161–170 of 176 posts
Props for the postmortem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair use by most standards? Which standards are those? I don't think a standard about training an AI on billions of images exists.
Google scrapes the entire internet to generate a searchable index of the internet. But the resulting search engine is only infringing where it reproduces entire copies of scraped news articles and images. Both places where they have been put back in their place through legal means. Like LLM's, it retains the produced index but not the original data. The big concern is whether producing an LLM is competing with artist…
People _do_ use LLMs to make art in someone else's style (knowingly or unknowingly) and claim it as their own creation.
Also, I wouldn't say the creators of LLMs are competing with artists. The users of LLMs are. Arists don't make LLMs, they make art, and people who use midjourney and such make art.
But I'd argue that creators of LLMs are still liable for the harm people cause using their tools. Perhaps not legally, but certainly ethically.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it transformative if I take all the pages in Hanya Yanagiharas A Little Life and use a thesaurus to change every second word? Or a more realistic scenario: what if I translate it to Spanish without license from the author? That's not allowed, and yet I have "transformed" the work in the same way that an LLM does.
These are my opinions ofc. > Is it transformative if I take all the pages in Hanya Yanagiharas A Little Life and use a thesaurus to change every second word? If you meant it literally.. I'd think that such a version would be a sort of parody. It'd be up to lawyers doing their cross-examinations to prove the work was intended for such a purpose though.. > Or a more realistic scenario: what if I translate it to Spanish…
I can just as well say that a translated work contains "linguistic observations". In fact a translator has to do a lot of transformative work in order to translate a text.
An LLM just takes a set of texts, looks at n-gram distributions, and generates similar text. It is quite literally a fuzzy way of copying. There aren't any mathematical observations in the output. Any math (statistics) is done in the copying process.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah this just shows that ergonomics matters. I use Nano Banana and Grok Imagine to generate silly images for my friends and siblings (instead of reaction gifs I do reaction slop). The workflow is quite easy. Just plop in a prompt and usually the first image is good enough to share. Not that my standards are high anyway. Would I pay extra to ensure that the artists that these models were trained on were compensated f…
Most people can't even imagine the complexity it would require to actually build a system that correctly tracks down the sources for image generation. Not to mention that each image is generated from literally every single training image in a very small percentage. It's not hard when someone inputs "create in style of studio ghibli" to say that studio Ghibli should get a cut. It's very different when you don't specif…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that as soon as it is used to create work, it’s reproducing work that is derived from what it was trained on. Not just the stuff it was TUNED on or asked to derive style from.
Its derivative but not to any infringing extent.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look, you've made a closed argument. Now if I mention small labs or floss projects that got litigated against, first I'd need to 'stop beating my wife'. No one is stealing anything. It's not theft. There has been no crime. None of this is anywhere near criminal law. I could make a more nuanced argument on copyright infringement. But to make that steelman, I'd need to accept a too large overton window shift, so I'll d…
It can output books verbatim. It often "mistakenly" embeds watermarks from famous artists into generated pictures. Arguing that it's not stealing because a bought and owned legal system, which worked at a glacial pace even before it was completely bought off, isn't theft just because a law doesn't exist yet is silly. It's analogous to saying that dumping uranium and blowing up nukes everywhere in the 1940s and 1950s…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only problem that people see in these models is the money flows. If it all was non-profit - then no one would raise the ethical issue.
I don't know I still think cutting artists livelihood from under them with tooling built on top of their work is unethical no matter how you cut it
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its derivative but not to any infringing extent.
Are you a lawyer? If not, you can't make that assertion with that level of confidence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
These are my opinions ofc. > Is it transformative if I take all the pages in Hanya Yanagiharas A Little Life and use a thesaurus to change every second word? If you meant it literally.. I'd think that such a version would be a sort of parody. It'd be up to lawyers doing their cross-examinations to prove the work was intended for such a purpose though.. > Or a more realistic scenario: what if I translate it to Spanish…
You cannot claim that a formulaic thesaurusing of a text is parody, not unless the process is related to the message of the original text itself. Even then, that's a dubious claim. Especially if it was done automatically. I can just as well say that a translated work contains "linguistic observations". In fact a translator has to do a lot of transformative work in order to translate a text. An LLM just takes a set of…
Oh even if it's not a parody it would look transformed enough that a first-time reader would be getting a completely different interpretation of the story* compared to the original source. And that's all that matters.
> There aren't any mathematical observations in the output. Any math (statistics) is done in the copying process.
Wrong. Weights, which these models comprise of, are literally numbers to an extensive mathematical equation.
> It is quite literally a fuzzy way of copying.
And no one knows/there is no consensus on what a 'fuzzy way of copying' is. It is either copying or it is not. You could say that training an LLM is abstracting and integrating various text into it's weights, hereby transforming the source material and again transforming it a second time via integrating it into its weights.