Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would 'kill' AI industry • Hacker News Board

Re: Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would 'kill' AI industry

#71

Post by Earw0rm » Tue, May 27, 2025, 9:36 PM UTC

birn559 wrote: post #65

pj_mukh wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The legality of Copyright material being present in the latent space of a commercialized foundation model would definitely be an interesting case! Though most of these cases aren't litigating this. They are charging that the ability to recreate copyrightable material is the fault of the tool and not the tool user[1]. [1]: https://www.darrow.ai/resources/ai-copyright-law

If using the work as training data was lawful (which hasn't been always the case as we know today) I tend to agree with you, but it might depend: creating an alteration of the work might be prohibited altogether or you might need to give proper credit to the original authors and that might already be violated when you present certain output to a user. In general, the user is responsible to obey the license of the ori…

It's not cut and dried in that way ("certain output"), in many models, any one piece of training data can influence any number of weights and potential outputs, and it's difficult or impossible to say which output was influenced to what extent by which input.

A drop of blood falls in a lake.. which bit of lake now contains blood?

Re: Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would 'kill' AI industry

#72

Post by const_cast » Wed, May 28, 2025, 12:38 AM UTC

pj_mukh wrote: post #63

const_cast wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 100% of all my usage of image generation is for artistic purposes that have nothing to do with the reproduction of or even the mimicry of existing art. How? You're creating artwork that is based off of the training data and is meant to replicate a subset of it. I think, just because you cannot pinpoint the exact art piece(s) that you are recreating doesn't mean that that isn't what you're doing.

Sorry when you said "Sole purpose", I assumed you meant the ChatGPT USERS sole purpose and OpenAI's expectation of their users' Sole purpose. My sole purpose as a ChatGPT user is not to create/recreate stock photos. "just because you cannot pinpoint the exact art piece(s)" Precisely, and neither can the owner of the copyright. Unless of course I rub into classical copyright issues ("these two art pieces look too simi…

> If I "use" your artwork, and generate another artwork that looks nothing like yours (either from my brain or by automating it) why do you care?

I wouldn't, but presumably the person who you are immitating would.

The fallacy here is that you think an LLM is taking one or two art pieces and then turning around and creating something brand new, like a human brain might do.

No. It's taking billions of art pieces and then sampling them at various frequencies to create your art work. We can find your art work somewhere in the training data, it's just hard.

In essence, we're smuggling the copyright violation through convolution. Since these models are truly very large, we can pretend that there isn't copyright violation. But there is, we just can't really find it because LLMs cannot work backwards.

Re: Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would 'kill' AI industry

#73

Post by pj_mukh » Wed, May 28, 2025, 4:41 AM UTC

const_cast wrote: post #72

pj_mukh wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry when you said "Sole purpose", I assumed you meant the ChatGPT USERS sole purpose and OpenAI's expectation of their users' Sole purpose. My sole purpose as a ChatGPT user is not to create/recreate stock photos. "just because you cannot pinpoint the exact art piece(s)" Precisely, and neither can the owner of the copyright. Unless of course I rub into classical copyright issues ("these two art pieces look too simi…

> If I "use" your artwork, and generate another artwork that looks nothing like yours (either from my brain or by automating it) why do you care? I wouldn't, but presumably the person who you are immitating would. The fallacy here is that you think an LLM is taking one or two art pieces and then turning around and creating something brand new, like a human brain might do. No. It's taking billions of art pieces and th…

" taking one or two art pieces and then turning around and creating something brand new, like a human brain might do."

I don't think the human brain is doing this at all (except maybe if you're writing a satire or homage). Your writing is the sum total of all your experiences which includes everything you've ever read, a number that might (depending on your age) at least approach millions of tokens.

And just like an LLM you'd find it difficult to piece together your influences.

Re: Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would 'kill' AI industry

#74

Post by chrischen » Wed, May 28, 2025, 5:32 AM UTC

SonOfKyuss wrote: post #44

chrischen wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That "industry" is everyone's industry if AI models that rely on public data is available to the public. Then everyone can benefit.

Your point would be kind of valid if the tools they build were free to use

I'm saying they should be. Rather than fighting to stop them from doing it, force them to legally open it to the public domain. Often the training code already is, so if they use public data they should release a public model.

Re: Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would 'kill' AI industry

#75

Post by const_cast » Wed, May 28, 2025, 5:54 AM UTC

pj_mukh wrote: post #73

const_cast wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I "use" your artwork, and generate another artwork that looks nothing like yours (either from my brain or by automating it) why do you care? I wouldn't, but presumably the person who you are immitating would. The fallacy here is that you think an LLM is taking one or two art pieces and then turning around and creating something brand new, like a human brain might do. No. It's taking billions of art pieces and th…

" taking one or two art pieces and then turning around and creating something brand new, like a human brain might do." I don't think the human brain is doing this at all (except maybe if you're writing a satire or homage). Your writing is the sum total of all your experiences which includes everything you've ever read, a number that might (depending on your age) at least approach millions of tokens. And just like an…

The difference is I'm a person - I get special privileges. A computer program does not, we don't need to cater to them because, well, they don't have feelings. Or rights.

Ultimately these are tools, slaves to humans, meant for one thing only - to serve us. If they're not serving us, they should be eradicated. Because that's what we do.

Stealing from humans, no matter how convoluted, is bad. We shouldn't do that, and luckily that's completely optional and we don't have to stand for it. The computer programs can't fight back, it's okay.

Re: Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would 'kill' AI industry

#76

Post by pj_mukh » Wed, May 28, 2025, 1:56 PM UTC

const_cast wrote: post #75

pj_mukh wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" taking one or two art pieces and then turning around and creating something brand new, like a human brain might do." I don't think the human brain is doing this at all (except maybe if you're writing a satire or homage). Your writing is the sum total of all your experiences which includes everything you've ever read, a number that might (depending on your age) at least approach millions of tokens. And just like an…

The difference is I'm a person - I get special privileges. A computer program does not, we don't need to cater to them because, well, they don't have feelings. Or rights. Ultimately these are tools, slaves to humans, meant for one thing only - to serve us. If they're not serving us, they should be eradicated. Because that's what we do. Stealing from humans, no matter how convoluted, is bad. We shouldn't do that, and…

Don't care if a computer program has special privileges or not, that's irrelevant. It's a tool, and it has the potential to make a whole host of processes and people's lives easier, and no one, not you, not an internet mob, not a council of elders has the right to preemptively stop those real-world tests based on vibes.

So getting to the bottom of what is actually stealing or not will be important (we can't just unilaterally declare it so), and AFAICT if a user misuses it to regenerate copyrighted material that particular user is at fault, not the tool itself.

Re: Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would 'kill' AI industry

#77

Post by still_grokking » Sat, May 31, 2025, 2:42 PM UTC

kulahan wrote: post #69

jimmydoe wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China might do it, so we did it first. I love this logic, and another place to apply it is about when to use nuclear bombs.

I’m not talking about China. I’m talking about every single nation on the planet.

As you say, "China" is here only a placeholder.

This "logic" that you need to do obviously illegal stuff (under current legislation) because otherwise someone else would do it and take the loot from that raid remains highly questionable no matter what country you put in that placeholder.

The same "logic" would for example dictate that you should dismiss patents as otherwise "someone in China" could do it before you. Somehow nobody would agree that this is a valid approach in that case…

Re: Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would 'kill' AI industry

#78

Post by still_grokking » Sat, May 31, 2025, 2:48 PM UTC

therealpygon wrote: post #68

birn559 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AIs are not creative, that's anthropomorphism. They use lossy compression to save training data. Later on, the compressed data is used to generate things that are potentially copyright violations (because they are very close to the original).

People don’t like honesty because they want to be special snowflakes, but sorry, humans aren’t that creative. The entire copyright and patent system is predicated on that fact, that you can only make money by making a thing exclusive and proprietary. That is directly caused by the fact that not only is it NOT original, but that others absolutely will invent/create the same thing eventually even without exposure to th…

But why should things work differently for "AI"?

One could of course say that "IP" ("intellectual property") is an ill concept all in all and abolish it. But than without exceptions! If it's not a valid concept in regard to "AI" it's not a valid concept in general. But if we want to keep that concept "AI" needs to bend to the same rules that apply to anybody else. Simple as that. Law is universal. (At least it should be like that everybody is equal before the law.)

Re: Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would 'kill' AI industry

#79

Post by still_grokking » Sat, May 31, 2025, 2:52 PM UTC

pj_mukh wrote: post #60

Earw0rm wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a strict reading, the tool itself is a copyright violation. In that an LLM is the code and its weights, and the weights contain a lossy compressed copy of a copyrighted work. Now you might say that's an overly rigid reading of copyright law, and I might agree, but that is nevertheless the reading of it applied to other domains - music, film and so on - where incorporating even a fractional, lossy and heavily proce…

The legality of Copyright material being present in the latent space of a commercialized foundation model would definitely be an interesting case! Though most of these cases aren't litigating this. They are charging that the ability to recreate copyrightable material is the fault of the tool and not the tool user[1]. [1]: https://www.darrow.ai/resources/ai-copyright-law

That's not true.

Some people (like the NYT¹) are in fact demanding before curt the destruction of the trained models as they obviously contain copyrighted content.

¹ https://pressgazette.co.uk/media_law/new-york-times-open-ai-...

Re: Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would 'kill' AI industry

#80

Post by still_grokking » Sat, May 31, 2025, 2:57 PM UTC

birn559 wrote: post #65

pj_mukh wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The legality of Copyright material being present in the latent space of a commercialized foundation model would definitely be an interesting case! Though most of these cases aren't litigating this. They are charging that the ability to recreate copyrightable material is the fault of the tool and not the tool user[1]. [1]: https://www.darrow.ai/resources/ai-copyright-law

If using the work as training data was lawful (which hasn't been always the case as we know today) I tend to agree with you, but it might depend: creating an alteration of the work might be prohibited altogether or you might need to give proper credit to the original authors and that might already be violated when you present certain output to a user. In general, the user is responsible to obey the license of the ori…

> the user is responsible to obey the license of the original work

The user is in this case the "AI" company.

They already violated law almost certainly by copying stuff from the net in the first place. (Almost certainly as it by now does not look like this was fair use, and there is no other means to make legal what they did.)