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AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

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Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#191

Post by thewanderer1983 »

kirse wrote: post #121
jeroenhd wrote: post #105

There's no part of AI that is being swallowed up by copyright. AI companies can ask for permission if they want to train their models on other people's works. It's not that hard, various image hosting sites have already added an opt-in/opt-out toggle to their services. Sites might even get away with using this stuff as compensation for free hosting. The fact of the matter is that the AI companies don't want to ask fo…

AI companies can ask for permission if they want to train their models on other people's works Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? Or observe paintings? Or listen to music? Do you ask for permission when you get new ideas from HN that aren't your own? Humans are constantly ingesting gobs of "copyrighted" insights that they eventually remix into their own creations without necessar…

This is the uncomfortable truth that no one on that side of the argument wants to address.

Also, the fact that Artistic Freedom is now under attack by artists. Not that long ago Artists hated the Music Industry and Corporations such as Disney for weaponizing Copyright law against Artistic Freedom. Now artists are utilizing that same tactic against other artists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_freedom

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#192

Post by LtWorf »

dns_snek wrote: post #44

> [...] and also, for software authors, prohibiting ML training would be antithetical to the Open Source Definition. So that probably won’t work. Of course. As an author of OSS, I'm more than happy to let your AI "learn" from my code as long as the trained model is released under a GPL compatible license.

And the output!

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#193

Post by kerpotgh »

snickerbockers wrote: post #171

I'd be far more amenable to corporations training their AI on my content of those exact same corporations hadn't spent the last two decades aggressively defending their own IP with DRM and multi-million dollar lawsuits. So they can go fuck themselves, or alternatively they can make their super advanced AI reproduce my copyright statement and license every time it copies my code. Which shouldn't be difficult at all.

[flagged]

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#194

Post by scheeseman486 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #152
scheeseman486 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The outcome you want will inevitably lead to entrenched intellectual property holders having an effective monopoly on the best AI tools. You know that Stable Diffusion lawsuit? Go check who the lawyers behind that work for; Disney wants that same outcome.

People who made or bought out the content get to have the content. I don't necessarily see the problem with that except for the ridiculous amount of time copyright remains valid. If a company invests $250 million into an original movie, I don't see why they shouldn't have some say over their content for at least a couple of years. Not until 2150 or whatever the end date for modern works is supposed to be, but give it…

I don't see any of these companies caring about artists, but something like Stable Diffusion is more of a weird accident. Like how IBM managed to create a platform with that became an open standard, something almost diametrically opposed to their own corporate values.

Good quality data and more of it means better output. Disney is almost certainly doing their own thing internally, benefiting from their ability to use both free as well as their own IP and the capital to hire cheap workers to train it directly.

It's not that I don't understand why artists might be upset about a company scraping copyrighted art, I just think that the longer term effects of legally kneecapping open source variants while handing over the most powerful versions of it to the existing intellectual property giants are A Bad Thing.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#195

Post by LtWorf »

Taywee wrote: post #49

> If the AI industry is to survive, we need a clear legal rule that neural networks, and the outputs they produce, are not presumed to be copies of the data used to train them. Otherwise, the entire industry will be plagued with lawsuits that will stifle innovation and only enrich plaintiff’s lawyers Or maybe, get this, how about people running AI only feed them information that they legally have the right to use? Ho…

But we don't want poor innocent microsoft to train models on their own code, do we?

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#196

Post by thewanderer1983 »

pigsty wrote: post #116
jeroenhd wrote: post #105

There's no part of AI that is being swallowed up by copyright. AI companies can ask for permission if they want to train their models on other people's works. It's not that hard, various image hosting sites have already added an opt-in/opt-out toggle to their services. Sites might even get away with using this stuff as compensation for free hosting. The fact of the matter is that the AI companies don't want to ask fo…

It’s strange to me that there’s a lot of overlap between people who think AI training should require explicit consent for every piece of training data, and people who think copyright and patents are insanely restrictive in the music/movies/literature/software world. It’s also worrying that requiring consent to train an AI model will inevitably lead to requiring consent to make handmade art that’s a little too similar…

Right. Not that long ago artists were rallying against Disney and the Music Industry for weaponizing Copyright against Artistic Freedom. Now it seems some artists have decided to use the same tactic.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#197

Post by LtWorf »

adrianN wrote: post #127
bamboozled wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely no comparison here, because children don't charge you to look at their artwork, if you ask nicely, they will probably give it to you for free. Companies using other peoples work without permission to train AI, will charge. Your suggestion would be accurate if we lived in a world where we all shared, and there was no money, and copyright didn't exist, but we don't.

It is my understanding that it makes no legal difference (at least in my country) whether I charge for my work or not when it infringes somebody's copyright. Simply sharing it is sufficient to get into trouble.

I don't know from which weird country you're from, but in mine profiting from it changes things a lot.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#198

Post by LtWorf »

bruce343434 wrote: post #169
threeseed wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea what your point is here. These AI companies are making serious amounts of money (OpenAI is valued in tens of billions) on the back of artists who never gave permission for their work to be used in this way. If a child took an artist's work, copied it and made significant amounts of money from selling it then yes they should be within the purview of copyright law.

AI doesn't copy one to one. It mixes, like humans.

And sometimes it mixes just from one. See github copilot.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#199

Post by pavlov »

visarga wrote: post #183
pavlov wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books?” I’m not able to read billions of books in less than an hour. Even if we agree that machine learning is like human learning, scale commonly matters in law.

I recently worked on information extraction from 10K documents. GPT-3 needs about 7 days of operation in batch mode on one thread. It takes 40..70s to read one single document and report the extracted data. One MINUTE per page. But I think you meant GPT-3 has seen many books during training, not during inference. You should know that training on millions of books is not the only way GPT-3 learns. It is just the found…

> “You should know that training on millions of books is not the only way GPT-3 learns. It is just the foundation of its knowledge.”

I’m not a lawyer, but to me it seems within the realm of possibility that a U.S. court eventually finds strongly in favor of the copyright holders, the Supreme Court agrees (because Big Tech has so few friends left), and OpenAI will be required to destroy the GPT-3 model and all copies of the training data because they can’t filter out copyrighted works.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#200

Post by LtWorf »

stale2002 wrote: post #100
Taywee wrote: post #49

> If the AI industry is to survive, we need a clear legal rule that neural networks, and the outputs they produce, are not presumed to be copies of the data used to train them. Otherwise, the entire industry will be plagued with lawsuits that will stifle innovation and only enrich plaintiff’s lawyers Or maybe, get this, how about people running AI only feed them information that they legally have the right to use? Ho…

> how about people running AI only feed them information that they legally have the right to use? That's what they did! It was in fair use. So yes, they did have the right to legally train the data on copyrighted images.

Train on data: sure… but sell the output? Different question altogether.
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