Things are about to get worse for generative AI • Hacker News Board

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#291

Post by jawngee » Sat, Dec 30, 2023, 2:29 PM UTC

koliber wrote: post #286

The responsibility for ensuring that copyrights were not violated fall on the person publishing the work. Whether they drew something themselves, hired an apprentice artists with no legal training to draw something, took a photograph of something, or used AI to create an image should not matter. Why does anyone assume that ChatGPT or other tools would NOT produce previously-copyrighted content? I can see a naive assu…

Your argument is nonsense.

The junior artist in your hypothetical would have as much liability, if not more.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#292

Post by FridgeSeal » Sat, Dec 30, 2023, 2:29 PM UTC

danielbln wrote: post #185

pylua wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put that c3p0 on a website that gets revenues from views and someone is getting paid.

Ok, sure, but that's not a GenAI thing, that's a plain old boring copyright thing. If I draw a bunch of C3POs and slap them on my Adwords website then I can expect a C&D letter post haste, who cares if the material in question came out of my pen, Photoshop or a GenAI model?

If the model was trained on works by artists (without their knowledge or consent, as seems to be the case) and you get it to spit out art that is basically identical in either content or style to that artist, and they don’t know, or are too poor to effectively sue you, should they just suffer? If you then make money off what is effectively their work, why shouldn’t they get paid? If they only work on commission and rightfully charge a premium, are you not actively gouging their business (knowingly or not)?

I don’t think they should miss out on the protections, or the ability to make money off their work if they desire. The fact that LLM’s give this “plausible deniability” shouldn’t be an excuse to tolerate it.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#293

Post by ncruces » Sat, Dec 30, 2023, 2:29 PM UTC

andy99 wrote: post #273

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the child / author then regurgitates entire paragraphs or sections verbatim in his own works and someone notices, you bet there will be a plagiarism lawsuit coming his way.

Sure. But if the child has that capability, it doesn't automatically make them a walking copyright violation. "Intelligence", even the current version of AI, entails knowing about stuff, including being able to recite. That doesn't mean intelligence's existence violates copyright. If a person used AI to make a copyright violating work, that's a different story, just like if they used their own innate intelligence to…

Taken to its conclusion, liability is then on everyone who decides to publish anything that ChatGPT “tells” them, because it might cross the threshold on plagiarism.

Are the OpenAIs of the world ready to shield their customers from that liability?

If it turns out that using ChatGPT to help you write your resumé opens you up to accusations of plagiarism, or DALL·E to create an image for your website opens you to copyright violation, will you use them?

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#294

Post by Baldbvrhunter » Sat, Dec 30, 2023, 2:31 PM UTC

IshKebab wrote: post #105

foobazgt wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's not like that. Examples of clearly infringing prompts in TFA were as vague as "animated plumber". Asking your session musician for something "melancholy" and having them pass off Stairway to Heaven as original would be unreasonable.

If you ask a human to draw "videogame plumber" they will correctly infer that you mean Mario and draw that. The model isn't doing anything deliberately evil. It's doing exactly what it has been asked. The problem is people are expecting it to have detailed knowledge of trademark law and avoid infringing trademarks, which it hasn't been even asked to do.

I cannot find any other video game plumbers except Mario, Luigi, Waluigi, and Wario.

Well, I say that but there is John, a plumber, in the adult romantic comedy game Plumbers Don't Wear Ties [0]. Named by PC Gamer as number one on its "Must NOT Buy" list in May 2007.

[0] https://limitedrungames.com/collections/plumbers-dont-wear-t...

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#295

Post by whywhywhywhy » Sat, Dec 30, 2023, 2:31 PM UTC

pointlessone wrote: post #73

If any of those results would be deemed infringing we can bid farewell to all fanart ever. Likewise, to all fanfiction. Or any original work that was merely heavily inspired by previous works. Like a lot of modern fantasy is basically Tolkien fan fiction. Or is Gandalf close enough to Merlin to claim prior art that is in public domain?

Weirdly some of the most vocal about this have been professional illustrators and artists who make a lot of money off what is essentially selling fanart commissions, not sure if they're understanding it could impact their work if they get what they want.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#296

Post by pxoe » Sat, Dec 30, 2023, 2:33 PM UTC

Havoc wrote: post #55

To me that’s the wrong question. Everyone knew it was trained on copyrighted material and capable of eerily similar outputs. But it’s already done. At scale. Large corps committing fully. There is no chance of that toothpaste going back in the tube. It’s a bit like when big tech built on aggressive user data harvesting. Whether it’s right, ethical or even legal is academic at this stage. They just did it - effectivel…

making sure that a dataset is clean and not full of material that's improperly sourced, copyrighted, unfit for use due to licensing or ethics, is not nearly hard enough nor "impossible" for it to be a situation where people should just "give up".

and yes, while open source models might be harder to regulate, those big corporations that currently use those things without distinction, exist as pretty established entities, and profit from services they offer in millions of dollars. there's more of a substantial existence, and more of a substantial scale of money they actually move. and they don't just "make a tool available", or have users do unambiguous actions where it would be the users that are infringing on anything, but do indeed use questionably sourced data and turn that into a model and offer that as a service. dirty data is very much a part of the deal with those.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#297

Post by FridgeSeal » Sat, Dec 30, 2023, 2:34 PM UTC

bhickey wrote: post #164

BlackJack wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

disclaimer: I work on GenAI at google, but views are my own The question is, how did the model create Mario&Luigi or Scrooge McDuck without training on copyrighted data? It can't just crawl Wikipedia because Fair Use in Wikipedia doesn't constitute Fair use for a commercial AI model. One possible outcome is more transparency on what datasets were used to train the models.

Disclaimer: ibid > It can't just crawl Wikipedia because Fair Use in Wikipedia doesn't constitute Fair use for a commercial AI model. Why not? The lawyers I've discussed this with socially think that questions like this are unresolved. There are certainly competing legal theories, but we're in uncharted territory. No one knows what the outcome will be until rulings come down or Congress acts. I find the NYT's argumen…

> > It can't just crawl Wikipedia because Fair Use in Wikipedia doesn't constitute Fair use for a commercial AI model. > Why not?

Because it’s tantamount to lying and deceptive conduct? It’s like asking for a licence to use something non-commercially, getting a hold of it, and conveniently deciding 10 minutes later, that you’re actually going to become a re-seller for all this stuff you have. Or going to the soup kitchen because you don’t want to pay your private chef tonight.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#298

Post by pc86 » Sat, Dec 30, 2023, 2:35 PM UTC

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #287

WhiteNoiz3 wrote: post #281

As I understood it, the legal precedent for generative AI is the same one that allows google to scrape websites in order to index them for search for the common good. Google also can display cached versions of websites which is the original content of those sites. No one is going to say that google is copyright infringement just because it is showing content from other websites verbatim. So I think this is a weak arg…

> No one is going to say that google is copyright infringement just because it is showing content from other websites verbatim Journalists [1] and Getty Images [2] did in the past [1]: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/03/07/14/025216/web-caching-g... [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/27/getty-ima...

And lost, if memory serves.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#299

Post by pc86 » Sat, Dec 30, 2023, 2:36 PM UTC

Intox wrote: post #12

Or... things are about to get worse for copyright holders. I don't see any developped country pressing the brake on AGI in the near future to protect a few copyright holders from getting "stolen" in hypothetic scenarios.

Well if it would stupid and economically deleterious to do it, you can count on the EU to at least talk about doing it, if not actually doing it.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#300

Post by JohnFen » Sat, Dec 30, 2023, 2:37 PM UTC

CM30 wrote: post #141

midasuni wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple could buy most of the NYT, RIAA and MPAA companies combined with petty cash. The big ones are Disney and Sony with a combined market cap about 250b. Microsoft alone is worth over 10 times that.

Honestly I've always wondered what would happen (and how much the entertainment world would change) if a company like Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc did just that. Or heck, if it turns out you need the rights to train LLMs and its easier to do that with public domain stuff, they just flat out bought half the entertainment industry and assigned everything to the public domain. Every Disney work every for example.

> and assigned everything to the public domain

In the US, this isn't possible. There is no legal mechanism for putting things into the public domain outside of the expiration of the term of copyright. The best you can do is to promise not to enforce your copyright.