The No Fakes Act has a “fingerprinting” trap that kills open source?

https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1q7qcux/the_no_fakes_act_has_a_fingerprinting_trap_that/

by guerrilla • 6 months ago

185 98 6 months ago

old.reddit.com

_def• 6 months ago

"Open Source" in this case means "ML models with open weights"

(not my interpretation, it's what the post states - personally that is not what I think of when I read "Open Source")

0928374082• 6 months ago

ML models with open weights? Like, say, Qwen?

scotty793• 6 months ago

Freeware models would be more accurate term, but people went with stronger meme for this one.

siliconc0w• 6 months ago

Yay another bill modeled after the DMCA, what could go wrong?

echelon• 6 months ago

This is worse than the DMCA because there's no provision for companies that develop or host the tech.

Why the hell can't these legislators keep to punishing the law breakers instead of creating unending legal pitfalls for innovation?

We have laws against murdering people with kitchen knives. Not laws against dinnerware. Williams Sonoma doesn't have to worry about lawsuits for its Guy Degrenne Beau Manoir 20-Piece Flatware Set.

Retr0id3• 6 months ago

Not laws against dinnerware.

Don't worry, the UK is on the case https://reason.com/2019/10/07/the-u-k-must-ban-pointy-knives...

dleeftink5• 6 months ago

Not saying this would be the right way to go about preventing undesirable uses, but shouldn't building 'risky' technologies signal some risk to the ones developing them? Safe harbor clauses have long allowed the risks to be externalised onto the user, fostering non-responsibility on the developers behalf.

akersten4• 6 months ago

Foisting the responsibility of the extremely risky transport industry onto the road developers would certainly prevent all undesirable uses of those carriageways. Once they are at last responsible for the risky uses of their technology, like bank robberies and car crashes, the incentive to build these dangerous freeways evaporates.

idle_zealot• 6 months ago

I think this is meant to show that moving the responsibility this way would be absurd because we don't do it for cars but... yeah, we probably should've done that for cars? Maybe then we'd have safe roads that don't encourage reckless driving.

__MatrixMan__• 6 months ago

How can you know how people are going to use the stuff you make? This is how we end up in a world where a precondition to writing code is having lawyers on staff.

beeflet6• 6 months ago

hansvm• 6 months ago

Just last weekend I developed a faster reed-solomon encoder. I'm looking forward to my jail time when somebody uses it to cheaply and reliably persist bootlegged Disney assets, just because I had the gall to optimize some GF256 math.

dleeftink5• 6 months ago

That is not what I said. It is about signalling risks to developers, not criminalising them. And in terms of encoders, I would say it relates more to digital 'form' than 'content' anyways, the container of a creative work vs the 'creative' (created) work itself.

While both can be misused, to me the latter category seems to afford a far larger set of tertiary/unintended uses.

ronsor• 6 months ago

No.

The reason safe harbor clauses externalize risks onto the user is because the user gets the most use (heh) of the software.

No developer is going to accept unbounded risk based on user behavior for a limited reward, especially not if they're working for free.

tracker12• 6 months ago

The reason safe harbor clauses exist is because you don't blame the car manufacturer for making the bank robbery get away car.

Aachen• 6 months ago

This reply sounds like a lot more sensible take: https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1q7qcux/the_no_...

OP replied and there's another in-depth reply to that below it

nerdponx• 6 months ago

Still smells like malicious anti-competitive lobbying by the AI industry.

terminalshort• 6 months ago

The industry does not fear open source models. This is just Karens doing what they do best.

nerdsniper• 6 months ago

OP's reply to that appears to be drafted with heavy help from ChatGPT:

I appreciate you citing the specific clauses. You are reading the 'Black Letter Law' correctly, but you are missing the Litigation Reality (how this actually plays out in court). The 'Primarily Designed' Trap: You argue this only targets a specific 'Arnold Bot.' blah blah blah.

xmprt• 6 months ago

I think this title is quite misleading given that it's only impacting open source models which is a very narrow interpretation of open source.

karlgkk2• 6 months ago

voice-conversion RVC model on HuggingFace, and someone else uses it to fake a celebrity, you (the dev) can be liable for statutory damages ($5k-$25k per violation). There is no Section 230 protection here. This effectively makes hosting open weights for audio models a legal suicide mission unless you are OpenAI or Google.

Good.

kouteiheika3• 6 months ago

So you'd prefer that only rich megacorporations and criminals have access to this technology, and not normal people and researchers?

Joel_Mckay8• 6 months ago

The studios did already rip off Mark Hamill of all people.

Arguing regulatory capture versus overt piracy is a ridiculous premise. The "AI" firms have so much liquid capital now... they could pay the fines indefinitely in districts that constrain damages, and already settled with larger copyright holders like it was just another nuisance fee. =3

renewiltord2• 6 months ago

How is that surprising? The advent of modern AI tools has resulted in most people being heavily pro-IP. Everyone now talks about who has the copyright to something and so on.

spencerflem2• 6 months ago

Why not? I don’t think normal people have very many good uses for deepfake tech.

karlgkk2• 6 months ago

No? Show me where I said that please :)

logicchains• 6 months ago

It should be called the anti-AGI bill, because trying to ban AI with certain capabilities is essentially banning embodied AI capable of learning/updating its weights live. The same logic applied to humans would essentially ban all humans, because any human can learn to draw and paint nudes of someone else.

geraldog• 6 months ago

You know kids, in the 80s, a lot of time before the First Crypto Wars, we had something called the Porn Wars on American Congress. I could leave out many depositions to Congress on Youtube, but I will leave you with some good music.

(shill)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HMsveLMdds

Which is of course the European Version, not the evil American Version.

71bw• 6 months ago

Is there some other music artist that has been present in the Congress as prevalently as Zappa...?

p0w3n3d2• 6 months ago

sorry for offtop but I've just discovered Frank Zappa and he looks and sounds like the precursor of Serj Tankian (SOAD) - I mean "sounds" like as in similar crazy all over the place style

zx8080• 6 months ago

I contacted my reps email to flag this as an "innovation killer."

Chinese companies will happy to drive innovation further after Google and OpenAI giants goes on with this to kill competition in the US.

US capitalism eats itself alive with this.

scotty793• 6 months ago

I really love how, thanks to China, people are beginning to see how technologically suppresive American oligarchy is and who's the reason why we can't have nice things.

SamInTheShell• 6 months ago

The actual link from the initial reddit post without the GOOG tracking: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/136...

Edit: Also does this mean OpenAI can bring back the Sky voice?

josalhor• 6 months ago

We do have tech that is "behind doors". Just look at military applications (nuclear, tank and jet design etc). Should "clonable voice and video" be behind close doors? Or should AGI be behind close doors? I think that the approach of the suggested legistation may not the right way to go about; but at a certain level of implementation capability I'm not sure how I would handle this situation.

If current tech appeared all of a sudden in 1999; I am sure as a society we would all accept this, but slow boiling frog theory I guess.

rookderby• 6 months ago

Reddit is one of the domains I block using StepenBlack's hosts list [0].

Here is some background info on the act from wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Fakes_Act.

[0] https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/blob/master/readme.md

alphazard• 6 months ago

Likely unconstitutional as it violates the 1st amendment, which has done a very good job of protecting the right to author and distribute software over the years. Clearly an unintended positive consequence, since no one who worked or voted on the Bill of Rights had a computer.

If the courts upheld the part in question, it would create a clear path to go after software authors for any crime committed by a user. Cryptocurrencies would become impossible to develop in the US. Holding authors responsible for the actions of their users basically means everyone has to stop distributing software under their real names. There would be a serious chilling effect, as most open source projects shutdown or went underground.

Guvante• 6 months ago

The law in question was very specific and not as broad as you imply here. In fact more specific than the Redittor implies too since the law doesn't cover audio models in general only those purpose built to replicate a particular individual.

As the law is specifically targeting models made to duplicate an individual it isn't hard to provide sufficient evidence to clear the hurdles required of restrictions on free speech as examples of the negative effects are well documented and "speech model for an individual" isn't a broad category.

Also I would point out first amendment isn't used by the US to protect software delivery anywhere. Instead it is Congress explicitly encouraging it through the laws it passes.

The No Fakes Act has a “fingerprinting” trap that kills open source?

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