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AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

heathermeeker.com

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Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#31

Post by phoe-krk »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #28
phoe-krk wrote: post #14

> But the latest and greatest software trend–generative AI–is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law. About time. > If the AI industry is to survive, we need a clear legal rule that neural networks, and the outputs they produce, are not presumed to be copies of the data used to train them. But they are compressed lossy copies of all that data! That's the whole point of noise/denoise functions that neural ne…

Incorrect. Training images are used to generate a latent manifold which might not contain any of the images in the original training set to within a meaningful delta unless they're massively overrepresented or cliche.

This might be technically correct but doesn't seem to matter much in practice because of how many practical cases of NN outputting copyright-infriging content there are. These include examples in the recent lawsuits that made the rounds on HN. Either even the best specialists behind these NNs cannot make the NNs not contain data that is "massively overrepresented or cliche", or they are unwilling to.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#32

Post by scotty79 »

Copyright is eating everything since the beginning of computing and spitting out worse ghosts of things we might have in its absence.

Sometimes we see glimpses of the world that we might have, in the form of open source, sci-hub and independent small sucessess against all odds created by people going against copyright behemoths.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#33

Post by Arainach »

keikobadthebad wrote: post #2

> Yes, that’s right, people crusading in the name of open source–a movement intended to promote freedom to use source code–are now claiming that a neural network, designed to save programmers the onus of re-inventing the wheel when they need code to perform programming tasks, is de facto unlawful. This is disingenuous... the issue for FOSS is the scrubbing the license off the code and then users not observing the ter…

Microsoft has never had a monorepo.

There's a Windows monorepo, and a monorepo for chunks of Office, but even now that many teams are on Git they're still very much different repos with different build tools, different code search (maybe they fixed some of that in the last few years but none of my friends there have mentioned it if so), different coding standards, and more.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#34

Post by a9h74j »

Jiejeing wrote: post #11

> But other than netting a hefty fee for the lawyers who bring the suit, what is the endgame, exactly? Pay people whose works you want to extract value from, it is that easy… Unless the whole point of this "AI" bubble is to create monetary value for the companies and their shareholders without being held accountable. I do not mean that creating, configuring, tuning a model, or even compiling a massive dataset is not…

> Pay people whose works you want to extract value from

So, e.g., from Basic Attention Token (BAT) to Basic Authorship Token (also BAT)?

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#36

Post by danbolt »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #28
phoe-krk wrote: post #14

> But the latest and greatest software trend–generative AI–is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law. About time. > If the AI industry is to survive, we need a clear legal rule that neural networks, and the outputs they produce, are not presumed to be copies of the data used to train them. But they are compressed lossy copies of all that data! That's the whole point of noise/denoise functions that neural ne…

Incorrect. Training images are used to generate a latent manifold which might not contain any of the images in the original training set to within a meaningful delta unless they're massively overrepresented or cliche.

> to within a meaningful delta

This feels like an argument for communism being the most productive system in theory. Most of the time I feel like I see uninspired material that’s tracing it’s own training data.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#37

Post by phoe-krk »

rubinelli wrote: post #26
phoe-krk wrote: post #14

> But the latest and greatest software trend–generative AI–is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law. About time. > If the AI industry is to survive, we need a clear legal rule that neural networks, and the outputs they produce, are not presumed to be copies of the data used to train them. But they are compressed lossy copies of all that data! That's the whole point of noise/denoise functions that neural ne…

De minimis is a longstanding defense in copyright law. If you are copying very little from very many works, as is the case when you turn multiple petabytes into a few gigabytes of neural network weights, you are in the clear. The problem arises when models overfit and spit out almost perfect copies of the training data.

Yes, agreed, I don't think the problem is with networks that mix tons of input data in a way that doesn't heavily derive from one or a couple of sources. The currently available models do not have overfitting solved, though, and this technological imperfection also has direct practical (and legal) consequences.

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#38

Post by [deleted] »

Jiejeing wrote: post #11

> But other than netting a hefty fee for the lawyers who bring the suit, what is the endgame, exactly? Pay people whose works you want to extract value from, it is that easy… Unless the whole point of this "AI" bubble is to create monetary value for the companies and their shareholders without being held accountable. I do not mean that creating, configuring, tuning a model, or even compiling a massive dataset is not…

[deleted]

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#39

Post by [deleted] »

keikobadthebad wrote: post #2

> Yes, that’s right, people crusading in the name of open source–a movement intended to promote freedom to use source code–are now claiming that a neural network, designed to save programmers the onus of re-inventing the wheel when they need code to perform programming tasks, is de facto unlawful. This is disingenuous... the issue for FOSS is the scrubbing the license off the code and then users not observing the ter…

[deleted]

Re: AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

#40

Post by mdp2021 »

phoe-krk wrote: post #14

> But the latest and greatest software trend–generative AI–is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law. About time. > If the AI industry is to survive, we need a clear legal rule that neural networks, and the outputs they produce, are not presumed to be copies of the data used to train them. But they are compressed lossy copies of all that data! That's the whole point of noise/denoise functions that neural ne…

> But they are compressed lossy copies of all that data

So are those you are storing in your mind...

(Edit: i.e., "learning is not a violation". Also see below.)

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