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

Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 352 posts

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#61

Post by RajT88 »

reverendsteveii wrote: post #48
RajT88 wrote: post #12

> “What about the next Taylor Swift?” he asked, arguing that a “relatively unknown artist” whose work was ingested by Meta would likely have their career hampered if the model produced “a billion pop songs” in their style. I have this debate with a friend of mine. He's terrified of AI making all of our jobs obsolete. He's a brilliant musician and programmer both, so he's both enthused and scared. So let's go with the…

counterpoint: Gorillaz is a band specifically designed around the idea that the artist doesn't have to exist in order to do all of the things you mention above. Gorillaz has an image, a style, a mythos, all of that. Granted, when they started at the time (2000) there needed to be human creativity in order to create all of that but with AI everything about this can now be generated. I suspect it won't be long before a…

Very relevant point. My own counter-example of Hatsune Miku is not totally AI generated - just generated using very sophisticated musical tools (see: Vocaloid).

There's some very impressive youtubers who are claiming to be generating new music with AI. The one I listen to the most I very much doubt has everything 100% generated - he probably generates a bunch of melodies and other bits of track and stiches the best candidates together. They do crank out a new album basically every 2 weeks though - and has just a scant few thousand followers. They are not making money, but the music is pretty on par with bands which sell hundreds of thousands or millions of albums.

This is part of what makes me think it's the people who can cultivate the mythos, the personality, the whole experience, who are going to be the big winners in the AI music economy. Sure, maybe Gorillaz obfuscates the identity of the artists (side note: do they though? it's well known to be a supergroup), but it still is a curated experience that human creativity was leveraged to create the whole experience.

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#62

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

TimPC wrote: post #3

I think the headline is a bit misleading. Mets did pirate the works but may be entitled to use them under fair use. It seems like the authors are setting up for failure by making the case about whether the AI generation hinders the market for books. AI book writing is such a tiny segment what these models do that if needed Meta would simply introduce guard rails to prevent copying the style of an author and continue…

> I also don’t think AI generated fiction is anywhere near high quality enough to substantially reduce the market for the original author.

Legal cases are often based on BS, really an open form of extortion.

The plaintiffs might've been hoping for a settlement.

Meta could pay $xM+ to defend itself.

Maybe they thought Meta would be happy to pay them $yM to go away.

The reality is, there's very little Meta couldn't just find a freely available substitute for if it had to, it might just take a little more digging on their end.

The idea that any one individual or small group is so valuable that can hold back LLMs by themselves is ridiculous.

But you'll find no end to people vain enough to believe themselves that important.

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#63

Post by Majromax »

bgwalter wrote: post #25
ndiddy wrote: post #5

The title for this submission is somewhat misleading. The judge didn't make any sort of ruling, this is just reporting on a pretrial hearing. He also doesn't seem convinced as to how relevant downloading books from LibGen is to the case: > At times, it sounded like the case was the authors’ to lose, with [Judge] Chhabria noting that Meta was “destined to fail” if the plaintiffs could prove that Meta’s tools created s…

The RIAA lawyers never had to demonstrate that copying a DVD cratered the sales of their clients. They just got high penalties for infringers almost by default. Now that big capital wants to steal from individuals, big capital wins again. (Unrelatedly, has Boies ever won a high profile lawsuit? I remember him from the Bush/Gore recount issue, where he represented the Democrats.)

> The RIAA lawyers never had to demonstrate that copying a DVD cratered the sales of their clients. They just got high penalties for infringers almost by default.

The argument for 'fair use' in DVD copying/sharing is much weaker since the thing being shared in that case is a verbatim, digital copy of the work. 'Format shifting' is a tenuous argument, and it's pretty easily limited to making (and not distributing) personal copies of media.

For AI training, a central argument is that training is transformative. An LLM isn't intended to produce verbatim copies of trained-upon works, and the problem of hallucination means an LLM would be unreliable at doing so even if instructed to. That transformation could support the idea of fair use, even though copies of the data are made (internally) during the training process and the model's weights are in some sense a work 'derived' from the training data.

If you analogize to human leaning, then there's clearly no copyright infringement in a human learning from someone's work and creating their own output, even if it "copies" an artist's style or draws inspiration from someone's plot-line. However, it feels unseemly for a computer program to do this kind of thing at scale, and the commercial impact can be significantly greater.

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#64

Post by CyberMacGyver »

Lerc wrote: post #55
Workaccount2 wrote: post #50

Let me make a clarifying statement since people confuse (purposely or just out of ignorance) what violating copyright for AI training can refer to: 1. Training AI on freely available copyright - Ambiguous legality, not really tested in court. AI doesn't actually directly copy the material it trains on, so it's not easy to make this ruling. 2. Circumventing payment to obtain copyright material for training - Unambiguo…

I'm not sure if Meta did anything illegal in 2. either. I thought the copyright infringement was by the people who provided the copyrighted material when they did not have the rights to do so. I may be wrong on this, but it would seem a reasonable protection for consumers in general. Meta is hardly an average consumer, but I doubt that matters in the case of the law. Having grounds to suspect that the provider did no…

The source being illegal doesn’t make your use legal. Infact one could argue that it’s equally illegal or worse since a corporation knowingly engaged in illegal activity.

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#65

Post by triceratops »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #50

Let me make a clarifying statement since people confuse (purposely or just out of ignorance) what violating copyright for AI training can refer to: 1. Training AI on freely available copyright - Ambiguous legality, not really tested in court. AI doesn't actually directly copy the material it trains on, so it's not easy to make this ruling. 2. Circumventing payment to obtain copyright material for training - Unambiguo…

> AI doesn't actually directly copy the material it trains on

Of course it does. Large models are trained on gigantic clusters. How can you train without copying the material to machines in the cluster?

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#66

Post by ebfe1 »

And this is how Chinese model will win in long term, perhaps... They will be trained on everything and anything without consequences and we will all use it because these models are smarter (except for area like Chinese history and geography). I don't have the right answer on what can be done here to protect copyright or rather contributing back to authors of a paper without all these millions dollar wasted in lawsuits.

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#67

Post by bilbo0s »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #60
flessner wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the former ever gets tested in court, it's the end of the road. All major AI companies have trained on copyrighted work, one way or another. What is inspiration? What is imitation? What is plagiarism? The lines aren't clearly drawn for humans... much less for LLMs.

The FairTrained models claim to train with only public domain and legal works. Companies are also licensing works. This company has a lawful, foundation model: https://273ventures.com/kl3m-the-first-legal-large-language-... So, it's really the majority of companies breaking the law who will be affected. Companies using permissible and licensed works will be fine. The other companies would finally have to buy large co…

I don't know?

Not really sure a claim is good enough. I don't know that you can just go into court and say, "Trust me, I don't use copyrighted material."

And I also can't see any way, other than providing training data and training an identically structured model on that data, that a company can conclusively show that they got the weights in an allegedly copyright free model from the copyright free training data a company provides.

Re: Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

#69

Post by thethimble »

triceratops wrote: post #65
Workaccount2 wrote: post #50

Let me make a clarifying statement since people confuse (purposely or just out of ignorance) what violating copyright for AI training can refer to: 1. Training AI on freely available copyright - Ambiguous legality, not really tested in court. AI doesn't actually directly copy the material it trains on, so it's not easy to make this ruling. 2. Circumventing payment to obtain copyright material for training - Unambiguo…

> AI doesn't actually directly copy the material it trains on Of course it does. Large models are trained on gigantic clusters. How can you train without copying the material to machines in the cluster?

“Copy” is ambiguous here. Of course data is copied during training. That said, OP is referring to whether the resulting model is able to produce verbatim copies of the data.
Post reply on HN