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

AI Data Laundering

waxy.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 120 posts

Re: AI Data Laundering

#41

Post by 9wzYQbTYsAIc »

Havoc wrote: post #38

The whole thing is a mess but frankly i doubt this genie can be put back in the bottle

I think it is an a priori fact that the cat is out of the bag.

The existing publicly available datasettes, algorithms, and weighted models certainly should be expected to be permanently in the hands of some non-law-abiding parties, at this point.

I think that it will be important to ensure that we have symmetric information, going forward, otherwise trying to put the genie back in the bottle may just end up further disadvantaging those that try to follow the rules.

Re: AI Data Laundering

#42

Post by 9wzYQbTYsAIc »

XorNot wrote: post #40
9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tell me how ML is different than the mind of a toddler ravenous for new information. If a person published a work that clearly plagiarized or violated a patent, that person would be open to legal action. I’m all for systemic change, but uses like this may end up having a chilling effect on human-created work.

> I’m all for systemic change, but uses like this may end up having a chilling effect on human-created work. Everytime this comes up, whichever party fears for it's livelihood always says something like this and ignores the other side: that rigorous enforcement activity is going to do the same thing, to human created work. Richard Stallman wrote a short story about this very issue.[1] There are already people hurling…

> Everytime this comes up, whichever party fears for it's livelihood always says something like this and ignores the other side: that rigorous enforcement activity is going to do the same thing, to human created work.

I may be providing a counter-example to your argument.

At this time, I’m not advocating for anything other than self-censorship by generative AI systems (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33194623 for some initial thoughts) and, as aggregated from some of my other comments in this thread, the following:

I think that it will be important to ensure that we have symmetric information, going forward, otherwise trying to put the genie back in the bottle may just end up further disadvantaging those that try to follow the rules.

-

Society needs to change the laws regarding the preservation of value of intellectual labor, as has long been suggested.

Acting like the law doesn’t matter is a bad thing, if we are making value judgements.

-

If society doesn’t value commodity intellectual labor, then society may need to address the commoditization of intellectual labor, directly, through things like UBI / vocational rehabilitation, etc.

Similar arguments can be made about robots and the commoditization of manual labor.

Re: AI Data Laundering

#43

Post by bigiain »

mkaic wrote: post #8
ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is larger than publishers, this is every artist, film-maker, photographer, every writer, every engineer, anybody who has ever written or created something and shared it publicly is liable to have their work assimilated and an infinite amount of derivatives produced with no control over how they're used and by whom. Comment generated with gpt-neox prompt: Comment about AI and data collection and generation and it…

> anybody who has ever written or created something and shared it publicly is liable to have their work assimilated and an infinite amount of derivatives produced with no control over how they're used and by whom. This has been the case ever since people started putting their art on the Internet publicly. The only difference is that now it's algorithms creating the derivatives, not people.

> The only difference is that now it's algorithms creating the derivatives, not people.

I see more of a difference than that.

I really don't care if a person makes a meme out of one of my Flickr photos I've shared publicly.

I'm much more grumpy at the idea that Facebook/Google/Microsoft using my Flickr photos and "giving away the AI automemes" as a way to further lock people into their walled gardens of surveillance capitalism.

(Not enough that I actually care enough to do anything about it. I have my Flickr account set to default to CC BY 2.0 for uploads, and I try reasonably hard to remember to lock that down to All Rights Reserved is I'm uploading pics of family or friends. But I don't lose sleep over any of it. I do sometime come across this pic of mine, which took on a life of it's own and is all over the internet, at least in coffee-related places, and wistfully wonder if I could have gotten more credit for it... https://flic.kr/p/sVHP9 )

Re: AI Data Laundering

#44

Post by pixl97 »

VanTheBrand wrote: post #26
RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #22

The horse seems well out of the gate.

the horse is out of the gate on photocopiers and before them printing presses but that doesn't make using them without the rights to what you are copying legal

I would go as far to say a vast amount of our creative economic output would cease tomorrow if we had strict 'right to read' copyright enforcement. You can also thank Disney for extending copyright beyond all reason.

Re: AI Data Laundering

#45

Post by tpmoney »

9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote: post #15
tpmoney wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A substitute for what though? Copyright law is only concerned with substituting the work under copyright. That is to say, the consideration is whether the infringing aspects of the secondary work would alter the demand and market for the work being infringed. In all the talk about AI data laundering there really hasn't been any indication that the AI generated item substitutes for the item it's alleged to infringe on…

Stock photography seems to be the obvious instance - why bother paying for the labor to make a stock photo, when you can have a generative AI system create the photo for you? And furthermore, has anyone demonstrated that it is or is not possible to fully, or substantially, recreate any given existing work using the right input prompts? I’m interested to know more of the legal details, but my understanding of copyrigh…

This is precisely my point though, "stock photography" isn't an individual work. Copyright law doesn't apply because you can't infringe on the copyright of "stock photography" as a whole any more than you can infringe on the copyright of "rap" or "rock and roll" or "oil paintings".

Further, just because a new tech can substitute for a class of old tech doesn't (often, barring protectionist laws) mean the old tech gets to impose legal restrictions on new tech. To trot out an obligatory car analogy, the rise of the automobile was not legally hampered by the fact that it substituted for the products of buggy and whip makers. More relevantly, the rise of photography and cameras was not legally hampered by the fact that it substituted for many painters products. The rise of stock photography itself wasn't legally hampered by the fact it substituted for the work of corporate artists. The rise of point and shoot cameras wasn't legally hampered because it substituted for the work of professional photographers.

Lastly if the argument is about that the tech makes it "possible to fully or substantially recreate any given existing work" using deliberate and specific inputs, well we've had plenty of legal precedent on that too. The same arguments were made about Xerox machines, about cassette tapes, about VCRs, about CD-Rs. The copyright holders pretty much lost in every case. At the point you are taking specific and deliberate actions to knowingly infringe on copyright is the point where the technology used is no longer relevant. The right inputs can be used to infringe on the copyright of Star Wars at any typewriter or computer keyboard in the world. The right inputs can be used to infringe on the copyrights of The Beatles at virtually any instrument. It is the act of infringing, not the technology, which is relevant here.

I believe in some companies, the copyright holders won a concession in the form of a tax levied against each CD-R and cassette tape sold to be distributed to the recording industy. One wonders how the authors of those countries felt about not getting a cut of every Xerox machine sold.

Re: AI Data Laundering

#46

Post by alar44 »

killjoywashere wrote: post #13

> It’s currently unclear if training deep learning models on copyrighted material is a form of infringement What? It's clearly a derived work.

Alright, then every piece of music you've ever heard is also a derived work. Unless the composer grew up in a void.

Re: AI Data Laundering

#47

Post by russellbeattie »

moyix wrote: post #3

The Authors Guild v Google decision about Google Books seems relevant: > In late 2013, after the class action status was challenged, the District Court granted summary judgement in favor of Google, dismissing the lawsuit and affirming the Google Books project met all legal requirements for fair use. The Second Circuit Court of Appeal upheld the District Court's summary judgement in October 2015, ruling Google's "proj…

An important part of the opinion (on the wiki page you linked to) is completely missing in the case of AI datasets:

> It generates new audiences and creates new sources of income for authors and publishers.

This is definitely not the case for artists and photographers, who don't benefit at all from the transformative nature of the AI output, and in fact are significantly harmed since it dilutes the uniqueness of their work by allowing anyone to imitate their style. Though to my knowledge "style" isn't protected by copyright - only trademark - I can't imagine there won't be lawsuits about this in the future.

That one artist who complained that people can't find his original work online now because of so many imitated pics is definitely exhibit A in terms of direct harm.

Re: AI Data Laundering

#48

Post by natch »

9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote: post #27
jstanley wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's good! Acting like it's a bad thing is just ludditery.

I think that the argument, overall, is that there are questions as to the legality of certain applications of the technology. Society needs to change the laws regarding the preservation of value of intellectual labor, as has long been suggested. Acting like the law doesn’t matter is a bad thing, if we are making value judgements.

So if a particular convolution appears often, how would you assign value to that? Any ideas?

Re: AI Data Laundering

#49

Post by 9wzYQbTYsAIc »

tpmoney wrote: post #45
9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stock photography seems to be the obvious instance - why bother paying for the labor to make a stock photo, when you can have a generative AI system create the photo for you? And furthermore, has anyone demonstrated that it is or is not possible to fully, or substantially, recreate any given existing work using the right input prompts? I’m interested to know more of the legal details, but my understanding of copyrigh…

This is precisely my point though, "stock photography" isn't an individual work. Copyright law doesn't apply because you can't infringe on the copyright of "stock photography" as a whole any more than you can infringe on the copyright of "rap" or "rock and roll" or "oil paintings". Further, just because a new tech can substitute for a class of old tech doesn't (often, barring protectionist laws) mean the old tech get…

> This is precisely my point though, "stock photography" isn't an individual work … It is the act of infringing, not the technology, which is relevant here.

I completely agree.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33241173 for my comments on that topic. (edit: self-censorship, for example, can be extended to generative AI systems)

> if the argument is about that the tech makes it "possible to fully or substantially recreate any given existing work" using deliberate and specific inputs, well we've had plenty of legal precedent on that too.

In this case, however, given that we are talking about a computer program, and as such, there are ways to legislate copyright protection (or other protections) without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33194623 for some initial thoughts on that topic

Re: AI Data Laundering

#50

Post by heavyset_go »

jstanley wrote: post #18
ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not remotely the same, scale and barrier to entry matter. With stable diffusion I can pick any artist right now and create over 1000 derivative works by tomorrow morning in his style to the same degree of expertise with no training involved and no work required.

That's good! Acting like it's a bad thing is just ludditery.

The Luddites weren't some cult of ignorant technophobes, they were highly-skilled middle class craftsmen and small business owners who went from being able to provide for their families to dying in utter destitution. The remainder of them were tried for machine breaking and were either executed by the state or exiled to penal colonies. They risked everything because everything was at stake, I have a hard time saying that their situation and outcomes were "good", and I have a hard time saying the same about similar situations that are playing out today.
Post reply on HN