AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law • Hacker News Board

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

#621

Post by welshwelsh » Sun, Jan 22, 2023, 11:39 PM UTC

RandomLensman wrote: post #270

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the datasets these tools are using are available to view for free. The AI isn't stealing physical books or paintings, it's viewing the same data that you or I can by sending an HTTP request, for free.

Could an AI view you for free in a street or even through a window? Does that imply it can use that view data to create advertising using your modified likeness, for example? Just because you can view something for free doesn't mean you can use it anyway you want.

Yes, of course. It could even create advertising using my unmodified likeness, and that wouldn't be a problem. A person's appearance in public is public domain, you don't need permission to use it.

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

#622

Post by welshwelsh » Sun, Jan 22, 2023, 11:44 PM UTC

ehnto wrote: post #471

metacritic12 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enf…

> 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 flip side of this is that if we undermine paid creators until there's no incentive for them to create, then the AIs abilities stagnate on old data and we as a society drop or at least diminish the skillsets that could create new media. AI can gene…

>if we undermine paid creators

I'm not even slightly concerned about that.

1. Art is better when it's not paid. Real artists have day jobs that pay the bills and they create art to express their ideas, not to make money.

2. Paid art isn't going away, it will just change. Certain skillsets will be forgotten, like how landscape painting was replaced by photography. But talented artists will leverage AI tools to create works that are greater than anything that came before.

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

#623

Post by mountainriver » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 12:08 AM UTC

chasing wrote: post #618

mountainriver wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not false, I'm describing my experience, which I said

Sorry. Let me correct: What a gross and hateful way to frame this, especially given your apparently limited experience…

Wow that was a hateful way to frame that, especially given your knowledge of me

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

#624

Post by bluefirebrand » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 12:10 AM UTC

joxel wrote: post #558

bluefirebrand wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in order to justify "the AI is a tool that a human is using, just like a paintbrush" you would have to have to define what meaningful creative process that the human has followed while using the tool. In my opinion things like selecting a training dataset and then writing prompts are not creative processes they are mechanical processes. Input in, output out, with barely any interaction from the human. Conside…

In my opinion things like selecting a training dataset and then writing prompts are not creative processes they are mechanical processes. Input in, output out, with barely any interaction from the human. >>> When it's bleeding edge research there is a ton of human creativity involved in developing the product and engineering the dataset.

Even if that were true, which I am kind of doubtful of, most applications of these tools are not going to be bleeding edge research and should not be treated as though they were.

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

#625

Post by dahart » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 12:17 AM UTC

jonkho wrote: post #604

dahart wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Distributing a model created using your brain is illegal, if the model violates copyright law. (Just like copying stuff without using neural networks in meat-space was already illegal.) If you create a program that reproduces copyrighted work, and distribute the program, then the distribution is illegal. That was the same answer I gave at the top. The brain vs silicon silliness is a strawman and has been all along be…

If you understand that the model is a tool, and that as a tool it can be used to generate activity that can violate laws and be used for other perfectly legal activities, then as a broad principle the distribution of said tool is not a violation of said laws. Cars, phones, guns, knives (practically anything) can be used to generate activities that break the law. They are perfectly legal to distribute. The onus on the…

While it’s true that knives and guns have both legal and illegal uses, it’s another straw man in this context, irrelevant to both neural networks and copyright law. In the case of neural networks, you’re distributing the copied material along with the tool, in the form of network weights, thus breaking the law by distribution whenever the network can reproduce significant portions of any of its individual training samples, or whenever you didn’t have legal permission to use the source training material.

> If you understand that the model is a tool, and that as a tool it can be used to generate activity that can violate laws and be used for other perfectly legal activities, then as a broad principle the distribution of said tool is not a violation of said laws

That statement is incorrect, the logic is flawed. Just because a tool has both legal and illegal uses does not necessarily have any bearing whatsoever on whether the tool’s distribution is legal. Tools that are illegal to distribute can have legal uses, and that does not make them legal to distribute.

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

#626

Post by greysphere » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 12:51 AM UTC

wvenable wrote: post #591

greysphere wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes work to create/identify/classify information, both in the economic and physics sense. That work should be allowed the same protections we do other forms of work. Your example is one where nearly no work was done, thus it doesn't deserve much value. "Let a = the set of all songs" doesn't help me find new songs I like. A songwriter does that work. Another artist that takes and uses and resells that work (witho…

> Another artist that takes and uses and resells that work (without consent), is stealing that work. Another artist accidentally uses a melody from another song (because it's a finite set) and are sued for all their income is a horrible system. The winners aren't the people producing value, it's the people who got there first and are now profiting off other people's work.

If I grew up under a rock, somehow became a self taught musician, and ended up authoring a song that had recognizable components from Happy Birthday, then even still the author of Happy Birthday, having established that melody so successfully in the public zeitgeist, reasonably should benefit.

This is so common the recording industry itself has established rules for sampling and licensing and covers and what not. Are there some folks out there abusing the system, for sure. But overall its goal is to maximize the value produced by the recording industry, which very much includes the people who 'got their first' who built foundations for future artists. To me, this all seems basically reasonable.

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

#627

Post by kdnvk » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 2:06 AM UTC

snickerbockers wrote: post #171

I'd be far more amenable to corporations training their AI on my content of those exact same corporations hadn't spent the last two decades aggressively defending their own IP with DRM and multi-million dollar lawsuits. So they can go fuck themselves, or alternatively they can make their super advanced AI reproduce my copyright statement and license every time it copies my code. Which shouldn't be difficult at all.

Which corporations are you referring to?

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

#628

Post by chii » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 2:52 AM UTC

Winsaucerer wrote: post #496

chii wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't automatically have the right to take my content and do whatever you like with it. actually you don't have the right to restrict the content, except as part of what's allowed in copyright law (those rights a spelt out - like distribution, broadcasting publicly, making derivative works). specifically, you cannot have the right to restrict me from reading the works, and learning from it. Imagine a hypothetic…

I assume you’re referring to US law here. Is there a handy place where these permitted restrictions are listed and described?

https://copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#106

The section titled "Exclusive rights in copyrighted works".

There are 6 rights.

(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;

(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;

(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;

(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;

(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and

(6) in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.

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

#629

Post by arp242 » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 3:32 AM UTC

asddubs wrote: post #466

arp242 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All or nothing, in my opinion. Either abolish or severely reduce copyright, or abide by it. I firmly believe in "practice what you preach". I you declare you firmly believe in A but then do something directly counter to that because it's more convenient in this specific case, then that doesn't sit right with me. Besides, further expanding copyright in this one area will only make it so much harder to reduce it late…

that's like saying "you say you don't believe in borders, yet you oppose this invasion? curious"

That kind of strained "gotcha!" comparison is not helping the conversation.

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

#630

Post by ninjin » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 4:05 AM UTC

Turing_Machine wrote: post #568

ninjin wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, can people stop speaking in absolutes regarding these systems? We (researchers and non-researchers alike) are gradually trying to comprehend exactly how much they generalise and memorise, but this is darn hard work and it is not our fault that several major tech giants decided to deploy and profit from these models long before the scientific and legal landscape was clear. Somepalli et al. (2022) [1] for exa…

> is a fairly strong argument against your statement above. From a quick skim of this paper, they apparently used toy models with a few hundred to a few thousand images in the training set. For the ones with as few as a few thousand training images, they rarely or never saw exact duplicates. For instance, in their figure 4, they show exact duplicates for the training set with only 300 images (well, duh), and didn't f…

Firstly, thank you for engaging in a discussion. Secondly, I am not an expert in image processing, rather my focus in on language. Thus my intuitions will not work as much in my favour in this domain, although the models do have similarities.

They explore a range of sizes and I do not think it is fair to to only highlight the smallest ones. They do explore a 12M subset of LAION in Section 7 for a model that was trained on 2B images. Yes, it is not an ideal experimental setup to use a subset (they admit this) and far from LAION-5B, but it is a fair stab at this kind of analysis and is likely to lead to further explorations.

Let us return though to your claim, which is what I objected to: “Pretty much none of these systems ‘reconstruct an image in detail’.” I think it is fair to say that this work certainly makes me doubt whether none of these systems (even the larger ones) exhibit behaviour that may limit their generalisability or cross the boundary of what is legally considered derivative work.

You may very well be right that once we scale to billions of images this behaviour is improved (or maybe even disappears), but to the best of my knowledge we do not know if this is the case and we do not know when, how, and why it occurs if it does occur. I remain a firm believer that these kinds of models are the future as there is little evidence that we have reached their limits, but I will continue to caution anyone that talks in absolutes until there is solid evidence to support those claims.