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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

#191

Post by Dylan16807 »

triceratops wrote: post #188
Dylan16807 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

Well you said explicit license earlier.

Would it be a violation to play back a record like a CD and have a digital buffer? That would be pretty silly.

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

#192

Post by Workaccount2 »

jamiek88 wrote: post #158
ilikehurdles wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To what extent connections in a neural network are analogous to connections between neurons in your brain is open to interpretation and study, but the point of the analogy is that in neither case is a copy being made.

Yeah but a copy IS made. A human just reads. The machine copies the full text then compresses a lossy copy in its weights. You keep dodging that with tortuous analogies of a human learning. I’m sure all these ‘clever’ questions would be useful if this trial was about humans but it’s not.

Model training works roughly by feeding the model a text excerpt and then hiding the last word in the excerpt. The model is then asked to "guess" what the final word is. It will then move around it's weights until the guess sufficiently matches the actual token. Then the process repeats.

The training material is used to play this guessing game to dial in it's weights. The training data is picked up, used as reference material for the game, and then discarded. It's hard to place this far from what humans do when reading, because both are using the information to mold their respective "brains" and both are doing an acquire, analyze, discard process.

At no point is training data actually copied into the model itself, it's just run past the "eyes" of the model to play the training game.

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

#193

Post by nashashmi »

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…

All AI is “trained” on existing works. But it also works by outputting altered copied data. This output part is a copyright violation.

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

#194

Post by quesera »

labrador wrote: post #28
Mbwagava wrote: post #8

Whether or not Meta wins this case, I'm never going to support any government that supports both LLMs and IP. Like we have to put up with IP despite having no clear value to a digital society but as soon as it becomes inconvenient it goes out the window? Nah, let's just trash the state and start over. It's going to take centuries to undo the damage wracked by IP-supported private enterprise. And now we also have to p…

I hope you don't think I'm snarky because I'm serious. If you're an American citizen you can homestead in Alaska and cut yourself off from all this if you like. edit: i'm serious. many americans would be much happier taking this option if they knew it existed. i may take it myself

Growing food in Alaska sounds like a meager existence, though.

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

#195

Post by throwawaymaths »

triceratops wrote: post #108
ants_everywhere wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can train yourself with every book at any library. You can also train yourself on a large number of movies and TV shows for a small monthly fee. Where your analogy goes wrong is you're saying you want to "[Circumvent] payment to obtain copyright material for training" to use Workaccount2's words.

So Meta borrowed every book from a library and paid to obtain all of the movies and TV shows? They kept only one copy of every book at any time on their system? Because I'm certainly not allowed to photocopy a library book in its entirety. And I guarantee you a Netflix subscription doesn't allow me to keep a copy of a movie on my hard drive and use it for training man or machine.

> Because I'm certainly not allowed to photocopy a library book in its entirety.

IANAL but that probably falls under fair use? You'll get in trouble if you photocopy the work and sell access to it.

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

#196

Post by anshumankmr »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #56
anshumankmr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting figure that guy. Here's this: >Boies also was on the Theranos board of directors,[2][74] raising questions about conflicts of interest.[75] Boies agreed to be paid for his firm's work in Theranos stock, which he expected to grow dramatically in value.[75][3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Boies That was one of the decisions of all time.

He was also the primary villain of John Carreyrou's account of Theranos' rise and fall -- Bad Blood -- as his firm attempted to bully and hound whistleblowers, and intimidate their families with baseless legal threats. Not a very nice or ethical guy.

>also the primary villain Hopefully second to Holmes,eh?

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

#197

Post by nashashmi »

triceratops wrote: post #65
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…

> 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?

Copyright law does not restrict storing copyright information. It restricts distribution of copyright data without permission. So a computer can store and analyze data but cannot spit it out verbatim. If it spits it out under fair use clause, then it becomes debatable whether the new work is fair use.

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

#198

Post by Dylan16807 »

pessimizer wrote: post #176
Dylan16807 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you do that, it won't be able to give you a summary detailed enough to infringe anything.

It may give me a summary good enough that I don't have to buy the book, since it read the book. If there are any parts that aren't detailed enough for me, I can ask them to be expanded. If you're telling me that's not "infringing," you should follow what up with the argument for why it is not.

Lots of websites will give you summaries of books and they never get sued for that, let alone lose.

If you ask the LLM for the summary to be expanded much, and you're not providing it with a fresh copy of the book to reference, it's going to be wrong.

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

#199

Post by delecti »

TrnsltLife wrote: post #184

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?

Books are sold for the purpose of people reading them, including all the normal consequences that happen from a person reading a book. AI training being analagous to that doesn't unlock some cheat code that makes it legal, or reading books illegal. And it might indeed be found legal, but not for that reason.

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

#200

Post by crystal_revenge »

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.

> That said, OP is referring to whether the resulting model is able to produce verbatim copies of the data.

Transformers are fundamentally large compression algorithms where the target of compression is not just to minimize reconstruction loss + compressed file size. In fact, basically all of machine learning used today can be viewed through the lens of learning a compression algorithm with added goals other than the usual.

By this logic if I create a lossy Jpeg of a copyrighted image it's not "copying" because the lossy compression.

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