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California governor signs AI transparency bill into law

gov.ca.gov

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Re: California governor signs AI transparency bill into law

#191

Post by AlexandrB »

kouteiheika wrote: post #180
drivebyhooting wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of them are trained on copyrighted data. Why is it okay for a model to serve up paraphrased books but verbatim copies from the Pirate Bay are illegal? I don’t deny the utility of LLMs. But copyright law was meant to protect authors from this kind of exploitation. Imagine instead of “magical AGI knowledge compression”, instead these LLM providers just did a search over their “borrowed” corpus and then performed a…

> Why is it okay for a model to serve up paraphrased books but verbatim copies from the Pirate Bay are illegal? Because they are not actually memorizing those books (besides few isolated pathological cases due to imperfect training data deduplication), and whatever they spit out is in no way a replacement for the original? Here's some back-of-the-envelope math: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is around ~460K…

> whatever they spit out is in no way a replacement for the original?

Is this actually true? I think in many cases it is a replacement. Maybe not in the case of a famous fictional work like Harry Potter, but what about non-fiction books or "pulp" fiction?

Kind of feels like the bottom rungs of the ladder are being taken out. You either become J.K. Rowling or you starve, there's no room for modest success with AI on the table.

Re: California governor signs AI transparency bill into law

#192

Post by AlexandrB »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #163
CamperBob2 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

News flash: You won't have any idea whether the textbook is AI-authored or not.

Then we trust nothing published after 2020 or so AI will have effectively frozen human progress in a snapshot of time because nothing created after LLMs became widely available will be trustworthy

Who is "we"? A lot of people don't care and will trust new AI generated stuff regardless of how wrong it is. What this means for human progress is uncertain.

Re: California governor signs AI transparency bill into law

#194

Post by Forgeties79 »

chrisweekly wrote: post #143
Forgeties79 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had to shoot from the hip and guess: 30% of the current crop of AI startups are going to make it at best. Frankly that feels insanely generous but I’ll give them more credit than I think they deserve re: ideas and actual staying power. Many will crash in rapid succession. There isn’t enough room for all these same-y companies.

I thought a 10% success rate was the baseline for startups -- which would make your 30% estimate generous indeed.

I'm admittedly hedging my bets in both directions a bit since really none of us know anything about what's going to happen lol

Re: California governor signs AI transparency bill into law

#195

Post by otterley »

Retric wrote: post #42
andy99 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your rent seeking is not a real world problem. I'm sceptical about the bill, I would be much more so if it was just some kind of wealth redistribution to the loudest complainers.

Radio stations get to use anyone’s music but they still need to pay to play that music. Requiring payment to use your product isn’t rent seeking anymore than requiring a hobo to leave your house is. AI companies trying to leverage their power and lobby governments to stiff paying people and thus increase profits is rent seeking behavior. They aren’t creating wealth by non payment, just trying to enrich themselves.

The music analogy doesn’t hold. Unlike websites that provide content for free to the public, commercial recording artists don’t make their content available for free on demand to the public. Spotify and radio/TV broadcasters, as well as individuals, don’t get a copy unless they buy one or make arrangements with the publisher or its licensees.

This is why we’re seeing paywalls go up: authors and publishers of textual content are seeing that they need to protect the value of their assets.

Re: California governor signs AI transparency bill into law

#196

Post by otterley »

Retric wrote: post #110
ndriscoll wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm? Creating new models is clearly adding wealth to the world, and it wouldn't terribly surprise me if a lot of source material (e.g. scanned books or recorded music) is older than the people working on models. The history of copyright is basically a perfect example of rent-seeking.

Creating new models doesn’t require taking content without any compensation. That’s the basic flaw in any argument around necessity.

That’s fine, but if you don’t want content taken without compensation, don’t make it available for free on the Internet. You can’t have it both ways, where it’s free to individuals to read but not for machines to do it. That’s just practically impossible.

Re: California governor signs AI transparency bill into law

#197

Post by otterley »

AlexandrB wrote: post #191
kouteiheika wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is it okay for a model to serve up paraphrased books but verbatim copies from the Pirate Bay are illegal? Because they are not actually memorizing those books (besides few isolated pathological cases due to imperfect training data deduplication), and whatever they spit out is in no way a replacement for the original? Here's some back-of-the-envelope math: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is around ~460K…

> whatever they spit out is in no way a replacement for the original? Is this actually true? I think in many cases it is a replacement. Maybe not in the case of a famous fictional work like Harry Potter, but what about non-fiction books or "pulp" fiction? Kind of feels like the bottom rungs of the ladder are being taken out. You either become J.K. Rowling or you starve, there's no room for modest success with AI on t…

That was the case before AI, too. A small minority of authors are going to be superstars; the rest are still going to have to have day jobs. Publishers largely exist as hedging machines that finance taking risks on new works that have market potential.

Re: California governor signs AI transparency bill into law

#198

Post by Retric »

otterley wrote: post #195
Retric wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Radio stations get to use anyone’s music but they still need to pay to play that music. Requiring payment to use your product isn’t rent seeking anymore than requiring a hobo to leave your house is. AI companies trying to leverage their power and lobby governments to stiff paying people and thus increase profits is rent seeking behavior. They aren’t creating wealth by non payment, just trying to enrich themselves.

The music analogy doesn’t hold. Unlike websites that provide content for free to the public, commercial recording artists don’t make their content available for free on demand to the public. Spotify and radio/TV broadcasters, as well as individuals, don’t get a copy unless they buy one or make arrangements with the publisher or its licensees. This is why we’re seeing paywalls go up: authors and publishers of textual…

LLMs are being trained on published books a direct equivalent of records. People were able to get one to reproduce over 40% of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s stone word for word. https://arstechnica.com/features/2025/06/study-metas-llama-3...

There’s zero chance that happened without the book being in their training corpus. Worse, there’s significant effort put into obscuring this.

Re: California governor signs AI transparency bill into law

#199

Post by otterley »

array_key_first wrote: post #188
cogman10 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “Artificial intelligence model” means an engineered or machine-based system that varies in its level of autonomy and that can, for explicit or implicit objectives, infer from the input it receives how to generate outputs that can influence physical or virtual environments. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like this definition covers basically all automation of any kind. Like, a dumb lawnmower responds to the…

These type of comments are so annoying. "Everything is the same as everything" as an argumentative tactic and mindset is just incredibly intellectually lazy. As soon as anyone tries to do anything about anything, ever, anywhere, people like you come out of the wood work and go "well what about this perfectly normal thing? Is that illegal now too???" Why bother making bombs illegal? I mean, I think stairs kill more pe…

Also, people seem to forget that when laws are challenged or cases arise that judges exist who are charged with making reasonable interpretations of the law.

Re: California governor signs AI transparency bill into law

#200

Post by otterley »

Retric wrote: post #198
otterley wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The music analogy doesn’t hold. Unlike websites that provide content for free to the public, commercial recording artists don’t make their content available for free on demand to the public. Spotify and radio/TV broadcasters, as well as individuals, don’t get a copy unless they buy one or make arrangements with the publisher or its licensees. This is why we’re seeing paywalls go up: authors and publishers of textual…

LLMs are being trained on published books a direct equivalent of records. People were able to get one to reproduce over 40% of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s stone word for word. https://arstechnica.com/features/2025/06/study-metas-llama-3... There’s zero chance that happened without the book being in their training corpus. Worse, there’s significant effort put into obscuring this.

Yes, they are trained on books, but the courts so far are largely in agreement that AI models are neither copies nor derivative works of the source materials. If you’re searching for legal protections against your works being used for model training, copyright law as written today does not appear to give you cover.
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