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GenAI tools ‘could not exist’ if firms are made to pay copyright::undefined
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So they’re admitting that their entire business model requires them to break the law. Sounds like they shouldn’t exist.
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The Kit Walsh article purposefully handwaves around a couple of issues that could present larger issues as law suits in this arena continue.
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He says that due to the size of training data and the model, only a byte of data per image could be stored in any compressed format, but this assumes all training data is treated equally. It’s very possible certain image artifacts are compressed/stored in the weights more than other images.
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These models don’t produce exact copies. Beyond the Getty issue, nytimes recently released an article about a near duplicate - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/25/business/ai-image-generators-openai-microsoft-midjourney-copyright.html.
I think some of the points he makes are valid, but they’re making a lot of assumptions about what is actually going on in these models which we either don’t know for certain or have evidence to the contrary.
I didn’t read Katherine’s article so maybe there is something more there.
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I’m not sure she does, just read the article and it focuses primarily what models can train on. However, the real meat of the issue, at least I think, with GenAI is what it produces.
For example, if I built a model that just spit out exact frames from “Space Jam”, I don’t think anyone would argue that would be a problem. The question is where is the line?
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This goes back to my previous comment of handwaving away the details. There is a model out there that clearly is reproducing copyrighted materials almost identically (nytimes article), we also have issues with models spitting out training data https://www.wired.com/story/chatgpt-poem-forever-security-roundup/. Clearly people studying these models don’t fully know what is actually possible.
Additionally, it only takes one instance to show that these models, in general, can and do have issues with regurgitating copyrighted data. Whether that passes the bar for legal consequences we’ll have to see, but i think it’s dangerous to take a couple of statements made by people who don’t seem to understand the unknowns in this space at face value.
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Reproduction of copyrighted material would be breaking the law. Studying it and using it as reference when creating original content is not.
humans studying it, is fair use.
So if a tool is involved, it’s no longer ok? So, people with glasses cannot consume copyrighted material?
No. A tool already makes it unnatural. /S
Copyright can only be granted to works created by a human, but I don’t know of any such restriction for fair use. Care to share a source explaining why you think only humans are able to use fair use as a defense for copyright infringement?
Because a human has to use talent+effort to make something that’s fair use. They adapt a product into something that while similar is noticeably different. AI will
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make things that are not just similar but not noticeably different.
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There’s not an effort in creation. There’s human thought behind a prompt but not on the AI following it.
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If allowed to AI companies will basically copyright everything…
Your reply has nothing to do with fair use doctrine.
You are aware of the insane amounts of research, human effort and the type of human talent that is required to make a simple piece of software, let alone a complex artificial neural network model whose function is to try and solve whatever stuff…right?
And that is human effort, not the AIs.
Good point. I say the software can be copywrite protected, but not the content the program generates.
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I don’t agree. The publisher of the material does not get to dictate what it is used for. What are we protecting at the end of the day and why?
In the case of a textbook, someone worked hard to explain certain materials in a certain way to make the material easily digestible. They produced examples to explain concepts. Reproducing and disseminating that material would be unfair to the author who worked hard to produce it.
But the author does not have jurisdiction over the knowledge gained. They cannot tell the reader that they are forbidden from using the knowledge gained to tutor another person in calculus. That would be absurd.
IP law protects the works of the creator. The author of a calculus textbook did not invent calculus. As such, copyright law does not apply.
Reproduction of copyrighted material would be breaking the law. Studying it and using it as reference when creating original content is not.
I’m curious why we think otherwise when it is a student obtaining an unauthorized copy of a textbook to study, or researchers getting papers from sci-hub. Probably because it benefits corporations and they say so?
While I would like to be in a world where knowledge is free, this is apples and oranges.
OpenAI can purchase a textbook and read it. If their AI uses the knowledge gained to explain maths to an individual, without reproducing the original material, then there’s no issue.
The difference is the student in your example didn’t buy their textbook. Someone else bought it and reproduced the original for others to study from.
If OpenAI was pirating textbooks, that would be a wholly separate issue.
I was under the impression they mentioned at some point torrenting things
Don’t know about OpenAI, but Meta used pirated books to train its AI.
https://www.techspot.com/news/101507-meta-admits-using-pirated-books-train-ai-but.html
I agree that the issues
- whether AI output are derivative works of its input, and
- whether input to AI is fair use and requires no compensation
are separate, but I think they are related, in that AI companies are trying to impose whatever interpretation of copyright that is convenient to them to the rest of the society.
And indeed Meta pirated books to feed its AI.
https://www.techspot.com/news/101507-meta-admits-using-pirated-books-train-ai-but.html
It doesn’t break the law at all. The courts have already ruled that copyrighted material can be fed into AI/ML models for training:
This ruling only applies to the 2nd Circuit and SCOTUS has yet to take up a case. As soon as there’s a good fact pattern for the Supreme Court of a circuit split, you’ll get nationwide information. You’ll also note that the decision is deliberately written to provide an extremely narrow precedent and is likely restricted to Google Books and near-identical sources of information.
Have there been any US ruling stating something along the lines of “The training of general purpose LLMs and/or image generation AIs does not qualify as fair use,” even in a lower court?
Hell, that article is also all about Google Books, which is an entirely different beast from generative AI. One of the key points from the circuit judge was that Google Books’ use of copyrighted material “…[maintains] respectful consideration for the rights of authors and other creative individuals, and without adversely impacting the rights of copyright holders.” The appeals court, in upholding the ruling that Google Books’ use of copyrighted content is fair use, ruled “the revelations do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals.”
If you think that gen AI doesn’t provide a significant market substitute for the artwork created by the artists and authors used to train these models, or that it doesn’t adversely impact their rights, then you’re utterly delusional.
You might want to read this post from one of the EFF’s senior lawyers on the topic who has previously litigated IP cases:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/how-we-think-about-copyright-and-ai-art-0
I guess I can’t read anything and learn from it.
i don’t think it’s need rules against the law…
you know what? I like this argument. Software/Streaming services are “too complex and costly to work in practice” therefore my viewership/participation “could not exist” if I were forced to pay for them.
Hey if they want to set that precedent, so be it.
Oh, no no no.
Rules for thee, not for me.
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Maybe because it’s not the same corporations? We might be seeing a giant powershift from IP hoarders to makers.
Not that I am a fan of the current implementation of copyright in the US, but I know if I was planning on building my business around something that couldn’t exist without violating copyright I would surely thought of that fairly early on.
“My profits from fencing your wallet could not exist if stealing your wallet were punished.”
“Ah, you’re right, how silly of me, carry on.”
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The LCA principles also make the careful and critical distinction between input to train an LLM, and output—which could potentially be infringing if it is substantially similar to an original expressive work.
from your second link. I don’t often see this brought up in discussions. The problem of models trained on copyrighted info is definitely different than what you do with that model/output from it. If you’re making money from infringing, the fair use arguments are historically less successful. I have less of an issue with the general training of a model vs. commercial infringing use.
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I don’t disagree with that statement. I’m having trouble seeing how that fits with what I said, though. Can you elaborate?
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Cool. Thanks. I can see it now. No, not really, just the pieces over time I’ve read on what wins fair use protections when challenged often talk about the interpretations involved and that profit making was generally seen as detracting from gaining fair use protections when the extent of the transformative nature was in question.
This mentions it, but of course it isn’t data on what has been granted protections vs. denials of protection. Harvard counsel primer on copyright and fair use
Noncommercial use is more likely to be deemed fair use than commercial use, and the statute expressly contrasts nonprofit educational purposes with commercial ones. However, uses made at or by a nonprofit educational institution may be deemed commercial if they are made in connection with content that is sold, ad-supported, or profit-making. When the use of a work is commercial, the user must show a greater degree of transformation (see below) in order to establish that it is fair.
Another reason why copyright should be shortened… Society has changed massively in the last 100 years, but every expression of our modern society is locked behind copyright.
I keep thinking how great it would be if the federal government made a central server system to access digital content for free via taxes.
All public domain and publicly funded research and content, all in one place. Could also host owned content for people/entities and pay out royalties automatically based on consumption.
There are ways to make this fairly affordable to everyone via taxes, but maybe the big opportunity is it could also allow companies to train AI on all the data for a fat, but fair subscription. The value of that could easily pay for enough to shrink any tax costs for the public.
In general, if the US government were smart (and not currently tearing itself apart) it would be creating a generative AI public service like the postal service, potentially even relying on public government documents and the library system for training.
Offer it at effectively cost for the public to use. Would drive innovation and development, nothing produced by it would be copyrightable, and it would put pressure on private options to compete against it.
We can still have the FedEx or DHL of gen AI out there, but they would need to contend with the public option being cheaper and more widely available for use.
In addition to the US government actually needing to do work, the senators would need to understand how to turn a computer on and off.
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if the US government was smart
So… This may be an unpopular question. Almost every time AI is discussed, a staggering number of posts support very right-wing positions. EG on topics like this one: Unearned money for capital owners. It’s all Ayn Rand and not Karl Marx. Posters seem to be unaware of that, though.
Is that the “neoliberal Zeitgeist” or what you may call it?
I’m worried about what this may mean for the future.
ETA: 7 downvotes after 1 hour with 0 explanation. About what I expected.
It’s interesting as it’s many of the MPAA/RIAA attitudes towards Napster/BitTorrent but now towards gen AI.
I think it reflects the generational shift in who considers themselves content creators. Tech allowed for the long tail to become profitable content producers, so now there’s a large public audience that sees this from what’s historically been a corporate perspective.
Of course, they are making the same mistakes because they don’t know their own history and thus are doomed to repeat it.
They are largely unaware that the MPAA/RIAA fighting against online sharing of media meant they ceded the inevitable tech to other companies like Apple and Netflix that developed platforms that navigated the legality alongside the tech.
So for example right now voice actors are largely opposing gen AI rather than realizing they should probably have their union develop or partner for their own owned offering which maximizes member revenues off of usage and can dictate fair terms.
In fact, the only way many of today’s mass content creators have platforms to create content is because the corporate fights to hold onto IP status quo failed with platforms like YouTube, etc.
Gen AI should exist in a social construct such that it is limited in being able to produce copyrighted content. But policing training/education of anything (human or otherwise) doesn’t serve us and will hold back developments that are going to have much more public good than most people seem to realize.
Also, it’s unfortunate that we’ve effectively self propagandized for nearly a century around ‘AI’ being the bad guy and at odds with humanity, misaligned with our interests, an existential threat, etc. There’s such an incredible priming bias right now that it’s effectively become the Boogeyman rather than correctly being identified as a tool that - like every other tool in human history - is going to be able to be used for good or bad depending on the wielder (though unlike past tools this one may actually have a slight inherent and unavoidable bias towards good as Musk and Gab recently found out with their AI efforts on release denouncing their own personally held beliefs).
That was a novel perspective for me. Thanks.
I think it’s a conflation of the ideas of what copyright should be and actually is. I don’t tend to see many people who believe copyright should be abolished in its entirety, and if people write a book or a song they should have some kind of control over that work. But there’s a lot of contention over the fact that copyright as it exists now is a bit of a farce, constantly traded and sold and lasting an aeon after the person who created the original work dies.
It seems fairly morally constant to think that something old and part of the zeitgeist should not be under copyright, but that the system needs an overhaul when companies are using your live journal to make a robot call center.
Lemmy seems left-wing on economics in other threads. But on AI, it’s private property all the way, without regard for the consequences on society. The view on intellectual property is that of Ayn Rand. Economically, it does not get further to the right than that.
My interpretation is that people go by gut feeling and never think of the consequences. The question is, why does their gut give them a far-right answer? One answer is that somehow our culture, at present, fosters such reactions; that it is the zeitgeist. If that’s the truth (and this reflects a wider trend) then inequality will continue to increase as a result of voter’s demands.
My interpretation is that people go by gut feeling and never think of the consequences.
Often, yes.
The question is, why does their gut give them a far-right answer?
The political right exploits fear, and the fear of AI hits close to home. Many people either have been impacted, could be impacted, or know someone who could be impacted, either by AI itself or by something that has been enabled by or that has been blamed on AI.
When you’re afraid and/or operating from a vulnerable position, it’s a lot easier to jump on the anti-AI bandwagon. This is especially true when the counter-arguments address their flawed reasoning rather than the actual problems. They need something to fix the problem, not a sound argument about why a particular attempt to do so is flawed. And when this problem is staring you in the face, the implications of what it would otherwise mean just aren’t that important to you.
People are losing income because of AI and our society does not have enough safety nets in place to make that less terrifying. If you swap “AI” for “off-shore outsourcing” it’s the same thing.
The people arguing in favor of AI don’t have good answers for them about what needs to happen to “fix the problem.” The people arguing against AI don’t need to have sound arguments to appeal to these folks since their arguments sound like they could “fix the problem.” “If they win this lawsuit against OpenAI, ChatGPT and all the other LLMs will be shut down and companies will have to hire real people again. Anthropic even said so, see!”
UBI would solve a lot of the problems, but it doesn’t have the political support of our elected officials in either party and the amount of effort to completely upend the makeup of Congress is so high that it’s obviously not a solution in the short term.
Unions are a better short-term option, but that’s still not enough.
One feasible solution would be legislation restricting or taxing the use of AI by corporations, particularly when that use results in the displacement of human laborers. If those taxes were then used to support those same displaced laborers, then that would both encourage corporations to hire real people and lessen the sting of getting laid off.
I think another big part of this is that there’s a certain amount of feeling helpless to do anything about the situation. If you can root for the folks with the lawsuit, then that’s at least something. And it’s empowering to see that people like you - other writers, artists, etc. - are the ones spearheading this, as opposed to legislators.
But yes, the more that people’s fear is exploited and the more that they’re misdirected when it comes to having an actual solution, the worse things will get.
The fear angle makes a lot of sense, but I wonder how many people are really so immediately threatened that it would cloud their judgment.
Well, when you consider that more than 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck - I’d say a lot of them.
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You’re not wrong but how many people here are actually pursuing their own personal interest. Most people here are probably wage-earners. Yet so many people support giving more money to property owners without any kind of requirement or incentive for work. Just a rent for property owners. It feels like this should be met with knee-jerk rejection.
I see way too many people advocating for copyright. I understand in this case it benefits big companies rather than consumers, but if you disagree with copyright, as I do, you should be consistent.
Copyright law should benefit humans, not machines, not corporations. And no, corporations are not people. Anthony Kennedy can get bent.
I hate the MAGMA companies as much as anyone, but AI such as LLMs, especially the open source stuff Facebook and Stable diffusion is making, is beneficial to us all.
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Well said.
You don’t have to be against copyright, as such. Fair Use is part of copyright law. It exists to prevent copyrights from being abused against the interests of the general public.
But I am against any copyright beyond forcing attribution to the original creator.
I’d say the main reason is companies are profiting off the work of others. It’s not some grand positive motive for society, but taking the work of others, from other companies, sure, but also from small time artists, writers, etc.
Then selling access to the information they took from others.
I wouldn’t call it a right wing position.
Wanting to abolish the IRS is a right-wing policy that will benefit the rich. That doesn’t change when some marketing genius talks about how the IRS takes money from small time artists, writers, etc. Same thing. It’s about substance and not manipulative framing.
That isn’t remotely similar…
The IRS takes a portion of income. This is taking away someone’s income, then charging access to it.
Like it or not, these people need money to survive. Calling it right wing to think these individuals deserve to be paid for someone taking their work, then using it for a product they sell access to, is absolutely insane to me.
I don’t know how this is supposed to make sense.
One is a percentage of income that everyone pays into.
The other is stealing someone’s work then using that person’s work for profit.
Recognizing that stealing someone’s work is not a right-wing position.
How is this complicated?
I see. Thanks for explaining.
This view of property rights as absolute is what right-libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, etc… espouse. Usually the cries of “theft” come when it gets to taxes, though. Is it supposed to be not right because it’s about intellectual property?
Property rights are not necessarily right-wing (communism notwithstanding). What is definitely right-wing is (heritable) privilege and that’s implied in these views of property.
ETA: Just to make sure that I really understand what you are saying: When you say “stealing someone’s work” you do mean the unauthorized copying of copyrighted expression, yes? Do you actually understand that copyright is intellectual property and that property is not usually called work? Labor and capital are traditionally considered opposites, of a sort, particularly among the left.
So… You think their art or writing was created by what then? Magic? Do you think no time was expended in the creation of books, research, drawings, painted canvases, etc?
Do you think they should starve because we currently live in a world driven entirely around money?
I don’t get your point even remotely.
Yeah…it’s pretty weird. Feels like some folks have really dived into LLMs regardless of ethics and will do any amount of hand waving to avoid criticism of a for-profit company openly attacking creatives’ livelihood with their own uncompensated works. In an ideal world where it wasn’t a case of “earn or die cold and alone in the streets”, sure, but this is just robbing those workers of the fruits of their labor and burning the ladder while
I think the “neoliberal zeitgeist” thought may be correct as neoliberal ideology devalues anything and everything that is not solely profit-driven, including just about everything that humans have historically found to make life meaningful.
Every single poster here has relied on disruptive technologies in their life. They don’t even realize that they couldn’t even make these arguments here if it was not for people before them pushing the envelope.
They don’t know the history of their technology nor corporate law. If they did they would just roll their eyes every time an entrenched economic interest started saber rattling about the next disruptive technology that is going to steal their profits.
The posters here are the people who complained about horsewhip manufactures that were going out of business because of cars. They are ignorant and act like the few sound bytes they heard make them an expert.
As an aside, when I browse TheGatewayPundit comments on AI articles, it is a lot more open, against legislation, and woke than I would expect!
It’s important to recognize that IP is conceptually fucky to begin with. They’re seeing what it’s claimed to be (creator ‘ownership’ of their creations) rather than what it really is (corporations using the government to enact violence on non-violent people).
It means nothing interesting. The position they feel they’re taking is “corporation bad” which is in line, they just haven’t analyzed how IP works in the real world.
So because corps abuse copyright, that means I should be fine with AI companies taking whatever I write–all the journal entries, short stories, blog posts, tweets, comments, etc.–and putting it through their model without being asked, and with no ability to opt out? My artist friends should be fine with their art galleries being used to train the AI models that are actively being used to deprive them of their livelihood without any ability to say “I don’t want the fruits of my labor to be used in this way?”
This is the problem people have
They don’t see artists and creators as worth protecting. They’d rather screw over every small creator and take away control of their works, just because “it’d be hard to train without copyrighted data”
Plenty of creators would opt in if given the option, but I’m going to guess a large portion will not.
I don’t want my works training what will replace me, and right now copyright is the only way we can defend what was made.
It’s like nobody here actually knows someone who is actually creative or has bothered making anything creative themselves
I don’t even have a financial interest in it because there’s no way my job could be automated, and I don’t have any chance of making any kind of money off my trash. I still wouldn’t let LLMs train with my work, and I have a feeling that the vast majority of people would do the same
I don’t know if your fears about your friends’ livelihood are justified, but cutting down on fair use will not help at all. In fact, it would make their situation worse. Think through what would actually happen.
When you publish something you have to accept that people will make it their own to some degree. Think parody or R34. It may be hurtful, but the alternative is so much worse.
Huh? How does that follow at all? Judging that the specific use of training LLMs–which absolutely flunks the “amount and substantiality of the portion taken” (since it’s taking the whole damn work) and “the effect on the market” (fucking DUH) tests–isn’t fair use in no way impacts parody or R34. It’s the same kind of logic the GOP uses when they say “if the IRS cracks down on billionaires evading taxes then Blue Collar Joe is going to get audited!”
Fuck outta here with that insane clown logic.
I think you would find it easier to help your friends if you approached the matter with reason rather than emotion. Your take on fair use isn’t is missing a lot, but that’s beside the point.
Assume you get what you
wantedare asking for. What then?Yeah, no, stop with the goddamn tone policing. I have zero interest in vagueposting and high-horse riding.
As for what I want, I want generative AI banned entirely, or at minimum restricted to training on works that are either in the public domain, or that the person creating the training model received explicit, opt-in consent to use. This is the supposed gold standard everyone demands when it comes to the widescale collection and processing of personal data that they generate just through their normal, everyday activities, why should it be different for the widescale collection and processing of the stuff we actually put our effort into creating?
As for what I want, I want generative AI banned entirely,
Well, you can see the moral (and political!) problem here. Maybe the people who crunched numbers before electric computers wanted them banned. Maybe people who make diesel engines want EVs banned. That’s asking the public to take a hit for the benefit of a small group. Morality aside, it’s politically unlikely.
or at minimum restricted to training on works that are either in the public domain, or that the person creating the training model received explicit, opt-in consent to use.
This is somewhat more likely. But what then?
I’ll start. Opt-in means that you have to obtain a license to AI train with something. You have to pay the owner of the intellectual property. What does this mean in our economy? What happens?
The concept of copyright is insane to begin with. Corps don’t make it bad - it starts out bad.
It’s an invented right.
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IDK. I have seen a number of pro-corpo copyleft takes. It’s absolutely crazy to me. The pitch is that expansive copyright makes for expansive copyleft. It seems neo-feudal to me. The lords have their castles but the peasants have their commons.
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Then they shouldn’t exist.
Too late
Fine. Shut them down.
Right? Like…I don’t give a shit. That’s not a threat or a fact that bothers me at all. They are only a tool for amassing more power and money. So what the fuck do I care.
And what about the open source models? Or the AI companies in countries that have more lax copyright laws? (Japan for example)
This technology exists now. We can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Copyright came out of the printing press, which allowed cheap copies to be made. Now a new technology has emerged so we likely need a new set of rules to replace the role that copyright performed, which was incentivizing artistic creation
Simple – you can’t charge for AI generation
I’d be fine with this argument if these generative tools were only being used by non-profits. But they aren’t.
So I think there has to be some compromise here. Some type of licensing fee should be paid by these generative AI tools.
You’re basically arguing for making any free use of them illegal, thereby giving a monopoly to the richest and most powerful capitalists.
Humans won’t be able to compete, and you won’t be able to use the means of generation either.
I’m arguing for free commercial use being illegal, absolutely.
And that fee should scale based on who is using it for commercial purposes. Microsoft and Google should be paying far, far out the ass for their data.
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And who does that serve?
Do you mean the whole thing or something specific like free commercial use being illegal?
I think the answer to both are the people who created the art, text, etc that these generative AI tools are going to make mostly obsolete.
Open source or open use AI will be practically illegal. Research will be practically impossible. It will be exclusively controlled by super rich and powerful corporations.
It won’t benefit the creators. It will only benefit those with the most capital that can buy up the training data needed and then can set the market so they make almost all of the money. For example you’d need to buy all the user content from reddit, facebook and twitter to train an AI. That will cost many millions because it’s a precious commodity (and only they own it). So only a few will control the “means of generation” and they will (have to) use it to make profit for themselves. This will make it practically illegal to make a free or an independent AI because you don’t have access to training data. This sets the rules and will lead to incredibly bad outcomes. For example anti-consumerist thinking or dissent could be suppressed, or other more subtle biases. Anything that reduces profit from advertising or threatens the shareholders. And they can manipulate the training data behind closed doors.
But that is how it’s going to go and it’s going to make the effects of AI generation on our civilization extra bad. We are so fucked :(
Sounds like a win to me
If they can’t afford a thing they want, that’s too bad.
The fact that their dream-AI ‘cant exist’ without stealing from everyone there is only one message to bounce back there from the rest of us;
‘good’
I’m just trying to think about how refined AI would be if it could only use public domain data.
ChatGPT channels Jane Austin and Shakespeare.
That’s not really how it would work.
If you want that outcome, it’s better to train on as massive a data set as possible initially (which does regress towards the mean but also manages to pick up remarkable capabilities and relationships around abstract concepts), and then use fine tuning to bias it back towards an exceptional result.
If you only trained it on those works, it would suck at pretty much everything except specifically completing those specific works with those specific characters. It wouldn’t model what the concerns of a prince in general were, but instead model that a prince either wants to murder his mother (Macbeth) or fuck her (Oedipus).
Of course they will exist. China will own them all.
Huh. You’d think in a situation where copyright is threatened by a lack of AI regulation, Disney would be all over this. Oh wait. They’re trying to use generative AI to make movies cheaper. Nevermind.
