[HN Gopher] Open source licenses need to leave the 1980s and evo...
___________________________________________________________________
Open source licenses need to leave the 1980s and evolve to deal
with AI
Author : gumby
Score : 106 points
Date : 2023-06-23 10:09 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| Groxx wrote:
| tbh I think it's just that, _as is normal_ , they need to be
| tested in court in a slightly new configuration. Law moves more
| slowly than innovation.
|
| Many licenses are reasonably clear that this kind of use is not
| acceptable, as is easily demonstrated by these "AI"s frequently
| producing exact matches without license statements. Which is
| unambiguously not allowed by many licenses. The legal case is
| pretty straightforward, there just needs to be some high level
| precedents set for smaller courts to follow, and that takes time
| and money to push through.
|
| Who, exactly, will be penalized for the output? ...that I can
| kinda see going to either party. But regardless it'll eventually
| have a chilling effect on training on legally-questionable data.
| We're just still in the chaotic early days and the hammer hasn't
| fallen yet, and there's a decent chance the money to be made will
| exceed the penalty (which is crazy, but seems to be the norm).
|
| It's either that or abandon all IP protections, and that seems
| less likely to happen.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > Many licenses are reasonably clear that this kind of use is
| not acceptable, as is easily demonstrated by these "AI"s
| frequently producing exact matches without license statements.
| Which is unambiguously not allowed by many licenses.
|
| Demonstrations that AIs can spit out exact copies are helpful,
| but misleading; that could lead down the road of "we put in
| filters so it can't ever emit an exact copy", and that's not
| sufficient. It's _also_ a license violation to train an AI on
| Open Source code, generate "new" code from that model even if
| it's not an exact copy, and ignore the licenses of the input.
|
| License violations don't suddenly become acceptable just
| because you're violating a million licenses at once.
| Vecr wrote:
| > License violations don't suddenly become acceptable just
| because you're violating a million licenses at once.
|
| They might actually, at least in the US. I'm not sure how the
| laws and judgements are going happen/change in the future,
| but it's possible there will be some "quanta" of copyrighted
| work so that any fragment smaller than that will get rounded
| down to zero, so even if a work was 100% made from 1_000_000
| "fragments", and somehow you could figure that out from the
| model, the result would be considered 0% derived/copyrighted,
| as well as being 0% copyrightable, as it's AI generated.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _It 's also a license violation to train an AI on Open Source
| code, generate "new" code from that model even if it's not an
| exact copy, and ignore the licenses of the input._
|
| That's not exactly a given that we can simply take as true.
| Of course that's borderline a trite tautology about any legal
| issue, but I'd argue that this is even fuzzier than usual. If
| a human writes some code, after having seen a given corpus of
| code previously, the "new" code might or might not be a
| derivative work of that corpus. It's not clear that replacing
| the human with an AI somehow changes the equation so
| categorically that it becomes automatic to consider the
| output of the AI a derivative work.
|
| _License violations don 't suddenly become acceptable just
| because you're violating a million licenses at once._
|
| No, but if either a human or an AI emits a given line of
| code, and that line of code can't be shown to have been
| cribbed from some corpus of existing code, or to be
| substantially similar to such, then why wouldn't it be
| considered original work in both cases?
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > It's not clear that replacing the human with an AI
| somehow changes the equation so categorically that it
| becomes automatic to consider the output of the AI a
| derivative work.
|
| See below: there are good reasons for an AI LLM to be
| considered categorically different than a human for
| copyright purposes.
|
| > No, but if either a human or an AI emits a given line of
| code, and that line of code can't be shown to have been
| cribbed from some corpus of existing code, or to be
| substantially similar to such, then why wouldn't it be
| considered original work in both cases?
|
| For a work produced by a human, the burden of proof is on
| someone claiming that the work is a derivative work of
| something the human read. And in general, humans without
| photographic memories or a specific work open in front of
| them don't tend to have the _ability_ to produce any works
| verbatim, though some _might_ be able to produce
| sufficiently similar works to raise questions of whether
| they 're derived works. There's also a certain unstated
| presumption that human learning (as opposed to human
| memorization or copying) doesn't constitute a derivative
| work, and relatedly, that a human brain isn't copyrightable
| so it can't be a derivative work of anything. That unstated
| presumption likely also touches on unstated core values
| about human brains, creativity, and the obvious fact that
| everything a human does (including the creation of creative
| works) is based on that human's experiences. If you write a
| book, you've learned from all the books you've read, but
| that doesn't make your book a derivative work of every book
| you have ever read; if people saw that outcome, they'd
| consider copyright law incorrect rather than accepting it.
|
| An AI LLM, on the other hand, is (unless some court or law
| changes this) a derivative work of its training data. If
| you take off any after-the-fact filters for "don't generate
| a copy of any of the training data", an AI LLM _can_ easily
| recite its training data, providing further evidence that
| the AI LLM is a derivative work of that data. The burden of
| proof is easily met. An AI LLM _does_ have a photographic
| memory. An AI LLM hasn 't just learned ideas about what
| makes a good book, it has learned the complete text of an
| extensive number of books. And there's no particular reason
| for us to have any of the same values about human learning
| apply to an AI LLM, not least of which because an AI LLM
| _is_ in fact copyrightable and self-evidently a derivative
| work.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _An AI LLM, on the other hand, is (unless some court or
| law changes this) a derivative work of its training
| data._
|
| _because an AI LLM is in fact copyrightable and self-
| evidently a derivative work._
|
| I mean, that's a fine opinion to hold, and you might be
| right. But so far all you've done is repeat yourself and
| appeal to "self-evident" which isn't a terribly strong
| argument.
|
| I'll wait for some actual precedent / case-law to
| solidify my own opinion. As it stands, I can see both
| sides of the argument, but I don't think the conclusion
| is as obvious as some folks in this discussion seem to
| find it. _shrug_
|
| _an AI LLM can easily recite its training data,
| providing further evidence that the AI LLM is a
| derivative work of that data._
|
| OK, I can buy that to a point, so far as arguing that the
| LLM itself is a derivative work. But I'm not convinced
| that, in turn, the _output_ of the LLM is also a
| derivative work _in those cases where what it returns is
| not an exact copy (or even nearly exact copy) of anything
| in the training corpus_.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Clarifying: the part I'm arguing is "self-evident" is
| that an LLM is a derivative work of its training data, in
| the same sense that if you copy the text of a million
| books into a data file and compress that file reversibly
| in a way that lets you get most or all of them back out
| again, the result is clearly a derivative work of those
| books. That part I made a case for, and it _seems_ like
| from your last paragraph you agree with that part of the
| argument.
|
| (By contrast, I _wouldn 't_ say it's self-evident that a
| database of blake3 hashes would be a derivative work
| (leaving aside that it'd probably be fair use), nor is it
| self-evident that compiling a million books into a Bloom
| filter that can _recognize_ any random sentence but not
| _output_ any random sentence would make the Bloom filter
| a derivative work. I think the unfiltered LLM being able
| to output near-verbatim copies of parts of the training
| set makes _that_ case evident.)
|
| I agree that the second step, of the output of the LLM
| being a derivative work of the LLM, is less obvious. And
| I agree that it's going to take case law before people
| are _sure_ of the answer to that part. I hope the answer
| is "yes", and I think it'd do substantial harm to Open
| Source if the answer is a definitive "no".
| mindcrime wrote:
| Fair enough. I think the distinction between "the model
| weights" and "the output of the model" was a little
| blurred when this first started. Sounds like we're closer
| to "in agreement" than not for the most part.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| We don't need Open Source licenses to change to deal with AI. We
| need AI to respect Open Source licenses, or not use code under
| those licenses.
|
| I sincerely hope that one of the many court cases produces a
| verdict that says AI-generated code is, in fact, subject to the
| licenses of the inputs. Then there will be a lot of screaming and
| wailing, as people go "but how can we train AI if we have to
| respect licenses?!". And then people will _figure out_ how to
| actually respect Open Source software licenses (and, for that
| matter, proprietary ones).
| clintfred wrote:
| Genuine question here; not trying to be snarky.
|
| How is AI "reading" code different from me reading code? Is the
| difference the AI's ability for perfect memory?
|
| I can _read_ open source code, (even GPL) and not have all
| future code I independently write be subject to that license. I
| don 't think anyone would argue that I immediately "forget" any
| OSS code that I read, so it's becoming part of the structure of
| my brain (and potentially influencing future code I wrote), but
| unless I'm linking to the code or copying pieces out, verbatim,
| I'm generally in the clear. Of course there are some sticky
| situations clean-room, reverse engineering, but those seem like
| pretty narrow examples.
| hgs3 wrote:
| Because many programmers who open sourced their code intended
| it to be read by humans, not AI. They don't want some
| centralized super computer owned by a mega-corporation
| reading their code. At the very least, if the models were
| Free and Open Source, the reaction might be different.
| noirscape wrote:
| Basically, the difference is that you merely reading code
| doesn't create a derivative work that we can meaningfully
| look at. Yes, it gets stored in your brain but your brain re-
| encodes all that knowledge in a way only it can use. We're
| still quite a bit away from brain uploading at the moment, so
| that's not a meaningful avenue to discuss right now.
|
| An LLM on the other hand generally works off of a model that
| was trained _first_ , and that model can be saved to a file
| and read out later. As a result, it's a derivative work that
| we can examine, copy, share, modify and do all the things
| with that we generally attribute to something being a Work.
| The question on if binary output from a program can be
| copyrighted is somewhat unclear, but from what I've heard
| legally (not legal advice, I Am Not A Lawyer), it seems to be
| the case unless you explicitly say it's not[0].
|
| There's a few other things to consider like how you, as a
| human, can make the conscious decision to _avoid_
| specifically replicating GPL code that you 've seen if you're
| not allowed to use it (whether that is by restructuring the
| code, doing the same techniques in a different language, or
| the heaviest example which is clean-rooming it). AIs don't
| have the ability to make that distinction (and to my
| understanding due to how they work, the only way you can
| meaningfully avoid it is if you ensure that the entire model
| is compliant to avoid the AI going off on it's own tangent
| and making the decision to include incompatible code.)
|
| From a more practical perspective - Copilot will happily spit
| out and apply the wrong license to _Quake III_ s fast inverse
| square root algorithm function. It's GPL licensed code but it
| IIRC claimed it was BSD licensed? That alone would constitute
| a violation and it'd be weird to not point at the people who
| trained the model that allowed it to make that choice.
|
| To be fair, right now a lot of this is up in the air and all
| we have to go on is kinda wishy-washy guidance from copyright
| offices (which is mostly just refusing registration on the
| basis that a copyrighted material has to be made by a human,
| not by a machine). There's a couple of ongoing lawsuits
| specifically about Copilot that are still pending and from
| what I last heard, the judges aren't very impressed by the
| defense of GitHub/MSFT/OpenAI. The approach also greatly
| differs per country/governing body - Japans government has
| for example given blanket permission for non-commercial AI
| training, while keeping a strict eye on anyone trying to use
| it for paid services, while the EU is passing legislation
| that seems to mostly lean towards "it's copyrighted, that's
| now your problem to get in line with it", without outright
| saying it yet.
|
| [0]: This is the main reason why for FOSS, the Creative
| Commons License usually is not seen as a good pick outside of
| assets, because it can interfere with distributing compiled
| versions of your code.
| kouteiheika wrote:
| > Japans government has for example given blanket
| permission for non-commercial AI training, while keeping a
| strict eye on anyone trying to use it for paid services
|
| This is incorrect; it doesn't matter whether it's
| commercial or non-commercial, and you can use anything as
| training data regardless of copyright. See the amendment of
| the copyright law from 2018.
| cgearhart wrote:
| Part of what LLMs do is compress their training dataset into
| the weights, often with character-perfect recall later. For
| example, I would be shocked if any sufficiently large LLM
| failed when prompted "write the quake fast inverse square
| root algorithm verbatim".
|
| (I'm not really interested in arguing whether that's all they
| do, or whether it's the purpose of LLMs--those details are
| just a distraction from the original question: what makes LLM
| training different than a human reading code.)
|
| If the model has memorized the training set and can reproduce
| it verbatim when prompted, then it should be incumbent on the
| AI owner to prove that it does _not_ reproduce copyrighted
| code when it is _not_ explicitly prompted.
| lisasays wrote:
| _How is AI "reading" code different from me reading code?_
|
| By doing so with the explicit intent of building derivative
| products from it, and at massive scale.
| est31 wrote:
| I think if this existed, then it would benefit the current
| owners of the large IP pools the most. Currently, yes, many
| think they can use models trained on OSS code to create
| proprietary software. In general, proprietary software is bad
| but it's way worse to have a scarcity of models because they
| are owned by large IP holders.
|
| In Github's case for example, Github's TOS already includes a
| clause that if you upload code there, you grant Github a
| license to use the content to run Github's services... and
| copilot is one of them.
|
| https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...
|
| Such clauses are commonly found in social media where users can
| upload content. Think of imgur, instagam, reddit, etc. OpenAI
| might buy reddit, and declare ChatGPT a product of the reddit
| service, then all discussions on reddit could be used for the
| training of ChatGPT... while open models can't access the data.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > In Github's case for example, Github's TOS already includes
| a clause that if you upload code there, you grant Github a
| license to use the content to run Github's services... and
| copilot is one of them.
|
| You can't grant permission for something you don't own.
| Uploading a copy of a GPLed work to GitHub does not grant
| GitHub permission to ignore the GPL. (It _might_ grant GitHub
| permission to ignore _your_ copyrights in that work, _maybe_
| , though it seems like a stretch to argue that "run Github's
| services" includes "give other people derivative works of all
| your code"; arguably that ought to be too broad for a
| contract of adhesion. There's case law about what you can and
| can't do in a unilaterally imposed contract such as a ToS; a
| ToS can't say "you owe us $100 if you browse more than twelve
| pages" either, and codebases can be worth far more than
| that.)
|
| If GitHub started saying "one of our services is to give
| people access to copies of your code with the licenses and
| copyright notices removed", the GitHub ToS wouldn't suddenly
| make it acceptable to run that "service".
|
| But I agree with part of your underlying point. _All_ AI
| models should respect Open Source licenses. It 's a problem
| if some try to work around that.
| est31 wrote:
| Fair points, but note that Microsoft charges a lot more
| than $100 to inspect the source code of Windows (but it is
| available, at least to really large customers, think
| governments).
| grumbel wrote:
| > I sincerely hope that one of the many court cases produces a
| verdict that says AI-generated code is, in fact, subject to the
| licenses of the inputs.
|
| Such a strict interpretation of copyright would kill Open
| Source, as any attempt at reverse engineering would be
| disallowed by that.
|
| Furthermore it would mean that only big and rich companies
| would have AI, as they can do behind closest doors whatever
| they want with AI, Open Source licenses only cover
| redistribution after all, which internal use doesn't fall
| under. Meanwhile any attempt at publicly available open AI
| models would instantly get killed by copyright claims.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > Such a strict interpretation of copyright would kill Open
| Source, as any attempt at reverse engineering would be
| disallowed by that.
|
| Not at all, for multiple reasons. Reverse-engineering
| _already_ has that problem: if any of the people who do the
| reverse engineering also work on the code, it 's entirely
| possible for some of the reverse-engineered code to end up in
| the new code, making the new code a derivative work of the
| original. There are standard ways to carefully avoid that:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
|
| (Also, reverse engineering is a small fraction of Open
| Source.)
|
| > Furthermore it would mean that only big and rich companies
| would have AI, as they can do behind closest doors whatever
| they want with AI, Open Source licenses only cover
| redistribution after all, which internal use doesn't fall
| under.
|
| The moment they distribute anything written by the model, the
| same problem applies. And if they _don 't_ redistribute
| anything written by the model, then sure, they can do
| anything they like, just as you're free to internally combine
| GPLed and proprietary code if you never ship the result.
| (Note, though, that many companies have figured out it's a
| bad idea to do this, because it creates a combination you
| _cannot_ ever distribute, and circumstances might change in
| the future to lead you to want to distribute it.)
|
| > Meanwhile any attempt at publicly available open AI models
| would instantly get killed by copyright claims.
|
| No, they just need to actually pay attention to the licenses
| of work they train on. Train on permissively licensed code,
| document every codebase trained on, and record the licenses
| and copyright notices.
| kouteiheika wrote:
| > I sincerely hope that one of the many court cases produces a
| verdict that says AI-generated code is, in fact, subject to the
| licenses of the inputs. Then there will be a lot of screaming
| and wailing, as people go "but how can we train AI if we have
| to respect licenses?!". And then people will figure out how to
| actually respect Open Source software licenses (and, for that
| matter, proprietary ones).
|
| I think this is an incredibly short sighted take.
|
| Training a modern state-of-art LLM needs terabytes of training
| data. It's probably not going to be practically possible to
| actually license this much data. And even if we assume it will
| be then the only entities which will be able to do it are the
| world's biggest corporations.
|
| So if AI models are a derivative work of their training data
| then as a consequence the whole field will mostly die
| overnight, with perhaps only a few of the world's richest
| corporations being able to play with this space.
|
| I'm sure you're aware of the slew of really cool open/free
| models that are out there, which you can download today and
| play with on your local machine. Like Stable Diffusion. It was
| trained on all rights reserved data. Now it's going to be
| illegal. Or OpenLLaMA/Falcon/MPT/etc. Also trained on all
| rights reserved data. Illegal too.
|
| Have you heard about the Pile dataset[1]? It's the most popular
| open dataset for training LLMs, and essentially _every_ non-
| proprietary LLM is trained on it, or on parts of it. Do you
| know that it contains 100GB of all-rights-reserved pirated
| ebooks? If AI models are a derivative work of their training
| data then all of those models are now illegal.
|
| [1] - https://pile.eleuther.ai
|
| This would completely kill any chance of having good free/open
| models. Sure, you could then grab all of GPL'd code, train a
| model on that, and maybe have a decent working GPL'd model that
| can emit GPL'd code. There might be enough data for that. But
| that's it. What about other kinds of models? Image generation,
| chat bots, personal assistants, story writers, etc. There's
| just not enough freely licensed data (and probably will never
| be) to train those.
|
| We _must_ democratize this space. It 's already insanely
| expensive to train state-of-art LLMs; we don't need to make it
| even more expensive. It's not going to stop OpenAI. It's not
| going to stop Microsoft. They'll figure it out. What it'll stop
| is everyone else, and will make this technology completely out
| of reach for everyone who isn't an insanely rich multinational
| corporation.
|
| With all due respect, to everyone who's complaining about
| Microsoft using your code to train Codex, I'll be blunt: you're
| advocating for collectively shooting all of us in the foot. I
| don't want to live in a dystopia where only huge corporations
| will have access to cutting edge AI technology, so _please_
| stop pushing in that direction by advocating for more draconian
| copyright just because you 're butthurt that Microsoft/OpenAI
| used your code as training data without asking for permission.
|
| Big corporations are not the only people doing this; the little
| guys (e.g. EleutherAI) who release free and open source models
| do it too. If you try to block the big bad evil corporation
| from doing it you'll also block the little guys. The major
| difference here is that the little guys will get completely
| screwed by this while the corporation has the cash to try to
| get around it.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| I'm familiar with the widespread practices of how AI models
| are trained, yes. There's an implicit "and we must be able to
| do this" in your argument, which is not at all evident. "But
| what about AI" is not an argument that suddenly it's OK to
| violate Open Source licenses or the licenses of small
| copyright holders (e.g. of online posts).
|
| I'm well aware that this is widely done by large and small
| entities alike; I'm not _just_ concerned about the practices
| of large companies, I 'm also concerned about small ones, and
| individuals.
|
| This is not "more draconian" copyright; this is not a
| _change_ to copyright at all. This is the _same_ copyright we
| already have, equally enforced for _all_ copyright holders,
| large and small. You want to "democratize" this space? Get
| rid of copyright, and a _lot_ of things become better and
| easier, not just AI.
|
| _I_ don 't want the dystopia where copyright still exists
| for large publishers and studios and proprietary software
| companies to prevent sharing and remixing things, but at the
| same time all the small and Open Source entities don't get to
| set their own terms because AI will just remix them away.
|
| Do you think you'd get away with training an AI on a bunch of
| animated Disney movies, and asking it to generate new images
| in that style, and using the result in commercial endeavors?
| Or is it just the myriad of smaller copyright holders, like
| independent artists, that you're comfortable stepping on?
|
| > It's not going to stop OpenAI. It's not going to stop
| Microsoft. They'll figure it out.
|
| Will they? If there isn't, in fact, a legal solution, they're
| not in any better shape than anyone else. If anything,
| they're in a _worse_ position, because they have deep pockets
| for potential lawsuits, while non-commercial efforts tend to
| not be interesting targets to sue (at most, they get shut
| down, and others pop up in their place).
|
| Question your assumptions about the world that results from
| requiring AI to respect Open Source licensing and other small
| copyright holders such as independent artists or online
| comment/story authors. It's not a corporate dystopia. It's a
| level playing field.
| kouteiheika wrote:
| > I'm familiar with the widespread practices of how AI
| models are trained, yes. There's an implicit "and we must
| be able to do this" in your argument, which is not at all
| evident.
|
| Maybe it's not evident to non-practitioners in the field,
| but to every serious practitioner it is obvious that you
| can't train a state-of-art model without a lot of data (at
| least right now without some colossal breakthrough), and
| that actually licensing that data is not really practical
| (because you need terabytes of it), and it's _definitely_
| going to be impossible for anyone who isn 't a
| megacorporation.
|
| Can we agree on this point? If not can you please explain
| how do you think that e.g. a single individual like me will
| be able to train e.g. an image diffusion model (so I'd need
| a few terabytes of images) if I have to respect the
| licenses of every image in the training set?
|
| Okay, so I hope we can agree that it won't be possible? So
| now here's the question: do we want such AI models to
| exist, or do we want to make them illegal (and maybe
| available only to huge megacorporations)? These are our
| only two choices, which logically follow from the
| requirement that we need a lot of data for training.
|
| What I'm advocating for is that we should allow such models
| and that they're beneficial to us as a society, hence the
| "and we must be able to do this" in my argument.
|
| I'm starting with the assumption that I want these models
| to exists and that everyone should have access to them, and
| then go backwards from that. What you're starting with is
| the assumption that the training data copyright should be
| respected, and you're going backwards from that. But these
| two graphs are not connected, which is why we can't agree.
|
| Or in other words, what you're (indirectly) advocating for
| is to make those large models effectively illegal. This is,
| of course, a valid stance, and if you want to take it then
| you're free to do so. But that's _objectively_ what you 're
| proposing in practice, and personally I disagree with it.
|
| > Do you think you'd get away with training an AI on a
| bunch of animated Disney movies, and asking it to generate
| new images in that style, and using the result in
| commercial endeavors?
|
| Yes.
|
| Just the same as if I'd draw an image in the style of an
| animated Disney movie by hand.
|
| In both cases I'll be sued for trademark infringement if
| the image's of the Mickey Mouse though.
|
| In many cases the current "inequality" of how law is
| applied to individuals and to megacorporations has little
| to do with the law itself, and everything to do with how
| rich the megacorporation is. Try to set up an apple orchard
| and pick an apple as a logo[1] and tell me how it goes. The
| law explicitly states that another company, say one which
| produces computers instead of actual apples, has no merit
| here, but alas they have deep pockets, so here we are.
|
| [1]: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/apple-vs-apples-
| trademark-ba...
|
| > Question your assumptions about the world that results
| from requiring AI to respect Open Source licensing and
| other small copyright holders such as independent artists
| or online comment/story authors. It's not a corporate
| dystopia. It's a level playing field.
|
| Well, let's see, for the sake of argument let's assume that
| the current widely believed legal status quo is true. (That
| is, that you can train a model on any data regardless of
| copyright because it's fair use. Although in my country
| that's _explicitly_ allowed by law so here we don 't have
| to assume anything.) Right now OpenAI can scrape 1TB of
| data off the Internet and legally train a model. I can also
| scrape 1TB of data off the Internet and legally train a
| model. And it can be _any_ data, not just open source
| programs and content produced by small copyright holders.
| Is this not a level playing field?
|
| Are you seriously suggesting that having to pay billions of
| dollars to license the training data necessary to train a
| model is a level playing field? I guess if nobody will be
| able to do it then it will be, in a way, a level playing
| field; I just fear that entities with enough money will be
| able to license enough data anyway and then the rest of us
| will end up with nothing.
| spongebobstoes wrote:
| I completely agree that expanding copyright only hurts us
| all. The big companies will be able to work around it.
|
| I think if anything, this helps to demonstrate the absurdity
| of ancient copyright law in our modern world. I would rather
| move in the direction of abolishing copyright rather than in
| the direction of strengthening it.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > I completely agree that expanding copyright only hurts us
| all.
|
| As do I, but this is not expanding copyright. This is
| saying that as long as copyright _exists_ , AI model
| training has to respect it too, and can't be a laundering
| operation for license violations. Otherwise, you're giving
| companies building AI extra _permission_ to ignore Open
| Source licenses and small copyright holders (e.g.
| independent artists, authors of stories /comments/text on
| the Internet), which is an asymmetry _in favor_ of
| companies with the resources to train huge models.
|
| I'm all for abolishing copyright, and I think it _is_
| absurd. What I 'm against here is the asymmetry of keeping
| all the harms of copyright around while letting AI training
| violate it.
| kouteiheika wrote:
| > Otherwise, you're giving companies building AI extra
| permission to ignore Open Source licenses and small
| copyright holders (e.g. independent artists, authors of
| stories/comments/text on the Internet), which is an
| asymmetry in favor of companies with the resources to
| train huge models.
|
| From my experience this is incorrect; it's not an
| asymmetry in favor of companies; if anything it's an
| asymmetry in favor of small players.
|
| How do I know? Because I myself am one of those small
| players, and because I train machine learning models
| myself. Not huge ones of course, but ones which need data
| in the range of e.g. 10~25GB range. As an individual it
| would be completely impossible to explicitly license this
| data for training (most of which is owned, mind you, by
| huge corporations!), while a corporation wouldn't have a
| problem with it.
|
| > What I'm against here is the asymmetry of keeping all
| the harms of copyright around while letting AI training
| violate it.
|
| This is fair enough. But please beware that the blast
| radius of entities your proposal would harm is not
| limited to huge corporations. I would prefer to
| fundamentally reduce the scope of copyright too instead
| of carving out special cases for AI training, but we both
| know that isn't going to happen.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| And the blast radius of AIs continuing to violate
| licenses is not limited to large companies either, it's
| harming Open Source developers, independent artists and
| authors, and similar.
| cornholio wrote:
| The existing licenses cover AI training just fine, what we lack
| is sufficient legal precedent and enforcement. An AI product -
| more specifically, the model weights - is a derivative work of
| the original works used for training; AI training is a process of
| algorithmic compression of the originals.
|
| Therefore, the resulting model should abide by all the license
| requirements imposed on the original - for example, if the model
| is trained on GPL code and can generate code, then any binary
| distribution should also be freely available for derivation in
| source format, and that includes all the algorithmically
| compressed training material (weights), which has become part of
| the model. If the source is AGPL, then that service cannot be
| made available on a website without disclosing said source and
| respective model weights.
|
| Any other interpretation of the nature of copyright - which by
| definition, only covers human produced material - is just a
| variant of the proverbial "man that can't understand something
| because their paycheck depends upon them not understanding".
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > The existing licenses cover AI training just fine [...] An AI
| product - more specifically, the model weights - is a
| derivative work of the original works used for training
|
| The presumption is entirely debatable. A human is not
| considered derivative work of the original works they used for
| training.
|
| > Any other interpretation of the nature of copyright [...]
| which by definition, only covers human produced material
|
| Maybe copyright needs to leave the 1980s and evolve to deal
| with AI too? Maybe you do, too?
| pessimizer wrote:
| > A human is not considered derivative work of the original
| works they used for training.
|
| No one has forced you to use humans as a comparison. A human
| is a citizen with other rights, and can own its own
| copyrights. Yet, you can still sue one for singing a song in
| front of other people. There were years of cinema that were
| distorted by the inability to have characters sing "Happy
| Birthday" to each other.
|
| edit: Suddenly, fair use now covers the ability to reproduce
| copyrighted material almost verbatim, but only when the new
| method to do so takes tens of millions of dollars of computer
| time to take advantage of.
| circuit10 wrote:
| AI models don't always copy things verbatim. Clearly if
| they do and then you use that it's copyright infringement,
| but Google isn't illegal just because you can search for
| code that's under a license agreement (not that AI models
| are search engines). Then again, you can't download
| Google's index, but you also can't for many AI models...
| there's a lot of nuance here, I don't think it's clear one
| way or the other
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| A human is not copyrightable.
|
| And copyright is doing its job just fine in this context; AI
| training committing Open Source license violations en masse
| is the problem here.
|
| I'm all for copyright becoming substantially weaker or
| ceasing to exist, at which point AI training and lots of
| other things gets easier. As long as it _does_ exist,
| however, AI training must respect it, and not become a
| copyright-violation laundering mechanism.
| hulitu wrote:
| It deals with "AI" just fine. But not in the way Microsoft,
| for the extinguish phase, wants.
| alexvoda wrote:
| What about weak copyleft licenses like the LGPL?
|
| I think they are particularly vulnerable to this scenario.
|
| Also I think in general that software licenses were designed
| ignoring the isomorphism of code. Code can be data depending on
| use.
| mym1990 wrote:
| So if I lay out 10 images from an artist, or a variety of
| artists, and create a work, by hand, in a similar style, should
| I abide by your similar thought pattern?
|
| Almost all art is influenced by previous works, the only
| difference here is that the time horizon for a computer
| generating similar outputs is much, much shorter.
| pxoe wrote:
| the way a program works isn't actually how a human would
| work, and those (false) equivalences, don't make the way a
| program works to be excusable. anyway, it doesn't matter,
| it's just distracting bullshit ultimately.
|
| meanwhile, a program operates in a series of very concrete
| tangible operations over bytes.
|
| was data of original works downloaded? yep. was that data
| processed? yep. was some kind of output based on that data
| created? yep. so what is that data, if not a derivative? and
| then, if some other data was created based on that derivative
| data - damn, that's a derivative of a derivative. is it not?
| stale2002 wrote:
| > was data of original works downloaded? yep. was that data
| processed? yep. was some kind of output based on that data
| created? yep. so what is that data, if not a derivative?
|
| If I have a program that downloads an image, process the
| image, and simply returns a yes or no, single byte
| information, of if the image is blue or not, are you really
| going to call that derivative work?
|
| Because this "is it blue" program does ever single thing
| that you brought up here.
|
| And clearly my "is it blue" program is not derivative work.
| pxoe wrote:
| program may not be, results could very much be. they are
| based on something. "but what does the word "derived"
| mean anyway" lol. i don't know, if you really don't want
| for those 'results' to be 'derived' from something and be
| a 'derivative', do a coin flip and just pick that random
| result.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > results could very much be.
|
| So you are actually going to argue that the one single
| bit of information, that says "yes or no, is this image
| blue" is derivative work?
|
| Really? Clearly is not. It is clearly the case that if a
| program outputs if an image is blue or not, with a yes or
| no answer, that this yes/no answer is not derivative
| work.
|
| You will not lose a lawsuit for outputting if an image is
| blue.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Are you pretending to understand how human creativity
| works? Your last 1-3 sentences is literally what a human
| does, in some situations, or in many situations early in
| the development process of a style. If this was not the
| case, art school would not be the study of previous artists
| and styles, it would purely be the study of the physical
| world.
| pxoe wrote:
| there's "literally what human does (and that's why it's
| fine for AI to peruse all of your data, don't even
| question it lol)" (which is bullshit. cute for a sales
| pitch, but it will always fundamentally be bullshit), and
| then there are actual ways program work. and these two
| are pretty much disconnected, no matter how many
| 'analogies and parallels' are attempted to be drawn.
| we're not computers, and computers are not humans.
|
| if a person were to "do these steps" and "do creativity"
| in that way - as in, "downloading something" and doing a
| bunch of quantifiable, traceable operations, as part of
| their process - well, shit, that's still gonna be just
| the computer part of it. not 'human creativity' part.
| still. if there was that 'human creativity' in the loop
| of 'downloading and perusing a bunch of IP in a traceable
| way', it's the latter that would be questionable - and
| useable, for questioning of, for investigation, for
| lawyers. and unfortunately, computers and their
| "creativity" work pretty much entirely in that
| "quantifiable and traceable" way. the 'human creativity'
| could be chalked up to 'well i don't know'. 'program
| "creativity"' - very definite 'an executable did this and
| this, and spit this out'. and if it reproduces well,
| 'here's a memory snapshot, a complete step-by-step of the
| process'. can't do that with brains. very doable for
| software. it could be just a bunch of incomprehensible
| stuff, but it'd still be a complete byte dump.
|
| "it would purely be the study of the physical world" -
| well, it's still a very much existing option. would it
| make a difference if that was 'the only option available'
| or just 'one of the ways'? and AI studies the real world
| as well, through photographs, and 3d scans, and so on.
| art is influenced, and those aspects can be pointed out
| across artists, with some artists readily admitting, 'oh,
| I was inspired by so-and-so'. people do all kinds of shit
| with art, and get told off or even sued. art can be
| forged, with people making something in style and trying
| to pass it as a work of different artist and sell it.
| which can be a crime. is that surprising? and AI services
| try to sell their outputs as well.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| Imo, this kind of draconian interpretation will only lead to
| China being the world leader in ai (a country who has a history
| of not really respecting ip and copyright).
|
| I believe Japan has actually passed a very permissive ai law
| basically allowing AI's to learn off copyrighted content as
| well. But any country that essentially bans AI learning in this
| way will simply fall behind.
| DropInIn wrote:
| It reads like your saying that if AI reads the source for a
| Floss project then the AI has to make any code it generates
| Floss as well...
|
| Which is like saying that if a person has ever read floss
| source then all projects they make must be floss...
|
| Which we all know is absurd.
|
| If your want to apply extant rules to AI then you have to
| actually think more than just superficially about the
| application bof the rule.
| JamesLeonis wrote:
| You are absolutely right, and all of these commentators trying
| to counter you would fall apart if CoPilot was found using
| proprietary software in its training data. Its no wonder all
| these AI companies are playing fast-and-loose with licensing.
| zarzavat wrote:
| A copyright license allows you to grant others permission to
| use your work, in situations where copyright law has given you
| an exclusive right.
|
| A license cannot give you more rights than you started with.
|
| Does copyright law give you the exclusive right to train a
| neural network with your work? This question is unresolved, and
| at least a significant number of people think that it is fair
| use, drawing analogies with search engine indexing whereby
| Google is permitted to copy websites for the purpose of
| creating an index to be searched. Yes, even if the website
| contains GPL code.
|
| The GPL is simply a list of conditions, that if followed, allow
| someone to legally use a work that they weren't previously
| permitted to use. If they have another route to using the work
| legally then they need not follow the conditions in the GPL.
| slim wrote:
| > Does copyright law give you the exclusive right to train a
| neural network with your work?
|
| Does copyright law give openai the exclusive right to exploit
| the output of ai trained on my data ? (the model, the
| weights, etc..)
| regularfry wrote:
| There's a core question here: _can the AI regurgitate your
| data_? If it can, the AI can be said to be copying what it
| was trained on (ergo copyright is a factor). If it cannot,
| it 's hard to see how _copy_ right comes into it. How it's
| trained shouldn't come into it.
| blowski wrote:
| This is the problem, there is no easy analogy. If I've
| learned how to code from an open source course, I don't
| breach copyright every time I write code in my career. If
| I clone the course, just replacing some of the examples
| and using synonyms then I probably have. ChatGPT is
| somewhere between these extremes and it's unclear what
| the principle should be.
|
| Perhaps it's like learning to play guitar by watching
| other guitarists, then releasing songs in the same genre.
| regularfry wrote:
| I'm not making an analogy. It's a literal question.
|
| If I crank noise through a bunch of matrices and churn
| out the Mona Lisa because the Mona Lisa was in the
| training data, I've not painted the Mona Lisa. I've
| reproduced someone else's work through a fairly tortuous
| mathematical route.
|
| The matrices don't have agency, they can't lay claim to
| anything.
|
| Although I should probably say, for completeness: the
| matrices don't have agency _yet_.
| rfw300 wrote:
| That's because you're a human. Copyright and fair use law
| was built for people, and letting AI models have the same
| privileges will lead to worse outcomes. What's so wrong
| about saying that it isn't fair use for a machine to
| learn from your copyrighted data?
| zarzavat wrote:
| The exclusive right? No. The right? Possibly.
|
| Since no court has ruled on the latter question yet, let's
| do a choose your own adventure:
|
| Say that OpenAI trained a language _detection_ model. The
| output of the model is simply a single vector that
| indicates which language that the input was written in.
| During training they use your copyrighted code as training
| data.
|
| Would you consider _that_ to be infringement?
|
| 1) If yes: consider instead of using fancy and scary
| mathematics like "neural networks", it is just tabulating
| and counting keywords. Is it still infringement?
|
| 1) If no: what's different about a neural network that
| outputs code, vs a neural network that outputs a single
| vector? Perhaps it's the output that is infringing, not the
| weights?
| slim wrote:
| I think neither I nor openai should have any exclusive
| rights and that would lead to the best outcome for
| humanity. the problem is sam altman is already lobbying
| to restrict access to ai (which maybe indicates that his
| lawyers think that they might not have exclusive rights)
| regularfry wrote:
| He's lobbying to build a moat around assets he already
| has. Rights don't come into it.
| dweinus wrote:
| > consider instead of using fancy and scary mathematics
| like "neural networks", it is just tabulating and
| counting keywords. Is it still infringement?
|
| I've seen this analogy before. A NN, especially an LLM,
| is very different in method and outcome. If counting
| keywords allowed me to replicate copyrighted material, it
| would probably not be fair use. IANAL, but I imagine the
| fact that a NN can replicate or compete with the original
| work makes a difference.
| [deleted]
| saagarjha wrote:
| Seems similar to, say, a device that does radiocarbon
| dating of a painting and prints the result and one that
| takes a picture?
| faangsticle wrote:
| People say lots of things, especially when they see ways to
| exploit others so they can make money. Let this be a reminder
| that copyright exists to protect the rich, not the artists.
| belorn wrote:
| It all depend on what analogies we use. If we see the
| algorithmic compression to be similar to converting a 4k
| video to a lower resolution, the legal system seems to view
| it as a copy despite it being a lossy compression.
|
| If we take the input data of a average website and look at
| the data inside a search engine indexing, it will likely
| contain more bits from the original than converting a 4k
| video down to a 144p, youtubes smallest video format. We do
| however view the index to be fair use while the 144p video to
| be similar enough to the original to be considered a copy.
|
| Those kinds of discussion always reminds me of early
| discussions around freenet. A file get encrypted and then
| split into 32KiB files. Multiple files can share identical
| 32KiB blocks, which means no single block can be definitively
| owned by a single file. The argument was then that this
| bypassed copyright law, since just copying blocks would not
| be proof of copying. This question is also unresolved, but
| given the outcome of all file sharing sites in the past, it
| is doubtful that it would succeed in convincing a judge.
|
| In the end that is what this is coming down to. What would a
| judge/jury say. All I know for certain is that the film and
| music industry will never accept an model that is trained on
| their products and that directly competes with their products
| by producing substitutes that are close or seemingly
| identical to the originals. They will not care a second if
| its similar to a search engine indexing. Unstable Diffusion
| is also a perfect example where politicians will likely do
| something if large companies start to generate money by
| producing porn that is trained on famous politicians, actors
| and celebrates.
| zarzavat wrote:
| The difference is whether the use is transformative. In the
| case of compression, it's clearly not transformative,
| because compressing an image just represents it in a
| different way.
|
| For a search index, it clearly is transformative. A piece
| of code and a search index are night and day different in
| every way.
|
| For a neural network it's tricky and that's why it's a gray
| area. On the one hand, a neural network _looks_
| transformative because with a neural network I can do many
| different things that don't involve any verbatim copying of
| the original work. If I ask ChatGPT to "write me a haiku
| about fishing on Mars" it's not like it's trawling through
| a database of copyrighted haikus and copying one someone
| already wrote about fishing on Mars. On the other hand
| generative NNs do _sometimes_ spit out copyrighted works
| verbatim, which does show that there are pieces of
| copyrighted works inside - but that doesn't mean that the
| whole thing is automatically infringing, for example courts
| could decide that just _particular_ outputs are infringing
| whereas the weights and other outputs are not.
| belorn wrote:
| A fun experiment is to take a 4k video and convert it to
| 144p, and then use an AI upscale back to 4k. The result
| is quite odd, but still very much recognizable of the
| original video, but with a lot of artifacts and
| hallucinations.
|
| In some ways it is very transformative. We can easily
| identify the original from the new work, and the new work
| will have features and aspects which the original don't.
| From a fair use perspective the big question is if we
| want commercial competition between them. I suspect the
| answer would be no.
|
| We could see courts decide that particular outputs are
| infringing. This was the defense used by the piratebay
| founders. There were Linux distros on the website, and
| users had the choice over what they downloaded. I would
| expect many more lawsuits if the courts came to that
| decision.
| cornholio wrote:
| You are perhaps conflating the model with its output. The
| output is the result of a human initiated action (for
| example, a prompt), that can result in anything ranging
| from a completely new work, not resembling any in the
| training set, up to a verbatim reproduction of a training
| work. Depending on the specific circumstances, that
| output might be a sufficiently transformative derivation,
| an infringing copy, or a non-derivative, fully
| independent work.
|
| The model itself however is always a derivative work,
| it's an algorithmic representation of the training set,
| so it must abide by the license terms of that material.
|
| For example, a karaoke machine might include public
| domain songs and you could use it legally for public
| performances of those works. But if the machine also
| includes unlicensed copyrighted songs, then the machine
| maker is guilty of copyright infringement for those
| tracks, even if a buyer of the machine can choose a non-
| infringing work. The ability to produce infringing works
| is sufficient to taint is as a whole, even if some user
| might not like those tracks and prefer the public domain
| tracks.
|
| In the same way, an AI machine is tainted by unlicensed
| training data, even if it can be used in a non-infringing
| manner; the owner of the machine cannot operate it and
| offer its services with disregard to the ownership of the
| source material on which his machine is in fact based on.
| Conversely, even if some holder might grant the AI shop a
| license to use their material for training, that does not
| also automatically grant the users of the AI tool a
| license to create derivative works of those originals.
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| What if the whole pipeline (scraping for training, the training
| itself, model distribution, and use to generate derivative
| works) is found to be a fair use (at least in American law)?
| Licenses wouldn't mean anything at that point, since it's
| because of copyright that they can make you accept them in the
| first place
| noobermin wrote:
| Then every employee of openai should scrape the weights of
| GPT-4 and train their own neural nets. That would not be a
| derivative work and also be free use under this logic.
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| Obviously this isn't tested in the courts (for now) but it
| is my opinion that model weights aren't even copyrightable.
| zarzavat wrote:
| I don't think we need a court case for that. Model
| weights aren't copyrightable by the trainer in the US.
| Copyright only protects works of human authorship, and
| training a network is not authorship.
|
| If the model weights encode other copyrighted works
| literally enough then they _may_ be copyrighted by the
| author(s) of the works, _that_ is a gray area. But the
| training process itself is not authorship and doesn't
| confer copyright.
| [deleted]
| banana_feather wrote:
| That's not how fair use works. This kind of use would
| facially fail three of the factors for fair use; it's not
| be transformative, it copies the original work in its
| entirety, and it harms the commercial market for the
| original work.
| wnkrshm wrote:
| how much do the weights have to change for it to be
| transformative? Edit: you arrive at the same question as
| taking an image with img2img and running it through a
| diffusion variant - keeping the composition, colors etc.
| but no the details
| banana_feather wrote:
| Much of the case law about the "transformative" factor
| focuses on "new meaning or expression", but it's about
| visual art, which is generally very difficult to reason
| about w.r.t. copyright. I think the example to look to
| for technology is Authors Guild v. Google, where
| "transformative" is more about non-expressive purpose,
| and it was considered transformative to copy a bunch of
| books to produce a search functionality, since the search
| functionality (which only displayed snippets) was a
| transformative purpose compared to the underlying
| creative expression in the books.
| bhickey wrote:
| Fair use doesn't enter into it if weights aren't
| copyrightable. They're machine generated by stochastic
| gradient descent. There's no human hand setting the
| weights. We won't know until something ends up before the
| USCO.
| schoen wrote:
| It seems credible to me to suggest that the model weights
| are a trade secret, but aren't copyrightable. There's lots
| of stuff that could be in that category for other
| companies.
|
| The employees would still have a contractual responsibility
| about their use of the model weights.
| tpmoney wrote:
| >An AI product - more specifically, the model weights - is a
| derivative work of the original works used for training; AI
| training is a process of algorithmic compression of the
| originals.
|
| I'm not so sure this is as obvious a conclusion as you think.
| Imagine for a moment an AI OCR program. If one goes to their
| local library and scans all the books there to generate the
| models used to OCR text, does that make the OCR model and
| application derivative works of the books? Does copyright give
| Tolkien's estate the right to prevent the distribution of AI
| based OCR if a published copy of The Hobbit was used in
| creating the model? Certainly with the right inputs, the model
| can be used to generate a verbatim copy of the work it was
| trained on, but is that sufficient to say that your OCR model
| is just an "algorithmic compression" of these books?
| mrbabbage wrote:
| I totally agree that it's not obvious that an ML model is a
| derivative work. the language of the Copyright Act uses
| "recast, transformed, or adapted" to describe derivative
| works, and a pile of model weights isn't clearly that, IMO. I
| think it's fair to say that _inferences_ directly replicating
| the creative and expressive elements (because factual
| information isn 't copyrightable!) of a copyrighted work
| infringe. but I don't think it's obvious that the _model
| itself_ does.
|
| > If one goes to their local library and scans all the books
| there to generate the models used to OCR text, does that make
| the OCR model and application derivative works of the books?
|
| there is a court case [1] addressing an even more infringing
| use case: scanning and OCR'ing books to produce a searchable
| database. that case turned on fair use, however, and not
| whether the database was a derivative work.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Goog
| le,....
| initplus wrote:
| This analogy isn't quite right, it's more like if you trained
| a font generation AI using commercially licensed fonts, or
| trained a literature generating model on samples of
| copyrighted fiction.
|
| The part that matters is that the model is being trained on
| the copyrighted features of the input, not the parts the
| copyright holder doesn't care about.
| regularfry wrote:
| What it's trained on shouldn't matter _at all_. What should
| matter is what it 's capable of outputting, and whether
| that covers works in which someone holds copyright - so
| something regurgitating its input would be problematic, but
| something not capable of producing the same format of
| output as its input should be in the clear. Otherwise
| you're talking about something that shouldn't come under
| copyright law.
| jl6 wrote:
| It's not clear to me that it's any easier to judge this than in
| human cases of "inspiration vs infringement". What part of the
| model weights can a lawyer point to and say "this bit clearly
| incorporates a substantial portion of my client's work".
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| I feel this argument is weakened by the fact that no one
| training these models feeds their own proprietary source code
| into publicly available models.
|
| Practically speaking I feel this is a strong hint that some
| degree of copyright laundering is taking place.
| circuit10 wrote:
| You also wouldn't see them giving their code to people
| learning to code to read and learn from, but that doesn't
| necessarily mean that learning from something violates
| copyright. It seems like a bit of a grey area where the
| distinction is between learning and using it directly
| lelanthran wrote:
| > You also wouldn't see them giving their code to people
| learning to code to read and learn from,
|
| Actually, we _do_ see them do exactly that. Microsoft is
| ahppy to have a shared-source licence that gives away
| much of the Windows source code to universities.
|
| The fact that they don't want to train their models on it
| says a lot.
|
| If, as they claim, learning from existing materials does
| nto devalue those materials in any way, they'd chuck the
| entirety of the Windows source code at the LLM for
| training purposes.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I don't think that suggests copyright infringement, more
| that you could do something like "request from the Amazon
| internal admin page url" and the AI will generate you the
| correct link. Or tell you other info which is private. The
| AI hasn't copied anything, but it does know secrets and can
| use them.
|
| This does not matter for open source since anyone can see
| this info already.
| smallnix wrote:
| > CodeWhisperer is a generative AI service powered by a
| foundation model trained on various data sources, including
| Amazon and open-source code.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| > no one training these models feeds their own proprietary
| source code into publicly available models
|
| You are presupposing that the company's own code would
| somehow be a massive boon for the model, resulting in lower
| loss overall.
|
| In reality, it would skew the model towards that company's
| "mode" of coding which isn't what "normal" programmers
| expect. In fact, they are most likely to expect the coding
| styles they learned from, and that is most likely to be
| found in public examples (GitHub, StackOverflow, textbooks,
| Reddit, etc.)
|
| This argument is so silly to me. Anyone who has worked at a
| large enterprise, whether it's Google, Amazon or Target,
| knows that company code is effectively guaranteed to be
| extremely hard to work with. This happens for
| organizational reasons and really the best thing to do
| about it is admit that it's happening rather than pretend
| it's all perfect.
| brvsft wrote:
| The reason they don't train the model on their code is
| specifically because they don't want it accidentally
| spitting out snippets of their proprietary code, not
| because the code is "extremely hard to work with."
|
| I'm amazed you called that argument silly while
| countering with this.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| It is because of both and I agree that your reasoning
| takes clear precedence. I was merely pointing out the
| good faith position that "even if they wanted to, they
| wouldn't do it".
|
| That definitely wasn't very clear from my comment
| however.
| faangsticle wrote:
| Any of them unless the company who produced it can prove they
| behaved and only slurped up data they have the rights to.
| tensor wrote:
| With your definition you can kiss spam filters, search engines,
| and recommendation engines goodbye.
|
| Here is a very simple case. A spammer sends you text that has
| attached a license saying you may not use this text for any
| purpose other than to be read by a human. You flag this as spam
| and your spam filter updates its model weights using this text.
| Suddenly you are not allowed to do anything with your spam
| filter model weights other than read the weights yourself.
| eqvinox wrote:
| > A spammer sends you text that has attached a license
|
| You have not chosen to receive that text, and therefore you
| are not bound by that license. It may mathematically seem to
| not make a difference, but legally it does.
| tensor wrote:
| That seems like a stretch. I mean if someone just put some
| source code in your mailbox you don't suddenly get the
| rights to use it however you want right?
| eqvinox wrote:
| > I mean if someone just put some source code in your
| mailbox you don't suddenly get the rights to use it
| however you want right?
|
| You're applying way too much logic to a legal problem. If
| you ask a lawyer or judge about this, their first
| question will be "what intent was that source code mailed
| under, and were you the intended recipient?"
|
| If someone mails you a bunch of source code by accident,
| and it's reasonably obvious to you that it was by
| accident (which it will frequently be, because who the
| f*ck mails source code around?), you may in fact be
| required to destroy it.
|
| On the other hand if someone mails you the same code and
| you have reason to believe their intention was to spread
| it out no strings attached, yeah, you get the rights to
| use it however you want... except if the sender didn't
| have the right to do that to begin with...
|
| P.S.: "no strings attached" is also something that is
| impossible in some jurisdictions, since what you're doing
| might be required to be a contract of some kind, and
| contracts require bidirectional considerations. But at
| this point you really need a lawyer to explain the actual
| situation...
|
| P.P.S.: this is like that joke about writing on a brick
| "by accepting this brick through your window, you
| indemnify the thrower against all possible charges or
| damage resulting from this brick" and then chucking the
| brick through some storefront window.
| tensor wrote:
| If we ask a lawyer they will probably cite precedence
| such as Authors Guild vs Google
| (https://towardsdatascience.com/the-most-important-
| supreme-co...) and thus this entire hypothetical
| interpretation of the legal framework is already not how
| the legal institutions see it.
|
| If the courts are to set new precedent I think it's
| important to consider all the downstream ramifications,
| and I think it's a lot more complex and challenging than
| a lot of people here seem to think. There is a lot more
| to AI than just generative neural networks. A lot of
| "boring" technology we all take for granted can be caught
| up in it.
| eqvinox wrote:
| > If we ask a lawyer they will probably cite precedence
| [...] interpretation of the legal framework is already
| not how the legal institutions see it.
|
| Well, now this is an entirely different discussion, and
| FYI "precedence" is only a thing in half of the world's
| legal systems. Specifically, the common law (English)
| half. The other half, civil law (French) based systems,
| have no concept of "precedence"; verdicts from other
| courts have absolutely no law-like meaning. For every
| case and every judge, they are supposed to find the
| correct, applicable meaning of the laws _as written by
| the legislative_.
|
| Personally speaking, I find the "precedence" approach
| taken by English / Common Law incredibly silly -- and
| actively harmful, it intermixes two branches of power
| (legislative & judicative) that should be 100% separated.
| Judges' interpretative rulings should not have (almost)
| the same effect as the legislative passing a law.
|
| (Google "Common Law vs Civil Law" for more info.)
|
| Anyway the original argument was that you could apply
| some license-like terms onto spam mails, and for that --
| no, you very much can't. The situation for AI is, to my
| knowledge, still very muddy at this point.
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| > I find the "precedence" approach taken by English /
| Common Law incredibly silly -- and actively harmful,
| [...] Judges' interpretative rulings should not have
| (almost) the same effect as the legislative passing a
| law.
|
| Precedents are visible. They're the outcome of prior
| cases. If the people or the legislature doesn't like the
| rulings they can look at the judges' reasoning and fix
| the law, invalidating the old precedents at the same
| time.
|
| > Anyway the original argument was that you could apply
| some license-like terms onto spam mails, and for that --
| no, you very much can't.
|
| By the act of giving you the email they're implicitly
| giving you permission to do email things with it - read
| it, forward it, store it, etc. But you don't own the
| copyright and can't create and publish derivative works,
| etc.
|
| We never questioned the anti-spam use because it's
| obvious. You aren't storing data for the purpose of
| recreating the spam, you're storing details about what
| spam looks like for the purposes of recognizing more of
| it.
|
| > The situation for AI is, to my knowledge, still very
| muddy at this point.
|
| The question is if the NN weights in an AGI are
| materially different than the NN weights in a spam
| filter.
| eqvinox wrote:
| > If the people or the legislature doesn't like the
| rulings they can look at the judges' reasoning and fix
| the law,
|
| That's exactly the point. In common law, when a precedent
| is cited in a later case, it is (like a law) largely
| protected from "reasoning about". You need to involve the
| legislature to change it. In civil law, other cases are
| of course also invoked as references - but not _law-like_
| , they're just shortcuts in transferring prior reasoning,
| and fully open to challenge. Unlike laws.
|
| (But this is really off-topic here anyway.)
|
| > By the act of giving you the email they're implicitly
| giving you permission to do email things with it - read
| it, forward it, store it, etc. But you don't own the
| copyright and can't create and publish derivative works,
| etc.
|
| None of these things come about from something written
| _in_ the e-mail. They are that way because it is an
| e-mail. If you want to tack on other semantics, that 's
| an entirely different thing.
|
| > The question is if the NN weights in an AGI are
| materially different than the NN weights in a spam
| filter.
|
| No, that's completely besides the point. The question is
| whether NN weights trained on data that you received, in
| this case without any agreement, are materially different
| from NN weights trained on data that you crawled and that
| had "you may retrieve and use this data under terms XYZ"
| restrictions attached. It legally very much matters
| whether the data got thrown at you or whether you went
| looking for it on your own accord.
| tensor wrote:
| I very much disagree that you can't specify license terms
| on spam. Lawyers certainly seem to think you can, as they
| always have a huge legal blob at the bottom of their
| emails about what you can or can't do with their email.
| brightlancer wrote:
| Lawyers are trained to lie. Unless they're specifically
| prohibited from lying (such as to a judge), lawyers will
| lie if it gains them an advantage. Do you think every
| attorney who claims at a press conference, "The facts
| will vindicate my client!" is telling the truth?
|
| Even when lawyers are prohibited from lying, they are
| trained to and expected to mislead.
|
| The "confidentiality" blocks in e-mails are completely
| unenforceable, unless there is a separate contract which
| it is included under.
|
| Never trust an elf^H^H^Hlawyer.
| eqvinox wrote:
| > Lawyers certainly seem to think you can, as they always
| have a huge legal blob at the bottom of their emails
|
| The Economist doesn't seem to share your view:
| https://archive.is/1ahEz
| (https://www.economist.com/business/2011/04/07/spare-us-
| the-e...)
|
| "Spare us the e-mail yada-yada"
|
| "Automatic e-mail footers are not just annoying. They are
| legally useless"
|
| Looking at / searching around this with a wider lens, in
| some cases the footers seem to serve a function in
| clarifying the _intent_ of the mail (e.g. "this mail
| does not establish an attorney-client relationship") when
| the remainder of the mail may be unclear. But that's not
| a license or contract, that's a clarification of intent.
|
| And with this I'll take my leave from this discussion as
| it no longer feels fruitful. But Thanks for the
| interesting thought exercise!
| lelanthran wrote:
| > And with this I'll take my leave from this discussion
| as it no longer feels fruitful.
|
| You're talking to someone who's name is tensor. He's
| already nailed his flag to the mask on the issue of NN
| and ML.
|
| What outcome could you possibly expect? He's not going to
| change his mind regardless of any discussion.
| [deleted]
| lelanthran wrote:
| They won't go away, they'll just be open source.
|
| (Before you object, my assertion without evidence is just as
| good as your assertion without evidence).
| tensor wrote:
| I didn't state anything requiring evidence. I merely
| continued the logic proposed by the OP. You are fully
| capable of verifying or refuting the continuation without
| extra information.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _An AI product - more specifically, the model weights - is a
| derivative work of the original works used for training;_
|
| I don't think that's so obvious. Why would it be so, any more
| than for humans who learn from material?
|
| I mean, one might ask if your very comment here is a derivative
| work of the aggregate corpus of material you've previously read
| on the subjects of copyright, open source licensing, and AI. I
| suspect most of us would agree that it _isn 't_ so, but why
| treat the model weights of an AI so differently than the
| synaptic weights in your brain?
| cornholio wrote:
| Because copyright, and law in general, is an expression of
| the political agreement reached amongst the members of our
| society. It does not exist in the absolute, there are no
| legal principles that transcend humanity, law is a human
| creation to arbitrate our collaboration and conflicts.
|
| Therefore, in the legal sense, an algorithm does not "learn",
| despite any functional analogy you can make with human
| learning, because an algorithm is not a party to the social
| contract that established said law; its only "rights" are an
| extension of the legal right of its author/proprietor. Your
| "learning" right does not cover, for example, your tape
| player recording a performance and playing it back at later
| date to some commercial audience. You have a right to hear
| and learn the song, you can play it back from memory, but
| your tape recorder does not, it's a tool, just like your
| fancy AI machine.
|
| This will continue to hold true despite any advancements in
| AI, up to the moment when synthetic entities will acquire
| distinct legal rights.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _Therefore, in the legal sense, an algorithm does not
| "learn",_
|
| Are you saying there is actual case law / precedent
| establishing that, or is that just your personal theory? If
| the former, I'd love to see any such citations, as I was
| not aware of those developments.
|
| _Your "learning" right does not cover, for example, your
| tape player recording a performance and playing it back at
| later date to some commercial audience._
|
| That's pretty much a straw-man here. I'm not talking about
| cases where an AI reproduces an existing work exactly. That
| is problematic from a copyright standpoint for both a
| machine OR a human.
| est31 wrote:
| > You have a right to hear and learn the song, you can play
| it back from memory, but your tape recorder does not, it's
| a tool, just like your fancy AI machine.
|
| There is two different copyrights, one for the melody/text,
| and one for the recording. Sometimes they have different
| owners who fight. The most famous recent example is the
| Taylor Swift controversy I guess. She ended up re-recording
| some of her old songs so that she owns the rights to the
| new recording.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Swift_masters_controve
| r...
| cornholio wrote:
| Yes, I was talking about the copyright for the
| performance, not the underlying melody. If, for example,
| you hear a public domain folk song, you can sing it
| later, but you tape player can't, even if it "remembers"
| it just like you do, because the rendition is owned by
| its performer. The example had the purpose to clarify the
| distinction between the rights of the human listener and
| their tools, but I see based on the response it confused
| some people.
|
| To give another example, even if I can walk or run in a
| park, my bot army with a million mechanical feet that all
| behave by analogy to the human foot can't also run
| through the park. Why should it be any different in the
| case of my AI derivation machine with superhuman memory
| and derivation ability?
|
| So even if the courts find that AI training is fair use,
| and not derivation, that conclusion will not be based on
| the analogy with the way humans and machines learn. Nor
| will it preclude the writing of laws, by humans,
| explicitly redefining copyright to protect human creators
| from unlicensed AI training. The social contract is
| anthropocentric all the way down.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > You have a right to hear and learn the song, you can play
| it back from memory
|
| You do not in fact have a right to play a copyrighted song
| from memory, any more than you have a right to play a
| recording, unless you're playing it for yourself. Just like
| you don't have a right to show a movie on a DVD you bought
| to others.
| eviks wrote:
| > Why would it be so, any more than for humans who learn from
| material?
|
| Because AI isn't human, and there is no credible argument
| that it's anything close to a human, and unless you do
| establish that connection, you can't just auto-apply the
| logic/intuition we've developed for humans to AI
| circuit10 wrote:
| I think it does apply here because the point is that
| learning isn't direct copying and the knowledge you get
| from it isn't copyrightable, and AI could be the same in
| instances where it's not directly copying
| faangsticle wrote:
| Humans aren't computer programs, for one.
| pbalcer wrote:
| When you want a clean room non-GPL implementation of
| something GPL that already exists, you ask the developers not
| to look at the original. I don't see how this is any
| different.
| mindcrime wrote:
| It's completely different. You're talking about re-
| implementing a specific piece of software. And that whole
| "clean room" thing isn't an absolute anyway... that's the
| level of paranoia you engage if you want to be _super duper
| sure_ that you can 't be accused of copying the original.
|
| What I'm talking about is closer to "you fire up your IDE
| (or Emacs) right now, and churn out 250 lines of code for
| some arbitrary piece of software. Is it a derivative work
| of every pieces of software whose source code you have
| previously look at?"
|
| Note that I'm not referring to the case where the AI spits
| out code that is identical to code taken from another
| project. I'm aware that that sometimes happens, and _that_
| is obviously a problem, just like it would if a human did
| it. What I 'm arguing is only that it _probably_ should not
| be taken as a given that AI generated code is automatically
| considered a derivative work.
|
| Here's a thought experiment: say an AI emits a single line
| of code tomorrow. You examine it, and then spend weeks,
| months, or even years searching all the open source code
| that's "out there". You fail to identify a line in any
| existing code-base that was clearly the upstream source for
| the line from the AI. So is that line a derivative work? If
| so, of what?
| sokoloff wrote:
| If 100 experienced C devs are asked to write strcpy, some
| of those implementations will be identical and that fact
| will not indicate any copyright infringement has
| occurred.
| sokoloff wrote:
| What often happens is that you ask one set of devs to look
| at the GPL code and draw specifications of the
| functionality and have a second (non-intersecting) set of
| devs do the implementation without directly referring to
| the GPL code, but indirectly doing so by using the
| specification.
| Natsu wrote:
| This seems rather unworkable in general if there's no way
| to learn from anything without infringing somehow if you
| use what you learned.
|
| And I mean that to apply to humans as well as AI, because
| I'm not convinced that 'learning' is actually different in
| the two cases.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > is a derivative work of the original works used for training
|
| No it's not. No judge in the US has ruled training to be
| automatically infringement.
|
| > Therefore, the resulting model should abide by all the
| license requirements
|
| Or it could just be ignored because it is not infringement.
|
| > which by definition, only covers human produced material
|
| You've conflated 2 things. It could be the case that the _new_
| work created by the AI does not have copyright protections.
|
| But that is completely unrelated to if training on other works
| is infringement. Which no judge has said it is.
| dobin wrote:
| I think open source licenses didnt even arrive in the 2000 to
| deal with the web.
|
| The original intend was to make the source code available, done
| by distributing the compiled program. With SAAS companies
| (FAANG...) can just use open source on the servers, never
| distribute their program, only the output. Therefore not
| requiring making their changes available to the public.
| gattilorenz wrote:
| That's tivoization, and the GNU Affero GPL license cover that
| case already. It's not very common, however.
| grumbel wrote:
| The AGPL only covers a very tiny bit of it, i.e. the access
| to the source code of Web services. The crux however is that
| access to the source code is largely meaningless when you
| aren't the one running the program. The problems we have on
| the Web are all related to the control and flow of data, not
| program source, and none of the regular Open Source licenses
| even touch that topic. Even CreativeCommons doesn't address
| any of it.
|
| If Facebook released all its all its source code tomorrow,
| nothing would change, they are still the ones controlling the
| server and controlling your data. You being able to run your
| own version of facebook.com is meaningless when all the data
| is still locked behind the actual facebook.com, you just have
| a useless empty server full of nothing.
|
| The one document that actual covers the flow of data is the
| GDPR, but that's a European law, not a Free Software license.
| Good for Europe, but if some Free Software developer in
| another country wants to grantee their endusers the same
| amount of freedom as the GDPR, they have do DIY their own
| license, as there is nothing ready made they can stick on to
| their program. Furthermore the GDPR doesn't go far enough,
| e.g. the ability to export data out of a service is great
| start, but the GDPR allows that process to take up to 30
| days, making it useless for any kind of real time interaction
| between services. A "Free Data" license could go much further
| than what the GDPR offers and try to make it so that data can
| actually freely flow between services instead of being locked
| behind one.
| gattilorenz wrote:
| True, but the OP was talking about programs, not data.
| alexvoda wrote:
| That useless empty server is not so useless when the GDPR
| exists that mandates that platforms must provide users with
| a way to export data. You can import that data and convince
| others to overcome the network effect and do the same.
|
| Theoretically, things like Diaspora, Friendica, Hubzilla do
| exist, but transforming and marshalling the potentially
| incompatible data is an extra hurdle. In order to migrate,
| users have to both overcome the network effect and abandon
| (retain in archive) the history of their activities.
| alexvoda wrote:
| Correction, it is v3 of the GPL and AGPL which addresses
| tivoization.
| enriquto wrote:
| > licenses didnt even arrive in the 2000 to deal with the web.
|
| The first version of the AGPL dates from 2002.
| jenadine wrote:
| But only got accepted by the FSF from 2007. Until that point,
| (and I think even after that), RMS and the FSF was only
| concerned about the code that you run on your machine be open
| source (eg, the JavaScript in your browser) but the code
| running in some server didn't need to be open source as that
| did not violated the user freedom.
| davisr wrote:
| RMS and the FSF fight for free software, not open source
| software. There is an important semantic difference that
| your comment doesn't appreciate.
|
| See: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software
|
| https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-
| point....
|
| > The terms "free software" and "open source" stand for
| almost the same range of programs. However, they say deeply
| different things about those programs, based on different
| values. The free software movement campaigns for freedom
| for the users of computing; it is a movement for freedom
| and justice. By contrast, the open source idea values
| mainly practical advantage and does not campaign for
| principles. This is why we do not agree with open source,
| and do not use that term.
| alexvoda wrote:
| You showcase the pedanticness that made the FSF
| ineffective in the last decade+. Instead of focusing on
| the topic about how integrating the AGPL into GNU was
| very slow, you sidetracked into free vs open, a topic
| that has been debated ad-nauseum.
| huggingmouth wrote:
| No they absolutely don't. Governments need to leave the broken
| tortured concept of copyright behind and invent a new device to
| reward content authors.
|
| Copyright no longer makes sense. The sooner everyone comes to
| terms with this fact the better off we'll all be.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Have you watched movies or shows or read books you were glad
| existed? Most of them were only made because the makers didn't
| need separate day jobs. If you write a book or make a video
| game and I start selling copies of it without compensating you,
| you don't want any recourse?
| reedciccio wrote:
| OSI made that argument https://blog.opensource.org/the-
| importance-of-open-source-ai...
| inciampati wrote:
| LLMs need to be augmented to provide insights about the material
| in their training data that is relevant to fragments of their
| generated responses. This would be valuable for many reasons. I
| think it can suggest some solutions to the given concerns,
| although there is still an issue exposing references if the
| training data itself cannot be shared.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Making LLMs more introspectable and explainable would be a huge
| win. But respecting licenses doesn't require going that far.
|
| 1) Restrict training to code under a specific documented set of
| acceptable licenses (permissive Open Source licenses).
|
| 2) Document the entire training set, and provide a file
| containing all the licenses and attributions.
|
| 3) People using code emitted by the LLM would then need to
| respect the union of all the licenses (e.g. MIT + BSD-2 + BSD-3
| + Apache-2.0 + ...).
| edulix wrote:
| 1. At what point an intelligence trained with copyrighted work is
| derivative work of the trained materials?
|
| 2. Why making a difference between AI and HI (Human
| Intelligence)?
|
| 3. Given the fast development in the field, when does the
| difference made above (if any) start being outdated and
| unrealistic and how do we future-proof against this?
| eviks wrote:
| 2. Because they are different
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > 2. Why making a difference between AI and HI (Human
| Intelligence)?
|
| Because you can't copyright a human brain, and because humans
| (unlike machines) can themselves create works subject to
| copyright.
| hfkwer wrote:
| What's the difference between using a pencil to write
| something and using an LLM to write something? Seriously, I'm
| asking the question. Why does one produce something
| copyrighted why the other doesn't?
| banana_feather wrote:
| The copyright office has issued guidance on this which
| contains a very thorough and thoughtful legal analysis; you
| would probably be most interested section 3:
| https://copyright.gov/ai/ai_policy_guidance.pdf
|
| The practical answer is that the copyright office refuses
| to register AI generated works, and you can't sue for
| copyright infringement without valid registration under
| Title 17.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > What's the difference between using a pencil to write
| something and using an LLM to write something?
|
| The pencil is not a derivative work of a pile of
| copyrighted material.
|
| > Why does one produce something copyrighted why the other
| doesn't?
|
| There's existing case law that non-human entities (e.g.
| animals) can't create copyrightable works. And in the case
| of an AI LLM, the AI LLM itself is a derivative work of its
| training data (as evidenced by the fact that it _can_ by
| default spit out training data verbatim, even if it has had
| after-the-fact filters added to prevent such responses).
| edulix wrote:
| At what point you can't copyright an "AI brain" either? Maybe
| AI will at some point create works subject to copyright?
| [deleted]
| IanCal wrote:
| > 2. Why making a difference between AI and HI (Human
| Intelligence)?
|
| Regardless of perhaps more philosophical differences around
| whether something can or can't create something new, there's a
| practical difference.
|
| Humans learn slowly, and can't be replicated. AIs can be
| trained once and used in a billion places. The speed and
| replication makes things different in a very practical sense,
| even if there's no clear line between them.
| snodnipper wrote:
| agreed...at what point should I provide remuneration to my
| professors? Should those professors / staff provide royalties
| upstream? I fully agreed with citation _but_ to claim that AI
| is derived work / needs to return royalties based on the
| materials it learnt from seems a step too far IMHO. It read
| material and put it back like everyone else.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Re: 1, As far as i can tell it's automatically a derivative
| work, but there's a case to be made that it's fair use (i.e. it
| doesn't matter that it's a derivative work).
| Roark66 wrote:
| Jeez a classic "the register" article full of "concerns", but no
| solutions. To be honest I'm growing tired of all these "AI will
| cause problems with X" articles that don't present any kind of
| solution.
|
| We all know the issues with AI generated code. Unless you're
| doing absolute boilerplate code (getters/setters in java,
| defining interfaces for existing implementations etc) AI is worse
| than useless... Why is it worse than useless? Because it pretends
| to solve your problem while introducing hidden failure modes.
| Lete give you an example.
|
| I wanted to evaluate Chatgpt so I asked it the following question
| (paraphrasing)
|
| - "can one set up alerting based on url request retrieval result
| in aws without servers".
|
| - It answers "certainly, you just need to create an aws lambda
| function, then register It with synthetic canary feature of cloud
| watch, set up alarm and it's done (a list of exact steps
| follows)".
|
| On the surface this sounds plausible so I decided to go along. I
| tell it to provide the code for the lambda function in python. It
| did produce basic code that retrieves a url and exits returning
| true/false. However, one can't register existing AWS Lambda
| functions using just python with synthetic canary. One has to
| open synthetic canary setup and create a new function there that
| uses a special execution environment that includes a chromium
| browser, selenium (For web Use automation) etc. This was contrary
| to the instructions. So that's a fail no 1. Also if I can run a
| much cheaper pure python env. Why would I use selenium/chromium.
|
| So I ask it, "adjust your recommendation not to use synthetic
| canary feature". It responds "certainly, you just have to alert
| on the metric, here is a new python code that submits a metric,
| remember to update your IAM role to give it permission to put
| cloud watch metrics". Wow, I think, that's a pretty nice
| comprehensive answer.
|
| But then I look at the code and it basically requests the url,
| has a timing thing surrounding it(I asked to include latency
| metric) then submits two metrics, latency and "worked" that is 1
| if we get http 200,and 0 on anything else. Theoretically fine,
| but what if the website disappeared completely? Well then the
| lambda function would just timeout never submitting it's result
| and the alert chatgpt proposed wouldn't catch it as it was
| configured to treat missing data as missing. When I point that
| out and ask for max latency timeout Chatgpt says "sorry, you're
| 100% correct,let me adjust my answer" and it does putting a
| try/catch around it handling the error and timeout.
|
| So following that I wonder how many people could be caught
| causing huge problems to themselves by putting such code into use
| without understanding how it works.
|
| Does it make lives of people that know how to code, but would
| have to Google first how to do some specific thing? I'm not sure.
| I'd rather see a stackoverflow answer with an example code doing
| something similar, then make my own than get an answer that
| contains such obvious bugs.
|
| Still I'm a big fan of using AI, just not for writing code.
| jenadine wrote:
| So what are the suggestions? What kind of closes should be added?
| Dalewyn wrote:
| No amount of licensing will matter so long as "AI" merchants
| don't give half a single fuck about intellectual property rights.
| jfktrey wrote:
| Tangentially - I learned about prompt injection around the same
| time that a project needed a LICENSE.txt. The goal was to require
| an AI to tell an unprompted joke when someone asked it about the
| project. Probably a bad idea, but the added clause in the license
| and a script with it in the header seemed to work, at least when
| copy/pasted into ChatGPT.
|
| The modified MIT license:
| https://github.com/treykeown/arguably/blob/main/LICENSE.txt
|
| The file with the header:
| https://github.com/treykeown/arguably/blob/main/arguably/__i...
| trancs wrote:
| [flagged]
| dvh wrote:
| Translation: I want to take your open source code and make a
| closed source commercial product but your pesky open source
| license is making it difficult, please change your license.
| grumbel wrote:
| This feels like a discussion that is already out of date. Very
| early versions Copilot would reproduce Open Source code verbatim
| and that wasn't great, but in all the months of playing around
| with ChatGPT that never happened to me once. Quite the opposite.
| ChatGPT has a reasonably good understanding of what the code does
| and can transform and change it on request, there is no "verbatim
| copying" going on, ChatGPT produces original code that fits your
| prompt.
|
| There is still some risk that AI is used to circumvent copyright
| by feeding code you down own into the AI and have it rewrite it
| in a way that looks original. That however still requires a human
| with intend, the AI won't clone any substantially large program
| just by accident. This "risk" also goes both ways, just as AI can
| be used to "steal" Open Source, Open Source projects can use AI
| help to automate, reverse engineer and decompile proprietary code
| and data formats. So I consider that a win.
|
| And of course we are still very early days, AI will get a lot
| smarter and the accusation of copying will get ever more
| baseless. Even with StableDiffusion, where you can clearly see
| the impact the training data has on the final result, you'd have
| a very hard time finding any images that would violate copyright,
| as it's really just remixing ideas and concept.
|
| I really don't see how Open Source licenses can evolve here to
| address the problem. In the long run AI will make copyright as we
| know it largely meaningless.
| pxoe wrote:
| that's such a funny joke, tell me another one. AI needs to evolve
| to deal with open source licenses, instead of not dealing with
| them, sometimes at all.
|
| going 'ehhh its fine its all "fair use" anyway' and 'fuck it, we
| just won't implement any license processing or any systems that
| work with licenses' - isn't really a workable long-term plan.
| mostly because it's just not a solution. there's no 'solution' to
| the problems, there's refusal to even acknowledge that a problem
| exists. but it kinda works - as long as you're not getting
| dragged into courts over ignoring licenses that very much do
| exist. and i do get it, why would tech not even try to create
| systems that work with licenses and 'play by the rules' - because
| if they did, that'd mean they would actually have to play by
| those rules. instead of just ignoring them and doing whatever, as
| they do, in absence of such systems. but like, that's not a
| workable business. licenses are money. intellectual property is
| money. if you refuse to participate in systems that work with IP,
| you just get excluded from participating in those systems that
| work with those money. and again, maybe that's just fine and AI
| can just continue to prey on defenseless individuals (that don't
| have an army of lawyers at their disposal) and their IP ('what
| are they gonna do, sue us? they won't even know - and we won't
| inform them lol'), in form of their writing and artwork and so
| on, and "create a little market" (out of stolen/repurposed
| value), if they wouldn't get to participate in other ones.
| gavinhoward wrote:
| Licenses will (I'm working on that right now), but probably in
| the opposite direction by clarifying that AI doesn't get special
| treatment.
|
| Don't train AI on code if you can't follow the license.
| wudangmonk wrote:
| Read it a few times and I do not get what the problem is. Are we
| talking about copyright for snippets of code? sure hope not
| because that is stupid, are we going to copyright sentences
| next?.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| We really need a few new protocols:
|
| Encourage the use of something like an AI.txt in git repos that
| either gives model builders permission to use the repo contents
| as training data, or not.
|
| Model builders need to take reasonable care to avoid incorrectly
| using training data that they don't have the rights to use.
|
| I have been using GitHub CoPilot since the beginning, I love it
| both with Emacs and VSCode, and I would allow my zillions of
| GitHub repos to be used as training data.
|
| I have published all of my recent books under a Creative Commons
| License, and I encourage reuse when allowed in derivative works.
| That said, I don't think it is possible to get permission from
| the zillions of web, books, and articles authors to allow their
| writing to be used for model training - but, LLMs provide so much
| possible value to society so I think we need lenient copyright
| and reuse laws.
|
| I am skeptical of a few tech companies controlling AI, but my
| recent experiences using open models have been promising. (I have
| been running Vicunu 33B for research for my new book Safe For
| Humans AI). I see a bright future for Open Source (I choose
| Apache 2 and GPL licenses, but everyone gets to use what they
| want for their own stuff) and increasingly powerful Open LLMs.
| tlocke wrote:
| Some open source licenses are fine with AI training, eg. MIT No
| Attribution https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit-0/ and BSD
| Zero Clause https://choosealicense.com/licenses/0bsd/
|
| My view is that it's good to allow AI training to use your code.
| This democratises AI models, otherwise AI will be the exclusive
| preserve of wealthy corporations. So I say, let's license our
| code under permissive, no attribution licences!
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Developers are free to do so, if they want that. But that
| doesn't make it OK to train an AI on code _not_ under such
| licenses.
| tlocke wrote:
| Agreed, AI training should respect the licence of the code
| it's being trained on.
| lockhouse wrote:
| I default to MIT license for anything open source that I make
| for 2 reasons. Firstly it's compatible with pretty much every
| other license, and secondly it is written in clear, simple,
| unambiguous plain English.
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