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AI is in danger of being swallowed up by copyright law

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

#661

Post by ElectricalUnion »

clnq wrote: post #459
sircastor wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 t…

When you buy a book or some other artwork, it is implicitly assumed you will put it in your brain, or your meat neural net. And that your brain could produce something related to this content. It's not just assumed, it's celebrated when a work of art gathers fans who produce their own, inspired content. Not sure why it needs to be over-complicated or different for silicone neural nets. But I think it will get very ov…

> When you buy a book or some other artwork, it is implicitly assumed you will put it in your brain, or your meat neural net. And that your brain could produce something related to this content.

It is implied that if you are using the work by youself, or via a tool you made youself, it's fine.

However works that you redistribute, by copying it yourself or indirectly by tools, said silicone neural nets being one example, instead require a "wide redistribution license agreement", and those are implicitly limited by default unless the work is put in a sorta public domain license.

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

#662

Post by dahart »

jonkho wrote: post #635
dahart wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sa…

> 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. Making statements and assuming the truth without reason nor evidence nor examples to back it up. Logical fallacy of…

What are you talking about? What I said there wasn’t an assumption, it’s a fact about our laws. Murdering someone with a gun and breaking copyright law distributing copyrighted material are covered by two completely separate and independent laws. Breaking or not breaking one of the laws does not imply anything about other laws. Your statement of “broad principle” is the assumption here that claimed that not breaking one implied you were not breaking the other, which is completely and utterly false. You really really should read up on copyright law before asserting things, and maybe the laws surrounding knives and guns too if you want to use them as examples. Your comments have repeatedly and consistently demonstrated a lack of understanding of the laws we’re discussing.

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

#663

Post by punyearthling »

When I hear the copyright vs. AI debate, it's always centered on American copyright law, which isn't enforceable around the world (and it shouldn't be). How do you prevent AI models in Turkmenistan, for instance, from using US copyrighted works posted online to train?

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

#664

Post by freejazz »

usrbinbash wrote: post #655
freejazz wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are just anthropomorphizing the model by calling it teaching and then implicitly equating that it's the same thing happening in the human mind. That's your burden to establish when you say it's the same.

I am not anthropomorphizing anything, because this is literally what happens. The model is taught, by having its predictions tested against examples, how images work.

You are, that's not what teaching means and it's not what learning means.

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

#665

Post by freejazz »

unusualmonkey wrote: post #617
freejazz wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are just anthropomorphizing the model by calling it teaching and then implicitly equating that it's the same thing happening in the human mind. That's your burden to establish when you say it's the same.

Actually, isn't the burden of the plaintiffs to prove their copyrights are being violated? Whether or not it's identical to human brains isn't the matter, they'd need to prove how a small 5GB model trained from a huge dataset infringes their rights specifically.

Well if it's their defense they need to substantiate it. Obviously the plaintiff has a theory, they filed the case.

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

#666

Post by mattnewton »

freejazz wrote: post #609
mattnewton wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this interpretation works if the code being generated is seen as essentially being retrieved by a lossy lookup function. But another interpretation is that the generic structure of the code was learned from the works, which is not copywritable. And that generic structure was used to synthesize new code, in much the same way a human who had seen a pattern in a proprietary codebase years ago was able to use tha…

You are just hiding the more complex argument behind the word "learned", which is not something in the normal understanding of the word that's attributed to a computer.

I can expand on that a bit- the weights in the big generative models are still basically too small to hold a significantly number of the input set with anything we would call compression today. This forces the model to strip the input down to some discovered bare structure, which when humans do this we call it things like “archetypes” or “theme” and it’s not generally copyrightable. Many LLM aren’t even trained for multiple epochs so it’s not optimized for memorization as much as it is forced to extrapolate on future examples. I’m arguing that the problem is that the computer has no knowledge of where the line is when it becomes plagiarism in our courts, not that it is always plagiarizing. I think it clearly can’t be always plagiarizing from anecdotal experience of using them and from just doing back of the envelop math on how many bits it has to memorize each input string.

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

#667

Post by KaiserPro »

Levitz wrote: post #464
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…

>Culture isn't free. Someone is paying for it, and if you stop paying them, then it doesn't get created. This is just deeply wrong. Culture existed before money. It is tragic to me that a person can't see culture as anything but a marketable good.

> It is tragic to me that a person can't see culture as anything but a marketable good.

with respect, thats not what I am saying, I'm saying it has a cost. If people do not have the means to spend that money on making culture, then it is not created.

Juvenal was a client of someone, and complained about it

Tallis, Allegri, Purcell, Bach, Mozart were all professional composers

The great seats of learning (Ashurbanipal's libary, Venice, Alexandria) are all paid for by a ruler wanting to show off how good they were

Wilde, byron were all rich people wafting around bored and making art on the way.

In the 60s-80s it was possible to live in NYC working at a bar or something, and still have time and money to create art. Where can you do that now?

Now you need to be rich, or have time, or get patrons. The internet is a great way to either lower the cost of entry (see music) or get support to create (see Patreon)

> This is just deeply wrong. Culture existed before money

Culture existed when we had time, food and resources to stop worrying about being cold wet and hungry.

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

#668

Post by silent_cal »

> The problem is that neural network models, and their outputs, are not copies of the original works. They are a set of probabilities (weights) that are trained based on thousands or even millions of data points.

True, but in order to train these models you have to copy and save images that are for the most part copyrighted. So while the models are not copies of images, they are definitely derivative works.

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

#669

Post by KaiserPro »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #431
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…

> Culture isn't free. Someone is paying for it, and if you stop paying them, then it doesn't get created. That doesn't seem to be universally true, but an end-game of capitalism. There are countless examples of artistry/sculpture/music that were created long before copyright existed and although they may have been "paid" for it previously, those cultural items can be appreciated without needing to pay someone for it.…

> they may have been "paid" for it previously, those cultural items can be appreciated without needing to pay someone for it.

You are arguing against your own point here. As I said culture stops being created when there is no money for people to create it.

Should copyright never expire? no. is 25 years enough? you betcha.

> There are also many contemporary cultural items that were created without monetary recompense

Again you are missing the wider point. For culture to be created you need a mix of people, and those people to feel safe enough, and have enough time and energy to create said culture. They will also need money for materials.

As I suspect you are not on a poverty wage, you will have the time, energy and healthcare to be able to create a new thing. This is not a luxury someone who works two jobs just to make rent has.

> our use of the word "stealing" is unnecessarily loaded and specifically means that the creator was deprived of physical ownership which would be incorrect.

stealing is taking with intent to deprive. I mean specifically what I say.

taking someone else's work and selling it as your own to make money, whilst depriving that person of credit or income stream. It is morally wrong.

Now there is an argument about corporations abusing copyright (they do) but, throwing it all out only benefits people like google, amazon and facebook.

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

#670

Post by silent_cal »

kirse wrote: post #121
jeroenhd wrote: post #105

There's no part of AI that is being swallowed up by copyright. AI companies can ask for permission if they want to train their models on other people's works. It's not that hard, various image hosting sites have already added an opt-in/opt-out toggle to their services. Sites might even get away with using this stuff as compensation for free hosting. The fact of the matter is that the AI companies don't want to ask fo…

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…

AI models aren't observing anything. The people who train them are copying other people's works to do so. By saying an AI model is "observing" images you're begging a question.
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