[HN Gopher] Sarah Silverman Hits Stumbling Block in AI Copyright...
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       Sarah Silverman Hits Stumbling Block in AI Copyright Infringement
       Lawsuit
        
       Author : nonfamous
       Score  : 25 points
       Date   : 2023-11-25 20:37 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.hollywoodreporter.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.hollywoodreporter.com)
        
       | crtified wrote:
       | One of the key principles quoted is "questioning whether artists
       | can substantiate copyright infringement in the absence of
       | identical material created by the AI tools". Or to paraphrase
       | "how can it be copyright infringement if the output is
       | different?".
       | 
       | I'm not here to make or dispute that argument, but it is
       | interesting to ponder the notion that, should a future AI become
       | able to similarly digest and remix existing content in order to
       | create viable new content - say, absorb Game of Thrones and Star
       | Trek and etc-etc, and spin out a whole new engrossing series
       | where everything is at-once very familiar and slightly-changed -
       | and in the process "launder" (to borrow a concept from finance)
       | the copyright, then that could indeed vastly change the future
       | outlook for some existing areas of art and entertainment
       | industries.
        
         | Manuel_D wrote:
         | I'm not sure what you mean by "laundering" the copyright. Even
         | human authors regularly take inspiration from other works.
         | Often very substantial inspiration, and copyright does not
         | prohibit this. Take Warcraft and Warhammer for example. Those
         | two settings are much more similar to each other than a Star
         | Trek & GoT spinoff would be to either Star Trek or GoT.
         | 
         | As long as the work produced by an LLM drawing inspiration from
         | Star Trek and GoT was sufficiently distinct from either setting
         | to infringe on copyright, I don't see why it'd be different
         | from a human author producing such a work.
        
           | foogazi wrote:
           | > LLM drawing inspiration
           | 
           | What does this even mean ?
           | 
           | Aren't LLM's just predicting the next token with zero
           | contextual knowledge of the world they inhabit
           | 
           | As much as I get excited for generative AI I can't shake the
           | feeling that it is empty regurgitation of the human
           | experience
        
             | Manuel_D wrote:
             | The corpus of text used to train the AI is the contextual
             | knowledge about the world. When you give it a word like
             | "phasor" it's going to associate that word with the Star
             | Trek universe (and probably angular representations of
             | complex numbers from EE textbooks too). When you give it
             | words like "Godswood" or "Andals" it's going to make
             | associations with those words.
             | 
             | Regardless of whether we think generative AI is empty
             | regurgitation, the copyright claims are going to have
             | difficulty sticking unless models are regularly reproducing
             | copyright texts. Even when they are it's usually in short
             | snippets, e.g. "It was the best of times, it was the worst
             | of times..." not regurgitating a whole Dickens novel.
        
       | MetaMonk wrote:
       | What is the minimum copywritable unit?
       | 
       | It would vary across media, but a copyeme (like morpheme,
       | grapheme, phoneme) is very hard to define.
       | 
       | Will it end up being some weird tensor, or something human
       | recognizable?
        
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       (page generated 2023-11-25 23:01 UTC)