OpenAI now tries to hide that ChatGPT was trained on copyrighted books, including J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series::A new research paper laid out ways in which AI developers should try and avoid showing LLMs have been trained on copyrighted material.
Its a bit pedantic, but I’m not really sure I support this kind of extremist view of copyright and the scale of whats being interpreted as ‘possessed’ under the idea of copyright. Once an idea is communicated, it becomes a part of the collective consciousness. Different people interpret and build upon that idea in various ways, making it a dynamic entity that evolves beyond the original creator’s intention. Its like issues with sampling beats or records in the early days of hiphop. Its like the very principal of an idea goes against this vision, more that, once you put something out into the commons, its irretrievable. Its not really yours any more once its been communicated. I think if you want to keep an idea truly yours, then you should keep it to yourself. Otherwise you are participating in a shared vision of the idea. You don’t control how the idea is interpreted so its not really yours any more.
If thats ChatGPT or Public Enemy is neither here nor there to me. The idea that a work like Peter Pan is still possessed is such a very real but very silly obvious malady of this weirdly accepted but very extreme view of the ability to possess an idea.
Ai isn’t interpreting anything. This isn’t the sci-fi style of ai that people think of, that’s general ai. This is narrow AI, which is really just an advanced algorithm. It can’t create new things with intent and design, it can only regurgitate a mix of pre-existing stuff based on narrow guidelines programmed into it to try and keep it coherent, with no actual thought or interpretation involved in the result. The issue isn’t that it’s derivative, the issue is that it can only ever be inherently derivative without any intentional interpretation or creativity, and nothing else.
Even collage art has to qualify as fair use to avoid copyright infringement if it’s being done for profit, and fair use requires it to provide commentary, criticism, or parody of the original work used (which requires intent). Even if it’s transformative enough to make the original unrecognizable, if the majority of the work is not your own art, then you need to get permission to use it otherwise you aren’t automatically safe from getting in trouble over copyright. Even using images for photoshop involves creative commons and commercial use licenses. Fanart and fanfic is also considered a grey area and the only reason more of a stink isn’t kicked up over it regarding copyright is because it’s generally beneficial to the original creators, and credit is naturally provided by the nature of fan works so long as someone doesn’t try to claim the characters or IP as their own. So most creators turn a blind eye to the copyright aspect of the genre, but if any ever did want to kick up a stink, they could, and have in the past like with Anne Rice. And as a result most fanfiction sites do not allow writers to profit off of fanfics, or advertise fanfic commissions. And those are cases with actual humans being the ones to produce the works based on something that inspired them or that they are interpreting. So even human made derivative works have rules and laws applied to them as well. Ai isn’t a creative force with thoughts and ideas and intent, it’s just a pattern recognition and replication tool, and it doesn’t benefit creators when it’s used to replace them entirely, like Hollywood is attempting to do (among other corporate entities). Viewing AI at least as critically as actual human beings is the very least we can do, as well as establishing protection for human creators so that they can’t be taken advantage of because of AI.
I’m not inherently against AI as a concept and as a tool for creators to use, but I am against AI works with no human input being used to replace creators entirely, and I am against using works to train it without the permission of the original creators. Even in the artist/writer/etc communities it’s considered to be a common courtesy to credit other people/works that you based a work on or took inspiration from, even if what you made would be safe under copyright law regardless. Sure, humans get some leeway in this because we are imperfect meat creatures with imperfect memories and may not be aware of all our influences, but a coded algorithm doesn’t have that excuse. If the current AIs in circulation can’t function without being fed stolen works without credit or permission, then they’re simply not ready for commercial use yet as far as I’m concerned. If it’s never going to be possible, which I just simply don’t believe, then it should never be used commercially period. And it should be used by creators to assist in their work, not used to replace them entirely. If it takes longer to develop, fine. If it takes more effort and manpower, fine. That’s the price I’m willing to pay for it to be ethical. If it can’t be done ethically, then imo it shouldn’t be done at all.
Your broader point would be stronger if it weren’t framed around what seems like a misunderstanding of modern AI. To be clear, you don’t need to believe that AI is “just” a “coded algorithm” to believe it’s wrong for humans to exploit other humans with it. But to say that modern AI is “just an advanced algorithm” is technically correct in exactly the same way that a blender is “just a deterministic shuffling algorithm.” We understand that the blender chops up food by spinning a blade, and we understand that it turns solid food into liquid. The precise way in which it rearranges the matter of the food is both incomprehensible and irrelevant. In the same way, we understand the basic algorithms of model training and evaluation, and we understand the basic domain task that a model performs. The “rules” governing this behavior at a fine level are incomprehensible and irrelevant-- and certainly not dictated by humans. They are an emergent property of a simple algorithm applied to billions-to-trillions of numerical parameters, in which all the interesting behavior is encoded in some incomprehensible way.
Bro I don’t think you have any idea what you’re talking about. These AIs aren’t blenders, they are designed to recognize and replicate specific aspects of art and writing and whatever else, in a way that is coherent and recognizable. Unless there’s a blender that can sculpt Michelangelo’s David out of apple peels, AI isn’t like a blender in any way.
But even if they were comparable, a blender is meant to produce chaos. It is meant to, you know, blend the food we put into it. So yes, the outcome is dictated by humans. We want the individual pieces to be indistinguishable, and deliberate design decisions get made by the humans making them to try and produce a blender that blends things sufficiently, and makes the right amount of chaos with as many ingredients as possible.
And here’s the thing, if we wanted to determine what foods were put into a blender, even assuming we had blindfolds on while tossing random shit in, we could test the resulting mixture to determine what the ingredients were before they got mashed together. We also use blenders for our own personal use the majority of the time, not for profit, and we use our own fruits and vegetables rather than stuff we stole from a neighbor’s yard, which would be, you know, trespassing and theft. And even people who use blenders to make something that they sell or offer publicly almost always list the ingredients, like restaurants.
So even if AI was like a blender, that wouldn’t be an excuse, nor would it contradict anything I’ve said.
Super interesting response, you managed to miss every possible point.
I disagree with your interpretation of how an AI works, but I think the way that AI works is pretty much irrelevant to the discussion in the first place. I think your argument stands completely the same regardless. Even if AI worked much like a human mind and was very intelligent and creative, I would still say that usage of an idea by AI without the consent of the original artist is fundamentally exploitative.
You can easily train an AI (with next to no human labor) to launder an artist’s works, by using the artist’s own works as reference. There’s no human input or hard work involved, which is a factor in what dictates whether a work is transformative. I’d argue that if you can put a work into a machine, type in a prompt, and get a new work out, then you still haven’t really transformed it. No matter how creative or novel the work is, the reality is that no human really put any effort into it, and it was built off the backs of unpaid and uncredited artists.
You could probably make an argument for being able to sell works made by an AI trained only on the public domain, but it still should not be copyrightable IMO, cause it’s not a human creation.
TL;DR - No matter how creative an AI is, its works should not be considered transformative in a copyright sense, as no human did the transformation.
I thought this way too, but after playing with ChatGPT and Mid Journey near daily, I have seen many moments of creativity way beyond the source it was trained on. I think a good example that I saw was on a YouTube video (sorry I cannot recall which to link) where thr prompt was animals made of sushi and wow, was it ever good and creative on how it made them and it was photo realistic. This is just not something you an find anywhere on the Internet. I just did a search and found some hand drawn Japanese style sushi with eyes and such, but nothing like what I saw in that video.
I have also experienced it suggested ways to handle coding on my VR Theme Park app that is very unconventional and not something anyone has posted about as near as I can tell. It seems to be able to put 2 and 2 together and get 8. Likely as it sees so much of everything at once that it can connect the dots on ways we would struggle too. It is more than regurgitated data and it surprises me near daily.
Just because you think it seems creative due to your lack of experience with human creativity, that doesn’t mean it is uniquely creative. It’s not, it can’t be by its very nature, it can only regurgitate an amalgamation of stuff fed into it. What you think you see is the equivalent of paradoilia.
Why you making personal jabs to make a point? How do you know my creative experience?
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I’m a bit confused about what point you’re trying to make. There is not a single paragraph or example in the link you provided that doesn’t support what I’ve said, and none of the examples provided in that link are something that qualified as fair use despite not meeting any criteria. In fact one was the opposite, as something that met all the criteria but still didn’t qualify as fair use.
The key aspect of how they define transformative is here:
Has the material you have taken from the original work been transformed by adding new expression or meaning?
These (narrow) AIs cannot add new expression or meaning, because they do not have intent. They are just replicating and rearranging learned patterns mindlessly.
Was value added to the original by creating new information, new aesthetics, new insights, and understandings?
These AIs can’t provide new information because they can’t create something new, they can only reconfigure previously provided info. They can’t provide new aesthetics for the same reason, they can only recreate pre-existing aesthetics from the works fed to them, and they definitely can’t provide new insights or understandings because again, there is no intent or interpretation going on, just regurgitation.
The fact that it’s so strict that even stuff that meets all the criteria might still not qualify as fair use only supports what I said about how even derivative works made by humans are subject to a lot of laws and regulations, and if human works are under that much scrutiny then there’s no reason why AI works shouldn’t also be under at least as much scrutiny or more. The fact that so much of fair use defense is dependent on having intent, and providing new meaning, insights, and information, is just another reason why AI can’t hide behind fair use or be given a pass automatically because “humans make derivative works too”. Even derivative human works are subject to scrutiny, criticism, and regulation, and so should AI works.
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Isn’t your last sentence making his point?
Neural networks are based on the same principles as the human brain, they are literally learning in the exact same way humans are. Copyrighting the training of neural nets is the essentially the same thing as copyrighting interpretation and learning by humans.
These AIs are not neural networks based on the human brain. They’re literally just algorithms designed to perform a single task.
Well, I’d consider agreeing if the LLMs were considered as a generic knowledge database. However I had the impression that the whole response from OpenAI & cie. to this copyright issue is “they build original content”, both for LLMs and stable diffusion models. Now that they started this line of defence I think that they are stuck with proving that their “original content” is not derivated from copyrighted content 🤷
Well, I’d consider agreeing if the LLMs were considered as a generic knowledge database. However I had the impression that the whole response from OpenAI & cie. to this copyright issue is “they build original content”, both for LLMs and stable diffusion models. Now that they started this line of defence I think that they are stuck with proving that their “original content” is not derivated from copyrighted content 🤷
Yeah I suppose that’s on them.
Copyright definitely needs to be stripped back severely. Artists need time to use their own work, but after a certain time everything needs to enter the public space for the sake of creativity.
If you sample someone else’s music and turn around and try to sell it, without first asking permission from the original artist, that’s copyright infringement.
So, if the same rules apply, as your post suggests, OpenAI is also infringing on copyright.
If you sample someone else’s music and turn around and try to sell it, without first asking permission from the original artist, that’s copyright infringement.
I think you completely and thoroughly do not understand what I’m saying or why I’m saying it. No where did I suggest that I do not understand modern copyright. I’m saying I’m questioning my belief in this extreme interpretation of copyright which is represented by exactly what you just parroted. That this interpretation is both functionally and materially unworkable, but also antithetical to a reasonable understanding of how ideas and communication work.
That’s life under capitalism.
I agree with you in essence (I’ve put a lot of time into a free software game).
However, people are entitled to the fruits of their labor, and until we learn to leave capitalism behind artists have to protect their work to survive. To eat. To feed their kids. And pay their rent.
Unless OpenAi is planning to pay out royalties to everyone they stole from, what their doing is illegal and immoral under our current, capitalist paradigm.
Yeah, this is definitely leaning a little too “People shouldn’t pump their own gas because gas attendants need to eat, feed their kids, pay rent” for me.
Because in practical terms, writers and artists’ livelihoods are being threatened by AIs who were trained on their work without their consent or compensation. Ultimately the only valid justification for copyright is to enable the career of professional creators who contribute to our culture. We knew how ideas and communication worked when copyright was first created. That is why it’s a limited time protection, a compromise.
All the philosophical arguments about the nature of ideas and learning, and how much a machine may be like a person don’t change that if anyone dedicates years of their efforts to develop their skills only to be undercut by an AI who was trained on their own works, is an incredibly shitty position to be in.
That’s actually not what copyright is for. Copyright was made to enhance the public culture by promoting the creation of art.
If these record label types impede public culture then they are antithetical to copyright
All the philosophical arguments about the nature of ideas and learning, and how much a machine may be like a person don’t change that if anyone dedicates years of their efforts to develop their skills only to be undercut by an AI who was trained on their own works, is an incredibly shitty position to be in.
So should Dread Zeplin be hauled off to jail because they created derivative works without permission? I mean maybe they should, but not for copyright imo. How about the fan Star Wars movies getting their balls sued off by Disney?
writers and artists’ livelihoods are being threatened by AIs who were trained on their work without their consent or compensation
Guess what? The actual copyright owners of the world; those who own tens of thousands or millions of copyrighted works, will be the precise individuals paying for and developing that kind of automation, and in the current legal interpretation of copyright, its their property to do so with. This outrage masturbation the internet is engaged in ignores the current reality of copyright, that its not small makers and artists benefiting from it but billion dollar multinational corporations benefiting from it.
This is a philosophical argument and an important one: Should we legally constrain the flow and use of ideas because an individuals right to extract profit from an idea.
I don’t think so.
Dread Zeppelin could have been sued. They were just lucky to be liked by Robert Plant.
As for the Star Wars fan movie, the copyright claim about the music was dropped because it was frivolous. The video creator made a deal with Lucasfilm to use Star Wars copyrighted material, he didn’t just go yolo.
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You are conditioning the rights of artists making derivative works to the rights of systems being used to take advantage of those artists without consent or compensation. Not only those are two different situations but also supporting the latter doesn’t mean supporting the former.
Like I said somewhere in this discussion, AI are not people. People have rights that tools do not. If you want to argue in favor of parody and fan artists, do that. If you want to speak out again how the current state of copyright makes it so corporations rather than the actual artists gets the rights and profit over the works they create, do that. Leaping in defense of AI is not it.
I’m challenging the legal precedent of the barrier of creating derivative works in any media, including AI.
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AI is not a person. If you replace it with a person in an analogy, that’s a whole different discussion.
We actually do restrict how tools can engage with artworks all the time. You know, “don’t take pictures”.
A sample is a fundamental part of a song’s output, not just its input. If LLMs are changing the input’s work to a high enough degree is it not protected as a transformative work?
it’s more like a collage of everyone’s words. it doesn’t make anything creative because ot doesn’t have a body or life or real social inputs you could say. basically it’s just rearranging other people’s words.
A song that’s nothing but samples. but so many samples it hides that fact. this is my view anyway.
and only a handful of people are getting rich of the outputs.
if we were in some kinda post capitalism economy or if we had UBI it wouldn’t bother me really. it’s not the artists ego I’m sticking up for, but their livelihood
To add to that, Harry Potter is the worst example to use here. There is no extra billion that JK Rowling needs to allow her to spend time writing more books.
Copyright was meant to encourage authors to invest in their work in the same way that patents do. If you were going to argue about the issue of lifting content from books, you should be using books that need the protection of copyright, not ones that don’t.
Copyright was meant
I just don’t know that I agree that this line of reasoning is useful. Who cares what it was meant for? What is it now, currently and functionally, doing?
I’m a huge proponent of expanding individual copyright to extreme amounts (an individual is entitled to own the rights and usage rights to anything they create and can revoke those rights from anyone), but not in favor of the same thing for corporations.
I hold the exact opposite view as you. As long as it’s a truly creative work (a writing, music, artwork, etc) then you own that specific implementation of the idea. Someone can make something else based on it, but you still own the original content.
LLMs and companies using them need to pay for the content in some way. This is already done through licensing in other parallels, and will likely come to AI quickly.
To be clear, I’m still working through my thinking in this but it’s been something cooking for quite a while. I may not have all the words to express my meaning. For example, I think there are two routes to take in making my argument, one moral, the other technical. I’m not building on the morality of copyright, but focusing on the technical aspects of the limits of ideas.
I suppose I would ask you then about your views in authoritarianism. Because it seems to be that with out an extremely authoritarian state, it would be basically impossible to enforce your view of copyright. Are you okay with that kind of pervasiveness?
Also, from a technical perspective, how do you propose this view of copyright be applied? This is kind of towards the broader point I’m thinking I believe in. It’s not just that copyright laws are epifaci ridiculous, they are also technically almost unenforceable in their modern extremist interpretation with out an extremely pervasive form of surveillance.
Easy. The same way we already do it. We enforce music licensing, video licensing and other ip licensing. It’s been done. All this would do is extend those rights to the individual and remove them from corporations. Work product can be owned by companies, but not indefinitely. Individuals should always be in control of their creations.
Restrictions would more or less be strictly commercial, to where hobbyists wouldn’t be impacted, but as soon as it’s used to make money the original creators are owed as part of it.
It wouldn’t be any harder than it is now, as long as copyright is proved. (Hey look, this is the first time I’ve found an actual use of NFTs). In general anything being done for momentary gain is already monitored and surveilled, so this wouldn’t be a change there either.
Edit: Also most of us already live in authoritarian states. This won’t really change anything. Big corps already enforce their copyright when it makes monetary sense and are actively trolling for unauthorized uses.
It wouldn’t be any harder than it is now, as long as copyright is proved. (Hey look, this is the first time I’ve found an actual use of NFTs). In general anything being done for momentary gain is already monitored and surveilled, so this wouldn’t be a change there either.
Personally, I think you are describing a dystopian, authoritarian landscape which will be devoid of any real creativity or interesting ideas. I’m a believer that all ideas are free to be stolen, copied, improved upon; that imitation of ideas is a fundamental human right, and fundamental to what it means to be human. Likewise, I think our social and media landscape would be much poorer without this right. I don’t think any one has the inherent right to profit off of an idea.
I feel the exact opposite. There’s no reason for me to create anything if someone else can come along and steal it. Eliminating copyright will bring your dystopian landscape where nobody shares any sort of art or creative work because someone else will steal it.
What motivation is there for creatives if you’re just telling them their work has no implicit value and anyone else can come along and reappropriate it for whatever they’d like?
I feel the exact opposite. There’s no reason for me to create anything if someone else can come along and steal it. Eliminating copyright will bring your dystopian landscape where nobody shares any sort of art or creative work because someone else will steal it.
This is great because I think you are totally correct in your sentiment that we believe oppositely. I see art created only for the purpose of profit as drivel; true art is an expression of the self. If the only reason you make art is for profit, you aren’t an artist, you are an employee.
That’s a great theory and all, but it’s not even money. I make no money from my photos, but I also refrain from posting any of them because I’d rather they not be used for AI training. Same with any music I create and I’m getting there with my code.
The nobility of art has always been in question, and it’s consistently been proven that artists who aren’t compensated for their work also tend to create less.
This is also not explicitly about profit. If I write a song and then it’s used at a hate rally, I currently have no recourse. They’re not making money from that application (directly), but they are using my creation to promote something I don’t agree with.
I’m curious to know if you’re an artist yourself, as it’s very contrary to the opinions from other creatives I know.
I assume you’re against the communal and collective culture that modders for games enjoy?
I assume you also believe no technological innovations are produced in America anymore since China would simply steal it.
Nowhere did I say derivative works are not ok. If a game maker explicitly forbids using modded versions of their game, I think that should be up to them. Games that have vibrant modding communities are almost always at least partially supported by the developer anyways.
My points are individual copyright anyways, not corporate. With increasing individual protections I also propose decreasing corporate copyright protection.
I believe that China makes 90% of the same product for 80% of the price after ripping off their American counterparts. But that’s also entirely off topic and really has nothing to do with this. Art/Creative Works are entirely different than physical goods.
I hold whatever view makes George Lucas stop digitally remastering the original trilogy.
If I memorize the text of Harry Potter, my brain does not thereby become a copyright infringement.
A copyright infringement only occurs if I then reproduce that text, e.g. by writing it down or reciting it in a public performance.
Training an LLM from a corpus that includes a piece of copyrighted material does not necessarily produce a work that is legally a derivative work of that copyrighted material. The copyright status of that LLM’s “brain” has not yet been adjudicated by any court anywhere.
If the developers have taken steps to ensure that the LLM cannot recite copyrighted material, that should count in their favor, not against them. Calling it “hiding” is backwards.
You are a human, you are allowed to create derivative works under the law. Copyright law as it relates to machines regurgitating what humans have created is fundamentally different. Future legislation will have to address a lot of the nuance of this issue.
Another sensationalist title. The article makes it clear that the problem is users reconstructing large portions of a copyrighted work word for word. OpenAI is trying to implement a solution that prevents ChatGPT from regurgitating entire copyrighted works using “maliciously designed” prompts. OpenAI doesn’t hide the fact that these tools were trained using copyrighted works and legally it probably isn’t an issue.
If Google took samples from millions of different songs that were under copyright and created a website that allowed users to mix them together into new songs, they would be sued into oblivion before you could say “unauthorized reproduction.”
You simply cannot compare one single person memorizing a book to corporations feeding literally millions of pieces of copyrighted material into a blender and acting like the resulting sausage is fine because “only a few rats fell into the vat, what’s the big deal”
you bought the book to memorize from, anyway.
Let’s not pretend that LLMs are like people where you’d read a bunch of books and draw inspiration from them. An LLM does not think nor does it have an actual creative process like we do. It should still be a breach of copyright.
We have to distinguish between LLMs
- Trained on copyrighted material and
- Outputting copyrighted material
They are not one and the same
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Legally the output of the training could be considered a derived work. We treat brains differently here, that’s all.
I think the current intellectual property system makes no sense and AI is revealing that fact.
I think this brings up broader questions about the currently quite extreme interpretation of copyright. Personally I don’t think its wrong to sample from or create derivative works from something that is accessible. If its not behind lock and key, its free to use. If you have a problem with that, then put it behind lock and key. No one is forcing you to share your art with the world.
Most books are actually locked behind paywalls and not free to use? Or maybe I don’t understand what you meant?
Following that, if a sailor is the sea were to put a copy of a protected book on the internet and ChatGPT was trained on it, how that argument would go? The copyright owner didn’t place it there, so it’s not “their decision”. And savvy people can make sure it’s accessible if they want to.
My belief is, if they can use all non locked data for free, then the model should be shared for free too and it’s outputs shouldn’t be subject to copyright. Just for context
Output from an AI has just been recently considered as not copyrightable.
I think it stemmed from the actors strikes recently.
It was stated that only work originating from a human can be copyrighted.
Output from an AI has just been recently considered as not copyrightable.
Where can I read more about this? I’ve seen it mentioned a few times, but never with any links.
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They might’ve just been bringing it up conversationally as it’s in a similar vein too
Should we distinguish it though? Why shouldn’t (and didn’t) artists have a say if their art is used to train LLMs? Just like publicly displayed art doesn’t provide a permission to copy it and use it in other unspecified purposes, it would be reasonable that the same would apply to AI training.
Ah, but that’s the thing. Training isn’t copying. It’s pattern recognition. If you train a model “The dog says woof” and then ask a model “What does the dog say”, it’s not guaranteed to say “woof”.
Similarly, just because a model was trained on Harry Potter, all that means is it has a good corpus of how the sentences in that book go.
Thus the distinction. Can I train on a comment section discussing the book?
Vanilla Ice had it right all along. Nobody gives a shit about copyright until big money is involved.
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AI and your brain are very different things
How do you know that guy isn’t an AI?
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His point is equally valid. Can an artist be compelled to show the methods of their art? Is it as right to force an artist to give up methods if another artist thinks they are using AI to derive copyrighted work? Haven’t we already seen that LLMs are really poor at evaluating whether or not something was created by an LLM? Wouldn’t making strong laws on such an already opaque and difficult-to-prove issue be more of a burden on smaller artists vs. large studios with lawyers-in-tow.
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If I read Harry Potter and wrote a novel of my own, no doubt ideas from it could consciously or subconsciously influence it and be incorporated into it. Hey is that any different from what an LLM does?
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Your brain isn’t an AI model
OR IS IT?
You joke but AI advocates seem to forget that people have fundamentally different rights than tools and objects. A photocopier doesn’t get the right to “memorize” and “learn” from a text that a human being does. As much as people may argue that AIs work different, AIs are still not people.
And if they ever become people, the situation will be much more complicated than whether they can imitate some writer. But we aren’t there yet, even their advocates just uses them as tools.
How do you see that as a difference? Tools are extensions of ourselves.
Restricting the use of LLMs is only restricting people.
When we get to the realm of automation and AI, calling tools just an “extension of ourselves” doesn’t make sense.
Especially not when the people being “extended” by Machine Learning models did not want to be “extended” to begin with.
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But this falls exactly under what I just said. To say that using Machine Learning to imitate an artist without permission is fine, because humans are allowed to learn to each other, is making the mistake of assigning personhood to the system, that it ought to have the same rights that human beings do. There is a distinction between the rights of humans as opposed to tools, so to say that an AI can’t be trained on someone’s works to replicate their style doesn’t need to apply to people.
Even if you support that reasoning, that still doesn’t help the writers and artists whose job is threatened by AI models based on their work. That it isn’t an exact reproduction doesn’t change that it relied on using their works to begin with, and it doesn’t change that it serves as a way to undercut them, providing a cheaper replacement for their work. Copyright law as it was, wasn’t envisioned for a world where Machine Learning exists. It doesn’t really solve the problem to say that technically it’s not supposed to cover ideas and styles. The creators will be struggling just the same.
Either the law will need to emphasize the value of human autorship first, or we will need to go through drastic socioeconomic changes to ensure that these creators will be able to keep creating despite losing market to AI. Otherwise, to simply say that AI gets to do this and change nothing else, will cause enormous damage to all sort of creative careers and wider culture. Even AI will become more limited with less fresh new creators to learn elements from.
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There is a difference between “analyzing” and derivating. The authorship of AI-created works is also not the user’s, it takes more than a prompt for that, and that seems to be the conclusion courts are leaning towards.
Still, even if that turns out to be technically correct, it still doesn’t help the creators getting undercut who might be driven out of their careers by AI.
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Exactly. If I write some Loony toons fan fiction, Warner doesn’t own that. This ridiculous view of copyright (that’s not being challenged in the public discourse) needs to be confronted.
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They can own it, actually. If you use the characters of Bugs Bunny, etc., or the setting (do they have a canonical setting?) then Warner does own the rights to the material you’re using.
For example, see how the original Winnie the Pooh material just entered public domain, but the subsequent Disney versions have not. You can use the original stuff (see the recent horror movie for an example of legal use) but not the later material like Tigger or Pooh in a red shirt.
Now if your work is satire or parody, then you can argue that it’s fair use. But generally, most companies don’t care about fan fiction because it doesn’t compete with their sales. If you publish your Harry Potter fan fiction on Livejournal, it wouldn’t be worth the money to pay the lawyers to take it down. But if you publish your Larry Cotter and the Wizard’s Rock story on Amazon, they’ll take it down because now it’s a competing product.
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I think its more like writing a loony toons fanfic based only on pirated material
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Can’t but theyre pretty open on how they trained the model, so like almost admitted guilt (though they werent hosting the pirated content, its still out there and would be trained on). Cause unless they trained it on a paid Netflix account, there’s no way to get it legally.
Idk where this lands legally, but I’d assume not in their favour
It’s honestly a good question. It’s perfectly legal for you to memorize a copyrighted work. In some contexts, you can recite it, too (particularly the perilous fair use). And even if you don’t recite a copyrighted work directly, you are most certainly allowed to learn to write from reading copyrighted books, then try to come up with your own writing based off what you’ve read. You’ll probably try your best to avoid copying anyone, but you might still make mistakes, simply by forgetting that some idea isn’t your own.
But can AI? If we want to view AI as basically an artificial brain, then shouldn’t it be able to do what humans can do? Though at the same time, it’s not actually a brain nor is it a human. Humans are pretty limited in what they can remember, whereas an AI could be virtually boundless.
If we’re looking at intent, the AI companies certainly aren’t trying to recreate copyrighted works. They’ve actively tried to stop it as we can see. And LLMs don’t directly store the copyrighted works, either. They’re basically just storing super hard to understand sets of weights, which are a challenge even for experienced researchers to explain. They’re not denying that they read copyrighted works (like all of us do), but arguably they aren’t trying to write copyrighted works.
No, because you paid for a single viewing of that content with your cinema ticket. And frankly, I think that the price of a cinema ticket (= a single viewing, which it was) should be what OpenAI should be made to pay.
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The powers that be have done a great job convincing the layperson that copyright is about protecting artists and not publishers. It’s historically inaccurate and you can discover that copyright law was pushed by publishers who did not want authors keeping second hand manuscripts of works they sold to publishing companies.
Additional reading: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne
I think a lot of people are not getting it. AI/LLMs can train on whatever they want but when then these LLMs are used for commercial reasons to make money, an argument can be made that the copyrighted material has been used in a money making endeavour. Similar to how using copyrighted clips in a monetized video can make you get a strike against your channel but if the video is not monetized, the chances of YouTube taking action against you is lower.
Edit - If this was an open source model available for use by the general public at no cost, I would be far less bothered by claims of copyright infringement by the model
AI/LLMs can train on whatever they want but when then these LLMs are used for commercial reasons to make money, an argument can be made that the copyrighted material has been used in a money making endeavour.
And does this apply equally to all artists who have seen any of my work? Can I start charging all artists born after 1990, for training their neural networks on my work?
Learning is not and has never been considered a financial transaction.
Actually, it has. The whole consept of copyright is relatively new, and corporations absolutely tried to have people who learned proprietary copyrighted information not be able to use it in other places.
It’s just that labor movements got such non-compete agreements thrown out of our society, or at least severely restricted on humanitarian grounds. The argument is that a human being has the right to seek happiness by learning and using the proprietary information they learned to better their station. By the way, this needed a lot of violent convincing that we have this.
So yes, knowledge and information learned is absolutely withing the scope of copyright as it stands, it’s only that the fundamental rights that humans have override copyright. LLMs (and companies for that matter) do not have such fundamental rights.
Copyright by the way is stupid in its current implementation, but OpenAI and ChatGPT does not get to get out of it IMO just because it’s “learning”. We humans ourselves are only getting out of copyright because of our special legal status.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
Fair use only works if what you create is to reflect on the original and not to supercede it. For example if ChatGPT gobbled up a work on the reproduction of firefies, if you ask it a question about the topic and it just answers, that’s not fair use since you made the original material redundant. If it did what a search engine would do and just tell you that “here’s where you can find it, you might have to pay for it”, that’s fair use. This is of course US law, so it may be different everywhere, and US law is weird so the courts may say anything.
That’s the gist of it, fair use is fine as long as you are only creating new information and only use the copyrighted old work as is absolutely necessary for your new information to make sense, and even then, you can’t use so much of the copyrighted work that it takes away from the value of it.
Otherwise if I pirated a movie and put subtitles on it, I could argue it’s fair use since it’s new information and transformative. If I released the subtitles separately, that would be a strong argument for fair use. If I included a 10 sec clip in it to show my customers what the thing is like in action, then that may be argued. If it’s the pivotal 10 seconds that spoils the whole movie, that’s not fair use, since I took away from the value of the original.
ChatGPT ate up all of these authors’ works and for some, it may take away from the value they have created. It’s telling that OpenAI is trying to be shifty about it as well. If they had a strong argument, they’d want to settle it as soon as possibe as this is a big stormcloud on their company IP value. And yeah it sucks that people created something that may turn out to not be legal because some people have a right to profit from some pieces of capital assets, but that’s the story of the world the past 50 years.
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I am not a lawyer by the way, I don’t even live in the US, so what I write is just my opinion.
But fair use seems a ridiculous defense when we talk about the Github Copilot case, which is the first tangible lawsuit about it that I know of. The plaintiffs lay out the case of a book for Javascript developers as their example. The objective of the book to give you excercises in Javascript development, I would get the book if I wanted to do Javascript excercises. The book is copyrighted under a share-alike attribution required licence. The defendants Github and OpenAI don’t honour the license with Copilot and Codex. They claim fair use.
So with the four factors:
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the purpose and character of your use: .Well, they present their Javascript excercises as original work while it’s obvious they are not, they are reproducing the task they want letter by letter. It is even missing critical context that makes it hard to understand without the book, so their work does not even stand on its own. Also, they do this for monetary compensation, while not respecting the original license, which if someone was giving a commentary or criticism covered by fair use, would be as trivial as providing a citation of the book. They are also not producing information beyond what’s available in the book. Quite funnily, the plaintiffs mention that the “derivative” work is also not quite valuable, as the model answered with an example from a “what’s wrong with this, can you fix it?” section for a question about how to determine if a number is even.
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the nature of the copyrighted work: It’s freely available, the licence only requires if you republish it, you should provide proper attribution. It is not impossible to provide use cases based on fair use while honouring the license. There is no monetary or other barrier.
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the amount and substantiality of the portion taken: All of it, and it is reproduced verbatim.
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the effect of the use upon the potential market: Github Copilot is in the same market as the original work and is competing with it, namely in showing people how to use Javascript.
And again, I feel this is one layer. Copyright enforcement has never been predictable, and US courts are not predictable either. I think anything can come of this now that it’s big tech that is on the defendant side, and they have the resources to fight, not like random Joe Schmoes caught with bootleg DVDs. Maybe they abolish copyright? Maybe they get an exception? Since US courts have such wide jurisdiction and can effectively make laws, it is still a toss-up. That said, the Github Copilot class action case is the one to watch, and so far, the judge denied orders to dismiss the case, so it may go either way.
Also by the way, the EU has no fair use protections, it only allows very specific exceptions for public criticism and such, none of which fits AI. Going by the example of Copilot, this would mean that EU users can’t use Copilot, and also that anything that was produced with the assistance of Copilot (or ChatGPT for that matter) is not marketable in the EU.
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Ehh, “learning” is doing a lot of lifting. These models “learn” in a way that is foreign to most artists. And that’s ignoring the fact the humans are not capital. When we learn we aren’t building a form a capital; when models learn they are only building a form of capital.
Artists, construction workers, administrative clerks, police and video game developers all develop their neural networks in the same way, a method simulated by ANNs.
This is not, “foreign to most artists,” it’s just that most artists have no idea what the mechanism of learning is.
The method by which you provide input to the network for training isn’t the same thing as learning.
Artists, construction workers, administrative clerks, police and video game developers all develop their neural networks in the same way, a method simulated by ANNs.
Do we know enough about how our brain functions and how neural networks functions to make this statement?
Do we know enough about how our brain functions and how neural networks functions to make this statement?
Yes, we do. Take a university level course on ML if you want the long answer.
My friends who took computer science told me that we don’t totally understand how machine learning algorithms work. Though this conversation was a few years ago in college. Will have to ask them again
ANNs are not the same as synapses, analogous yes, but different mathematically even when simulated.
This is orthogonal to the topic at hand. How does the chemistry of biological synapses alone result in a different type of learned model that therefore requires different types of legal treatment?
The overarching (and relevant) similarity between biological and artificial nets is the concept of connectionist distributed representations, and the projection of data onto lower dimensional manifolds. Whether the network achieves its final connectome through backpropagation or a more biologically plausible method is beside the point.
When we learn we aren’t building a form a capital; when models learn they are only building a form of capital.
What do you think education is? I went to university to acquire knowledge and train my skills so that I could later be paid for those skills. That was literally building my own human capital.
Humanities and Art majors are often criticized for not producing such capital.
But wouldn’t this training and the subsequent output be so transformative that being based on the copyrighted work makes no difference? If I read a Harry Potter book and then write a story about a boy wizard who becomes a great hero, anyone trying to copyright strike that would be laughed at.
Your probability of getting copyright strike depends on two major factors -
• How similar your story is to Harry Potter.
• If you are making money of that story.
It doesn’t matter how similar. Copyright doesn’t protect meaning, copyright protect form. If you read HP and then draw a picture of it, said picture becomes its separate work, not even derivative.
How is it any different from someone reading the books, being influenced by them and writing their own book with that inspiration? Should the author of the original book be paid for sales of the second book?
Again that is dependent on how similar the two books are. If I just change the names of the characters and change the grammatical structure and then try to sell the book as my own work, I am infringing the copyright. If my book has a different story but the themes are influenced by another book, then I don’t believe that is copyright infringement. Now where the line between infringement and no infringement lies is not something I can say and is a topic for another discussion
change the grammatical structure
I.e. change form. Copyright protect form, thus in coutries that judge either by spirit or letter of law instead of size of moneybags this is ok.
using copyrighted clips in a monetized video can make you get a strike against your channel
Much of the time, the use of very brief clips is clearly fair use, but the people who issue DMCA claims don’t care.
You could run a paid training course using a paid-for book, that doesn’t mean you’re breaking copyright.
I think a lot of people are not getting it. AI/LLMs can train on whatever they want but when then these LLMs are used for commercial reasons to make money, an argument can be made that the copyrighted material has been used in a money making endeavour.
Only in the same way that I could argue that if you’ve ever watched any of the classic Disney animated movies then anything you ever draw for the rest of your life infringes on Disney’s copyright, and if you draw anything for money then the Disney animated movies you have seen in your life have been used in a money making endeavor. This is of course ridiculous and no one would buy that argument, but when you replace a human doing it with a machine doing essentially the same thing (observing and digesting a bunch of examples of a given kind of work, and producing original works of the general kind that meet a given description) suddenly it’s different, for some nebulous reason that mostly amounts to creatives who believed their jobs could not at least in part be automated away trying to get explicit protection from their jobs being at least in part automated away.
I hope OpenAI and JK Rowling take each other down
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What’s the issue against openAI?
They used to be a non profit, that immediately turned it into a for profit when their product was refined. They took a bunch of people’s effort whether it be training materials or training Monkeys using the product and then slapped a huge price tag on it.
I didn’t know they were a non profit. I’m good as long as they keep the current model. Release older models free to use while charging for extra or latest features
They’re stealing a ridiculous amount of copyrighted works to use to train their model without the consent of the copyright holders.
This includes the single person operations creating art that’s being used to feed the models that will take their jobs.
OpenAI should not be allowed to train on copyrighted material without paying a licensing fee at minimum.
Also Sam Altman is a grifter who gives people in need small amounts of monopoly money to get their biometric data
So hypothetical here. If Dreddit did launch a system that made it so users could trade Karma in for real currency or some alternative, does that mean that all fan fictions and all other fan boy account created material would become copyright infringement as they are now making money off the original works?
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He’s not helping them. That’s my point. He’s taking advantage of them for his grift, so fuck him.
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Why are people defending a massive corporation that admits it is attempting to create something that will give them unparalleled power if they are successful?
Mostly because fuck corporations trying to milk their copyright. I have no particular love for OpenAI (though I do like their product), but I do have great distain for already-successful corporations that would hold back the progress of humanity because they didn’t get paid (again).
But OpenAI will do the same?
Perhaps, and when that happens I would be equally disdainful towards them.
In the United States there was a judgement made the other day saying that works created soley by AI are not copyright-able. So that that would put a speed bumb there.
I may have misunderstood what you though.Yeah, they might not copyright it, but after it becomes the ‘one true AI’, it will be at the hands of Microsoft, so please do not act friendly towards them.
It will turn on you just like every private company has.
(don’t mean specifically you, but everyone generally)
Huh. Doesn’t this means technically AI cannot do copyright infringement.
Nah, it would mean that you cannot copyright a work created by an AI, such as a piece of art.
E.g. if you tell it to draw you a donkey carting avocados, the picture can be used by anyone from what I understand.
you cannot copyright a work created by an AI, such as a piece of art.
That’s what I said. Copyright infringement is when there is another copyrightable object that is copy of first object. AI is not witin copyright area. You can’t copyright it, but also you can’t be sued for copyright infringement too.
if you tell it to draw you a donkey carting avocados, the picture can be used by anyone from what I understand.
Yes. Same for Public Domain, but PD is another status. PD applies only to copyrightable work.
It’s like argument “but new politicians will steal more” that I hear in Russia from people who protect Putin
It’s literally not, wtf.
Do not let any private entity to get overwhelming majority on anything period.
But do not kid yourself that Microsoft will let OpenAI do anything for public once it gets big enough.
OpenAI is open only in name after they rolled back all the promises of being for everyone.
That’s my entire point. It’s not who, but how long.
Also Microsoft plays both sides here. OpenAI vs copyright is wrong question. There’s more: both are status-quo. Both are for keeping corporate ownership of ideas.
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There’s a massive difference though between corporations milking copyright and authors/musicians/artists wanting their copyright respected. All I see here is a corporation milking copyrighted works by creative individuals.
Because ultimately, it’s about the truth of things, and not what team is winning or losing.
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The dream would be that they manage to make their own glorious free & open source version, so that after a brief spike in corporate profit as they fire all their writers and artists, suddenly nobody needs those corps anymore because EVERYONE gets access to the same tools - if everyone has the ability to churn out massive content without hiring anyone, that theoretically favors those who never had the capital to hire people to begin with, far more than those who did the hiring.
Of course, this stance doesn’t really have an answer for any of the other problems involved in the tech, not the least of which is that there’s bigger issues at play than just “content”.
Because everyone learns from books, it’s stupid.
An LLM is not a person, it is a product. It doesn’t matter that it “learns” like a human - at the end of the day, it is a product created by a corporation that used other people’s work, with the capacity to disrupt the market that those folks’ work competes in.
And it should be able to freely use anything that’s available to it. These massive corporations and entities have exploited all the free spaces to advertise and sell us their own products and are now sour.
If they had their way they are going to lock up much more of the net behind paywalls. Everybody should be with the LLMs on this.
You are somehow conflating “massive corporation” with “independent creator,” while also not recognizing that successful LLM implementations are and will be run by massive corporations, and eventually plagued with ads and paywalls.
People that make things should be allowed payment for their time and the value they provide their customer.
People are paid. But they’re greedy and expect far more compensation then they deserve. In this case they should not be compensated for having an LLM ingest their work work if that work was legally owned or obtained
Except the massive corporations and entities are the ones getting rich on this. They’re seeking to exploit the work of authors and musicians and artists.
Respecting the intellectual property of creative workers is the anti corporate position here.
Except corporations have infinitely more resources(money, lawyers) compared to people who create. Take Jarek Duda(mathematician from Poland) and Microsoft as an example. He created new compression algorythm, and Microsoft came few years later and patented it in Britain AFAIK. To file patent contest and prior art he needs 100k£.
I think there’s an important distinction to make here between patents and copyright. Patents are the issue with corporations, and I couldn’t care less if AI consumed all that.
And for copyright there is no possible way to contest it. Also when copyright expires there is no guarantee it will be accessable by humanity. Patents are bad, copyright even worse.
There is nothing anti corporate if result can be alienated.
Large number of these Artist, musicians and authors is corporate America today. And those authors artists and musicians have exploited all our spaces for far too long. Most of the internet had been turned toxic due to their greed. I wish they take their content and go find their own spaces instead of mooching off everybody else’s. These LLMs are only doing what they’ve done
I’m sorry, what?
If they had their way they are going to lock up much more of the net behind paywalls.
This!
When the Internet was first a thing corpos tried to put everything behind paywalls, and we pushed back and won.
Now, the next generation is advocating to put everything behind a paywall again?
How are we going to make ai, if it can’t learn?
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Then give the AI a library card, feel better?
The reasoning that claims training a generative model is infringing IP would still mean a robot going into a library with a card it has to optically read all the books there to create the same generative model would still be infringing IP.
Same way that counting cards is illegal
Humans can judge information make decisions on it and adapt it. AI mostly just looks at what is statistically what is most likely based on training data. If 1 piece of data exists, it will copy, not paraphrase. Example was from I think copilot where it just printed out the code and comments from an old game verbatim. I think Quake2. It isn’t intelligence, it is statistical copying.
Well, mathematics cannot be copyrighted. In most countries at least.
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because it might hurt authors and musicians and artists and other creative workers
FTFY. Corporations shouldn’t be making a fucking dime from any of these works without fairly paying the creators.
Leftists hating on AI while dreaming of post-scarcity will never not be funny
AI is the new fan boy following since it became official that nfts are all fucking scams. They need a new technological God to push to feel superior to everyone else…
Are you ok? You seem upset
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Training AI on copyrighted material is no more illegal or unethical than training human beings on copyrighted material (from library books or borrowed books, nonetheless!). And trying to challenge the veracity of generative AI systems on the notion that it was trained on copyrighted material only raises the specter that IP law has lost its validity as a public good.
The only valid concern about generative AI is that it could displace human workers (or swap out skilled jobs for menial ones) which is a problem because our society recognizes the value of human beings only in their capacity to provide a compensation-worthy service to people with money.
The problem is this is a shitty, unethical way to determine who gets to survive and who doesn’t. All the current controversy about generative AI does is kick this can down the road a bit. But we’re going to have to address soon that our monied elites will be glad to dispose of the rest of us as soon as they can.
Also, amateur creators are as good as professionals, given the same resources. Maybe we should look at creating content by other means than for-profit companies.
Also this argument if replacing human workers has been made with every single industrial revolution.
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The point is fighting back against it is stupid. The point is people still have work. New technology opens up new was to work with new jobs.
This is just OpenAI covering their ass by attempting to block the most egregious and obvious outputs in legal gray areas, something they’ve been doing for a while, hence why their AI models are known to be massively censored. I wouldn’t call that ‘hiding’. It’s kind of hard to hide it was trained on copyrighted material, since that’s common knowledge, really.
what if they scraped a whole lot of the internet, and those excerpts were in random blogs and posts and quotes and memes etc etc all over the place? They didnt injest the material directly, or knowingly.
Not knowing something is a crime doesn’t stop you from being prosecuted for committing it.
It doesn’t matter if someone else is sharing copyright works and you don’t know it and use it in ways that infringes on that copyright.
“I didn’t know that was copyrighted” is not a valid defence.
Is reading a passage from a book actually a crime though?
Sure, you could try to regenerate the full text from quotes you read online, much like you could open a lot of video reviews and recreate larger portions of the original text, but you would not blame the video editing program for that, you would blame the one who did it and decided to post it online.
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If training models are considered IP then shouldn’t we allow other training models to view and learn from the competition? If learning from other IPs that are copywritten is okay, why should the training models be treated different?
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People are acting like ChatGPT is storing the entire Harry Potter series in its neural net somewhere. It’s not storing or reproducing text in a 1:1 manner from the original material. Certain material, like very popular books, has likely been interpreted tens of thousands of times due to how many times it was reposted online (and therefore how many times it appeared in the training data).
Just because it can recite certain passages almost perfectly doesn’t mean it’s redistributing copyrighted books. How many quotes do you know perfectly from books you’ve read before? I would guess quite a few. LLMs are doing the same thing, but on mega steroids with a nearly limitless capacity for information retention.
but on mega steroids with a nearly limitless capacity for information retention.
That sounds like redistributing copyrighted books
Nope people are just acting like ChatGPT is making commercial use of the content. Knowing a quote from a book isn’t copyright infringement. Selling that quote is. Also it doesn’t need to be content stored 1:1 somewhere to be infringement. That misses the point. If you’re making money of a synopsis you wrote based on imperfect memory and in your own words it’s still copyright infringment until you sign a licensing agreement with JK. Even transforming what you read into a different medium like a painting or poetry cam infinge the original authors copyrights.
Now mull that over and tell us what you think about modern copyright laws.
Just adding, that, outside of Rowling, who I believe has a different contract than most authors due to the expanded Wizarding World and Pottermore, most authors themselves cannot quote their own novels online because that would be publishing part of the novel digitally and that’s a right they’ve sold to their publisher. The publisher usually ignores this as it creates hype for the work, but authors are careful not to abuse it.
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Yeah I don’t see how that’s true. If that were true wouldn’t every board walk tee shirt shop be sued into oblivion from Nickelodeon over Sponge Bob?
Lol, say that to the first (obscure) Harry Potter line I tried on ChatGPT.
Using Copyrighted Work as Art as example still influences the AI which their make Profit from.
If they use my Works then they need to pay thats it.
Still kinda blows my mind how like the most socialist people I know (fellow artists) turned super capitalist the second a tool showed like an inkling of potential to impact their bottom line.
Personally, I’m happy to have my work scraped and permutated by systems that are open to the public. My biggest enemy isn’t the existence of software scraping an open internet, it’s the huge companies who see it as a way to cut us out of the picture.
If we go all copyright crazy on the models for looking at stuff we’ve already posted openly on the internet, the only companies with access to the tools will be those who already control huge amounts of data.
I mean, for real, it’s just mind-blowing seeing the entire artistic community pretty much go full-blown “Metallica with the RIAA” after decades of making the “you wouldn’t download a car” joke.
Fuckin preach! I feel like I’m surrounded by children that didn’t live through the many other technologies that have came along and changed things. People lost their shit when photoshop became mainstream, when music started using samples, etc. AI is here to stay. These same people are probably listening to autotuned music all day while they complain on the internet about AI looking at their art.
I feel like a lot of internet people (not even just socialists) go from seeing copyright as at best a compromise that allows the arts to have value under capitalism to treating it like a holy doctrine when the subject of LLMs comes up.
Like, people who will say “piracy is always okay” will also say “ban AI, period” (and misrepresent organizations that want regulations on it’s use as wanting a full ban.)
Like, growing up with an internet full of technically illegal content (or grey area at best) like fangames and YouTube Poops made me a lifelong copyright skeptic. It’s outright confusing to me when people take copyright as seriously as this.
I say piracy is always okay but also am a big fan of AI. I had chat GPT write my last cover letter and got the job
Based
Nobody would defend copyright if it wasn’t already in place, it’s a sick idea. They ask us to cut the field of human knowledge for private benefit. Now they want to destroy a new technology in its name. Greed knows no bounds.
I defend the idea of copyright. The first copyright law was in 1710, to protect authors from the printing press. Without copyright, whoever owned the printing press would sell copies of books with no obligation to pay the author. When copying art is trivial, the artist needs copyright protection in order to make a living creating art.
There are major problems with modern copyrights. Like all things in capitalism it has been subverted to benefit the rich, but the core idea behind copyright is sound.
These lawsuits are not to stop the development if generative AI. These lawsuits are to stop the unlicensed use of copyrighted works as AI training data.
There are AI models that are only trained with licensed data. This doesn’t stop the development of AI.
Artists should have the right to choose whether their work is used as training data. And they should be compensated fairly for it. That will be the case if these lawsuits succeed.
Ultimately it’s a propertarian scheme of ownership imposed onto the realm of concepts and ideas. The first person to successfully lay claim to an idea is given a monopoly on that idea for some number of years. A book, an invention, a melody. To secure profit for that individual, the entire rest of humanity is prevented access to the idea except under his terms, and the naturally free exchange of information is curtailed by statute to accomplish this, via the imposition of punishments for anyone who goes against this scheme. I do not think that’s defensible. That is to say, I don’t think humanity sees a net benefit from this way of doing things. Even some hypothetical 20-30% reduction in the generation of different kinds of creative works would be well offset by the benefit humanity sees from being able to access them, and the funds that would be going to the artist still could if people saw fit.
Is this being used to stop the development of generative AI? Yes, literally the imprint on an AI of having parsed the works and understood them in some symbolic capacity, they want to curtail that. And the existing models that have already done that would likely be rendered illegal, setting the entire technology back a year or two.
In an ideal world without greed, you are right in saying that copyright is not beneficial for the human race as a whole. Unfortunately we don’t live in such a world. Look at what happened with insulin. The person invented it placed a ludicrously low priced patent of one dollar because he felt that it should be available cheaply to all who need and yet today in the US, insulin is a ridiculously expensive drug which many people struggle to afford. This is because while the inventor was not greedy and thought about the greater good, the pharmaceutical industry did not. They saw an opportunity to make money and are screwing people in the process
Insulin is ridiculously expensive because of monopoly status over methods on how to produce it (on top of any other laws restricting supply). I personally contributed to a project to create an open source method to make insulin.
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Nobody would defend copyright if it wasn’t already in place
I don’t know about that. Say you take a few years to write a handful of poems, and it turns out people in your neighborhood really like them. You compile the poems into a book, and sell it for $5, and it sells well. Seeing this, your neighbor buys one, copies it, and starts selling it one neighborhood over for $2, and representing themself as the author. I would think most people in that situation would want to say, ‘hey, that’s not fair’. I don’t think that’s sick or rooted in greed, copyright can be a check on greed.
So thanks to copyright, we’re now living in a world where artists are fairly compensated and not exploited by large corporations acting as middlemen that have seized control of their creative works and used it for their own profit?
More so than we would be without copyright at all
Copyright needs to be extended for individuals and cut back for corporations. People should be allowed to own rights to their ip, but corps should have much higher levels of restrictions and how some knowledge must be shared.
So the people who generate and curate that knowledge don’t deserve to be compensated? Are you going to be a full time wikipedia editor then? Or does your “greed know no bounds”?
I defend copyright. The original intent was to protect creators in order to foster more creativity. Most artists will have no incentive to create if their work can be reappropriated by a larger group to leverage it for monetary gain, which is directly being taken from the original creator.
I’m a photographer. I’ve removed all my pictures from the internet and plan to never post more. I don’t want my work being used to train AI. Right now we have no choice in that matter, so the only option is to no longer share our work.
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What do you do for your work, and will you send it to me for free then? Can I sell it and keep all the money I get?
As a Civilian Pirating is no Problem but if its a Company that behaves like they own their Neural Network to 100%.
Piracy is gonna live as long Services are Bad for Average Joe,but these US Corps can afford to pay for this.
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I don’t get why this is an issue. Assuming they purchased a legal copy that it was trained on then what’s the problem? Like really. What does it matter that it knows a certain book from cover to cover or is able to imitate art styles etc. That’s exactly what people do too. We’re just not quite as good at it.
A copyright holder has the right to control who has the right to create derivative works based on their copyright. If you want to take someone’s copyright and use it to create something else, you need permission from the copyright holder.
The one major exception is Fair Use. It is unlikely that AI training is a fair use. However this point has not been adjudicated in a court as far as I am aware.
It is not a derivative it is transformative work. Just like human artists “synthesise” art they see around them and make new art, so do LLMs.
LLMs don’t create anything new. They have limited access to what they can be based on, and all assumptions made by it are based on that data. They do not learn new things or present new ideas. Only ideas that have been already done and are present in their training.
Transformative works are not a thing.
If you copy the copyrightable elements of another work, you have created a derivative work. That work needs to be transformative in order to be eligible for its own copyright, but being transformative alone is not enough to make it non-infringing.
There are four fair use factors. Transformativeness is only considered by one of them. That is not enough to make a fair use.
Transformativeness is only considered by one of them. That is not enough to make a fair use.
Somebody better let YouTube content creators know that. /s
this is so fucking stupid though. almost everyone reads books and/or watches movies, and their speech is developed from that. the way we speak is modeled after characters and dialogue in books. the way we think is often from books. do we track down what percentage of each sentence comes from what book every time we think or talk?
Aye, but I’m thinking the whole notion of copyright is banking on the fact that human beings are inherently lazy and not everyone will start churning out books in the same universe or style. And if they do, it takes quite some time to get the finished product and they just get sued for it. It’s easy, because there’s a single target.
So there’s an extra deterrent to people writing and publishing a new harry potter novel, unaffiliated with the current owner of the copyright. Invest all that time and resources just to be sued? Nah…
Issue with generating stuff with 'puters is that you invest way less time, so the same issue pops up for the copyright owner, they’re just DDoS-ed on their possible attack routes. Will they really sue thousands or hundreds of thoudands of internet randos generating harry potter erotica using a LLM? Would you even know who they are? People can hide money away in Switzerland from entite governments, I’m sure there are ways to hide your identity from a book publisher.
It was never about the content, it’s about the opportunities the technology provides to halt the gears of the system that works to enforce questionable laws. So they’re nipping it in the bud.
this brings up the question: what is a book? what is art? if an “AI” can now churn out the next harry potter sequel and people literally can’t tell that it’s not written by JK Rowling, then what does that mean for what people value in stories? what is a story? is this a sign that we humans should figure something new out, instead of reacting according to an outdated protocol?
yes, authors made money in the past before AI. now that we have AI and most people can get satisfied by a book written by AI, what will differentiate human authors from AI? will it become a niche thing, where some people can tell the difference and they prefer human authors? or will there be some small number of exceptional authors who can produce something that is obviously different from AI?
i see this as an opportunity for artists to compete with AI, rather than say “hey! no fair! he can think and write faster than me!”
Well, poor literature has always existed, which some might not even dignify to call literature. Are writers of such things threatened by LLMs? Of course they are. Every new technology has beought with it the fear of upending somebody’s world. And to some extent, every new technology has indeed done just that.
Personally, and… this will probably be highly unpopular, I honestly don’t care who or what created a piece of art. Is it pretty? Does it satisfy my need for just the right amount of weird, funny and disturbing to stir emotions or make me go ‘heh, interesting!’? Then it really doesn’t matter where it comes from. We put way too much emphasis on the pedigree of art and not on the content. Hell, one very nice short story I read was the greentext one about humans being AI and escaping from the simulation. Wonder how many would scoff at calling art something that came out of 4chan?
Maybe this is the issue? Art is thought of as a purely human endeavour (also birds do it, and that one pufferfish that draws on the seabed, but they’re “dumb” animals so they don’t count, right? hell, there’s even a jumping spider that does some pretty rad dances). And if code in a machine can do it just as well (can it? let it - we’ll be all the better for it. can’t it? let it be then - no issue) then what would be the significance of being human?
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