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A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

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Re: A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

#51

Post by ninetyninenine »

SoKamil wrote: post #19
3PS wrote: post #2

Broadly summarizing. This is OK and fair use: Training LLMs on copyrighted work, since it's transformative. This is not OK and not fair use: pirating data, or creating a big repository of pirated data that isn't necessarily for AI training. Overall seems like a pretty reasonable ruling?

What if I overfit my LLM so it spits out copyrighted work with special prompting? Where to draw the line in training?

I mean the human brain can memorize things as well and it’s not illegal. It’s only illegal if said memorized thing is distributed.

Re: A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

#52

Post by toomuchtodo »

veggieroll wrote: post #49
toomuchtodo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let everyone donate their DVDs and other physical media. You don’t need to buy it, you just need to possess the media.

Indeed, I forsee a "training dataset consortium" arising out of this, whereby a bunch of companies team up to buy one copy of everything and then share it for training amongst themselves (ex. by reselling the entire library to each other for $1).

Like an Archive? Connected to the Internet?

Re: A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

#53

Post by layer8 »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #46
3PS wrote: post #2

Broadly summarizing. This is OK and fair use: Training LLMs on copyrighted work, since it's transformative. This is not OK and not fair use: pirating data, or creating a big repository of pirated data that isn't necessarily for AI training. Overall seems like a pretty reasonable ruling?

Agreed. If I memorize a book and I am deployed into the world to talk about what I memorized that is not a violation of copyright. Which is reasonable logically because essentially this is what an LLM is doing.

It might be different if you are a commercial product which couldn’t have been created without incorporating the contents of all those books.

Humans, animals, hardware and software are treated differently by law because they have different constraints and capabilities.

Re: A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

#55

Post by AtlasBarfed »

deadbabe wrote: post #42
NobodyNada wrote: post #40

One aspect of this ruling [1] that I find concerning: on pages 7 and 11-12, it concedes that the LLM does substantially "memorize" copyrighted works, but rules that this doesn't violate the author's copyright because Anthropic has server-side filtering to avoid reproducing memorized text. (Alsup compares this to Google Books, which has server-side searchable full-text copies of copyrighted books, but only allows user…

You can use the copyrighted text for personal purposes.

Hey can I have a fake llm "trained" on a set of copyrighted works to ask what those works are?

So it totally isn't a warez streaming media server but AI?

I'm guessing since my net worth isn't a billion plus, the answer is no

Re: A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

#56

Post by tantalor »

derbOac wrote: post #10
3PS wrote: post #2

Broadly summarizing. This is OK and fair use: Training LLMs on copyrighted work, since it's transformative. This is not OK and not fair use: pirating data, or creating a big repository of pirated data that isn't necessarily for AI training. Overall seems like a pretty reasonable ruling?

But those training the LLMs are still using the works, and not just to discuss them, which I think is the point of fair use doctrine. I guess I fail to see how it's any different from me using it in some other way? If I wanted to write a play very loosely inspired by Blood Meridian, it might be transformative, but that doesn't justify me pirating the book. I tend to think copyright should be extremely limited compare…

The analogy to training is not writing a play based on the work. It's more like reading (experiencing) the work and forming memories in your brain, which you can access later.

I'm allowed to hear a copyrighted tune, and even whistle it later for my own enjoyment, but I can't perform it for others without license.

Re: A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

#57

Post by layer8 »

thedevilslawyer wrote: post #8
lesuorac wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic won't submit a spreadsheet of all the books and whether they were purchases or not. So trivially, not every book stolen is shown to be later purchased. As just a matter of society, I don't think you want people say stealing a car and then coming back a month later with the money.

While no one wants anyone to steal a car, almost no one would mind freely cloning a car. The trouble truly is that 3d-printing hasn't gotten that good yet.

The car would be unlikely to exist if its maker had to expect free clones without compensation. So yes, people would mind.

Re: A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

#58

Post by alganet »

ticulatedspline wrote: post #13
3PS wrote: post #2

Broadly summarizing. This is OK and fair use: Training LLMs on copyrighted work, since it's transformative. This is not OK and not fair use: pirating data, or creating a big repository of pirated data that isn't necessarily for AI training. Overall seems like a pretty reasonable ruling?

Definitely seems reasonable to say "you can train on this data but you have to have a legal copy" Personally I like to frame most AI problems by substituting a human (or humans) for the AI. Works pretty well most of the time. In this case if you hired a bunch of artists/writers that somehow had never seen a Disney movie and to train them to make crappy Disney clones you made them watch all the movies it certainly wou…

What you are describing happened and they got sued:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_Mouse#Walt_Disney_Produ...

I'm on the Air Pirates side for the case linked, by the way.

However, AI is not a parody. It's not adding to the cultural expression like a parody would.

Let's forget all the law stuff and these silly hypotheticals. Let's think of humanity instead:

Is AI contributing to education and/or culture _right now_, or is it trying to make money? I think they're trying to make money.

Re: A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

#59

Post by ranger_danger »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #50
ticulatedspline wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For closed models the storage problem isn't really a problem, they can be judged by what they produce not how they store it as you don't have access to the actual data. That said, open weight LLMs are probably screwed, if enough of the work remains in the weights such that they can be extracted (even if it's without even talking to the LLM) then the weight file itself represents a copy of the work that's being distri…

Why doesn’t this apply to humans? If I memorize something such that it can be extracted did I violate the law? It’s only if I choose to allow such extraction to occur then I’m in violation of the law right? So if I or an LLM simply doesn’t allow said extraction to occur, memorization and copying is not against the law.

I think an important distinction here is distribution... did you tell someone else what you memorized? Is downloading a model akin to distributing that same information?

Re: A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

#60

Post by ticulatedspline »

NobodyNada wrote: post #40

One aspect of this ruling [1] that I find concerning: on pages 7 and 11-12, it concedes that the LLM does substantially "memorize" copyrighted works, but rules that this doesn't violate the author's copyright because Anthropic has server-side filtering to avoid reproducing memorized text. (Alsup compares this to Google Books, which has server-side searchable full-text copies of copyrighted books, but only allows user…

Yep, broadly capable open models are on track for annihilation. The cost of legally obtaining all the training materials will require hefty backing.

Additionally that if you download a model file that contains enough of the source material to be considered infringing (even without using the LLM, assume you can extract the contents directly out of the weights) then it might as well be a .zip with a PDF in it, the model file itself becomes an infringing object whereas closed models can be held accountable by not what they store but what they produce.

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