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Japan’s government will not enforce copyrights on data used in AI training

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Re: Japan’s government will not enforce copyrights on data used in AI training

#231

Post by galaxyLogic »

somenameforme wrote: post #222
kmod wrote: post #155

Not trying to express an opinion on the legal matter, but as a technical matter it's pretty obvious that LLMs create copies of (some of) their training data. Here's GPT-3.5 reciting the Declaration of Independence: https://chat.openai.com/share/eb30c373-7fec-4280-892d-479567... Unless you're claiming that GPT-3.5 is deriving the Declaration of Independence (from information about the founding fathers?) I don't see ho…

You don't need to even read their law to know that they are speaking only of training and not of output. Otherwise, they would have just suddenly created the world's most obvious loophole. Create an 'LLM' that "trains" on some input and then categorically outputs each file, be it a movie, song, book, or whatever. You've now legalized copyright infringement (and distribution) of everything. So their law is going to es…

Makes sense. Imagine having your tape-recorder in your living room and start it recording. Then turn on your stereo. The music that comes out is recorded on your tape-recorder.

Is that a violation of copyright? I'm not a lawyer but I think copyright legislation is about forbidding the production of "derived works". If you just record something but never play it back it is not a "derived work" is it? It only becomes a violation if you distribute it, make it available to others, and thus "produce a derived work".

So training an LLM is like recording. But if you use it as a means to distribute copies of copyrighted material without approval of its copyright holders then you are in violation.

Re: Japan’s government will not enforce copyrights on data used in AI training

#232

Post by lmm »

johnwalkr wrote: post #211
Loocid wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which I find bizarre given how backwards Japan is in the adoption of other technologies. Eg their continued reliance on paper records and fax machines.

Do you have concrete examples? I recently moved from Japan to Europe after 10 years in Japan and while some things seemed old-fashioned in Japan, things also change overnight there. During Covid most companies changed to digital signing. In Japan I often needed a paper from the city, but it was an easy-to-obtain printout I could get immediately from city hall or even from 7-11. I tend to require the same papers in Eu…

> Example 1: get ID card at the airport when you emigrate to japan. In Europe it takes 2-3 months.

Yeah now have fun going through the process of renewing a My Number card. Go to city hall (during the hours when it's open), fill in a form, wait 2-3 months to get a notification that your replacement card has been made, then you have to book an appointment during office hours at city hall to pick it up (likely taking another few months).

Yes the initial residence card is issued quickly, but at that point you've had to wait 2-3 months to get the CoE for the visa, so they probably made it during that time.

> Example 2: getting a local driving license takes 1 day provided your country has a treaty with japan.

And involves a whole day of standing around in various queues, again during business hours only. Hardly a picture of efficiency.

Re: Japan’s government will not enforce copyrights on data used in AI training

#233

Post by michaelbrave »

madeofpalk wrote: post #93
nl wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly agree with this. There's a distinction between "learning from" and "copying". "Learning from" is a transformative process that distills from the observation. This distillation can be as simple as indexing for a search engine, or as complex as a deep neural network. Simply because a neural network can create something that is a copyright violation doesn't mean the training process itself it. A human can see…

> A human can see a advertisement for a Marvel movie and then reproduce the Marvel logo. Redistributing (and possibly actually doing that reproduction) that logo is a copyright violation, but the learning process isn't. This then becomes about where the liability of that violation lies, and how attractive that is to companies. A human "learning" the marvel logo and reproducing it is violation. How does OpenAPI fit in…

> A human "learning" the marvel logo and reproducing it is violation

Not quite, it's really in the resale or redistribution that violation occurs, painting an image of the hulk to hang in your living room wouldn't really be a violation, selling that painting could be, turning it into merch and selling that would wholeheartedly be, trying to pass it off as official merch is without question a violation.

Re: Japan’s government will not enforce copyrights on data used in AI training

#234

Post by lmm »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #225
lmm wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The things that an LLM is likely to contain a complete verbatim copy of are things that are a) short b) widely repeated to the point that they're embedded into our culture - and by that token those things are almost certainly not copyrightable.

Is a bar in a song not "short"? Try putting one of those in your book and not getting sued for copyright.

If you literally mean a bar, yes those are short, likely a couple of words, and you put those in books all the time and don't get sued. ("The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind" is 4 bars, and I've seen books quote it verbatim without a second thought). Likewise, plenty of people put the entire Declaration of Independence in their book without a second thought, and I assume don't get sued for it.

If you're talking about a verse or more of something that's not quite so culturally pervasive (people put the whole of the star-spangled banner in their books, again without a second thought), well, at that point it's probably not something that an LLM would reproduce verbatim.

Re: Japan’s government will not enforce copyrights on data used in AI training

#235

Post by hosh »

wodenokoto wrote: post #217
kmod wrote: post #155

Not trying to express an opinion on the legal matter, but as a technical matter it's pretty obvious that LLMs create copies of (some of) their training data. Here's GPT-3.5 reciting the Declaration of Independence: https://chat.openai.com/share/eb30c373-7fec-4280-892d-479567... Unless you're claiming that GPT-3.5 is deriving the Declaration of Independence (from information about the founding fathers?) I don't see ho…

It says training, not inference. I can read a copyrighted book legally and retain that information legally. I can distill it (legally) but while I might be able to recite it, I’m not allowed to. I think that is a reasonable framework around generative AI (after all, I am alllowed to count the words in Harry Potter, so statistical modeling of copyrighted material has legal precedent) The problem with AI is of course t…

Adjacent to copyrights are private and confidential data. It’ll be interesting to see how Japan’s legal framework around this handles private data.

Re: Japan’s government will not enforce copyrights on data used in AI training

#236

Post by emkoemko »

nearbuy wrote: post #109
jpollock wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copying into RAM during training is making a copy, and can be a copyright violation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAI_Systems_Corp._v._Peak_Comp... . However, it seems that there is a later case in the 2nd circuit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartoon_Network,_LP_v._CSC_Hol... .

The sources used for training these AIs are publicly available sources like Common Crawl. If having a copy in RAM is a copyright violation, then there are copyright violations occurring well before any AI ever sees it.

it is and the same reason Blizzard can sue cheat makers because they are violating copyright law by using the memory of the game etc

Re: Japan’s government will not enforce copyrights on data used in AI training

#237

Post by rtpg »

Loocid wrote: post #152
georgewsinger wrote: post #6

Japan also ranks 3rd (behind the USA & India, with larger populations) in ChatGPT usage: https://www.demandsage.com/chatgpt-statistics/ There's also been discussion of their government using ChatGPT to reduce red tape: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-18/japan-gov... It's cool to see Japan and Japanese culture taking techno-optimist stances on AI.

Which I find bizarre given how backwards Japan is in the adoption of other technologies. Eg their continued reliance on paper records and fax machines.

Perhaps places are multifaceted and not reducible to 2-bit facts like the usage of fax machines or lack of credit card adoption.

Re: Japan’s government will not enforce copyrights on data used in AI training

#238

Post by harles »

crazygringo wrote: post #176
kmod wrote: post #155

Not trying to express an opinion on the legal matter, but as a technical matter it's pretty obvious that LLMs create copies of (some of) their training data. Here's GPT-3.5 reciting the Declaration of Independence: https://chat.openai.com/share/eb30c373-7fec-4280-892d-479567... Unless you're claiming that GPT-3.5 is deriving the Declaration of Independence (from information about the founding fathers?) I don't see ho…

Sure, but the key part there is "some of". They're necessarily able to produce verbatim copies only of the most duplicated, most repeated, most cited works -- and it's precisely due to their popularity that they're the only things worth including verbatim. I'm not going to opine on what the legality of that should be, but it's essentially the material considered most "quotable" in different contexts. I'm quite sure t…

I’m not sure it matters much that the current model can’t reproduce Harry Potter verbatim. If it can do smaller more quoted works now, it’ll tackle larger more obscure things in the future. It’s just a matter of time until it can output large copyrighted works, meaning the question of what to do when that happens is pretty relevant right now.

Re: Japan’s government will not enforce copyrights on data used in AI training

#239

Post by fnordpiglet »

Ukv wrote: post #77
Retric wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI models will make 1:1 copies of training data where artists try and avoid doing so. It’s common to obscure this copying by intentionally inserting lossy steps, but making an MP3 isn’t a new work. It’s most obvious when large blocks of text are recreated, but the core mechanism doesn’t go away simply because you obscure the underlying output. “Extracting Training Data from Large Language Models” https://arxiv.org/ab…

> AI models will make 1:1 copies of training data where artists [...] In general I don't think this is the case, assuming you mean generations output from popular text-to-image models. (edit: replied before their comment was edited to include the part on text generation models) For DALL-E 2: I've never seen anyone able to provide a link of supposed copying. Even if you specifically ask it for some prominent work, you…

Given the models are too small to possibly contain enough information to reproduce anything with any fidelity, that’s the only possibility - if it creates something similar to an original work, it’s similarity is fairly poor. Where it can do well is when the copyright material is something simple, like a super man logo. But even then it’s always slightly off.
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