[HN Gopher] Copyright liability for generative AI pivots on fair...
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Copyright liability for generative AI pivots on fair use doctrine
Author : hhs
Score : 22 points
Date : 2023-09-25 15:57 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.bloomberglaw.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.bloomberglaw.com)
| flangola7 wrote:
| Existing media paradigms will not be around for very long, for
| better or worse. Intellectual property exists because high
| quality film, music, books, and more, require labor and resources
| to produce. Within a few years quality media of any type will be
| so plentiful and abundant it be as cheap as dirt.
|
| No one today hires elite guards to protect a 50kg bag of salt...
| but at one time we did.
| thatoneguy wrote:
| This is about as believable as a cryptobro saying "fiat
| currency will not be around for very long, for better or
| worse".
|
| You can't produce genuinely new things with a human point of
| view based on lived experience with generative AI and there's
| no reason to expect that will be happen in the near future.
| Humans care about human stories and they care most about novel
| stories, not chewed-over already-told stories.
|
| That said, with any luck we'll just get back to typewriters and
| film photos and we can shut the internet down for everything
| but email and Wikipedia. To do otherwise would leave thoughts,
| hopes and dreams open for consumption by software expressly
| designed to use them against their creators.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| This whole analysis seems weak. Fair use is a defense once it has
| been decided that there has been infringement, and it's not
| obvious that there is infringement.
| tivert wrote:
| > Importantly, the court focused on the "highly transformative
| purpose" of Google's use of this material--that Google was
| transforming many diverse copyright-protected books into a new,
| useful search mechanism that didn't compete with the underlying
| works.
|
| It's pretty obvious that generative AI should fail that test;
| _because the whole point is to compete with the underlying
| works,_ and the technology is marketed and understood that way.
| It doesn 't have the same defense as Google Books, because that
| is so crippled with copyrighted works that it cannot be used as a
| substitute for the books it's searching.
|
| I mean a lot of people are hyping ChatGPT as a replacement for
| Wikipedia (which is was obviously trained with), and image
| generators as replacements for stock imagery (and there are
| documented cases of those reproducing recognizable watermarks:
| https://photutorial.com/stable-diffusion-watermarks-investig...).
|
| Also generative AI systems aren't people, so I think it's totally
| fair to not grant their operators rights by analogy to something
| a human would do.
| nbened wrote:
| I think the reproduction of recognized watermarks is hilarious.
|
| I could see some kind of trend emerging as a competition to
| replace the watermarks as closely as possible to the real thing
| without it actually being the real thing just for the joke, an
| argued original work. Kinda like Nathan For You's Dumb
| Starbucks becoming some viral hit just by changing one word,
| could see some bored anti-establishment dudes following a
| similar path.
| Aerroon wrote:
| But the AI model itself does not compete with those works
| though. You have to use the AI model _with additional input_
| and substantial compute resources to potentially generate a
| work that competes.
|
| You don't read wizardlm.ggml instead of Hobbit.txt.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| > because the whole point is to compete with the underlying
| works
|
| I don't see how this is the case and if it hinged on that, how
| is it different from a book citing another book. That book
| competes with the book it's citing.
| tivert wrote:
| >> because the whole point is to compete with the underlying
| works
|
| > I don't see how this is the case
|
| If it wasn't the case, what's the point of these models
| getting billions of dollars thrown at them? What's the actual
| sales pitch for using them in the economy?
|
| > and if it hinged on that, how is it different from a book
| citing another book. That book competes with the book it's
| citing.
|
| One of the obvious differences is these models _don 't cite
| their sources_. Even if you can get them to generate
| something that _looks like a cite_ , it's not a real cite of
| the works the model actually used.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| > If it wasn't the case, what's the point of these models
| getting billions of dollars thrown at them?
|
| This is a digression. There are use cases other than
| creating competing books, do I need to actually list them
| out?
|
| - Turning unstructured text into structured data.
|
| - Summarizing news
|
| - Sentiment analysis
|
| - Semantic search
|
| - Helping people write research papers
|
| and more.
|
| How do any of those compete with fiction or non-fiction
| books?
|
| > One of the obvious differences is these models don't cite
| their sources.
|
| Do I need to cite the math textbook that I used to learn
| algebra when I write a book on calculus?
| tremon wrote:
| Did you miss the "generative AI" in the headline? All the
| examples you list are general applications of NLP's, not
| of generative AI. Your argument would be similar to
| defending nuclear missiles by listing all the good things
| that a nuclear power plant can bring.
|
| _Do I need to cite the math textbook that I used to
| learn algebra when I write a book on calculus?_
|
| Yes, you do, if you put verbatim snippets of those
| textbooks in your own work.
| kuchenbecker wrote:
| My opinion means very little, but AI like to see a
| solution that preserves generative AI progress while
| giving incentives to use licensed content.
|
| E.g.
|
| "The burden of proof when republishing the output of AI
| generated content is on the person publishing the
| generated content. All unlicensed sources must be cited
| in a public searchable index."
|
| With this, if you're a company and you accidentally use
| the output of Generative AI you have liability if the
| work is infringement.
|
| This gives companies an incentive to have licenses for
| their content but doesn't strictly prohibit ~linking~
| sourcing from publically available content.
|
| This will also allow the industry to use publicly
| viewable content to push the boundaries of generative AI
| in a research capacity without fear of liability.
|
| A person could tell a sufficiently advanced generative AI
| trained on licensed data to recreate something under
| copywrite by just describing it. You would not be able to
| publish that output.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| > All the examples you list are general applications of
| NLP's, not of generative AI.
|
| I think you are being purposefully obtuse.
| tivert wrote:
| > This is a digression. There are use cases other than
| creating competing books, do I need to actually list them
| out?
|
| Are the generative models crippled to only be able to do
| those things?
|
| And some of the things you list are _also_ likely to be
| in direct competition with the original works (e.g.
| "Summarizing news.") I believe "AI" generated news sites
| are already a thing (e.g. plagiarizing/summarizing
| original news articles, so another party can generate ad-
| revenue from them).
|
| > Do I need to cite the math textbook that I used to
| learn algebra when I write a book on calculus?
|
| No, because I previously said: "...generative AI systems
| aren't people, so I think it's totally fair to not grant
| their operators rights by analogy to something a human
| [mind] would do."
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| > the whole point is to compete with the underlying works
|
| AI doesn't compete just compete with "the underlying works"
| though; it competes with _all_ works, even works that weren 't
| in its training set. So the type of "competition" you're
| describing is incidental, and not connected to the AI's use of
| any particular copyrighted work it was trained on.
|
| I don't know whether that makes a difference under existing
| law, but I'd argue that it should.
|
| I'd also argue copyright/fair use shouldn't even come into
| play, since AI models do not (typically) contain copies of the
| works they're trained on in the first place (except in cases of
| over fitting), but that's a completely separate issue.
| sheepshear wrote:
| This is a weird argument. You can violate someone's copyright
| as long as you compete with other people too?
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(page generated 2023-09-25 23:02 UTC)