Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/08/30/2023-18624/artificial-intelligence-and-copyright

by cpeterso • 3 years ago

213 302 3 years ago

yieldcrv3• 3 years ago

I’ve made so much money stacking my pitch decks and websites with AI generated media that I don't care if someone copy and pastes it and uses it commercially too

People married to their prompt engineering outputs are really missing the forest for the trees

ProllyInfamous• 3 years ago

"When the rice desolves to 'free,' people shall starve."

nvy• 3 years ago

Perhaps it's the artists on whose content your models got trained that are rightfully upset. After all, you're not giving them a dime and neither is "open" "AI"

cscurmudgeon• 3 years ago

Do the artists pay other artists they "trained" on consciously and subconsciously?

asynchronous2• 3 years ago

I think that we shouldn’t burn perhaps the greatest digital art tool ever created in the sake of preserving our currently broken copyright system.

yieldcrv3• 3 years ago

You don’t know which models I used and never will know if that condition has suddenly become satisfied

Curious what the next goal post will be, I’ve seen them move already

Andrex• 3 years ago

An entire forest of hallucinated trees, sounds tranquil yet disturbing.

quickthrower22• 3 years ago

I am having trouble making sense of that last statement - can you rephrase it?

yieldcrv3• 3 years ago

A lot of people would like their AI creations to have to copyright protection, but it isn't necessary to making money

kelseyfrog2• 3 years ago

The narrative beauty of filling this up with GPT-created comments will be so incredibly sublime.

h2odragon• 3 years ago

Since it'll be real people driving the efforts; the final results should normalize out about the same, statistically speaking.

This all gets boiled down to like 3 or 4 rows in a spreadsheet, anyway.

Der_Einzige• 3 years ago

I'm going to try to plead my case for images generated using sophisticated prompt engineering to be copyrightable. For example, at the point that I've written a prompt with 20 tags, 10 negative prompt tags, some loras, custom weights, embeddings merges, and prompt editing, I'm now writing what is effectively a "program", which should be copyrightable and so should its outputs.

It's total BS to me that a book of midjourney generated images is itself copyrightable because a human arranged the book together, but that a highly sophisticated prompt involving custom tooling wouldn't be.

If nothing else, my comments should show the US Patent Office how deep the rabbit-hole goes with just how interpolatable everything is with everything else.

stonogo3• 3 years ago

No, you're passing inputs to a program, and your description completely omits the vast majority of that input: the creative output of an unknown number of other people, whose rights you are attempting to launder.

Robotbeat• 3 years ago

Transformative collage.

stale20027• 3 years ago

Thats nice and all. But it has nothing to do with whether something is copyrightable or not.

Instead, something is copyrightable based on the amount of human input into the process.

And it is very clear that there can be a lot of human input into AI image generation.

Even though I will concede that going into midjourney and just typing in "Hot anime girl" isn't a lot of input and likely doesn't deserve copyright protection.

But there can be so much more to AI art than the boring case of low effort mid journey prompts.

dleeftink• 3 years ago

Sampling is an art form if properly attributed (and possibly even without; whole genres are built on the premise), especially if it elevates the original work.

That's not to say copyrighting ML derived creative works is the way forward, but that creativity has bearing wherever a 'medium' can be manipulated.

lern_too_spel• 3 years ago

Copyright is, like all regulation, freedom restriction for the benefit of society. Producing movies and books takes a lot of investment, and people would not do it to the extent they do without copyright. If we think there is more than enough creative content, we should reduce copyright protections, and if we think there is not enough, we should increase it. Generative AI will move the needle very far in the direction of overabundance and should result in correspondingly reduced copyright protections.

LegitShady9• 3 years ago

The thing you're authoring is just your prompt. Apply for a copyright for it. The image or text generated in reply is generated by a computer with no more input from you than someone commissioning work using very precise words, and lacks human authorship.

idle_zealot5• 3 years ago

This falls apart when you start getting into things like control net and posing, or iterative erasing, reprompting, and in/outfilling. It starts feeling more like some weird combination of 3d modeling, photoshop, and a really advanced autofill.

singpolyma32• 3 years ago

That's the same as saying if I open paint and draw with the mouse my mouse movements should be copyrightable but not the resulting image...

andrewprock• 3 years ago

Your prompt (the input) should be copyrightable. The output should not.

asynchronous2• 3 years ago

Okay but does that include the seed? The sum of the input model datasets? I think a better scenario is no copyright for any part of this process. Give humanity what they’re going to take anyway- open access to this tech.

optymizer4• 3 years ago

The training model for Stable Diffusion has a lot of copyrighted images mixed together into an output which makes the plagiarism non-obvious, but let's reduce the set by 1 image. Shouldn't affect the output too much, right? Maybe some prompt will have a slightly different image.

Now let's reduce it by another image. Again, less options for what to display, fewer images to take pixels from, but still a lot of options, output may sound copyrightable.

Now lets do that N-1 times. What output will we get when the model was trained on a single image, let's say an image that is labeled 'dog'. If your prompt is "an image of a dog" you will get that image, the only image in the training set. When going from latent space to image space, taking pixels from that image in the output, despite it being done in convoluted ways, is that not an obvious copyright infringement? I think it is. There's a cloud of mumbo jumbo about latent space, but after the dust settles and it needs to generate pixels in the output image, Stable Diffusion has a step that is essentially copying pixels from the source image into the output. When there's only 1 image, it will reproduce large portions of that image, necessarily infringing on copyright.

So then adding back images one by one into the training set, each one being used as source for the pixels being copied, what makes that model OK? Just because the output is 50% image A and 50% image B, or 0.1% image A and 0.1% image B and 99.8% image C, doesn't suddenly make it OK.

Once there are millions of images, you end up with just tiny blobs of pixels being copied from many different images. That's still infringes on the copyright of all those images, because it's essentially a map-reduce process that maps pixels from copyrighted images and reduces them into a single image.

stale20027• 3 years ago

is that not an obvious copyright infringement?

No, it is absolutely not.

Let's do the same hypothetical that you brought up and using other people's art, but instead are model just takes 1 single pixel from 1 million images.

Taking 1 single pixel from a million images, or the first letter from every book, and putting it into a new work is transformative fair use.

Transformative fair use is legal.

Just because the output is 50% image A and 50% image B, or 0.1% image A and 0.1% image B and 99.8% image C, doesn't suddenly make it OK.

It quite literally does! Using .1% percent of an image is legal.

The amount of work that you take from someone else is one of the 4 factors of fair use.

Yes, the specific example you gave falls under what the courts literally use right now as one of the factors!

flangola72• 3 years ago

You are describing transformative use, which is permitted. Otherwise I could create a picture with every possible RGB pixel and then claim all other artists are infringing on 0.1% of my work.

gnopgnip2• 3 years ago

How does this square with something like Cariou v Prince? http://www.artistrights.info/cariou-v-prince

idle_zealot5• 3 years ago

This viewpoint is about as coherent as "every image file is copyright infringing because every pixel in it exists somewhere in some other image somewhere".

Derivative works, when substantially changed, are not infringing. If I take an image of the Mona Lisa and rearrange all its pixels so it looks like a picture of a cat, that's not infringement.

If I sample lines and curves and colors and styles from several images and make something new, that's not infringement.

The actual problem with image models is that they can sometimes be coaxed into outputting images that are quite similar to an image they were trained on. That constitutes infringement.

spookie• 3 years ago

Thank you, it basically boils down to this.

I'm baffled at how someone in their right mind still argues as if using any other tool is free of copyright infringement of some kind.

It also boggles my mind how, in our line of work (which is often artistic in its own right), a lot of people make preconceptions on how art is made. Often reducing it to nothing but transformative generation. Such takes are deeply narcissistic, and downright wrong. At this point I'm led to believe they're AI generated.

lost_tourist3• 3 years ago

I personally feel the mere fact that it was fair use of mostly copyrighted images it's fairly self evident that anything produced from it should not be copyrightable, UNLESS the origin of the art used to train the model is 100% owned by the "artist". This could either via licensing for that purpose or they own the copyright to, that right not extendable to corporations, as a corporation can't be an artist. It doesn't matter how complex the prompt or series of prompts are, the key here is that the "artist" either owns the training material or licensed it through the proper chain of licensors.

internet101010• 3 years ago

It is impossible to 1:1 replicate the input as an output because the images are not stored. It isn't a database. It's basically aggregating summaries/abstractions/generalizations of a bunch of tags.

In other words, it is transformative by default.

nearbuy2• 3 years ago

Once there are millions of images, you end up with just tiny blobs of pixels being copied from many different images.

This is not how these neural nets work. They don't copy pixels from anywhere. They learn features.

The features represented internally are generally not easy to interpret to humans, but for sake of illustration, there could be an artificial neuron that fires when a subject should have blue eyes. Having a lot of blue eyes in the training data would help this neuron learn better when to fire (based on the values of other neurons, which may in turn represent other features). For example, it may learn to place more importance on an input that represents pale skin or Nordic origin.

It can learn concepts like cars have wheels, and wheels are round, etc. And then when you ask it to draw a car, it composes one from the concepts it learned. Some parts of the network will deal with the fine details that more directly influence pixels, but these aren't copying pixels from any image either. They're weighing a bunch of factors (eg is this pixel part of the iris and did the network decide to make a person with blue eyes?) and choosing pixel colors based on those factors.

darkclouds• 3 years ago

I would say, treat the AI like a human viewing said data/material, but unlike the majority of humans, most dont have Kim Peek levels of observation and recall, so should there be some sort of expiration of data built into AI's and if so, should it be a blanket cut off date for all data an AI has been exposed to, or allow for some specialisation like a human might have in order to fulfil their occupation?

I'm also aware that search engines have access to data, most humans do not, which gives the search engines an advantage, think accessing ft.com for example, so should AI's have access to data in the context of a search engine or as a human?

Its tough, I want to give AI's full access to see what the tech is truly capable of, but I'm aware this will lead to more global monopolies over and above the existing search engine monopolies allowed to dominate in a country or territory, which will harm smaller AI entities.

idle_zealot5• 3 years ago

It's funny to see this copyright overreach as somehow opposed to monopolies. Should using data to train AI models be made illegal then the only entities capable of affording it would be global monopolies (and maybe pirates? Though the compute necessary may be prohibitive). There would be no way for smaller AI entities to compete.

gremlinsinc2• 3 years ago

If a human author is allowed to read and cite other works in their new composition. For example a Stephen King book referencing another author or famous book like Lord of the rings, then ai should be allowed to do the same as provide similar outputs that Stephen King would come to organically. if it's just using themes, show me any book that's not got derivative parts in it at all.

rickmode2• 3 years ago

I believe we first need to answer the question of whether the copyright of the AI model’s source text or images affects the output.

My opinion — and note I’m a software engineer, not a lawyer — is that an AI, being a statistical model and not generally intelligent, should not be allowed to disregard the copyright of its source material. This would, I think, require the AI’s creator to secure a license for all of its sources that allows this sort of transformation and presentation. And further, a user of the AI would themselves require a license to use the output.

The alternative seems to be “anything goes”.

idle_zealot5• 3 years ago

Is intelligence really a factor here?

Say I use the same training set as one of these LLMs, copyright protected text and all, and use it to derive a compression algorithm that uses very little space to store tokens and token sequences that are common in that huge collection of text. The resulting compression scheme includes some sort of statistical artifact derived from that copyrighted text. Is that allowed? And if so why is an LLM different?

quickthrower22• 3 years ago

LLMs are generative though not just compressive

cj2• 3 years ago

Very good question indeed.

A lot of these questions are somewhat ethical/moral in nature. E.g. is it okay to take someone else's creative work, process it through some algorithm, to create a service like ChatGPT? Or a compression algorithm? I don't know.

It's awesome to see the Copyright office request input from both sides of the argument.

stale20027• 3 years ago

is that an AI, being a statistical model and not generally intelligent, should not be allowed to disregard the copyright of its source material

None of what you are saying has anything to do with copyright.

The tool Photoshop isn't generally intelligent either. And yet, yes it can be used to create art using other people's stuff.

And it could be done legally if the results are transformative.

jtr1• 3 years ago

Photoshop doesn’t install with a massive directory of other people’s copyrighted works to draw snippets from.

gnopgnip2• 3 years ago

Is there any precedent where copyright was focused on the input rather than the final published work?

jj9992• 3 years ago

Compilers

kevinmchugh2• 3 years ago

Remixes, generally?

Natsu7• 3 years ago

My problem with this is that artists learn by studying other artists, cutting that off because it's AI rather than focusing on whether the resulting work is derivative, seems more of a problem to me. It seems to me that an AI can be used for either original work or derivatives, proving that you can get derivatives out of it has always struck me as no different than commissioning a copy of someone's work from a human artist and being shocked that you got what you asked for.

skydhash6• 3 years ago

You can ask someone to produce a pin-up version of Minnie Mouse, but good luck using it in any commercial activities.

Most LLMs are just profiteering from people’s labor without their consent. And there’s nothing new being produced. It’s always a statistical output of previous works.

freejazz16• 3 years ago

Can an AI express to you how van gogh affected it as an artist? I'm not sure that AI is "learning" the way we say humans are "learning," when humans learn and study art. Obviously there is no debate that you can input van gogh into a model and produce something van gogh-like as a result. But I've not seen anything that indicates that the AI is learning anything about van gogh at all. Perhaps it comes down to whether you think learning van gogh is just creating a mapping of all of his brush strokes ever, and only exactly what they look like. It's obvious the AI knows nothing more than that. If you think that's what humans do when they learn art, I'd be sad for you!

As to your hypothetical, we don't give copyrights to people who make rote copies of things, human or otherwise. Is the implication of the shock, that there is sufficient difference with the work as to render it a derivative and not a copy? Okay, how so? And of what consequence? Making derivatives of a copyright without license is infringement.

judge20202• 3 years ago

This would, I think, require the AI’s creator to secure a license for all of its sources that allows this sort of transformation and presentation

That is a fairly illogical leap. From your text alone, “should not be allowed to disregard the copyright of its source material” would be: “the AI’s maintainer should have a fairly reliable (but not infallible) system to output how likely it generated something that is a direct derivative work of something in its dataset”. As a human you don’t need to attribute/license every piece of art you’ve seen of clouds if you draw a cloud. So if an AI draws a cloud that is actually derivative of the millions of clouds it has seen, then it doesn’t need any permission from the millions of creators to draw one either.

Nevermark3• 3 years ago

I don’t think it makes sense for both model builders and the model’s users to separately obtain licenses for the same works used in the training set.

A model trained on several copyrighted data sources cannot somehow be used in a way depending on a subset of those sources.

So all parameters of usage and compensation should be settled by contract between the model builder and copyrighted data supplier, before the copyrighted material is used.

Or to put it simply: using copyrighted material to create a model would NOT be considered fair use.

That’s it. That’s the standard. No complicated new laws required.

Model builders obtain permission to use copyrighted material from copyright holders based on any terms both agree to.

Terms might involve model usage limits, term limits, one time compensation, per use compensation, data source credits, or anything else either party wants.

The likely result will be some standard sets of terms becoming popular and well known. But nobody has to agree to anything they don’t want to.

Retric7• 3 years ago

Yes, someone using a model can’t know if the generated text/image/sound is a nearly identical copy of the original material they don’t recognize. If use of the output of these systems comes at significant legal risk then then such systems become nearly useless.

kuchenbecker• 3 years ago

I slightly disagree, in that I think the person using the tool should bear the burden of copyright. I.e. if the model outputs something under copywrite it merely can't be republished. In this same way, i can use Photoshop on proprietary data but I can't necessarily sell the results.

renonce2• 3 years ago

Problem is, how can you determine if the model contains copyrighted material? The laws governs copyright through ownership, so in order to claim copyright infringement you have to be able pinpoint a specific person and prove that their work is somehow embedded in the gradients, which is not practically possible at the point. It's just like how you can't practically enforce copyright on encrypted data unless you ban encryption altogether.

kelnos• 3 years ago

I don’t think it makes sense for both model builders and the model’s users to separately obtain licenses for the same works used in the training set.

I'm torn on who should pay, and where and when. In the world of patents, there's often an option/split. Say a chip manufacturer wants to build H265 decoding into their hardware. The chip manufacturer could buy the license. Or the purchaser (who probably is building some sort of board or device around the chip) could pay for the license. Or they could disable that functionality in the end product, and the consumer could pay for a license (or not, if they don't care about that feature).

The most common is usually the middle option: the end-device manufacturer (or brand that eventually sells the product) will pay for the license.

But I'm not sure if this works all that well for an AI model. With hardware, the license is usually paid per unit. It's easy to see that one chip = one license. If the model builder buys a license, that model could be used one time or 100 million times. Tracking use like that probably isn't all that practical, but I think it's safe to say that a 100-million-use model should probably pay more for a license than a single-use model.

So maybe the model builder should be responsible for attaching a comprehensive "copyright history" to the model, and users should have to pay for a license based on their use? Again, not sure how to track that. But I guess general software licensing has similar problems when you can "hide" usage.

gwd4• 3 years ago

Or to put it simply: using copyrighted material to create a model would NOT be considered fair use.

The more I think about it, the more something along these lines seems like it might be the right way to think about it.

When you play a DVD, for example, you copy the bits off the DVD, into the memory of your DVD player, and onto your screen; this is all explicitly considered "fair use" copying. But if you then copied those fair-use bits off the screen onto a thousand other screens, that violates copyright.

When you, as the human watch the DVD, bits of it get copied into your brain; but you don't then copy the bits of your brain to millions of other people -- they each have to make their own copy.

We could make the law for LLMs follow a similar logic: That having an LLM watch a video or read a text is similar to having a DVD player read a DVD or a web browser copy information from a website. It's good for that limited use case, but the resulting copy cannot be copied again without a license.

This would allow (say) researchers, or even individuals, to do their own training and so on without a license; but when anyone wanted to create something that they wanted to scale up, they'd have to get licenses for everything.

That would fundamentally keep things balanced as they are now with creators and other creators. The big problem isn't that a handful of other creators may be copying their style; that growth in competition is limiting because of the expense of duplication. It's that millions of electronic engines can copy their style.

meowkit• 3 years ago

My opinion as a SWE who is dating a lawyer (joke, not a serious qualification but it does provide some insight):

Generative models traverse and interpolate high dimensional state spaces. These state spaces are created from input data.

I would argue people do the exact same thing - the first main difference is we can use novel inputs (e.g. we can use images or words to develop our music/temporal state spaces and vice versa). People also are recursive and self referential in a way that doesn't collapse.

Until we solve the interpretability problem (e.g. can you decode the feature space of a neural network into something we can comprehend) there is no good solution. Either traditional copyright wins and we get even more draconian policies (think Disney and their desire to never put anything in the public domain), or we have a free for all (which I don't think is bad for creative works, but certainly for more practical things like stock photos or nonfiction).

cj2• 3 years ago

I can appreciate how this line of thinking might be attractive.

But IMO the human<>machine comparison doesn't lend itself much credence. We shouldn't assume that just because a human is allowed to do something, a machine is automatically allowed to do the same thing, too. I think some care should be taken when considering if we allow machines to have the same privileges as humans.

rcme2• 3 years ago

Whether or not “humans do it” isn’t relevant. You can walk around with a copyrighted song in your head. That is not copyright infringement. But if you take that song, create a digital copy, and distribute it for money, then you are violating someone’s copyright. Additionally, our legal system requires a balance of probabilities. It’s hard to prove that someone was influenced by another work unless the similarities are plainly obvious. The same does not apply to ML models where the training data and algorithm are knowable facts.

ethbr1• 3 years ago

Until we solve the interpretability problem (e.g. can you decode the feature space of a neural network into something we can comprehend) there is no good solution.

This is the rub. Without reverse attribution... open source anonymous models become a free-for-all loophole.

Since that doesn't currently exist, I think the best we can do is to say that any commercial entity using a model bears the responsibility of proving the model they use is untainted by copyrighted material (to which they haven't secured rights).

Open source model X is... whatever it is.

But I'll be damned if OpenAI / Meta / Microsoft / IBM should be able to build a commercial product on top of laundered copyrighted material while ignoring provenance.

I mean, we have models for this: software code and art. Both aren't clearly attributable. In the case of software code, we've developed case law around clean room design and similarity. In the case of art, we value verifiable chain of custody.

Hopefully, something similar would tilt commercial funding of AI in the direction of responsible use.

distract8901• 3 years ago

The analogy doesn't hold when you consider the sheer scale of the problem.

I can outright buy a machine for a few thousand dollars that can crank out a faithful rewrite of every Stephen King novel without the shitty endings and nonsense plot points. It can do it in a few days, maybe a couple of weeks at most.

To do that with human labor would take years and cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars.

Instead of paying an artist a couple hundred for a commissioned drawing, I can just scrape up their entire portfolio and generate any image I want with their style. I can generate hundreds or thousands of images. I can take their distinct style and use it exclusively as the branding for my company.

What a ML model does is very fundamental not what happens when a human draws inspiration from prior art. A human would require an extremely significant amount of time and resources to perfectly imitate every artist they have ever seen. It takes a human significant time and resources to produce faithful variations on prior art.

A ML model is measured in words or images per second.

mjan226403• 3 years ago

The value of copyright is going to vanish. There is enough public domain material to train models on and to avoid the problem altogether.

There used to be professions like tinkerers, bards, clowns. The tinkerers disappeared when the society became modern. The clowns on the other hand managed to lobby for laws that put people into jail for heinous crimes like copying pictures, and survived longer. They are going to bite the dust now.

omnicognate• 3 years ago

... a SWE who is dating a lawyer
I would argue people do the exact same thing

Perhaps a ménage à trois with a neuroscientist would change your view on this.

rickmode2• 3 years ago

Generic reply to siblings here… I get the intelligence argument.

My _main_ point is that there’s a non-trivial question to answer here.

I’m not qualified to answer (though I’ve offered up my non-expert opinion). It certainly seems to quickly veer in to philosophy!

mensetmanusman• 3 years ago

Because the cat is out of the bag so to speak, any attempt to force ai companies to generate their own content to train on means we are signing up for a future where only multi billion dollar companies are in control.

PaulDavisThe1st• 3 years ago

If they were truly forced to do this, even they would find it difficult.

paulusthe• 3 years ago

I agree completely. AI model trainers should have to pay the people who provide their training materials, and there should be a default assumption of opting out until someone or their company explicitly opts in.

Unfortunately the Peter thiels and all those bizarrely out of touch silicon valley assholes have already effectively scraped the Internet because ethics don't matter if you're special like them, so to a degree regulations are way behind the ball.

That said it's still worth doing, and I'd love to see it done retroactively as well. It's not as if "I forgot that I had a public Myspace 25 years ago" is an implicit user opt-in for some startup to save your data - however anonymized they claim it is (lol!) - and train its AI on it.

paxys3• 3 years ago

is that an AI, being a statistical model and not generally intelligent, should not be allowed to disregard the copyright of its source material

But then you are just shifting the problem forward by an inch. What happens when tomorrow someone declares that their model is generally intelligent and is therefore allowed to disregard copyright when training just like a person can?

jasonzemos• 3 years ago

This point is of the utmost importance from a public policymaking perspective. Laws such as these are easy to craft now and difficult to change later. I feel like we are previewing an unfolding disaster here.

The future will clearly yield a class of "beings" striving for some degree of indistinguishability from or coexistence with humans. Proposals that discriminate --literally discriminate -- without respect for the principles of universality and equal treatment under law are creating and condemning a marginalized group before it even reaches maturity. This is an old and tired theme repeated through history. Let's foresee this and not get it wrong.

freejazz16• 3 years ago

Is it your experience that people's facial declarations cary the day in legal disputes? It's not mine. Rather, it seems like the whole thing is designed to provide scrutiny against bare facial declarations that something is true or false.

I see this on HN all the time "someone just has to claim" "someone just has to say". Yeah... that's not how it works. People can say whatever they want, that doesn't mean it satisfied their burden of proof. Self serving testimony is the lowest form of evidence imaginable.

8note• 3 years ago

Why is being a statistical model relevant?

The simplest statistical model is an average. Why would the average pixel rgba of a bunch of images invoke the copyright of those images?

chii14• 3 years ago

The crux of the AI copyright argument sits in economics. Those currently producing content want future content generated from AI to benefit them financially, as long as a thin sliver of their own content was used in the training.

This is like asking all the student to pay their teachers a (small) percentage of their future economic output.

zmmmmm• 3 years ago

The alternative seems to be “anything goes”.

Seems like a huge false dichotomy. You really can't imagine anything in between total shutdown of AI training on public data sources and no rules at all?

I think we should try a bit harder for a middle ground.

fluidcruft6• 3 years ago

I personally have a really hard time finding any meaningful difference or distinction between "AI" and "lossy compression". Copyright and "lossy compression" are pretty easy to reason about. Model "building" is "compression". Model "use" is "decompression". Everything about these AI models seems to be about the "lossy" part, but "lossy" is just an adjective to the main show.

It's very difficult to not conclude that copyright of a trained model should be treated identically to the copyright of a zip file.

CamperBob22• 3 years ago

When you perform lossy compression, you feed it one file at a time, not every file in existence.

tomrod4• 3 years ago

Some compression, yes, but the analogy oversimplifies. AI rerepresents input information in a transformative way (embedding, say) then creates new, derived and combined output from a new input (e.g prompt).

It's not just lossy compression. It's potentially novel.

chii14• 3 years ago

Information is not copyrighted, just the expression of said information.

So if you took a recipe book, extracted the recipe information, and listed out the recipe in a different format (such as a table), it's a new work. It does not violate the copyright of the recipe book you extracted the info from.

gwd4• 3 years ago

I personally have a really hard time finding any meaningful difference or distinction between "AI" and "lossy compression".

If you feed a photo of your dog into a JPEG compressor and the result looked like a cat in the same style, I think you'd be pretty annoyed.

NoMoreNicksLeft• 3 years ago

Why would any non-lunatic want to live in a world where someone can't import an image into software?

If only some software is disallowed, then why permit Excel but prohibit Stable Diffusion?

Can someone even look at a SD-generated image, and claim with certainty that their own art was used to train it? Any more than claiming that another artist was inspired by it, looking at their output?

I'm fine with anything goes. The alternative seems to be copyright maximalist clownworld.

jillesvangurp• 3 years ago

It shows you are not a lawyer. You misunderstand how copyright works. Creating copies or derivative works and distributing those is all that matters under copyright. This is not "disregarding" copyright (which is not an actual thing) but something that is either fair use or may require some kind of permission from the creators of the original by those distributing some kind of derived work or copy. That's why it's called copyright.

Copyright merely restricts the distribution of original works or their derivatives. In case of an infringement, copyright holders can insist you stop distribution and/or compensate them for that.

If I sell you a paint brush, I'm not liable for you putting a red nose on the mona lisa and trying to sell it off as an original work. Doing that on the original would be an act of vandalism (because you don't own it) and doing that on a replica that you got from somewhere infringes on the rights of those that created the replica. Which is a derived work or copy in itself of course and the distribution of that is regulated by copyright. Distribution of such a replica is of course fine because Da Vinci has been dead for a very long time and his work would no longer be protected under copyright. Distributing your red nosed mona lisa would therefore be fine too. Either way, the paint brush seller is no party in this case this is between you, Da Vinci, his descendants, and the replica creators.

Now your assertions as to what AIs are of aren't, are simply not relevant. You assert it's a statistics algorithms thingy. That sounds like a tool to me. Yet another paint brush. Using a paint brush is not infringing on anyone's rights. For that you have to distribute the results of your work. The nature of the tool does not matter. How you use the tool does not matter either. You merely create (potentially) derivative works with the tool and what you do with those matters. Especially when you distribute them to others. One of those derivative works is of course the AI model itself. Creating one is fine. Copyright gets potentially infringed when you distribute one.

Now we get to the core of the matter. Can you with a straight face say the AI model resembles the original and is a derivative work. It doesn't actually look like or resemble the original in any shape or form. Even proving the AI model is derived from the original is tricky. Copyright is not about protecting vague ideas or notions but the concrete shape or form of things. And it's only an infringement if you distribute a derived work or a copy of a thing to others. So, merely creating an AI model is not distributing anything to anyone. You are merely using tools to create something for yourself. An AI model in this case.

Distributing a verbatim copy of a book is an infringement. Citing the book in your own work is fair use (up to a point). Paraphrasing elements from the book, acknowledging it exists, taking inspiration of it, or reading it aren't copyright infringements.

The legal problem with AI models is that their concrete shape or form doesn't resemble the original inputs in any shape or form. Besides, companies like OpenAI don't actually distribute their AI models. They are huge; it's not very practical. They merely exploit those models to generate outputs to inputs from their users and customers. Are those outputs derivative works? Maybe, but that's where it gets tricky. They clearly aren't in the classical sense. Not even close. But if you somehow could conclude that they are, who is distributing that derivative work? Secondly, it the AI model is a tool, who actually creates those outputs and are those outputs protected under copyright? Who actually holds those rights? And how would you tell apart such an output from a human created one?

It's questions like this that make all this extremely murky from a legal point of view. IMHO without dramatic changes to copyright law or the way it has been commonly interpreted legally, it's just very poorly suited to do anything about stopping AI companies from doing what they are doing. You'd have to bend the conventional interpretation quite a bit for that. No doubt, there will be court cases where people will try to do that. But it will take many years before the dust settles on that. And I wouldn't get my hopes up on some unexpected/dramatic outcome.

freejazz16• 3 years ago

This is generally, but I'm surprised you aren't aware that distribution isn't the only right protected by copyright - creating derivative works is protected, display rights are protected.

harshreality• 3 years ago

This is more of a problem for images, where similar output to inputs is likely, than for LLMs, where no matter what you prompt it with I doubt you can get it to regurgitate any significant parts of Harry Potter well enough to be a classical copyright violation of any of the novels. Maybe you could generate a copyright violation of character traits.

The output space of images (MB for larger images) tends to be larger than books (a few hundred KB of text for a long novel), but the perceptual output space of books is much larger.

Any determination that licensing is required for AI generation, or use of AI-generated works, is unacceptable until Congress or courts put some reasonable objective tests in place to determine what is and isn't a copyright violation for various types of works of various lengths. Not the ambiguous 4-factor test that is basically whatever the judge feels like. It will be a complete mess otherwise. They can't just define a new AI policy for copyright with a few types of works in mind; it has to work for all works.

You could look at this mathematically from a complexity perspective and try to define a similarity function that's true when a second work is close enough to a first work to be a derived work (assuming the first one had been seen by the creator of the second). Unfortunately that won't work because nobody can define such a function to everyone's satisfaction, and the courts wouldn't accept any informal suggestion of a definition when it didn't come from Congress. Specifically, you'd get into trouble with consistency in the function determining derived works depending on length of the work: short works, like a haiku, are much more sensitive to copyright violation in some ways... a mere 17 syllables is a complete reproduction and therefore a copyright violation, yet a single word isn't; for a novel, reproducing 1/17 of the content is almost certainly a copyright violation, but reproducing 17 syllables probably isn't.

Different stakeholders and creative re-mixers would want different things from the function. It's untenable.

mjan226403• 3 years ago

The human brain is no different. It generates content from the things it learned.

CatWChainsaw2• 3 years ago

Repost #4 I believe

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37305580

"I'll keep saying it every time this comes up. I LOVE being told by techbros that a human painstaking studying one thing at a time, and not memorizing verbatin but rather taking away the core concept, is exactly the same type of "learning" that a model does when it takes in millions of things at once and can spit out copyrighted code verbatim."

JamesBarney5• 3 years ago

My opinion is we should treat AI like photoshop/word/windows. If you use windows to copy a file and distribute it, Microsoft isn't liable you are. If you use word to type up a book and sell it, you're responsible.

Same with a statistical model, if you general a copyrighted work and distribute it you are responsible. But the tool (GPT-4) maker isn't responsible just like Adobe isn't responsible for copyright infringement.

The copyrighted text/image isn't generated until you ask it to. Your prompt is what reproduces the material.

lewhoo3• 3 years ago

I think you are right. People argue if LLM's store or maybe generalize. I propose an experiment for anyone interested. Try and do this prompt multiple times and change the appropriate verse numbers:

Provide quote from King James' Bible Genesis :25-31

Provide quote from King James' Bible Genesis :1-25

or whatever you fancy.

I didn't go through the whole Bible, but I got pretty much a verbatim chapter. I argue that you can't do this with copyrighted books only because of guardrails and not chatgpt's lack of capability so the information is there, and it's verbatim. Plus other books don't have such nifty indexing.

rmbyrro• 3 years ago

AI is taking work away from lawyers, and instantly creating more work for lawyers.

Ain't that interesting to reflect upon?

I speculate there is a hidden force in the universe, something physicists are yet to identify, which mandates: "they shall always have something to do".

gaganyaan7• 3 years ago

I hope your opinion isn't shared by lawmakers. Copyright is a relic of the past, and it needs to be put out of its misery. Trying to (mis)apply copyright here would just lobotomize the US. Existing companies would just technically operate out of a saner jurisdiction, and we'd be handing other countries a golden opportunity to leapfrog the US.

scotty79• 3 years ago

"anything goes" is the best and most natural solution. Just don't let people copyright the output if they don't have full copyright on all of the inputs. This should finally get rid of the cancer that is copyright in a generation or two.

vouaobrasil7• 3 years ago

We as a society have a relatively healthy setup for people to create art and content. Sure there are problems, but on the whole it mostly works. What AI will do is destroy that by removing the profitability of creating that content.

Although generative AI operates on a similar principle to a human being exposed to a large number of artworks, it does so at a speed blindingly faster, enabling it to outcompete humans at many tasks. The number of such tasks will only increase in the future.

Thus, small-time content creators who make an independent living from content creation will be squeezed out and left in the dark. In some years, it will be very hard to make money from content creation at all.

The access to information and entertainment will also become more anonymous, will most people consuming things through AI generation. Of course, that will be convenient at first, but we will end up with a world where a significantly SMALLER fraction of people controlling AI supply us with everything. (Including manipulative advertising to consume more of their product.)

For every benefit that AI gives us, there are 10 losses.

I used to dislike draconian copyright laws, but now I like them. And I sincerely hope they are used against AI to make AI unprofitable. I believe further that AI will be society-disrupting in a variety of other ways and thus, as a society, we should destroy it. But I am pessimistic.

marcinzm4• 3 years ago

And I sincerely hope they are used against AI to make AI unprofitable.

No, they'll make AI unprofitable for small time creators but not massive corporations. The latter either already have rights to vast quantitates of training data or will hire a thousands in Africa to create training data that is just legally different enough to count.

vouaobrasil7• 3 years ago

That is why we should halt AI completely and do a more thorough analysis of its societal-level implications before blindingly putting it out there.

Because when new technology is introduced, it makes it almost impossible to stop using it due to the way our current society is setup (as a sensitive machine that is very quick to reward any gains in efficieny and economic output as opposed to sustainability).

flangola72• 3 years ago

Even if we keep draconian copyright laws they need to be changed in some ways. Otherwise Disney will dominate by creating their own AIs and we still end up with a small faction controlling what we consume - and we will be paying them for the honor of it on top.

vouaobrasil7• 3 years ago

I agree. I was being somewhat facetious there. I don't really enjoy copyright laws the way they are, but I do believe that AI is the FAR greater evil.

chottocharaii• 3 years ago

What you’re describing requires an ability to copyright style on top of expression. That would be an unacceptable constraint on freedom of speech and artistic freedom in my view

The ability of an industry to turn a profit should not constrain the ability of the general public to communicate ideas. Expression is the only thing that should be copyrighted against

hakfoo2• 3 years ago

I don't want to see AI copyright, but that's more an extension of not wanting to see any copyright.

A lot of it comes down to creativity as a process, or as a product.

It feels like many people tend to view creativity-- especially capital-A Art-- as a process-- it should be arduous and require skill and be an exclusive club. I've seen people be very hostile to pre-AI digital technology because it lowers the bar-- with software, you have a canvas that you can keep erasing until you're happy, a straight-edge that's perfect every time, etc.

I tend to think the important part is the end product: was someone able to express their vision to the highest possible level of fidelity? In that regard, every new technology gets us closer-- the person who couldn't draw a circle can take a photo and doctor it in the GIMP until he's happy. The next frontier for this is to say "I can use AI to generate 200 permutations, and then take the ones I like best and further hack on them to get what I want."

This also makes me hostile to copyright, since anyone trying to claim work as their own, establish restrictive conditions, or "stop plagiarism" is denying others tools and resources that could be used to deliver their vision. Maybe the most effective way to realize someone's vision is to start with an existing piece of work and modify to fit. (programmers seem to understand this more innately than, say, photographers)

vouaobrasil7• 3 years ago

I tend to think the important part is the end product: was someone able to express their vision to the highest possible level of fidelity? In that regard, every new technology gets us closer-- the person who couldn't draw a circle can take a photo and doctor it in the GIMP until he's happy. The next frontier for this is to say "I can use AI to generate 200 permutations, and then take the ones I like best and further hack on them to get what I want."

I don't think effort should be arbitrarily constrained to make the bar high, but I do not agree with you that the end product is important.

What is important is that the product comes from people because art helps society be healthier by existing as a means of communication from people to other people. Once AI begins to take over part of the process, it becomes like athletes who dope...it removes the essence of their achievement.

Art is more than just a single, isolated product for consumption. It exists to inspire, to change minds based on its ORIGINS, not just on its end results.

The problem with your argument is that you are ignoring the sociological effects of artistic creation, and focusing on the act of maximizing along a SINGLE variable: aesthetic value. That does art a disservice, and it means that the argument for or against AI must also be more subtle.

Besides, isn't the strategy of releasing AI just to see what happens a bit haphazard?

porknChps• 3 years ago

Yeah changes to copyright are the solution. Not unenforceable rules around AI.

Local LLMs are going to make enforcement impossible.

Unless corporations and government collude to lockdown the frame buffer, a user at home can build a corpus from their own gameplay footage and train an AI to make new environments for those entities (working on such a setup now, modeling AI vectors with an open source engine’s geometry primitives and shader language).

The output space for visual content is much smaller than language which has to understand context.

Visual outputs we find acceptable for forming spatial understanding are much more limited. There’s only so much nuance to geometry and color gradient to be layered on before a virtual space is an unintuitive psychedelic miasma.

People have favorites and will use them to extend them.

The Constitution offers an opening for copyright change. It protects works “for a limited time”. Anything encumbered by copyright for an average person entire life span was effectively copyrighted forever.

ZoomerCretin3• 3 years ago

Why would copyrightability of AI generated work affect its profitability? Owning a copyright gives you the exclusive right to copy and sell a work. If no one owns the copyright for a work, no one has the _exclusive_ right to copy and sell that work.

vouaobrasil7• 3 years ago

Well, then an AI generated hollywood movie could just be copied and distributed for free.

clarkmoody• 3 years ago

Small time creators don't make money anyway. Starving artists and all that.

carom• 3 years ago

There are three copyright issues here; datasets, model weights, and model outputs.

Dataset copyright is pretty well defined and things can often be used under fair use. Fair use decisions are done with a four prong test and really decided by the courts on a case-by-case basis.

Model weights cannot currently be copyrighted. They are the output of a mechanical process over the dataset. However, software faced a similar situation where the source code could be copyrighted but the compiled binary was not. US copyright law was updated to address this. We may see something similar for model weights.

Model outputs are less clear, but these are likely copyrightable by the user of the model. It is not possible for a non-human to hold copyright, so the model cannot. It is very unlikely that the company producing the model could assert copyright over the outputs. A good analogy here is someone using photo manipulation software.

Super interesting area. I think we will eventually see an update to the copyright code to make weights copyrightable. Also it will be interesting to see how court challenges (code generation, image generation) affect datasets in the future.

usr8new2• 3 years ago

Biggest issue is the first one. Dataset copyrights are where most of the fight b/w regulators, AI companies & artists is happening.

Should you be able to train your model on an image or text someone uploaded on the internet without buying the copyright? If no, then most of current LLMs & stable diffusion models will have to go & I don't see big tech allowing it.

jj9992• 3 years ago

Who do you think should hold the copyright on the model weights, the copyright holders of the individual works comprising the dataset or the ones who assembled the dataset?

XorNot• 3 years ago

Depends who you think holds the copyright on the SHA256 hash of an image.

Model weights are even less specific then that number, since they don't represent any specific source input at all.

shagie• 3 years ago

I don't think that model weights are copyrightable.

They're a mathematical transformation of the source material.

As a trivial example, applying gray = .299 r + .587 g + .114 b to a pixel is also a mathematical transformation but it doesn't create a new copyright.

And thus, the model is a mathematical transformation and a derivative work of its source material.

However I am also of the opinion that the resulting model is sufficiently transformative and fills a different purpose than the source material and so the model is not infringing.

From the Perfect 10 case against Google and Amazon:

…We conclude that the significantly transformative nature of Google's search engine, particularly in light of its public benefit, outweighs Google's superseding and commercial uses of the thumbnails in this case. … We are also mindful of the Supreme Court's direction that "the more transformative the new work, the less will be the significance of other factors, like commercialism, that may weigh against a finding of fair use."

That was dealing with thumbnails being used in search and it was found that thumbnails being used for search was sufficiently transformative and applied to a different purpose that Google's use didn't infringe.

I believe that a model is even more transformative given that bar.

That doesn't mean that the output of the model isn't infringing, but that's a human with agency creating and publishing that output which is a different artifact to be considered than the model weights.

Tazerenix• 3 years ago

Realistically an AI model is basically just a very complicated piece of software. The model weights are akin to the software code, the model outputs are akin to the outputs a user of the software creates, and the datasets are akin to the intellectual property put into the software by the developer to create the code.

In the same way that a developer could not simply steal someone elses intellectual property in order to develop a feature of a piece of software, one cannot simply steal the intellectual property to adjust the model weights. The main difference is its generally quite easy to see in practice if a model has utilized some intellectual property (because for example you can ask ChatGPT to recite the first 100 words of Harry Potter) compared to another piece of software where you'd need access to the source code or developers thoughts (which could only be achieved through litigation, in most circumstances).

I think a great many people come up with convoluted answers to this question because they are uncomfortable with the reality that these very large organizations have essentially stolen hoards of intellectual property, and now that the horse has bolted people want to justify not closing the barn door. It seems to me very simple: to train an AI model on data, you must respect its copyright. The model weights should be copywriteable by the developers of the model (even if the law currently does not allow this), and the outputs of the model should be copywriteable by the person who interacted with the model (software) to produce the outputs.

The analogy with Photoshop is extremely simple: If some other software invented Gaussian blurring and copywrited it, then Adobe would have to license that technology from them to include it as a feature in Photoshop. The actual photoshop software/code would be copywrited by Adobe, and if someone created an blurry image with Photoshop they can copywrite it.

I think people only disagree with this due to some sense that the process of translating data to model weights is "automatic" or "computational" in nature. You could in principle get a person to, by hand, go through millions of data sets and compute the changes to the model weights. This is no different to someone writing a piece of code, checking someone elses approach, and adjusting their own code after the fact. It just happens that we have developed very effective tooling to automate the adjusting of the code.

Zuiii3• 3 years ago

Three points I want to make:

- Models are nothing more than a statistical distillation of facts that can be traversed. They are not like software at all. Calling them software is like calling pachinko machines software. Nonsense.

- Models are mechanically derived with no element of human authorship or creativity. You could argue that there is creativity in selecting the dataset or the process that derives the model, but neither is relevant to the final generated model. Even if we assumed for the sake of argument that a model is more that a just statistical distillation, it should still not be considered copyrightable due to this reason alone.

- Don't use the word Steal when you refer to the well-defined act of infringement. Stealing implies deprivation of property which does not and cannot occur in this case. Using the word Infringe is more honest and less manipulative.

gaganyaan7• 3 years ago

It's not stealing, and the term "intellectual property" should be put to rest:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html

Your opinions on what should be copyrightable are wrong, and fortunately the courts agree.

dredmorbius• 3 years ago

You've rather conspicuously failed to mention a fourth, with two parts, and the first listed in the article abstract: "the use of copyrighted works to train AI models, the appropriate levels of transparency and disclosure with respect to the use of copyrighted works".

Outputs are the third mentioned: "the legal status of AI-generated outputs."

spaceribs• 3 years ago

I'd be interested to see the outcome of all this honestly, but I see parallels in how we exclude natural organisms from copyright and instead rely on patents to enforce ownership of unique genetics.

namtzigla• 3 years ago

This is _exactly_ how it looks when a society commits suicide.

mbakke• 3 years ago

What do you mean? Can you point to examples of societal collapse similar to this?

AFAICT this is a novel problem. Personally I think the logical conclusion will be to fair use/copyleft everything, but that seems like a win for society.

OneOffAsk• 3 years ago

Creative works are incompatible with capitalism. We’ve create a thin finicky interface between them with copyright laws, but it hardly works. I’m not saying artists and creators shouldn’t have financial security in this system, quite the opposite. I don’t have a better idea, but I hope we can come up with something that doesn’t conflate ownership with attribution and also protects the livelihood of people who want to share their creations.

1vuio0pswjnm73• 3 years ago

You are prohibited from using the content of this site in "large language models" or any other usage for the purpose of "artificial intelligence".

Liquidated Damages

paxys3• 3 years ago

I'll just write a blog with a disclaimer "no one is allowed to read this blog". Now anyone who comes across it is violating my terms and owes me money!

1vuio0pswjnm73• 3 years ago

They might never read it, they might just use it to train "AI".

Like Google scanning peoples' email. "We do not read anyone's mail. It's all done by computer."

mr_toad• 3 years ago

It wouldn’t stop them arguing fair use.

You can’t have a license that restricts fair use because fair use doesn’t require a license.

1vuio0pswjnm73• 3 years ago

https://www.authorsalliance.org/2023/02/23/fair-use-week-202...

Of course, alleging copyright infringment is useful to get into federal court as contracts are generally governed by state law.

lost_tourist3• 3 years ago

Copyright is for humans, not AI. Since the AI is doing 99.999% of the work on an "original work" and since the work is derived from the work of others, copyright should not apply. Copyright is for humans and creations of humans. If we get a truly sapient AI then we can revisit.

ZoomerCretin3• 3 years ago

Is there anyone willing to make the case for allowing generated works to have copyright protections?

A lot of people here seem to mistake copyright for "right-to-sell" generated works. As it stands now, with no copyrights granted for AI generated works, anyone can sell any generated works unless some copyright holder believes it violates their copyright.

kirrent• 3 years ago

I don't have any strong opinion either way but here is, to me, the best form of the argument.

I think the clear analogy is copyright in photographs. There is no a priori reason to believe that copyright should apply to either photographs or model outputs. In the US the copyright act was extended by congress to allow for copyright in photographs. When this was challenged in Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, the argument was made that a photograph only mechanistically captures the world and doesn't involve authorship and therefore doesn't fall in the scope of copyright outlined in the constitution. The court disagreed and found there is sufficient authorship in photography through the choice of lighting, framing, camera settings, posing of subjects, etc.

Similarly, one could argue that there is authorship in the choice of topic, prompting, framing, etc when using a generative model. Look at some of the very complex prompts on Midjourney's example page. I've spent a fair amount of time trying to make images which are just as striking and failing. Just as in photography, I think an extension of copyright in this case would probably need to involve an act of congress rather than a development in case law (though I'm outside the US and not that familiar with the act and relevant case law).

If you haven't read the Zarya of the Dawn letter from the US copyright office, I think it's a very cogent explanation of where things currently stand. An artist generated images for a comic book. They get no copyright in the images because they didn't sufficiently have authorship in them. They do get copyright in the entire comic book which involves a particular selection and arrangement of images. https://www.copyright.gov/docs/zarya-of-the-dawn.pdf

paxys3• 3 years ago

I have never understood the fair use argument when it comes to training data.

I publish a copyrighted article. Some LLM ingests it without permission, but since the output of that LLM is sufficiently different from my source article there is no violation.

I publish copyrighted code. Some company decides to consume it without purchasing a license. The product they distribute is vastly different from my code itself, but I can still sue them into oblivion.

What's the difference between the two?

Mathnerd314• 3 years ago

Well "consuming" the code means copying it word for word into your source tree. The compilation process does mangle it a bit but usually you can find identical function names and so on, and the courts have ruled that object code is equivalent to source code for purposes of copyright.

A different situation is you read a copyrighted news article and write the facts from it in your essay. Since the copyright of the news article only extends to creative expression and not factual information, there is no violation. For me, it is hard to tell what difference there is between this situation and an LLM identifying statistical patterns in the news article.

devsda2• 3 years ago

A different situation is you read a copyrighted news article and write the facts from it in your essay.

This is fine for actual facts(with some caveats) but how should it apply for creative works like a novel ?

Yodel0914• 3 years ago

I publish copyrighted code. Some company decides to consume it without purchasing a license. The product they distribute is vastly different from my code itself, but I can still sue them into oblivion.

Isn't the analogy more: an employee at a company reads your copyrighted code, along with many other pieces of code, and produces a new piece of code? Your code influenced the output, but in no way can you a) detect that influence b) assert any copyright over the output.

In your analogy, your code is still "in tact" within the new product; that's not the case with LLM-produced output.

thayne• 3 years ago

If the new code is almost identical to the original code, then it is very much subject to copyright, or at the very least is grounds for a lawsuit. And generetive AIs can and do generate output extremely similar to some of its inputs if given the right prompt.

My personal opinion is that training a model isn't infringing the copyright. But generating outputs can, if they are sufficiently similar. And since the model itself can't be liable for such infringing works, I think the creator of the model should be responsible.

olalonde• 3 years ago

The copyrighted article is not part of the output (at least, not verbatim). The copyrighted code is part of the output.

renonce2• 3 years ago

You can actually prove that some company distributed a product with your code but you can't practically prove that LLM contains your source article.

JamesBarney5• 3 years ago

I publish copyrighted code. Some company decides to consume it without purchasing a license. The product they distribute is vastly different from my code itself, but I can still sue them into oblivion.

No you can't. If a company reads your copyrighted code, then writes up a spec and sends it to another team that writes up code that accomplishes what you did, that doesn't violate copyright and you wouldn't be able to sue them into oblivion.

livrem2• 3 years ago

It's more like if I look at thousands of articles and produced a big spreadsheet containing interesting facts about those articles, like word frequencies or what words tend to come after what other words. I never before heard anyone suggest that that kind of analysis would be copyright infringing. The new thing is that someone figured out how to organize dumb facts like that in a clever way and use it to create something sometimes useful, but without actually copying parts of the original articles since those were never saved as part of the data.

gaganyaan7• 3 years ago

The difference is that the software is in active use in your scenario. Consider if you took a copyrighted program and calculated the sha hash of it. You can then use that hash without needing to have a copy of the original program. The hash is also not infringing, because it's a simple fact.

vajrabum• 3 years ago

I'm surprised that nobody has suggested that what's behind this RFC is Disney and other large studios lobbying to make it legal to copyright AI generated content so that they can move to AI generated movies and art. Right now you can't get a copyright on AI generated content.

extraduder_ire• 3 years ago

I think the current precedent is that you can, as long as it's not wholly machine generated work. Whatever modicum of creativity you put in as an editor is what's got legal protection.

Joel_Mckay4• 3 years ago

AI Jesus chat-bot could claim copyright over biblical content.

In theory, a company that owns Christian (c 2023) content could be filing DMCA claims every Sunday.

The silliness of digital-racketeers must end at some point. =)

javajosh2• 3 years ago

You've described a viable startup business plan.

Joel_Mckay4• 3 years ago

It is what I enjoy doing, but someone has already launched a product. =)

text-with-jesus:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/text-with-jesus/id6446922759

Pyrodogg• 3 years ago

I'm not sure what it's feelings are on the topic but Ask Jesus is a thing on twitch rn. NSFW (It's chat generated content on Twitch)

https://www.twitch.tv/ask_jesus

It takes chat prompts and weaves together scripture, The Internet, odd pronunciation, callbacks to other questions, and hilarious fails when chat gets, uh, playful.

AI Jesus just said there is a time and place for everything and that it might just be the time to buy Starfield. It knew it was a game being only prompted with, 'Jesus, should I buy Starfield?'

Joel_Mckay4• 3 years ago

Ah, but can you buy Starfield with the change from within yourself.

Also, the buggy nature of Armored Core 6 could be fun too.

Happy computing =)

Ajedi324• 3 years ago

Much debate has been had about how existing copyright law applies to AI models. But once you get past that and start asking about how copyright should apply to AI models (as the copyright office is here) the answer in my mind becomes clear.

Copyright, as defined in the U.S. Constitution, exists "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"[1]. I can think of no better modern example of "the Progress of Science and useful Arts" than AI models themselves. Therefore, it follows that:

1. Existing copyright laws should _not_ be applied in such a way as to make training these models any more difficult than it already is (as that would be in direct opposition to the stated goal)

2. AI models should be copyrightable by the person training the model (for the same reason any other software program is copyrightable)

3. Output of AI models should be copyrightable by the person running the model (for the same reason any other creative work is copyrightable) provided the output does not conflict with any preexisting copyright

For those who think training on copyrighted materials should be illegal, explain to me how that helps "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" and I'll re-consider my position.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause

showerst• 3 years ago

So i'm not sure how I feel, but to play Devil's advocate --

If I know anything I create is just going to be hoovered up and input into somebody's AI model so I do 99% of the work and they get 99% of the profit, perhaps I'm much less likely to progress Science and useful Arts by creating content in the first place.

I fear an internet of signup walls and TOC agreements for everything, just to prevent crawlers that feed AI from soaking it all up.

chii14• 3 years ago

If I know anything I create is just going to be hoovered up and input into somebody's AI model

but today, without an AI model, anything you create is already going to be learnt and studied (if it is worth studying of course). What's the difference, but speed?

they get 99% of the profit

Why is that a priori the assumption? What stops you from getting a profit?

I do 99% of the work

you did 0.000001% of the work, since the model contains billions of other works from which they train.

Ajedi324• 3 years ago

If I know anything I create is just going to be hoovered up and input into somebody's AI model so I do 99% of the work and they get 99% of the profit

Could you give a more concrete example of how this could happen?

As-is, I don't see how the existence of an AI model trained on J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is going to result in Tolkien's works receiving 99% less profit.

Maybe you could argue AI models as a whole will devalue certain types of creative works (e.g. art commissions for designing logos), but they don't need to train on any one particular creative work to accomplish that, so unless you're saying we should just ban AI models entirely I'm not sure how copyright helps with that.

I fear an internet of signup walls and TOC agreements for everything, just to prevent crawlers that feed AI from soaking it all up.

This is a fair point, particularly since it appears to be already happening to some extent. Though it seems to be largely social media companies and content aggregators trying to control access to information they don't hold the copyright to in the first place, not individual users trying to restrict access to works that they created. I'm not sure copyright would really help "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" there so much as "promote the wallets of large social media conglomerates".

Zuiii3• 3 years ago

If I know anything I create is just going to be hoovered up and input into somebody's AI model so I do 99% of the work and they get 99% of the profit, perhaps I'm much less likely to progress Science and useful Arts by creating content in the first place.

Perhaps you wouldn't but I, and apparently most of the scientific community who publish research, would (and do). The entitlement of people here feel towards their way of doing things is astounding.

It's a story as old as time: Those who try to resist or limit progress (by placing arbitrary restrictions) will be beaten by those who adapt.

asu_thomas• 3 years ago

Although I disagree and consider copyright an anti-social institution only necessary due to the anti-social capitalist mode of relations, I commend you for making an actually coherent argument on this question. It is the first coherent argument I've come across outside of the small Marxist circles I run in.

chii14• 3 years ago

3. Output of AI models should be copyrightable by the person running the model

i would go further, and declare that this output is uncopyrightable.

rsaxvc• 3 years ago

Do you see #1 and #3 conflicting at all? Ex: you produce a model, run it, publish and copyright some output. I can then use that as training data for another model in the style of your existing model?

Ajedi324• 3 years ago

I see that more as a conflict between #1 and #2, but fair point. In extreme cases, you could probably make a crude copy of a model by training a new model solely on the outputs of the first one. Normally that would be a derivative work, but that's inconsistent with the idea that training on copyrighted works is always permissible.

Maybe one way to resolve this would be to say there ought to be some practical limits on what percentage of the training data can be from any one individual source. If I train an model solely on the text of one book, for example, such that it's so overfitted that it can do nothing but regurgitate passages from that book, it's probably fair to call that a derivative work. The same would apply to a model trained solely on output from another model. (Though if it merely incorporates a few examples from a bunch of different models that would be okay.)

klabb34• 3 years ago

Copyright, as defined in the U.S. Constitution, exists "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"[1]. I can think of no better modern example of "the Progress of Science and useful Arts" than AI models themselves.

This makes no sense. Before AI, it’s clear that copyright itself restricts what can be done, in order to promote overall health of innovation. You can’t just say this is cool so therefore allowed, then there would never have been any copyright in the first place. You have to argue that the overall result will be better given the rules you propose.

Now, I’m no fan of copyright, but it is abundantly clear that the tech companies are able to capitalize on new tech disproportionately. Thus, it’s a transfer of privilege from the very many designers, artists, musicians, authors etc to whomever will dominate AI. That’s not good, simply because of the centralization.

Moreover, you can’t just look at the short term gains of AI models that can be produced with existing content. You need to include the change in incentives, when creators financial prospects are even more minuscule than today. Even if AI is all that matters, they still need training data, and that needs to come from somewhere.

gaganyaan7• 3 years ago

AI is the innovation. Trying to misapply copyright here would retard the progress of science and useful arts, not promote them, because it would wrongly restrict that innovation.

The answer to big tech corporations centralizing this is to fund it publically and make it available for free to everyone as a shared summation of our culture, not lobotomize ourselves just to profit a few old dinosaurs that are relying on an outdated idea of copyright.

AlexandrB• 3 years ago

provided the output does not conflict with any preexisting copyright

I think this clause is doing all the work here and unfortunately in many cases there's no quick, automatic way to verify this.

Because of the legal costs involved in litigating who copied whom, I fear this would allow someone to sue the original creator of a work for infringing on the copyrighted output of an AI model trained on that work. If this seems far fetched, consider that this already happens with the DMCA and Creative Commons works: https://www.techdirt.com/2016/04/26/ifpi-files-dmca-takedown...

globular-toast• 3 years ago

If you're going to bring up the origin of copyright you also need to consider the world copyright was made for. Back then, there was only one type of copying machine: a printing press. These were huge, expensive machines that could only practically be operated by corporations. Copyright was invented to protect authors from those corporations.

Your point 1 is what concerns me. AI models seem too much like the printing presses of old. They are available mainly to corporations and authors need to be protected from them. Otherwise there will be no incentive for anyone to publish anything novel as they know the corporation will slurp it up and make it "better" with their better model.

gaganyaan7• 3 years ago

Number 3 doesn't really make sense. I wouldn't get copyright if I told a human artist "draw a dog". Why would that change just because I'm telling an AI to do it?

Ajedi324• 3 years ago

I oversimplified that point a bit for brevity's sake, but I'd say I agree that some level of creative input from the human operator should be required in order for the work to be copyrightable. If I draw a black 100px*100px square in MS paint that's not copyrightable, nor should typing "dog" with a seed of "1" into Stable Diffusion be. But as soon as even the smallest level of creative input is involved, yeah it should be copyrightable.

Also, kinda beside the point, but:

I wouldn't get copyright if I told a human artist "draw a dog".

If they were working for hire, yeah you absolutely would.

40yearoldman• 3 years ago

The only clear solution is to abandon the notion of a copyright.

We have know for a long time that everything can be represented with numbers, even more so within the space of computers.

All we have done is invent a system to help us find numbers we find special.

thenose2• 3 years ago

Trying, though it's hard to get noticed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37346620 And I want to participate in the community here, not merely mention the thing I've built.

unstuck3958• 3 years ago

though it's hard to get noticed.

I'd suggest to start with at least a brief paragraph on what thenose is, what it's goals are etc. I read your post, and found myself reading the technical workings of something I didn't know anything about.

nostril• 3 years ago

Hi HN, I have been working on something directly related to AI and copyright. Would it be ok to point it out here?

Recently The Pile was taken offline from The Eye by DMCA. One solution is to host it offshore, which we're calling The Nose: https://thenose.cc

The technical security measures may be of interest to the audience here, so I'll be as detailed as possible. The following formula should be safe if you follow it to the letter.

The basic setup is to install Whonix on a VeraCrypt drive, acquire Monero through any method, use a service like changenow to convert Bitcoin on a wallet stored only on the Whonix installation, sign up for a ProtonMail account (when they ask for email verification, use a no signup inbox service like yopmail), rent a dedicated server at Shinjiru using bitcoin, and register the domain at the same place. They're both a registrar and a server host, which simplifies matters. Use N/A for all contact info. Use Cloudflare to manage your site's DNS records.

Wallet security: do not ever move Bitcoin to any wallet linked with your personal identity. This is easier said than done. First there is the question of how to store passwords. These are the keys to the kingdom, and are the most sensitive aspect by far, because they're intimately linked with you. Additionally, if hardware failure occurs, you'll lose everything if you store them on the Whonix drive. My setup is to use KeePass to store the passwords on a laptop I use to VNC into the computer with the Whonix drive, and then save the database to a folder that gets synced to the cloud. The only flaw in this model is that if your laptop is compromised while your KeePass is open, you're done. But (as Ulbricht discovered) this is always true. The threat model assumes lawyers coming after you with DMCA with additional safeguards against the FBI narrowing down who you are in real life. If your physical location is compromised through any method, you're done.

All it takes is one mistake to end you. SSH into your box from your real computer? Done. Sign up using your real name with Mailgun? Done. Accidentally say "Thanks, <your real name>" to the support staff at Shinjiru in an email? Done. Abandon ship and close everything down.

The security of this technique comes down to simplicity. There are very few moving parts. I opted for nginx + mediawiki with Discourse forums at https://forums.thenose.cc (though I don't know if anyone will care enough to join). Logging is turned off to protect users downloading the data, though you only have my word on this. But reputation is the only thing a hacker has ever truly had anyway.

If you're serious about following the above recipe, I urge you to read through the Whonix docs on online anonymity: https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Documentation Remember, threat model is your saving grace. You probably aren't starting a darknet, so you can relax your threat model in terms of physical safety. But you won't get away with any mistakes made in cyberspace.

As for the site itself, I've avoided asking for donations for now (hosting is $130/mo though, which will get expensive) or describing anything beyond this HN comment. I'll say it's for simplicity, but in fact I only started it a few days ago and haven't had time to provide anything but the essence of our service: hosting AI datasets in stable, copyright-resistant ways.

If additional datasets beyond The Pile need protection or distribution, you can contact me at nostril@thenose.cc or at https://forums.thenose.cc. I have a 4TB drive, of which 800gb is being used by The Pile so far.

artninja1988• 3 years ago

You can try to join the EleuthorAI discord. They are the people that crated the pile iirc. It's very active and I think you would be able to get in touch there.

Zuiii3• 3 years ago

I wonder how they verify the personhood of the people making the comments. I can see this process being easily abused if the comments aren't taken by real people in person.

That said, I hope the US doesn't end up piling even more restrictions onto copyright. They'd only be shooting themselves in the foot. Copyright has completely failed to achieve the purpose for which it was intended to solve (only intended to give authors a short amount of time to profit off their efforts? look at it now). Perhaps it's time to rethink the concept of copyright as a whole before other countries beat the US to it.

mlsu• 3 years ago

The entire discussion about AI and copyright strikes me as a bit naive.

Right now, we are in a situation where nobody quite knows what these AI models are useful for. We have some inkling that they might be extraordinarily useful for making money -- but not precisely how, not even the companies that are developing the models themselves.

Once they money starts, the debate over copyright will fall exactly into the economic seams between the major players involved:

- new tech orgs who are monetizing models will say that the model is "exactly as humans are": they see copyrighted works in training, and then produce wholly original outputs. And of course that the model weights themselves are, like the outputs of employees, completely owned by the company.

- incumbents who stand to lose out on the new gold rush will say that every single output of a model belongs to them if just a single image or sentence was seen in training. And that because of that, we really should just shut the whole thing down, because how could you ever prove that a model was not trained on copyrighted material?

The faultlines will entirely rest on who has more power, hard and soft. How much can they influence the legal system, either by spending $ to hire legal talent or by sheer soft politicking, balanced with how favorable they appear to the general public who uses their product (or consumes their media). I suspect that the end result of this debate is a "legal" way of doing things accessible only to the extremely large players, and a small, politically insignificant collection of individuals, hackers, and startups who aim to unseat those large players (or just flat-out train "illegal" models). The worst possible end result is that the legal system is just too fossilized to deal and tries something draconian like not allow datacenter-scale GPU compute.

As an aside, I predict a sizeable space for companies that do "compliance" -- asserting the copyright status of a dataset, perhaps even themselves using ML. That market will carve off and leave rotting a sizeable chunk of the new money's ML profits.

It's fun to talk about this, I guess. But remember that what you or I have to say about what a machine learning model philosophically is has no bearing what-ever when it comes to the actual ability for individuals, startups, or large players to use models.

I will predict though: enjoy Llama2 while it lasts. Like the internet, it will become fully assimilated into the larger intellectual property machine.

cookiengineer• 3 years ago

Imagine the future where we have instead of HDMI recording cards that circumvent crappy encryption something like a downscale and upscale neural co processor to circumvent copyright protection.

Last time they tried to copyright everything with DMCA it actually turned out to be a useless law.

Why not fix DMCA first and make malicious intent actually prosecutable - and then move on to transformative topics?

Can't fix copyright if copyright itself is already broken in the law. 90 years made sense in a world of pen and paper, but not in a world with the internet.

hanselot• 3 years ago

Every day of my life I wake up feeling more and more detached from the world.

That people are even debating this is so incredibly stupid to me.

The only people that will benefit from more onerous copyright are the major corporations that already have lawyers lined up and ready to fight their battles ad infinitum. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37347528

The everyday person will not benefit from any decisions made by courts on this matter. We will get the absolute shittiest implementation of copyright possible, see all other industries where copyright plays a role.

They convinced you to fight each other over scraps while they violate your copyright behind closed doors and use it to further their own agendas. They wield copyright like a weapon to effectively silence and dominate entire industries, leaving the average human unable to even comprehend how to fight back.

Lawyers and Copyright. Without them we would be so much better off.

lewhoo3• 3 years ago

Copyright by itself is such a clever trick to prevent the world from advancing.

And yet, the world is advancing.

jalapenos• 3 years ago

Putting my money on the copyrighters lose.

The US and its fears of China catching up aren't going to let their latest prized jewel OpenAI get kneecapped by "stop copying me!"s.

lewhoo3• 3 years ago

A lot of talk here on how copyrights and intellectual property are stupid, backwards, ancient (this is particularly strange, because the right for humans to exist and not be harmed is arguably much older and no one is complaining) and harmful without exploring a world without them. If I recall copyrights were introduced along with the development of mass print for the purpose of protecting authors of books. How will the world of today solve this issue ?

Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: Request for comments

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