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AI weights are not open “source”

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Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#251

Post by mikewarot »

zarzavat wrote: post #57

Weights might be copyrightable but in no universe are they copyrightable by OpenAI, Google, etc just because they did the training and spent money on GPUs. The only people who can possibly own the copyright, if any such copyright exists, are the authors of the training data. I find this whole discussion about copyright of weights almost absurd, the incredible amount of deference given to our corporate lords is such t…

>Weights might be copyrightable but in no universe are they copyrightable by OpenAI, Google, etc just because they did the training and spent money on GPUs.

I don't see why not. If you took all the same training data, you would not get the same weights. Especially if RLHF was used to tune those weights. The weights are not a set of facts, they are the result of work, sometimes millions of dollars of work. Surely they deserve copyright protection if they are ever "published".

If not, then they are a trade secret, and other rules apply.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#252

Post by palata »

horsawlarway wrote: post #109

If anything - this entire conversation just highlights (Over and Over and Over and Over again) how absolutely bonkers abusive our current copyright laws are. The vast majority of small individuals are compelled by contract to surrender their rights to large corporations. Those large corporations then abuse the ever loving fuck out of those rights. The express intent of copyright is now a sad joke. Personally - I'm pr…

So you don't like that large corporations can abuse current copyright laws, and your solution when they find a way to launder what they don't control yet (e.g. open source code) is to burn the copyright system to the ground, such that now they can also abuse what remains?

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#253

Post by palata »

robomartin wrote: post #85

Can someone give me a legal answer to this? People, from early school, all the way up to university, use copyrighted materials to learn various topics and obtain degrees. This trains our brains using the work of others. The same is true as we navigate life. We learn various skills and subjects consuming the work of others. And, yes, in the case of most people, we use that training to pursue various careers, obtain wo…

Because humans are not machines. Otherwise we would send machines to prison when they kill someone, right?

I see it like this:

Say you write a book. I assume you would find it obvious that I am not allowed to copy your book, replace your name by mine, and sell it, right? That's the point of copyright.

Now say I don't just copy-paste your book, but I run it through a software that replaces some words with synonyms (without losing quality or meaning), and I sell it all the same. Are you fine with that? I would tend to say that I am still abusing your copyright on your book.

Generative AIs can do exactly that, and the people using generative AIs don't have a simple way to check if the output they got is a slightly-modified copy of copyrighted material or not. All we know is that the AI is a machine taking the words in your book, processing them automatically, and generating a new text. Those are not humans who learned about the world and write down their thoughts, but machines that copy-pasted-and-modified words.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#254

Post by soultrees »

Just a thought, what would happen if all copyrights were abolished or the generative AI revolution we’ve been seeing will continue to the point where almost everything machine generated to a point, and therefore, open season if derivative copyright isn’t protected, then what would actually happen to the US economy?

I don’t buy the argument that people just won’t innovate anymore as there won’t be an incentive anymore just doesn’t cut it. There are multiple motivations that exist simultaneously, for example - governments have a motivation to technologically advanced compared to peer nations, humans have an inherent desire to create, power, notoriety, etc etc.

So in that case, let’s just abolish the first layer of incentive that actually uncovers more greed than anything by absurd copyright laws and just open the flood gates and get rid of all copyright. We need some real innovation and all this babble about who owns an ‘idea’ is way too restricting.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#255

Post by justinjlynn »

kmeisthax wrote: post #250
Retric wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general if you pay someone to paint a picture they own the copyright and it needs to be assigned back to you even if you give them quite specific instructions. The instructions lacked sufficient control over the outcome to give some form of dual copyright. Presumably that general rule would also prevent your instructions to DALLE from giving you copyright ownership of the output either. The AI isn’t getting owners…

Right. And furthermore, I don't actually think prompts alone are copyrightable in most cases - I just wanted to propose an argumentum ad absurdum. Certainly, you can't argue creativity when you're also keyword-stuffing your prompts to call up various feature sets that the model just so happens to associate with them.

The output of a compiler (i.e. A translation program) is created via a prompt (the source code). The output object code is very much copyrighted. People keyword stuff their source code all the time (pragmas) in order to influence the generated output. Why does that object code deserve copyright protection except when the compiler is an AI model (i.e. A translation program)? Compilers use genetic algorithms and weights from profiling in order to generate better output. Where does the output stop being capable of copyright protection because it's no longer "creative"?

If a museum can include a small portion of a frame around a public domain painting and claim new copyright as a result - surely any smallest spark or creative influence qualifies, including choosing a single word and choosing the model and time and which output is selected does as well.

The idea of work for hire, and the notion of copyright assignment, applies to people and not machines or processes employed in the creation of a work. Your brush manufacturer would never dare try to claim that their creative selection of fibres and thus their contribution to the unique brush patterns in your painting constitutes a creative contribution to your work. Why is a complex digital model which does the same any different?

Perhaps it is copyright as a whole that is wrong and is nothing to do with AI. This is what we get for creating imaginary property as a means to finance speculative creative endeavours in a capitalist system. So, yeah. Fun times there - once again technology challenges another economic status quo.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#256

Post by capr »

mike_d wrote: post #157
immibis wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has nothing to do with IP laws, and everything to do with baby formula laws. You don't seriously think that without the ability to sell the recipe, nobody would invent a safe and effective baby formula, right?

I'm not sure you fully grasp all the dimensions of IP law. If you have two brands of baby formula, Death brand that kills babies, and OK brand that is perfectly fine, and you start putting Death brand in fake cans labeled OK brand - that is absolutely an IP enforcement issue. The desire of OK brand to protect their brand, and profits, combined with reasonable IP laws allows them to lead enforcement actions and protec…

Every place on earth already has laws against deception and scams since thousands years ago, this has nothing to do with IP law.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#257

Post by capr »

mike_d wrote: post #151
capr wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pointing out that IP is broken is _not_ easy because most people believe in the contradictory notion of intellectual property, you included, not knowing the legal history of IP, the legal and economic history of the concept of property, and so on. If it were easy, it would be obvious to everybody that 1) IP law is immoral and 2) nothing bad would happen if it's abolished outright. Here's a free ebook on the subject,…

> 2) nothing bad would happen if it's abolished outright. It is interesting that people living in the places with the weakest IP laws will pay a premium to import baby formula from the places with the strictest laws. > Here's a free ebook on the subject Of course it is some right-libertarian wonk piece.

I'm pretty sure a patent lawyer would know more about IP than you do, so I'm not sure who's the wonk here.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#258

Post by Retric »

justinjlynn wrote: post #255
kmeisthax wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. And furthermore, I don't actually think prompts alone are copyrightable in most cases - I just wanted to propose an argumentum ad absurdum. Certainly, you can't argue creativity when you're also keyword-stuffing your prompts to call up various feature sets that the model just so happens to associate with them.

The output of a compiler (i.e. A translation program) is created via a prompt (the source code). The output object code is very much copyrighted. People keyword stuff their source code all the time (pragmas) in order to influence the generated output. Why does that object code deserve copyright protection except when the compiler is an AI model (i.e. A translation program)? Compilers use genetic algorithms and weight…

Multiple independently created compilers can directly translate source code to unoptimized machine code that works in a completely straightforward fashion based on the definition of the language. There’s a great deal of complexity involved in creating more optimized output, but the goal is to have functionally equivalent programs.

There’s no way to map DALLE prompts into any kind of obvious picture from the input. Even DALLE itself can produce a wide range of outputs from a single input.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#259

Post by Retric »

mlyle wrote: post #248
Retric wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not simple mechanical steps and are the result of creative choice Creative choices requires intentional control over the output across a meaningfully different range of viable possibilities. A brick layer has a huge range of viable options in the specific brick and its alignment in a wall but none of those choices are artistically meaningful. The coefficients are also not in any meaningful sense chosen based on ins…

I don't really agree. Here's what the supremes said in Feist V. Rural: > Factual compilations, on the other hand, may possess the requisite originality. The compilation author typically chooses which facts to include, in what order to place them, and how to arrange the collected data so that they may be used effectively by readers. These choices as to selection and arrangement, so long as they are made independently…

> Alphabetical order wasn’t quite enough, But people directing the work that produces the coefficients are doing considerably more creative work than that.

I agree it’s more effort but the metric isn’t effort so I disagree that qualifies the coefficients as copyrightable. The SHA256 hash of a movie isn’t copyrightable even though the movie itself was.

> No one requires complete creative control

That’s a strawman, there are requirements for creative control. You don’t own copyright to your normal dumps, but you can get copyright from looking down and selecting to take a picture. That’s the low bar for a creativity requirement, but it exists.

Re: AI weights are not open “source”

#260

Post by mlyle »

Retric wrote: post #259
mlyle wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really agree. Here's what the supremes said in Feist V. Rural: > Factual compilations, on the other hand, may possess the requisite originality. The compilation author typically chooses which facts to include, in what order to place them, and how to arrange the collected data so that they may be used effectively by readers. These choices as to selection and arrangement, so long as they are made independently…

> Alphabetical order wasn’t quite enough, But people directing the work that produces the coefficients are doing considerably more creative work than that. I agree it’s more effort but the metric isn’t effort so I disagree that qualifies the coefficients as copyrightable. The SHA256 hash of a movie isn’t copyrightable even though the movie itself was. > No one requires complete creative control That’s a strawman, the…

> I agree it’s more effort but the metric isn’t effort so I disagree that qualifies the coefficients as copyrightable.

I know the metric is no longer effort. But there's a lot of creative choices that I've mentioned that greatly affect the coefficients, even if we don't know what those creative choices are going to do to each film grain in the photograph or coefficient in the matrix.

> You don’t own copyright to your normal dumps

Yes, there's an explicit exemption in LOC's guidelines for things that are the direct output of natural processes.

If you have a lot of choices affecting output, then the output is subject to copyright. Indeed, the Supremes above said that factual contemplations can qualify if they involve a "minimal degree of creativity".

In the end, we'll see.

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