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

401–410 of 705 posts

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

#401

Post by KaiserPro »

jstummbillig wrote: post #377
KaiserPro wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books yes, thats why I pay a fee to buy/borrow one (or someone pays the fee in the case of a library.) > listen to music again money is exchanged. > Humans are constantly ingesting gobs of "copyrighted" insights that they eventually remix into their own creations without necessarily reimbursing the original source(s) of their creativity. yes, and so…

You don't need to pay for or "borrow" anything to learn from copyrighted works. Nobody has had that expectation for years, and that is also not what copyright pertains to. It's not that AI breaks into libraries and isn't paying the fees. You can google an image of any great work of art and look at it for as long as you like, for free and take from it what you can and use all of that to create something else and get p…

> What if humans from here on will only be paid to create stuff that an AI can't?

I look forward to a life of horrific poverty

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

#402

Post by kragen »

jwildeboer wrote: post #319

The interesting thing is how Heather Meeker carefully avoids mentioning the obvious approach that is perfectly compliant with laws and regulations around copyright and use: opt-in. If a new way of using information arises, asking for consent through opt-in is the obvious choice. But also the most costly one. That's why the "forgiveness instead of permission" approach is seen as somehow heroic, when it actually simply…

the question at issue in these lawsuits is whether the law requires permission (or equivalently forgiveness) or whether people are free to do as they wish in these cases

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

#403

Post by jstummbillig »

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…

If an AI is not a human (I agree) it's a tool, that a human or company created. If it's a tool, the product belongs to the person who owns or uses (which is an important distinction, but not for this case) the tool. Ownership of the product can then be transferred to a new owner through whatever legal means.

If we agree on this, what we need to resolve mostly seems to be, in how far a human should not be allowed to use publicly available data to make his tool, in the same way he is allowed to use publicly available data to make anything else.

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

#404

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#406

Post by Winsaucerer »

flawi wrote: post #289
pid-1 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you ask for permission when you train your mind on copyrighted books? Yes, you do need to buy books, which gives you permission to read them.

This is literally what the AI does as well. 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. The thing that authors are trying to argue here is that they should get to control what type of entity should be allowed to view the work they purchased. It's the same as going "you bought my book, but now that I know you're a communist, I t…

But it's not humans reading it, it's using it to train ML models. There are similarities between humans learning from books and ML models being trained on it, but there are also salient differences, and those differences lead to concerns. E.g., I am concerned about these large tech companies being the gatekeepers of AI models, and I would rather see the beneficiaries and owners of these models also be the many millions or billions of content creators who first made them possible.

It's not obvious to me that the implicit permission we've been granting for humans to view our content for free also means that we've given permission for AI models to be trained on that data. You don't automatically have the right to take my content and do whatever you like with it.

I have a small inconsequential blog. I intended to make that material available for people to read for free, but I did not have (but should have had!) the foresight to think that companies would take my content, store it somewhere else, and use it for training their models.

At some point I'll be putting up an explicit message on my blog denying permission to use for ML training purposes, unless the model being trained is some appropriately open-sourced and available model that benefits everyone.

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

#407

Post by vb-8448 »

RobotToaster wrote: post #368

> "The Co-Pilot suit is ostensibly being brought in the name of all open source programmers. 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." Maybe people wouldn't be so a…

> Maybe people wouldn't be so angry about an AI trained on mostly open source code if said AI was open source, and not a proprietary SaaS.

Exactly, the point is this one. Open-source doesn't mean liability free, you still have to comply to the license!

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

#408

Post by jstummbillig »

KaiserPro wrote: post #401
jstummbillig wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to pay for or "borrow" anything to learn from copyrighted works. Nobody has had that expectation for years, and that is also not what copyright pertains to. It's not that AI breaks into libraries and isn't paying the fees. You can google an image of any great work of art and look at it for as long as you like, for free and take from it what you can and use all of that to create something else and get p…

> What if humans from here on will only be paid to create stuff that an AI can't? I look forward to a life of horrific poverty

I don't think there is any defensible reason to have people at large suffer over AI advancement, without having a plan for making their lifes better.

If AI takes jobs because it's simply superior at them, and that creates friction and anxiety until we have stuff figured out, that's of course sad and we should do our best to soften the process, but I think it's inevitable. The carriage must die. It seems obvious that restrictions on training data are just a distraction and will not move the needle on any interesting time frame.

If however AI does not pay forward, in an arrangement that makes our collective lifes better, I will be the first to work on burning it into to the fucking ground.

But, on a lighter note, since that has generally been the direction of human civilization (not linear when zoomed in, but always when zooming out) I remain optimistic.

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

#409

Post by rvz »

hnlmorg wrote: post #349
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? Plenty of people have been successfully sued if their work is too similar to existing content. This isn’t a new concept that AI is throwing into contention, it’s literally just companies trying to side step copyright law because of “disruption”. Source: I work for a company in this field and we do gain…

Exactly. Somehow it is so 'hard' for many AI companies to ask for permission to use and monetize copyrighted images in the training set these days and instead of asking permission, they attempt to bypass copyright law and give out frequent useless excuses from AI bros like: 'but muh fair use tho', 'oh well genie's out of the bottle it's too late', 'oops, cat's out of the bag, but you can opt out now'.

Little do some of them know that OpenAI was able to get permission from Shutterstock via a partnership to use their copyrighted images in the training set for DALL-E 2. [0] There is also a reason why Dance Diffusion was trained on only public domain music and copyrighted music which has the actual permission from the authors. [1] If they did otherwise and monetized on copyrighted music without the permission from musicians or record labels, they would be sued to the ground.

With the recent cases of Getty, Shutterstock, and even as admitted by the CEO of Stability themselves [2], the way forward for using copyrighted images in the training set for commercial purposes, is via licensing. Neither Getty or Shutterstock are looking for banning it, despite the AI bros claiming that these companies are trying to.

If not, just train only on public domain images to avoid these legal issues.

[0] https://www.shutterstock.com/press/20435

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/07/ai-music-generator-dance-d...

[2] https://twitter.com/EMostaque/status/1603390169192833027

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

#410

Post by sircastor »

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…

>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.

When you buy a book, you’re not paying a licensing fee. You’re exchanging for goods. You’re granted very few rights to own a copy of the work. But they’re almost all to do with distribution. None of those rights is the right to read it.

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

By this interpretation, all the artists upset by stable diffusion have given tacit permission for their works to be used as they are published in the public. Even though those works are posted to websites, the artist has not granted any rights to the viewer of the work.

> only natural humans have that ability according to the law

The law is not explicit about this, and we have case law that describes non-human entities as having rights associated historically with personhood. This is definitely not clear, nor is it obvious.

Post reply on HN