain in detail how transformer model training works (showing they understand the technical nitty gritty and the overall architecture of transformers) and also layout a case for why it is clearly a violation of copyright. You can find lots of people talking about training, and you can find lots (way more) of people talking about AI training being a violation of copyright, but you can't fin…

They never said model training is a violation of copyright. The ruling says model training on copyrighted material for analysis and research is NOT copyright infringement, but the commercial use of the resulting model is:

"When a model is deployed for purposes such as analysis or research… the outputs are unlikely to substitute for expressive works used in training. But making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries."

Re: US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

#133

Post by xhkkffbf »

autobodie wrote: post #109
Workaccount2 wrote: post #105

I have yet to see someone explain in detail how transformer model training works (showing they understand the technical nitty gritty and the overall architecture of transformers) and also layout a case for why it is clearly a violation of copyright. You can find lots of people talking about training, and you can find lots (way more) of people talking about AI training being a violation of copyright, but you can't fin…

I have yet to see someone explain in detail how writing the same words as another person works (showing they understand the technical nitty gritty and the overall architecture of the human mind) and also layout a case for why it is clearly a violation of copyright. You can find lots of people talking about reading, and you can find lots (way more) of people talking about plagarism being a violation of copyright, but…

A big part of copyright law is protecting the market for the original creator. Not guaranteeing them anything. Just preventing someone else from coming along and copying someone else's work in a way that hurts their sales.

While AIs don't reproduce things verbatim like pirates, I can see how they really undermine the market, especially for non-fiction books. If people can get the facts without buying the original book, there's much less incentive for the original author to do the hard research and writing.

Re: US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

#134

Post by gitremote »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #125
jfengel wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand your question. It's reasonably clear that transformers get caught reproducing material that they have no right to. The kind of thing that would potentially result in a lawsuit if you did it by hand. It's less clear whether taking vast amounts of copyrighted material and using it to generate other things rises to the level of copyright violation or not. It's the kind of thing that people woul…

My comment is about training models, not model inference. Most artists can readily violate copyright, that doesn't me we block them from seeing copyright.

The judgement was about model inference, not training.

Re: US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

#135

Post by flyingcircus3 »

whamlastxmas wrote: post #46
prvc wrote: post #6

The released draft report seems merely to be a litany of copyright holder complaints repeated verbatim, with little depth of reasoning to support the conclusions it makes.

[flagged]

The very fact that you can bring this tired retort to any argument regardless of context reveals it for what it is: an off ramp to any conversation you have no better argument against.

Re: US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

#136

Post by Aerroon »

jasonlotito wrote: post #124
vessenes wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you - a voice of sanity on this important topic. I understand people who create IP of any sort being upset that software might be able to recreate their IP or stuff adjacent to it without permission. It could be upsetting. But I don't understand how people jump to "Copyright Violation" for the fact of reading. Or even downloading in bulk. The Copyright controls, and has always controlled, creation and distribut…

> But I don't understand how people jump to "Copyright Violation" for the fact of reading. The article specificaly talks about the creation and distribution of a work. Creation and distribution of a work alone is not a copyright violation. However, if you take in input from something you don't own, and genAI outputs something, it could be considered a copyright violation. Let's make this clear; genAI is not a copyrig…

>Yeah, fan fiction is generally not legal. However, there are some cases where fair use covers it.

Which is a clear failure of the copyright system. Millions of people are expanding our cultural artifacts with their own additions, but all of it is illegal, because they haven't waited another 100 years.

People are interested in these pieces of culture, but they're not going to remain interested in them forever. At least not interested enough to make their own contributions.

Re: US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

#137

Post by pitaj »

dmonitor wrote: post #82
Zambyte wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took me a while to be convinced that copyright is strictly a bad idea, but these two articles were very convincing to me. https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/24/Alice-in-Wonderland.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/23/Sustainable-creativity-po...

You need some mechanism in place to prevent any joe schmoe from spinning up FreeSteam and rehosting the whole thing.

There can be many incentives for people to use official sources: early access, easy updates, live events, etc

Re: US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

#138

Post by tempeler »

rurban wrote: post #85
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Democratized" as in large corporations are free to ingest the IPs and then reinterpret and censor them before they feed their version back to us, with us never having free access to the original source?

"Democratized" in the meaning of fascistoized, right? Laws do not apply to the cartels, military, executive and secret services.

To defend yourself against those who don't play by the rules. it has to be democratized. The world isn’t a fair place.

Re: US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

#139

Post by franczesko »

mattxxx wrote: post #51

Well, firing someone for this is super weird. It seems like an attempt to censor an interpretation of the law that: 1. Criticizes a highly useful technology 2. Matches a potentially-outdated, strict interpretation of copyright law My opinion: I think using copyrighted data to train models for sure seems classically illegal. Despite that, Humans can read a book, get inspiration, and write a new book and not be litigat…

> Piracy refers to the illegal act of copying, distributing, or using copyrighted material without authorization. It can occur in various forms

Professing of IP without a license AND offering it as a model for money doesn't seem like an unknown use-case to me

Re: US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

#140

Post by xhkkffbf »

jsiepkes wrote: post #110
Workaccount2 wrote: post #105

I have yet to see someone explain in detail how transformer model training works (showing they understand the technical nitty gritty and the overall architecture of transformers) and also layout a case for why it is clearly a violation of copyright. You can find lots of people talking about training, and you can find lots (way more) of people talking about AI training being a violation of copyright, but you can't fin…

This isn't about training AI on a book, but AI companies never paying for the book at all. As in: They "downloaded the e-book from a warez site" and then used it for training.

This is what's most offensive about it. At least buy one friggin copy.
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