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Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

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Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#181

Post by Dylan16807 »

triceratops wrote: post #178
Dylan16807 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell there is also a principle that you can have ephemeral copies as part of handling and processing the work. Your example involves transmission and mine doesn't, and that's a whole different can of worms. Also the result of that case was self-contradicting so it's not a great basis to build too much logic upon.

> there is also a principle that you can have ephemeral copies as part of handling and processing the work. I'm not aware of this principle. Where is it spelled out? > Also the result of that case was self-contradicting I agree the verdict was a travesty. An innovative business went to ridiculous lengths to stay on the right side of the copyright mafia (data centers with tiny individual TV antennas for each subscribe…

> I'm not aware of this principle. Where is it spelled out?

Well, do CDs give you a license agreement that allows you to copy the data? I've never seen one. And it's nearly impossible to play a CD without that copying.

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#182

Post by [deleted] »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #122
nilsbunger wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s something called a substantive transformation test in copyright law. When you write a summary of a book, you don’t infringe on copyright because it’s a “substantial transformation”. This goes along with the idea that you can copyright the text but not the ideas it expresses. When model training reads the text and creates weights internally, is that a substantial transformation? I think there’s a pretty strong…

No transformation is needed. The point here is that book files have to be copied before they can be used for training. Copyright texts typically say something like "No unauthorised copying or transmission in any form (physical, electronic, etc.)" Individuals who torrented music and video files have been bankrupted for doing exactly this. The same laws should apply when a corporation downloads torrent files. What happ…

[deleted]

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#183

Post by triceratops »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #175
triceratops wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The counterargument to that is model training is impossible without making copies. That's not true for humans.

That's not really true. Models train (in greatly simplified way) by being shown an excerpt and being told to guess the next token from the excerpt. They push around their weights until the token they output matches the next token in the excerpt. Then the excerpt is no longer needed. You can think of it like the article is loaded, the LLM plays this token guessing game through it, then the article is discarded. On the…

> by being shown an excerpt [of copyrighted material]

How is this done? Are bits not written into RAM or disk? Are they not sent between machines in a training cluster? That's copying.

> it is seemingly not far removed from how humans consume content

Except that humans don't make full copies to RAM, or disk or paper.

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#184

Post by TrnsltLife »

Reading the books changes the weights of the neural network. If ruled illegal, wouldn't it also become illegal for a human to read an illegally downloaded book? So far, I thought just redistribution was illegal.

Will the neural network (LLM) itself become illegal? Will its outputs be deemed illegal?

If so, do humans who have read an illegally downloaded book become illegal? Do their creative outputs become illegal?

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#185

Post by startupsfail »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #50

Let me make a clarifying statement since people confuse (purposely or just out of ignorance) what violating copyright for AI training can refer to: 1. Training AI on freely available copyright - Ambiguous legality, not really tested in court. AI doesn't actually directly copy the material it trains on, so it's not easy to make this ruling. 2. Circumventing payment to obtain copyright material for training - Unambiguo…

It’s weird that you are saying it’s unambiguously illegal. AFAIK, in some cases used for training were initially created by non-profits and transformed sufficiently to strip the copyrights.

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#186

Post by lelanthran »

317070 wrote: post #76
bilbo0s wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know? Not really sure a claim is good enough. I don't know that you can just go into court and say, "Trust me, I don't use copyrighted material." And I also can't see any way, other than providing training data and training an identically structured model on that data, that a company can conclusively show that they got the weights in an allegedly copyright free model from the copyright free training data a co…

I do hope people are still innocent until proven guilty? If you did not use copyrighted materials for training, people will not be able to prove that you did, and that should be good enough.

> I do hope people are still innocent until proven guilty?

It's a civil matter not a criminal matter so that that doesn't apply.

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#187

Post by tomrod »

ksynwa wrote: post #161
triceratops wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI doesn't actually directly copy the material it trains on Of course it does. Large models are trained on gigantic clusters. How can you train without copying the material to machines in the cluster?

Don't they mean that LLMs cannot perfectly reproduce the source material?

They're only stochastically lossy compression -- so sometimes it can.

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#188

Post by triceratops »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #181
triceratops wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is also a principle that you can have ephemeral copies as part of handling and processing the work. I'm not aware of this principle. Where is it spelled out? > Also the result of that case was self-contradicting I agree the verdict was a travesty. An innovative business went to ridiculous lengths to stay on the right side of the copyright mafia (data centers with tiny individual TV antennas for each subscribe…

> I'm not aware of this principle. Where is it spelled out? Well, do CDs give you a license agreement that allows you to copy the data? I've never seen one. And it's nearly impossible to play a CD without that copying.

> And it's nearly impossible to play a CD without that copying.

Exactly. It's how you are supposed to use the CD. That's not true for your example of a book on a webcam. You're supposed to read the book, not an image of the book.

That's not the same thing as copying for "processing".

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#189

Post by moomin »

thethimble wrote: post #69
triceratops wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI doesn't actually directly copy the material it trains on Of course it does. Large models are trained on gigantic clusters. How can you train without copying the material to machines in the cluster?

“Copy” is ambiguous here. Of course data is copied during training. That said, OP is referring to whether the resulting model is able to produce verbatim copies of the data.

A good way of thinking about this is: consider the case where the data in question is illegal. Could you get into trouble for not only having access to it but also making copies of it?

There’s plenty of case law there…

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#190

Post by int_19h »

Filligree wrote: post #37
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an LLM model is very different from the original work True, but not the only relevant thing. If the output of the LLM is "not very different from the original work" then the output could be the infringement. Putting a hypercomplex black box between the source work and the plagiarised output does not in itself make it "not infringing". The "LLM output as a service" business is then based on selling something based o…

The output of the LLM is very different from the original, though. It’s hard to look at this and claim it isn’t.

In the general case, yes, but they can verifiably reproduce at least some copyrighted works verbatim, which implies, at the minimum, that their content is stored in model weights in some fashion.
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