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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

#671

Post by freejazz »

mattnewton wrote: post #666
freejazz wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

You equating that process to something that "humans do" is anthropomorphism.

It's not true that that is what humans do.

Having knowledge of where the line is with regards to copyright liability is not an element required to prove liability. i.e. it's of no consequence that the infringer doesn't realize or know that they are infringing. Copyright is strict liability in that sense.

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

#672

Post by freejazz »

okamiueru wrote: post #566
BeFlatXIII wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The music industry should be like visual arts, not the other way around. Do we want more inane lawsuits based on vague similarities?

No, no, I agree about the insane lawsuits for similar sounding music. The popular music is mostly regurgitated stuff anyways. But the equivalent here would be "Penny Lane as if composed by Michael Jackson and sung by Taylor Swift". My example is bad, because I stopped following popular music a decade or two ago. But replace the deceased artists with living ones. My point probably should be made clearer. You know how…

If you want to do a cover of someone's song, but in a different genre, you still need to license it. It's called a mechanical license.

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

#673

Post by okamiueru »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #660
okamiueru wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, no, I agree about the insane lawsuits for similar sounding music. The popular music is mostly regurgitated stuff anyways. But the equivalent here would be "Penny Lane as if composed by Michael Jackson and sung by Taylor Swift". My example is bad, because I stopped following popular music a decade or two ago. But replace the deceased artists with living ones. My point probably should be made clearer. You know how…

Thank you for articulating the split between the users of AI models and the owners of the models. I like using the models in the manner of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and from that perspective, all the arguments about artists’ moral rights are nothing more than regulatory mumbo-jumbo and sour grapes. However, I do strongly agree that there is something morally icky about companies such as “Open”AI and HuggingFace mak…

I should mention that Stability.AI, Hugging Face and Stable Diffusion are tightly connected. It's all a bit muddy, and I didn't help by mixing them up. However, what I think is that Stability.AI is the company, "Hugging Face" is the community based website for sharing models and the likes, and "Stable Diffusion" is the implementation of the diffusion model developed in a university in Munich.

It's not really fair to take it all out on Stability.AI, as at the very least, they are sharing the technology and models with everyone (for the time being). And that open up some incredible possibilities.

It's much worse what DALL-E, Midjourney and others do, which is much the same, while they let people play with it, but it's all theirs, and they can take it away at any moment.

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

#674

Post by freejazz »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #221
LtWorf wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know from which weird country you're from, but in mine profiting from it changes things a lot.

It sounds like your country is the weird one. Try burning the complete works of Disney onto stacks of DVDs, then go down to your high street and hand them out. See how long you get away with that for.

It's ultimately a commercial use because you are directly affecting Disney's market. This should be obvious.

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

#675

Post by freejazz »

bruce343434 wrote: post #169
threeseed wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea what your point is here. These AI companies are making serious amounts of money (OpenAI is valued in tens of billions) on the back of artists who never gave permission for their work to be used in this way. If a child took an artist's work, copied it and made significant amounts of money from selling it then yes they should be within the purview of copyright law.

AI doesn't copy one to one. It mixes, like humans.

Anthropomorphism isn't an argument.

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

#676

Post by crote »

readams wrote: post #522
jcelerier wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Following this logic, isn't training AI on Github or Deviantart 100% fair game then? Unlike forum comments, GitHub code generally has an explicit license attached which you'd have to respect - you know, for instance by giving attribution to every MIT-licensed source that was used. And even then, let's say someone releases a book with all your HN comments: you are definitely entitled to sue them for copyright. Here'…

But you can still see the code and learn generally how to write code. Maybe you see a style of unit testing in a library, and decide to incorporate the techniques into your own code. This is not a copyright violation. It can't be, or all creative expression would be dead.

This does not universally hold, though.

For example, the "clean-room design" method of copying a work exists precisely to avoid potential copyright issues. One team reads the original work and writes a description in such a way that it cannot possibly be infringing, and a second team reads the description and creates the new work. This avoids any chance of someone reading the original work and incorporating potentially infringing aspects into the new work.

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

#677

Post by crote »

usrbinbash wrote: post #361
cycomanic wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, AI learning is not the same as a person learning. The same way memorizing a book is not the same way as putting it into computer memory. Nobody would sue you for copyright infringement if you memorized a book, song or movie in your head. No the issue is a completely different matter if you made a copy on a harddrive.

> The issue is a completely different matter if you made a copy on a harddrive. But there are no copies. For example, the LAION-2b training data is a total of 240 TB. The pruned SD model based on this dataset, is less than 5GB. The data isn't copied into the models, it is used to teach the models, letting them learn patterns in the dataset.

Okay, but can you prove that?

I have a 1.9 GB mp4 file on my harddrive. It contains 2 hours and 15 minutes of 1080p video data at 24 fps. Assuming it was generated from 4096x2160 16-bit color depth source material, the "training data" was 10.32 TB. I bet I could even get a similar size reduction as LAION-2b if I recompressed it to 720p.

Could I not also claim that I created an advanced AI model, which did not copy but learned patterns in the dataset? Modern video compression algorithms are getting quite complicated, after all.

I think no reasonable person would agree with this, but can you prove that the AI model is doing something substantially different?

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

#678

Post by wvenable »

greysphere wrote: post #626
wvenable wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Copyright is supposed to promote the creation of new works. You just described a system where a song written well over 100 years ago is preferred over over a new artist creating a new work.

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

#679

Post by anotherman554 »

jefftk wrote: post #415
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…

> It's very possible that a judge will rule that AI models do not violate copyright. Current market odds for that are at 77%: https://manifold.markets/JeffKaufman/will-the-github-copilot...

"No" includes the litigation being dropped with no ruling.

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

#680

Post by jefftk »

anotherman554 wrote: post #679
jefftk wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's very possible that a judge will rule that AI models do not violate copyright. Current market odds for that are at 77%: https://manifold.markets/JeffKaufman/will-the-github-copilot...

"No" includes the litigation being dropped with no ruling.

Good point! The market isn't exactly trying to answer my parent's question. But it's reasonably close: the litigation is unlikely to be dropped if it would win.
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