Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

heathermeeker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 705 posts

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

#391

Post by joxel »

_ph_ wrote: post #274
wolframhempel wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really unsure if there is a qualitative difference between a human looking at lots of images, deriving patterns and recompiling them into a new image or a computer doing the same.

Currently there is definitely a wide gap because the current "AI" are completely incapable of a real intellectual process. Wheras humans can develop a true understanding and consequently it is an actual learning and not memorizing process. Of course there are overlaps and consequently from time to time there are law suits about copyright infringements by artists. The pure fact that Stable Diffusion tends to produce 3…

Regression =/= memorization and is exactly how humans synthesize information as well.

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

#392

Post by [deleted] »

RandomLensman wrote: post #272
usrbinbash wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which is very different. Why is it different? The only difference that matters, is scale. And again, if I want to argue that something done 10000000000 times is legally problematic, I have to be prepared to explain why doing it 10 times is problematic as well, only less so.

Nothing new. People differentiate between genocide and murder, for example, or poisoning water supply vs an individual poisoning. Criminal law in quite a few places definitely has scale considerations.

[deleted]

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

#393

Post by hnlmorg »

avianlyric wrote: post #382
kirse wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI companies can ask for permission if they want to train their models on other people's works Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? Or observe paintings? Or listen to music? Do you ask for permission when you get new ideas from HN that aren't your own? Humans are constantly ingesting gobs of "copyrighted" insights that they eventually remix into their own creations without necessar…

> Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? Or observe paintings? Or listen to music? Yes, that’s exactly what happens when you buy a book, or pay for a music subscription. The work is in the public domain, then global permission to observe and copy the work is already granted. > Do you ask for permission when you get new ideas from HN that aren't your own? You don’t need to. It’s impli…

> You publish in public, you automatically grate licenses for the public to consume and transform it.

No you don’t. That would fall under the category of “derivative work” which is still the intellectual property of the original author under most jurisdiction copyright laws.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work

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

#394

Post by metacritic12 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #105

There's no part of AI that is being swallowed up by copyright. AI companies can ask for permission if they want to train their models on other people's works. It's not that hard, various image hosting sites have already added an opt-in/opt-out toggle to their services. Sites might even get away with using this stuff as compensation for free hosting. The fact of the matter is that the AI companies don't want to ask fo…

Regardless of whether one agrees or not with paying creators of the training data, I think the deeper issue here is about societal wealth distribution and who gets paid for X now that X is being done very well by AIs. A less equitable world has Google or billionaires getting paid. A more equitable world has the artists.

But I want to argue here that for purposes of this latter question, your proposal of copyright enforcement (or anything similar) is too little to late.

-These "copyright violating" AIs have demonstrated the proof of concept and the damage is done. Even if these AIs are banned, the companies will just parallel reconstruct it by running the 80/20 rule: pay tiny amounts to get most of the data. After all the creators of the data were doing it for free and are in such fierce competition there's no bargaining power.

- More nefarious AIs will just do transfer learning on intermediate neurons, very difficult to prove stealing here.

- Even if you get the system to work, what about future artists and writers? Are we just creating an entrenched historical group of creatives getting royalties forever?

The distributional problem is not well solved by copyright, and better solved with e.g. corporate taxes, income taxes, VATs.

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

#395

Post by usrbinbash »

RandomLensman wrote: post #305
croon wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just gave two examples of where both ends of the scale are illegal, which only strengthens the argument of GP. IANAL, and I'm not stating anything about the reality of the judicial system, but only following the logic of the argument.

My examples only were meant illustrate that scale is a well known "thing" in legal systems and I happened to pick things with two illegal endpoints (IANAL). You could look at other things like the need for permits for certain things as a function of size and use, if you want simple examples for scale mattering and legal endpoint(s).

I am no lawyer, so the following is only my opinion.

I am completely aware that scale is a "thing" in legal systems. But as I said before: For scale to be important, the unscaled act in itself has to be problematic already.

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

#396

Post by kragen »

avianlyric wrote: post #382
kirse wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI companies can ask for permission if they want to train their models on other people's works Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? Or observe paintings? Or listen to music? Do you ask for permission when you get new ideas from HN that aren't your own? Humans are constantly ingesting gobs of "copyrighted" insights that they eventually remix into their own creations without necessar…

> Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? Or observe paintings? Or listen to music? Yes, that’s exactly what happens when you buy a book, or pay for a music subscription. The work is in the public domain, then global permission to observe and copy the work is already granted. > Do you ask for permission when you get new ideas from HN that aren't your own? You don’t need to. It’s impli…

not literally everything this comment says about copyright is false, but it does pack an impressive number of errors into a comparatively small space

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

#397

Post by SonicTheSith »

i_like_apis wrote: post #334
fsckboy wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thanks for sending your strawman in to do battle with his strawman. you don't need permission to train on books, but you do need to buy the books or take them from the library one at a time. "training" these machines so far is not like human learning as becomes apparent when they spit out source code that mirrors individual repositories. And you know that humans are required to both remix their own creations and foll…

This “ML learning is not like human learning” fallacy is all over the place lately. It’s stupid, and it should stop. Humans are capable of both facsimile and imitation. The fact that ML is able to perform facsimile far better than a human can is not evidence that this is “not the same” learning. Only that ML learning is superior . ML is far superior in feats of both imitation and facsimile.

Are you high? How is ML learning superior to human learning?

If I show a 3 year old a single picture of a Tiger, and tell him this is a tiger, the child is able to recognize a Tiger fairly accurate in real life without further input. Though the child might say that a house cat is tiger,,,,

ML learning needs millions of pictures to do the same, and still might mistake an elephant for a tiger...

ML is nothing more than graph approximation, there is no logical reasoning

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

#398

Post by phkahler »

>> One possible best practice would be to allow authors to specifically opt out of use of their output for ML training.

That is legally the default. Creators own their copyrights. In many cases it is made explicit with a creative commons non-commercial use license. Remember, without a license you get nothing commercial - except the nebulous fair use.

The real problem here is companies thinking they can consume large amounts of material and works simply because they can see them on the internet and obfuscate them by combining together.

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

#399

Post by SonicTheSith »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #371
alpaca128 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It didn't walk into a bookstore and steal all the books off the shelf, it read through material made available to it entirely legally. Github ignored the licenses of countless repos and simply took everything posted publicly for training. They didn't care whether it was available to them entirely legally, they just pretended that copyright doesn't exist for them.

Isn't the definition of public repo that anyone is allowed to download and read it?

Nope, public repos have license, often open source licenses that state that you can freely use the code, or change it , but only if the resulting product will also be opensource.

Other licenses such as the MIT license require that you name the original creator.

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

#400

Post by kragen »

zarzavat wrote: post #259
errantmind wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> US copyright law only applies in the US This isn't entirely true, due to various entangled trade agreements that require countries to respect each other's intellectual property as a prerequisite. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention

They require countries to respect each other's copyrights , not each other's copyright law . The US, for example, does not enforce EU database rights. Moreover, you can in EU copy a book made by a US author who died 80 years ago even if that copyright is still valid in the US. Local laws are enforced by local courts. What the Berne Convention requires is that if I have a copyright in US it will be recognised in Franc…

database rights are not copyrights but a new sui generis monstrosity, but this comment is otherwise correct
Post reply on HN