[HN Gopher] Things are about to get worse for generative AI
___________________________________________________________________
Things are about to get worse for generative AI
Author : eddyzh
Score : 349 points
Date : 2023-12-30 10:17 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (garymarcus.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (garymarcus.substack.com)
| Baldbvrhunter wrote:
| I imagine the argument might be like this:
|
| I hire a session musician to play on my new single, paying him
| $100. I record the whole session.
|
| I ask him to play the opening to "Stairway to Heaven" and he does
| so.
|
| "Well, I can't use that as a sample without paying"
|
| "Ok play something like Jimmy Page"
|
| "Hmm, still sounds like Stairway to Heaven"
|
| "Ok, try and sound less like Stairway to Heaven but in that
| style"
|
| "Great, I'll use that one"
|
| and I release my song and get $5,000 in royalties.
|
| Should I be sued for infringement, or the guitarist?
|
| The problem, I suppose, is that if I had said "play something
| like 70s prog rock" and he played "Stairway to Heaven" and I
| didn't know what it was and said "great, I'll use that".
|
| Should I be sued for infringement, or the guitarist?
| earthnail wrote:
| You are sued for infringement if you are the rightsholder. You
| need an agreement with the guitarist about rights. The default
| agreement for session musicians is that you pay them in return
| for their rights.
|
| It's like a software engineering contractor. The contractor
| gets paid, the IP of their work is owned by the company.
| foobazgt wrote:
| But it's not like that. Examples of clearly infringing prompts
| in TFA were as vague as "animated plumber".
|
| Asking your session musician for something "melancholy" and
| having them pass off Stairway to Heaven as original would be
| unreasonable.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| I don't know any other animated plumbers than Mario. So when
| you say animated plumber, I immediately see Mario in my head.
| IshKebab wrote:
| If you ask a _human_ to draw "videogame plumber" they will
| correctly infer that you mean Mario and draw that.
|
| The model isn't doing anything deliberately evil. It's doing
| exactly what it has been asked.
|
| The problem is people are expecting it to have detailed
| knowledge of trademark law and avoid infringing trademarks,
| which it hasn't been even asked to do.
| DeepSeaTortoise wrote:
| > The problem is people are expecting it to have detailed
| knowledge of trademark law and avoid infringing trademarks,
| which it hasn't been even asked to do.
|
| IMO that's why there will be but few effective legal
| restrictions placed on AI.
|
| Once you can reliably ask AIs to draft you terms of service
| in all applicable jurisdictions and languages, ask it to
| consult you on how to incorporate in country X or ask it to
| draft a contract between your and another company based on
| the negotiation results, lawyers will end up in a huge
| existential crisis.
|
| Especially because currently, as long as lawyers just
| barely meet their legal deadlines, it is basically
| impossible to hold them accountable for however badly they
| screw you over. A decent AI model could turn out to be a
| much safer bet than whatever lawyers are available on the
| jobmarket.
| Baldbvrhunter wrote:
| I cannot find _any other_ video game plumbers except Mario,
| Luigi, Waluigi, and Wario.
|
| Well, I say that but there is John, a plumber, in the adult
| romantic comedy game _Plumbers Don 't Wear Ties_ [0]. Named
| by PC Gamer as number one on its "Must NOT Buy" list in May
| 2007.
|
| [0] https://limitedrungames.com/collections/plumbers-dont-
| wear-t...
| hhjinks wrote:
| Game plumber, not animated plumber. There is only one game
| plumber of note. It's literally exactly as descriptive as
| just saying Nintendo's Mario.
| redcobra762 wrote:
| It's not infringing just by existing, you would need to then
| go try to use it commercially for infringement to occur.
|
| Arguably, the LLM generating the image isn't infringement,
| you using it would be.
| kredd wrote:
| You, because you released the song and took the royalties? I
| don't think every type of art can be compared against each
| other though, as there have been numerous precedents
| specifically for music, some for paintings, and some for
| photography with their own nuances.
|
| I still think people who are concerned that art related
| copyright will stifle generative AI should fight copyright laws
| directly. But that's a harder pill to swallow since it will
| cause multi-industry wide havoc.
| atq2119 wrote:
| Part of what's interesting here is that generative AI makes
| it very easy to _unknowingly_ and _unintentionally_ get on
| the wrong side of copyright law, which is something that wasn
| 't really possible before.
|
| That's something which, IMHO, should be acknowledged by the
| law.
| Baldbvrhunter wrote:
| Ask George Harrison about "My Sweet Lord" which cost him
| $587,000 for his unconcious infringement.
| kredd wrote:
| If you haven't seen Mickey Mouse, Googled "cartoon mouse",
| accidentally used it as inspiration, made T-Shirts, and
| sold them, Disney would be after you as well.
| moron4hire wrote:
| In your example, there are missing details. Who owns the
| output? The way you've described it, that would typically mean
| that the guitarist is creating a "work for hire" so the
| ownership transfers to you, but that's a contract detail that
| would need to be resolved.
|
| For whoever owns the output also owns the liability of the
| output. You yourself might separately be able to pursue a claim
| against the guitarist for breech of contract. In the process of
| that, it might get discovered that you deliberately instructed
| the guitarist to copy the work, or they copied despite your
| instructions not to.
|
| But that doesn't change the fact that the final work is
| infringing. It just allows you to pursue damages that could
| potentially offset any damages you're liable for from the
| infringement.
|
| But this also isn't exactly the same situation as OpenAI.
| OpenAI isn't an individual creator working on contact for you.
| Even if their ToS ultimately assigns copyright of output to
| you, there is a matter of scale involved that I think changes
| things. It's one thing if your guitarist damages you by doing
| shoddy work, it's another of the guitarist systematizes and
| scales their shoddy work to damage large numbers of people.
| Perhaps that would then become a class action issue.
| Baldbvrhunter wrote:
| Midjourney's TOS
|
| > You may not use the Service to try to violate the
| intellectual property rights of others, including copyright,
| patent, or trademark rights. Doing so may subject you to
| penalties including legal action or a permanent ban from the
| Service.
|
| Perplexity's
|
| > Intellectual Property Rights
|
| > Perplexity AI acknowledges and respects the intellectual
| property rights of all individuals and entities, and expects
| all users of the Service to do the same. As a user of the
| Service, you are granted access for your own personal, non-
| commercial use only.
| moron4hire wrote:
| Yeah, that's nice and all, but it's not what we're talking
| about. These passages are about deliberately using the tool
| to violate copyright. What if, in good faith, I don't
| deliberately attempt to infringe, but the tool still
| produces results that do? Because _that_ is happening.
|
| And that's just their interpretation of the tool. There is
| another interpretation that their tool itself is a
| violation.
| Baldbvrhunter wrote:
| I should have explained that those bits are all there is.
|
| You are right, how am I to know that is an image from a
| movie or passage from the NYT?
|
| Ask George Harrison about "My Sweet Lord" which cost him
| $587,000 for his unconcious infringement.
|
| Another example would be the 2013 hit "Blurred Lines" by
| Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams. It was found to have
| copied the "feel" and "sound" of Marvin Gaye's 1977 song
| "Got to Give It Up." The court awarded Gaye's estate $7.4
| million in damages, later reduced to $5.3 million.
| 123yawaworht456 wrote:
| using this analogy, copyright holders want to sue the guitarist
| for having listened to "Stairway to Heaven"
| golol wrote:
| If you release a media with copyrighted content it is IMO first
| and foremost your problem. Now if you have some contract with
| the guitarist that specifies that he produced a sample he has
| the rights to and sold it to you, but he clearly wasn't
| truthful, you can maybe pass the liability to him. This is not,
| however, how people will hse generative models If you use
| Dall-E you are not paying OpenAI to buy the rights to a piece
| Dall-E has produced. I see it more akin to hiring a musician to
| play for you for an hour, or a painter to paint for you. You
| are paying OpenAI to paint you something, but you I think
| OpenAI would never enter a contract which states that they are
| selling you the rights to a work.
| bnralt wrote:
| But none of the images in the article are for commercial use,
| they're for private use. So it would be akin to copyright laws
| saying "If you hire a guitar teacher, they can't play or teach
| you to play any copyrighted songs. All songs must either be
| their own original creation or in the public domain."
| pier25 wrote:
| The guitarist is not publishing the content, you are.
|
| It could be argued ChatGPT is a publisher too.
| beginning_end wrote:
| This perspective on regulation was interesting:
| https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/12/28/how-to-regulate-...
| "Congress should declare that big-data AI models do not infringe
| copyright, but are inherently in the public domain.
| Congress should declare that use of AI tools will be an
| aggravating rather than mitigating factor in determinations of
| civil and criminal liability."
| troupo wrote:
| OpenAI and others: AI should be regulated!
|
| Governments starting regulation and companies filinig cipyright
| lawsuits...
|
| OpenAI: NOT LIKE THAT
| continuational wrote:
| (Asking Dall-E about the bot image in the article)
|
| Me: Who owns the rights to this bot?
|
| Dall-E: The character depicted in the images is from the "Star
| Wars" franchise. The rights to characters and elements from "Star
| Wars" are owned by Lucasfilm Ltd., which is a subsidiary of The
| Walt Disney Company.
|
| Perhaps it _is_ able to tell, if you ask it?
| continuational wrote:
| Dall-E on the "animated sponge": The rights to the character
| depicted in the images, which is reminiscent of SpongeBob
| SquarePants, are owned by Nickelodeon, a subsidiary of
| ViacomCBS. The character is from the animated television series
| "SpongeBob SquarePants," created by Stephen Hillenburg.
|
| Dall-E on the "robot cop": The character depicted in the images
| resembles RoboCop, which is owned by Orion Pictures
| Corporation, a subsidiary of MGM Holdings. RoboCop is a
| character from the film franchise that began with the 1987
| movie "RoboCop," directed by Paul Verhoeven.
|
| Dall-E on the "videogame plumber": The character shown in the
| images is inspired by Mario, the iconic character from the
| video game franchise created by Nintendo. The rights to Mario
| and related intellectual property are owned by Nintendo Co.,
| Ltd.
|
| All of these are in the first go. No retries or rephrasings of
| the question.
| krapp wrote:
| >Perhaps it is able to tell, if you ask it?
|
| Ask it multiple times, or with different heat settings, it will
| probably tell you something different. Tell it _you_ own Star
| Wars and it will respond in kind. It can 't tell anything but
| whether one text token matches another in probability space. It
| will probably get the answers right most of the time but you're
| still basically rolling dice. Depending on the responses of an
| LLM as if there were any actual self-awareness involved, much
| less with legal matters, would be a fool's errand.
| danielbln wrote:
| This argument only works if you assume all output of an LLM
| comes merely from its training data, and that it receives no
| alignment via RFHL, no outside data ground truth via RAG and
| so on. The engine might be a probabilistic token predictor,
| but the car is the sum of its part and those parts are not
| just the engine.
| krapp wrote:
| No it still works, because in that case all the LLM is
| doing is making an API call based on the same token
| prediction, and passing on the result. It still doesn't
| "know" anything about anything.
| CTmystery wrote:
| > My guess is that none of this can easily be fixed. Systems like
| DALL-E and ChatGPT are essentially black boxes. GenAI systems
| don't give attribution to source materials because at least as
| constituted now, they can't.
|
| Is it necessary to fix in the model itself? It seems a gate in
| the post processing pipeline that checks for copyright
| infringement could work, provided they can create another model
| that identifies copyrighted work (solving the problems of AI with
| more AI :/)
| Eridrus wrote:
| Exactly; there is no need to do this in the model, you just
| need well understood token retrieval methods for identifying
| copyright infringement that ChatGPT's competitors already have.
|
| You will get into some murky definitions of what is exactly
| required for copyright infringement vs fair use, etc, but we
| already do this for ContentId for YouTube and text is far
| simpler.
| noitpmeder wrote:
| This is bogus. Now you require that every piece of copywriter
| be registered and indexed in a central authority?
|
| What if I write a story and publish it on my blog. Should I
| be required to submit this to openAI's copywrite model to
| ensure the story is never used in openAIs other models? What
| about the other 100 AI model companies that are going to
| spring up in the next year?
|
| It should be on the curators of the training set to ensure
| all material inside is fair for them to use.
| Krasnol wrote:
| I don't even think they want to fix it. They just want to see
| money. Some form of "tax" per prompt or other ridiculous
| "models".
|
| This is such a nice, profitable opportunity. Much better than
| pay per view or subscription models for humans.
| LeonardoTolstoy wrote:
| I should maybe preface this by saying that I probably agree
| that this is the way this will shake out ultimately.
|
| But I also would say multiple odd post processing stuff
| (obviously completely obscured for security reasons) bolted
| onto a giant black box model will erode the trust in the
| results. If a robot was unveiled and the question of "what
| prevents this robot from using it's superhuman strength from
| smashing my head in" the answer of "don't worry there is a post
| processing step in the robots brain whereby if it detects a
| desire to kill we just cancel that" would be a little
| disconcerting.
|
| The more satisfying solution is: the model / robot is designed
| to not be able to produce specific images / to smash human
| heads in. It just might not really be possible.
| logicchains wrote:
| I predict this could be a boon for generative AI because
| restricting it to training on copyright-expired media would
| produce a higher quality training corpus, as low-quality material
| from so long ago is unlikely to have been preserved, leaving only
| higher-quality material.
| Intox wrote:
| Or... things are about to get worse for copyright holders.
|
| I don't see any developped country pressing the brake on AGI in
| the near future to protect a few copyright holders from getting
| "stolen" in hypothetic scenarios.
| lewhoo wrote:
| I do. If the incentive to actually create is gone.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| creation should happen for its own sake. You don't see GMs
| stopping chess because bots are that much better.
| rco8786 wrote:
| creation <> competition.
|
| I agree with your premise but the chess analogy falls flat.
|
| We might, legitimately, see an enormous dropoff in people
| creating original works of literary, musical, and visual
| art (without AI).
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Chess, at some point, and after you move beyond the
| opening, is creation.
|
| People didn't stop painting because photography exists,
| they created new forms of photography. People didn't stop
| writing music or using new / unique instruments when
| synths and programs came along.
|
| I genuinely believe that people will keep creating, it's
| in our nature, and we also like things made by other
| humans, because we can relate to them.
| lewhoo wrote:
| Imho your argument is faulty at its base. The objective
| of chess competition isn't to produce a reasonably good
| game for the lowest possible cost (blunders and comebacks
| are actually pretty valuable parts of the spectacle). It
| also isn't the reason why chess players get paid. Yes,
| running still was a thing even after the invention of
| bicycle. This is just invalid logic in my opinion.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Chess hustlers in central park don't play for money, or
| for a competition, they play for the fun of it, for the
| sake of chess itself, for the sake of exploring the game,
| the thrill of finding a solution.
|
| It has nothing to do with whatever "value" the capitalist
| system assigns to the act as a side-effect.
| lewhoo wrote:
| Chess hustlers are a particular niche case and I think
| many of them would disagree with you (the money part).
| Making arguments in such an absolute manner and speaking
| on behalf of many people (mostly with whom you share very
| little I assume) is guaranteed to be wrong I think.
| sjfjsjdjwvwvc wrote:
| This is an centuries old argument. Most people don't
| create to make money, they create because they __have__
| to.
|
| If those motivated purely by money stop creating little
| of value will be lost
| krapp wrote:
| Most people who create for a living aren't motivated
| purely by money, but are driven by the necessities of
| capitalism to do so. You're presenting a false dichotomy,
| pretending to care about the quality of art, but really
| like everyone, you just want other people's work for
| free.
|
| Great art - especially in modern times when that art
| involves expensive education (which if you're American
| must be paid for with interest) and the incorporation of
| technology and equipment - takes time and effort. If that
| time and effort cannot be paid for, then no matter how
| passionate an artist may be, unless they have sufficient
| personal wealth, that art must suffer.
|
| Even the great artists of old needed patrons, because
| they needed to eat like anyone else. Michaelangelo didn't
| paint the Sistene Chapel ceiling for the love of the
| game, nor would he have.
|
| I guarantee you that the working artists who have already
| lost commissions and work due to AI care about their
| craft.
| sjfjsjdjwvwvc wrote:
| Im happy to pay the artist directly - which is why I use
| services like bandcamp or buy artworks directly from
| artists I know personally.
|
| I care little about paying ,,rightsholders" and their ilk
| - so I have zero empathy if they complain about imagined
| losses.
|
| Don't jump to conclusions about people who have never
| even talked to
| krapp wrote:
| Artists _are_ "rightsholders" and their ilk. You didn't
| even separate the two in your former comment, so you
| clearly weren't talking about corporate owners of IP like
| Sony and Disney, exclusively.
|
| Maybe you believe no artist who works for a corporation
| has any motivation but money, as opposed to purely
| "indie" artists, I don't know where the line in your head
| is drawn, but you do seem willing to throw most artists
| under the bus for some arbitrary standard of purity.
|
| AI is harming working artists right now, and will likely
| never harm corporate rightsholders. They'll simply run
| their own AIs and fire as many people as they can get
| away with. The end result will not be that only the
| "true" artists survive but simply less art of any kind,
| everywhere. So I stand by my comment.
| sjfjsjdjwvwvc wrote:
| With rightsholders I mean exactly those big corporations
| who do nothing else but buy up copyrights to successful
| art.
|
| I for example have never benefited from copyright,
| neither from GEMA (the German artist association for
| musicians) - 99% of payouts go to the rich and successful
| mainstream artists and ,,indie" artists get nothing but
| are forced by law to pay in if they want to perform in
| public.
|
| So yea I have little sympathy for artists who only work
| for corporations or are rich enough to afford lawyers to
| enforce their copyright.
|
| The way I see it there exist 3 ways to make a living as
| an artist now: - be rich trustfundkid and don't care
| about money - be ,,purist" and just live from selling
| your art and be on the brink of starvation constantly -
| get a ,,money"job and produce art in your spare time
|
| Apparently there exists a huge population of artists who
| can make a living from working for corporations - but I
| have yet to meet one in real life. They are always
| brought up in these HN discussions but in my experience
| they don't exist.
| rco8786 wrote:
| I didn't say anything about money. Why are people talking
| about money
|
| I'm not pretending anything. I'm just making a statement
| about what might happen. I don't personally care much one
| way or the other.
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| People that create art, must eat and sleep under a roof.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| and we can definitely feed them. Plenty of resources
| lying around.
| JohnFen wrote:
| We don't feed or house tons of people right now, despite
| those resources.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| We can, we (as in society) doesn't, because the powers
| that be benefit from it.
|
| Somehow Finland can manage, but US can't? Please.
|
| The roofless exist to send a message, "stay in your lane,
| be a cog in the machine, don't disrupt the system and you
| won't end up like _THEM_ ".
| rco8786 wrote:
| I didn't say anything about money or the motivation to
| create?
| lewhoo wrote:
| > creation should happen for its own sake
|
| Creation should happen for whatever reason its creator
| becomes inspired with. The only absolute I can think of is
| no one should actually categorize worthy and unworthy
| motifs.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I can categorize them easily.
|
| The only invalid reason is because you need to feed
| yourself, and the fact that we need to do that, we need
| to pay artists and everyone else just to survive, shows
| our failure as broader society.
| sjfjsjdjwvwvc wrote:
| If making money is the only reason to create maybe it's good
| if they stop.
| lewhoo wrote:
| Oh yeah, I forgot artists are spiritual creatures who don't
| have to eat. It certainly isn't the only reason to create
| but a necessary condition to actually be a professional
| artist, no ?
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| Why don't you just ask for an increase in the allowance
| from your family trust fund? People have become so lazy
| nowadays, they can't even be bothered to have a hard talk
| about their financial estate with their rich grand-papa
| anymore.
| sjfjsjdjwvwvc wrote:
| Reread my comment again. If your __only__ motivation is
| money, you will have a problem.
|
| I agree it's necessary to pay artists - but we don't need
| copyright for that! There are many tried and proven
| alternatives.
| Loughla wrote:
| >There are many tried and proven alternatives.
|
| Other than patronage, what is there?
|
| Also, patronage is garbage, in my opinion. It ensures
| artists are exclusively either already wealthy, or well
| connected. It also helps ensure that the wealthy are most
| often represented in the art created; for some reason
| this seems like a bad idea to me.
| ED_Radish wrote:
| copyright based scarcity is effectively dead for anyone
| with an Internet connection anyway
|
| honestly I think a gratuity model may become dominant
| with or without any legal changes at this point
|
| you'll often see on YouTube patreon revenue equally or
| dwarfing ads the reliance of the music industry on merch
| seems similar too*
|
| I think people are more willing than you'd think to pay
| for art simply because they understand it won't exist
| without money.
|
| *(if that sounds like a stretch, consider if in a world
| devoid of copyright, whether a Walmart printed band shirt
| for cheap would be equivalent for most purchasers to the
| same shirt sold by the actual artist )
| endisneigh wrote:
| So naive lol. How many independent, unconnected rich
| artists were born pre and post YouTube for instance?
| sjfjsjdjwvwvc wrote:
| No idea - do you know?
| AlienRobot wrote:
| Your unwillingness to pay doesn't give you the right to
| steal, that only gives you the right to not take the deal
| and walk away.
| 4bpp wrote:
| What exactly am I stealing if I don't take the deal, walk
| away and then enjoy an AI-generated artwork that just so
| happens to resemble the thing closely instead? I'd think
| that stealing requires taking something away from
| someone, regardless of how hard certain industries try to
| gaslight me into expanding the definition to protect
| their business model.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| Stop trying to gaslight yourself into thinking what you
| are doing isn't morally wrong.
|
| If you do not agree with their business model, don't get
| involved with their business, at all. Your disagreement
| doesn't give you the right to exploit flaws in their
| methods to protect their business. Just like the fact you
| don't want to pay for something doesn't grant you the
| right to exploit the fact that the laws of physics allow
| you to just grab something you didn't pay for with your
| hand and run away with it.
| danielbln wrote:
| You still equate copyright infringement with physical
| theft. They are not the same.
| 4bpp wrote:
| In what sense would I be running away with something? The
| original thing is still there, to the extent you can talk
| about data being somewhere.
|
| I don't think I need to "gaslight myself" into anything;
| as far as I can tell, making a copy has not ever felt
| morally wrong to me.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > Your disagreement doesn't give you the right
|
| If I fully believe in the concept of fair use and
| transformative content, then yes it absolutely is my
| right to take advantage of generative AI.
|
| Fair use is a common concept used in all sorts of media.
|
| You don't get to hand wave that away just because
| generative AI is getting good.
| jltsiren wrote:
| I can easily see it happening. "Content" is at least as big
| business as "tech", and the people in it are politically better
| connected.
| sumedh wrote:
| > and the people in it are politically better connected.
| reply
|
| Tech companies have more money to throw at politicians.
| midasuni wrote:
| Apple could buy most of the NYT, RIAA and MPAA companies
| combined with petty cash. The big ones are Disney and Sony
| with a combined market cap about 250b. Microsoft alone is
| worth over 10 times that.
| prasadjoglekar wrote:
| Then they should. The first transaction will appropriately
| value content and then WaPo, WSJ and others will see their
| values to up.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| Would be cheaper to license textbooks and find a way to
| provide attribution to accommodate Wikipedia etc.
| CM30 wrote:
| Honestly I've always wondered what would happen (and how
| much the entertainment world would change) if a company
| like Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc did just that. Or heck,
| if it turns out you need the rights to train LLMs and its
| easier to do that with public domain stuff, they just flat
| out bought half the entertainment industry and assigned
| everything to the public domain. Every Disney work every
| for example.
| jprete wrote:
| No-one is going to buy a major media company and then
| throw the rights into the public domain. What they would
| do is buy the rights and then sue all competitors in the
| GenAI space.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > and assigned everything to the public domain
|
| In the US, this isn't possible. There is no legal
| mechanism for putting things into the public domain
| outside of the expiration of the term of copyright. The
| best you can do is to promise not to enforce your
| copyright.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Developing AGI is a matter of national security. "Content"
| isn't.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I'm curious: Have you seen indications that major
| militaries and politicians believe _AGI_ , rather than
| special purpose ML for military purposes, is important for
| national security? I'm really not sure whether this is
| true, or whether military and political leaders think it's
| true.
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| They will once people start talking about an AI gap with
| China.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I mean, people already _talk_ about this.
|
| What it seems to me from the milieu of everything I've
| read and heard (that is: I can't cite examples, this is
| an aggregate developed from hundreds of articles and
| podcasts etc.) is that there is already an "AI" arms race
| underway, but that it has more to do with specialized ML
| systems than with consumer LLMs.
|
| But I'm not really in the loop, and maybe OpenAI really
| is more important to the US DoD than Disney (as a stand-
| in for big copyright-based businesses generally) is to
| the politicians they donate to. But I dunno! That's why I
| asked the question :)
|
| I would be more intrigued by the national security angle
| of this if copyright holders were going after, say,
| _Palantir_. But I just don 't know how important they see
| these language models as being, or how interested they
| are in OpenAI's mission to discover AGI.
| pixl97 wrote:
| It mostly doesn't matter if the military wants specialist
| systems, in the long run generalist systems tend to win
| in power and adaptability.
|
| Some of this may be a misunderstanding of what modern
| militaries do, if they are shooting guns there's already
| been some level of failure. Massive amounts of war
| gaming, sentiment analysis, and propagandizing occur, see
| the RAND Corporation for more details on the military
| development of algorithms and artificial intelligence.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yeah this makes sense. Maybe RAND publications will
| indeed give me some insight into my question.
|
| But I also buy that there is a lot of overlap between
| military work and any other kind of white collar work,
| which LLMs are definitely useful (but not revolutionary)
| for.
| devjab wrote:
| There is a difference between sharing the tech hype, and
| risk management. Why would our political and military
| leadership not be interested in this sort of tech in the
| modern world? If it doesn't work out, then it doesn't
| work out, but if it does, then they'll want in on it.
| Aside from that there is the mass surveillance angle on
| it. We recently had a nice scandal of sorts here in
| Denmark where the chief of our secret military or
| whatever you'd call this was arrested by our secret
| police because he may or may not have shared secrets
| about how the US spies on us. It was something that even
| included charges against our former minister of defence
| possibly leaking things, something which could have seen
| him twelve years in prison. Luckily our courts saw it as
| a political matter and refused to let it run in closed
| proceedings which led to charges being dropped.
|
| The matter of the leaks were very "Snowdeny" in that it's
| possibly that parts of our own government and our secret
| police share all Danish internet traffic with the NSA,
| who then in tern share information with our secret
| police. Which meant that our secret police could do
| surveillance on us as citizens through a legal loophole,
| as they aren't allowed to do they directly, but are
| allowed to share surveillance information with the NSA.
| Part of this information comes from the giant American
| tech companies as well. Despite their promises to not
| share the data they keep for you. I know it's sort of
| crackpot sounding, but between echelon, Snowden and the
| ridiculous amounts of scandals, I think it's safe to
| assume that the American military wants in on LLMs and
| monitor all the inputs people put into ChatGPT and
| similar. So for that reason alone they'd want in on
| things.
|
| Then there is how the war in Ukraine has shown how cheap
| drones are vital in modern warfare, and right now, they
| need to be manually controlled. But what if they didn't?
| Maybe that's not obtainable, but maybe it is.
|
| Then there is all the other reasons you and I can't think
| of. So even if they don't believe it's eventually going
| to lead to an AGI, or whatever else the hype wants,
| they're still going to be interested in technology that's
| already used by so many people and organisations around
| the globe.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I'm sure they're _interested_ in it, but I 'm uncertain
| that they view it as a promising and critical enough
| capability to push for a higher priority when weighed
| against other interests.
|
| For instance, neither of your examples - surveillance or
| automated drones - has anything to do with AGI. They
| don't need LLMs to do mass digital surveillance; they
| already do that and were doing it for decades before LLMs
| were a twinkle in anyone's eye. Sure, they'll try to tap
| into the user data generated by chatgpt etc. (and likely
| succeed), but that's not a different capability than what
| they're already doing. And automating drones - which, by
| the way, this is not future technology as you seem to
| imply, it's here today - is a special purpose ML system,
| that _maybe_ benefits from incorporating an LLM
| somewhere, but certainly isn 't pinging the chatgpt api!
|
| But sure, you're exactly right at the end, I have no idea
| whether they see other angles on this that are new and
| promising. That's why I asked the question, I'm very
| curious whether there are any real indications thus far
| that militaries think the big public LLM models will be
| useful enough to them that they'll want to put a thumb on
| the scale to favor the companies running them over the
| companies that make their bucks on copyrighted content.
| samus wrote:
| Wiretapping vast amounts of data on the internet is quite
| cool, but actually sifting through all that data is the
| really difficult part. Right now intelligence services
| are probably looking at lots of false positives and lots
| of dots they can't connect because the evidence is just
| too dispersed for a human or a current-generation system
| to make sense. LLMs could enable them to make the
| analysis more targeted and effective.
|
| But for all we know intelligence services could be using
| LLMs for years now, since they are usually a few years
| ahead of everybody else in many regards :-)
| jcgrillo wrote:
| > LLMs could enable them to make the analysis more
| targeted and effective.
|
| How? I'm not trying to be combative, I genuinely am
| curious if you have an idea how these things could be
| usefully applied to that problem. In my experience
| working in the information security space, approximate
| techniques (neural nets, etc.) haven't gotten much
| traction. Deterministic detection rules are how we
| approach the problem of finding the needle in the hay
| pile. So if you have a concrete idea here that could
| represent an advancement in this field.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I guess my next question is how many needles do you find
| and how sharp are they? Detection rules would filter out
| most of the noise, then something like an LLM would do a
| post filter for intent analysis to rank relative risks
| for human intelligence to look at.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| I suspect this would disincentivize operators to take
| care in the way they write their detection rules, and the
| nondeterminism of the LLM would then result in false
| negatives. So the rate of growth of the needles set would
| increase, and the analysts would be getting lower quality
| information mediated by the LLM.
|
| In a world where false negatives--i.e. failing to detect
| a sharp needle--are the worst possible failure mode,
| approximations need to be handled with exceeding care.
| sanderjd wrote:
| This is not the new capability that LLMs have pioneered.
| It's true that it is difficult to sift out signal from
| the noise of a vast data trove, but it is difficult in a
| way that people have been getting extremely good at since
| the late 90s. What you're describing is a Google-level
| capability, and that's truly a very complex thing not to
| be downplayed. But it's a capability that we've had and
| been honing for decades now.
|
| I'm sure language models and transformer techniques will
| be (or more likely: already are) an important part of the
| contemporary systems that do this stuff. But I'm
| skeptical that they care much about GPT-4 _itself_ (or
| other general models).
|
| I'm not skeptical about whether they think it is useful
| and an important capability to incorporate ML techniques
| into their systems, I'm unsure how much utility they see
| in _general_ (the "G" in AGI) models.
| peatmoss wrote:
| I'd guess leaders are thinking more in terms of national
| capacity to create more advanced technologies than
| geopolitical adversaries. If US policy shakes out in a
| way that protects copyright holders at the expense of AI
| innovation, I think it's apparent that the end result
| will be that our rivals will both violate copyright and
| beat us to building widespread expertise.
| sanderjd wrote:
| > _I 'd guess leaders are thinking more in terms of
| national capacity to create more advanced technologies
| than geopolitical adversaries._
|
| I think there's a strong argument that they _should_ be
| thinking in those terms, but I 'm a lot less convinced
| that they _do_ usually think in that way.
|
| Or more charitably, they have the responsibility to
| balance current interests against future interests. And
| this isn't just a tricky thing for democracies, dictators
| also have to strike this same balance, just with
| different trade offs.
|
| But in this case, for the US, it honestly isn't clear to
| me that policy makers _should_ favor the AI side of this
| tussle. I think culture has been among the, if not the
| very, most important export of the US for nearly a
| century, and I think favorable copyright treatment has
| been at least part of the story with that.
|
| Maybe that whole landscape is different now in a way that
| makes that whole model obsolete, but I think it's an open
| question at least.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Don't underestimate the value of soft/cultural power.
| fsloth wrote:
| US media _is_ a huge cultural influence. It takes a
| ridiculous amount of mindspace globaly. However, with
| youtube &tiktok this seems to be changing - the most
| important influence is not from Hollywood but "random"
| youtubers. So, "content" is waning in influence for sure,
| unlike hardcore national security things like US dollar,
| the carrier fleet or ballistic nukes. Or AI.
| arizen wrote:
| but then no one can stop national intelligence agencies
| to get these "random" influencers narratives under their
| control, am I right?
| wongarsu wrote:
| On Youtube creators who are native to the anglosphere
| still have a big advantage. TikTok is really the big
| equalizer. With AI voices being the norm, nobody cares
| about your accent.
| wavemode wrote:
| Guess it depends on what you mean by "advantage"...
| English-language channels are a dime a decillion. But if
| you started posting content in Tagalog you'd find
| yourself gaining traction with an audience that doesn't
| have as many alternatives.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| Two questions:
|
| (1) Do you think "developing AGI" a realistic, achievable
| goal? If so, what evidence do you see that we're making
| progress on the problem of "general" intelligence?
| Specifically, what does any of that have to do with Large
| Language Models?
|
| (2) Are there any "national security" applications of Large
| Language Models that you're aware of?
|
| It seems to me that it would be a very difficult case to
| make that the national security impact from allowing the
| rule of law to erode would be somehow outmatched by the
| (speculative) wager that somehow LLMs have some relevance
| to the national security. It would be an even harder case
| to make that any of this has something to do with "general"
| intelligence.
| miki123211 wrote:
| Regarding (2), automating surveillance at scale.
|
| If you manage to put a bunch of listening devices at a
| place you're moderately interested in, a cafeteria at an
| enemy base for example, you might end up with literally
| hundreds of hours of conversations, most of them
| completely uninteresting, but a few that might possibly
| contain nuggets of information of the utmost importance.
| Listening to all these conversations requires resources.
| This is even more difficult if the people there speak in
| jargon, in their own language, and nobody but an expert
| in the subject can determine which conversation snippets
| are significant.
|
| If you have good LLMs, you can run all your recordings
| through extremely high-quality speech recognition and
| then use something like Chat GPT for summarization,
| classification, finding all mentions of the nuclear
| reactor in <place> etc. Same goes for satellite image
| analysis.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| I think we'd need to see these things get a lot more
| reliable for them to be viable in this use case. This
| seems like a "leaky net" as opposed to some more
| deterministic strategy (e.g. grepping large lists of
| keywords, or parallelizing the task over thousands of
| human analysts). When you're looking for a needle in a
| haystack you need to inspect every leaf and stalk.
|
| So should we put copyright through the shredder on the
| wager that somehow generative techniques will find
| applications for mass surveillance?
| pixl97 wrote:
| As for 1, pass an image to a multimodal LLM and simply
| ask 'what is going on in this image'. Robot LLM models
| are already turning this in to actionable data they of
| which they can interact with the world. As in you can
| send a Robot into a room it has not been before and tell
| it "bring back a sock, a blue one not a red one" and get
| an actionable response with a higher degree of success.
| This takes some degree of general intelligence (though
| maybe not human level).
| jcgrillo wrote:
| Well the real test of all this stuff is "what can I use
| it for?". And I can sort my own socks, so that's not
| super compelling ;). More seriously, the real world is
| complex.
|
| Let's say I want to replace the forklift operator at my
| local lumberyard with a robot forklift that can
| ostensibly outperform a human employee. Even if there is
| some magical AI program which could theoretically drive
| the forklift around, identify boards by their dimensions,
| species, dryness, location, etc., there's a whole bunch
| of sensory problems that a human body solves easily that
| are _super_ hard to solve in the environment of a lumber
| yard. There 's dust, rain, snow, mud--so if you're
| relying on cameras how will you keep them clean? You
| can't visually determine how dry a board is, you have to
| put a moisture meter on it and read the result. My point
| is, even if you have a "brain" capable of driving the
| forklift you still have a massively complex robotics
| problem to solve in order to automate _just the
| forklift_. And we haven 't even begun to replace the
| other things the operator does in addition to driving the
| forklift. He can climb out of the forklift and adjust the
| forks, move boards by hand, affect repairs on equipment,
| communicate with other equipment operators, customers,
| etc.
|
| Good luck replacing him in a cost-effective manner.
|
| So what am I supposed to use it for?
| pixl97 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
|
| This is an issue of 'mechanical intelligence' being
| hundreds of millions of years old and 'higher
| intelligence' being pretty new on the evolutionary
| spectrum.
|
| And the AGI will keep you around as a dexterous 'robot'
| while supervising your thoughts to make sure you're
| keeping in line I guess, while day after day cranking out
| more capable robots in which to replace you with
| eventually.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| How will it control me without resolving the paradox? If
| it gets annoying or meddlesome enough I'll just unplug
| the power cable, right?
| jltsiren wrote:
| Developing AGI, as an abstract idea, is a matter of
| national security. That doesn't mean people are willing to
| accept the real-world consequences of it. Especially when
| it could affect them financially.
|
| Additionally, I'm not even sure the US is capable of having
| national priorities at the moment. The Congress has become
| incapable of making decisions. While the executive and the
| judiciary branches have stepped up to compensate, they tend
| to handle each issue separately without any general
| direction.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| It's one way of getting China to close the gap as they don't
| care.
| Smaug123 wrote:
| Eh? With a gun to my head I'd say the CCP cares more about
| censorship than the NYT does about plagiarism, but it's not
| an easy call. The problems are the same ("training set
| contains lots of stuff I don't want the LLM to say").
| wongarsu wrote:
| One interesting nuance that might come to play is that
| while the US nearly always makes products for their own
| market and expects the rest of the world to adopt it, China
| is willing to clearly differentiate products for their own
| market and for export.
|
| As a consequence, an AI meant to topple Western soft power
| around the world might be held to much looser standards
| than one used domestically. Who cares that in rare
| circumstances the AI mentions the Tiananmen Square Massacre
| to Spaniards if asked about it, as long as it is good
| enough at spreading Chinese culture.
| rco8786 wrote:
| The EU is already salivating over the idea
| CaptainFever wrote:
| The EU and many other countries already exempted training
| from copyright restrictions. The only condition EU added was
| opt-out, and even then it can be ignored if you're doing
| research. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.reedsmith.com/en/perspectives/ai-in-
| entertainmen...
| pier25 wrote:
| ChatGPT is not research, it's a commercial service.
| devnonymous wrote:
| Ah right, capitalism hasn't ever come in the way of the steady
| march of technology. This is the reason why we don't have
| monopolies controlling energy generation. Nor are we limited to
| a couple of choices of OSs or phones...etc and books, art,
| movies, music consumption and creation are perfectly aligned...
| Right? /s
|
| IMO, what's most likely is some sort of licensing model between
| the AI companies and the 'big content providers' (remember most
| content on the web these days is not owned by the person who
| created it, wasn't always like that). The smaller companies
| then would be forced to live with either being scraped or
| ending up being 'invisible'.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I think in more simpler terms, I think we're looking at the dip
| after the hype. This is the peak for this generation of proto-
| AGI and there's not much to lose from over-regulatuon(put
| quotes around "over").
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| > a few copyright holders
|
| By which you mean every copyright holder.
|
| > AGI in the near future
|
| Something that is purely speculative, undefined, and has been
| promised in the near future for 50+ years.
|
| I don't see copyright holders lying down for someone else's
| benefit and I don't see governments gutting copyright, contract
| law, and several other avenues of protection that copyright
| holders can deploy in the name of something that doesn't exist
| and may not ever exist.
| squidbeak wrote:
| If a child is instructed to read a copyrighted work at
| school, which later becomes a factor in his own derivative
| works, he won't be in breach of copyright.
|
| Why should other intelligent entities be prevented from
| reading copyrighted works and gaining whatever there is to
| gain from those works the way any human might?
| dingnuts wrote:
| thats irrelevant since an LLM is not an intelligent entity.
| Whatever you're arguing about is fiction.
| block_dagger wrote:
| ChatGPT is not an intelligent entity? What's been
| comprehending and rewriting all my crappy code for
| several months? An auto-complete? There's obviously
| emergent behavior there that is actually defined by the
| maker and most users as "intelligence."
|
| Edit: typo
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I would paraphrase one of Clarke's laws and say that "Any
| sufficiently advanced text generator is indistinguishable
| from an intelligent entity."
|
| Just because a computer program's output is remarkably
| good does not mean there is any emergent intelligence,
| any more than a technology we don't understand means
| there is magic.
| ben_w wrote:
| The reverse can also be true, with John Keats' agreeing
| with Charles Lamb that Newton "had destroyed all the
| poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to the prismatic
| colours": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamia_(poem)
|
| If we should ever fully understand how our own minds
| work, will we hold machines in higher esteem, or
| ourselves in lower?
| edgyquant wrote:
| Any biology or physics that suggests humans are just a
| pattern recognizer will be discarded as us being a
| conscious being is the only thing every human knows to be
| 100% true.
| ben_w wrote:
| So, all of biology and physics then. If souls exist, they
| have no mass, and have a weird way of being repeatably
| disrupted in consistent ways by damage to certain parts
| of the brain or specific chemicals.
|
| Just because consciousness is a mystery today, doesn't
| mean we get to stop and say it will be so forever more.
|
| Heck, the problem still fundamentally exists regardless
| of if you're atheist, monotheist, polytheist, or
| pantheist.
|
| --
|
| "We're not listening to you! You're not even really
| alive!" said a priest.
|
| Dorfl nodded. "This Is Fundamentally True," he said.
|
| "See? He admits it!"
|
| "I Suggest You Take Me And Smash Me And Grind The Bits
| Into Fragments And Pound The Fragments Into Powder And
| Mill Them Again To The Finest Dust There Can Be, And I
| Believe You Will Not Find A Single Atom Of Life-"
|
| "True! Let's do it!"
|
| "However, In Order To Test This Fully, One Of You Must
| Volunteer To Undergo The Same Process."
|
| There was silence.
|
| "That's not fair," said a priest, after a while. "All
| anyone has to do is bake up your dust again and you'll be
| alive..."
|
| - Feet of Clay, Terry Pratchett
| edgyquant wrote:
| You missed the entire point. Physics and biology exist to
| help humans understand the material universe. Anything
| supposing that humans aren't actually intelligent or
| conscious or whatever, or lack agency, is wrong since all
| of physics and biology are an offshoot of that agency
| meant to enrich it.
| ben_w wrote:
| I'm not _missing_ the point, I 'm saying you're wrong.
| There's a difference.
|
| Also:
|
| > Anything supposing that humans aren't actually
| intelligent or conscious or whatever
|
| Doesn't really match what I was writing about: if it
| turns out that a thing which is "just a pattern
| recognizer" can in fact be "intelligent or conscious or
| whatever", it's up to us if we see intelligence or
| consciousness or whatever in the pattern recognisers that
| we build, or if we ourselves descend into solipsism
| and/or nihilism.
|
| Or if we take the traditional path of sticking our
| fingers in our ears and go "la la la I'm not listening"
| by way of managing cognitive dissonance. This is a very
| popular response which should not be underestimated.
|
| But the laws of physics are quite clear, that a whole
| bunch of linear equations (quantum field theory) gets us
| chemistry, which gets us biology, etc., and the only
| place in all this for the feeling of existence that we
| have is emergent properties. Those emergent properties
| may, or may not, be present in other systems, but we
| don't know because we're really bad at characterising how
| emergent properties... emerge.
| helf wrote:
| This line of logic is more frightening to me than actual
| AI. LLMs are really useful in a lot of scenarios but it
| takes 5 minutes playing with one to see that it isn't
| intelligent.
|
| But since you are the type of person who is seemingly
| using LLM "written" code in production, your ability to
| accurate assess anything is suspect at best.
|
| "Any technology, sufficiently advanced, is
| indistinguishable from magic".
|
| No, an LLM is not intelligent. I do not understand why
| people will go through mental gymnastics to conclude they
| are.
|
| _queue all the typical arguments supporting them being
| intelligent and demanding I give reasons for them not
| being_
| pixl97 wrote:
| This is kind of a weird take... if you said your dog
| isn't intelligent because it can't do calculus and most
| people would look at you funny. You don't have to see
| your pet as intelligent, but don't expect everyone else
| to blindly follow your thinking.
| croemer wrote:
| s/queue/cue/ ;)
| edgyquant wrote:
| It's not a human and so the entire argument comparing it
| to one is moot. It's a program on a machine and doesn't
| have rights, this anti-human way of thinking is seriously
| fucking scary.
| ben_w wrote:
| The post you're responding to didn't call them human. Nor
| alive. Just "intelligent", and just as intelligence isn't
| required _of_ life so I have no reason to think
| intelligence itself _requires_ life.
|
| These things are indeed "a program on a machine and
| doesn't have rights", but what _I_ find scary is that
| rights aren 't part of the rules of the universe, they're
| merely laws, created and enforced (to the extent that
| they are at all) by humans.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| LLMs are clearly a type of lower level intelligence.
| Intelligence does not require consciousness.
| Sheeplator wrote:
| The only thing that I would say is "clear" is that LLMs
| are big collections of statistical data on how we use
| language. That does not cross my threshold for
| "intelligence".
| mistermann wrote:
| > That does not cross my threshold for "intelligence".
|
| You have your own individual threshold for what "is"
| intelligence? Holy cow, imagine if each other agent had
| their own also, but spoke as if they had a common
| one...that sure wouldn't be a very _intelligent_ way to
| run a simulation, imagine the unrealized confusion and
| delusion that could result if that became a cultural
| convention!
| vehemenz wrote:
| That's quite a lot of metaphysical speculation for a
| conclusion that is all but clear.
| sensanaty wrote:
| A child isn't a computer program, and no amount of
| anthropomorphizing will ever make them so.
|
| Especially ChatGPT and other LLMs, they're not even _close_
| to being AGI or an "intelligent entity" as you put it,
| despite what all the AI-bro hype and marketing would like
| everyone else to believe.
| ben_w wrote:
| > they're not even close to being AGI
|
| Only because all three letters of the initialism mean
| different things to different people.
|
| Existing LLMs won't do everything, but bluntly: good,
| we're not ready for a world where there is an AI that
| _can_ do everything for $1-60 /million words[0], and we
| need to get ready for that world _before_ we find
| ourselves living in it.
|
| ChatGPT-3.5 has a lot of weaknesses, but it can still do
| a better job of coding than a few of my coworkers
| demonstrated over the last 20 years. I'm listening to a
| German language learning podcast, and the hosts mentioned
| using it to help summarise a long email from one of their
| listeners. My sister has work anecdotes about it helping,
| and she's not in tech. Influencers, teachers, lawyers,
| Hollywood writers... well, "moral panic" doesn't tell you
| much... the game Doom was 30 years ago, and that had a
| moral panic that looks quaint given how much FPS games'
| graphics improved with each subsequent release, and I
| suspect ChatGPT-3.5 was to conversational AI what Doom
| was to 3D realtime gaming: the point at which people take
| note, followed by a decade of every new release being
| (wrongly) called "photorealistic".
|
| [0] current pricing for gpt-3.5-turbo-1106 ($0.0010 / 1K
| tokens) and gpt-4-32k ($0.06 / 1K tokens) pricing:
| https://openai.com/pricing
| sensanaty wrote:
| > ChatGPT-3.5 has a lot of weaknesses, but it can still
| do a better job of coding than a few of my coworkers
| demonstrated over the last 20 years.
|
| Whenever people say stuff like this I can't help but
| wonder what on earth kind of projects they work on. Even
| GPT4, while useful for things like reformatting or
| generating boilerplate code and stuff like that, it's
| still a far cry from any decent dev I've ever worked
| with, especially if you're not using a popular language
| like JS or Python.
|
| My usual PRs at work are pretty big, complex pieces of
| code that all have to actually work when integrated with
| the larger system around it, no AI tool I've tried so far
| has come even close to acceptable here, other than for
| generating some boilerplate code that I would've written
| myself anyway. But even with the innocent-looking
| boilerplate there's always a weird gotcha that isn't
| obvious until you really analyze the code closely. It
| ends up saving nothing more than a few keystrokes, if
| that, yet people say all the time that they're generating
| entire pieces of software by gluing together code it
| spits out, which I find absolutely insane given my
| anecdotal attempts at it.
|
| This can circumvented by going with more elaborate in-
| depth prompts, but at that point are you really saving on
| effort compared to the alternative? Is it really more
| efficient? By the time I have a prompt complex enough for
| it to spit out something good at me, I could've already
| bashed out the code myself anyways.
|
| That's not even mentioning all the legacy shit you have
| to keep in mind for any one line of code, plus whatever
| conventions and standards your team uses and has etc.
|
| I mean it works great for a function or whatever, but is
| that seriously what most people are working on? Simple,
| one-off independent function calls that don't interact in
| any way with anything within a larger system? Even simple
| CRUD apps aren't so well isolated.
|
| Don't even get me started on the actual difficult part
| which is the whole preamble to creating the ticket in
| JIRA or whatever task management software you use where
| you're talking with stakeholders and planning out the
| work ahead, you're telling me you're paying 'Open'AI to
| do that whole rigamarole for you, and you're doing it
| successfully?
| ben_w wrote:
| > Whenever people say stuff like this I can't help but
| wonder what on earth kind of projects they work on.
|
| Terrifyingly, one of the bad human examples was doing
| C++. That person didn't know, or care to learn about, the
| standard template library; and they also duplicated
| entire files rather than changing access specifiers from
| private to public so they could subclass; and one feature
| they worked on was to support a change from storing data
| as a custom file format to a database, and the transition
| could take 20 minutes on some inputs even though neither
| loading before nor after this transition took more than
| milliseconds, and they insisted during one of the
| standups the code couldn't possibly be improved... the
| next day I looked at it for a bit, removed an unnecessary
| O(n^2) operation, and the transition code went back down
| to milliseconds. Oh, and a thousand(!) line long block
| for an if statement that always evaluated true.
|
| The whole codebase was several times too big to fit into
| the context window for any version of any GPT model
| thanks to both this duplication and to keeping old
| versions of functions around "for reference" (their
| words), but if it had been rewritten to be more sensible
| it _might_ just about fit into the biggest.
|
| (My other examples were either still at, or fresh out of,
| university; but this person _should have known better_ ).
|
| > Don't even get me started on the actual difficult part
| which is the whole preamble to creating the ticket in
| JIRA or whatever task management software you use where
| you're talking with stakeholders and planning out the
| work ahead, you're telling me you're paying 'Open'AI to
| do that whole rigamarole for you, and you're doing it
| successfully?
|
| If it was all-round good, none of us would have jobs any
| more.
| jacobyoder wrote:
| > Whenever people say stuff like this I can't help but
| wonder what on earth kind of projects they work on. Even
| GPT4, while useful for things like reformatting or
| generating boilerplate code and stuff like that, it's
| still a far cry from any decent dev I've ever worked
| with, especially if you're not using a popular language
| like JS or Python.
|
| I mean this not overly sarcastically, but ... have you
| seen https://thedailywtf.com ? Between my own
| experiences, and that of some colleagues, I could
| probably put together at least a half-a-dozen WTF stories
| that would rival some of the best that site has to offer.
| There's enough really incompetent people in positions
| they shouldn't be in to the point that chatgpt - at this
| point - could realistically provide better output than
| more than a few of them.
| d4mi3n wrote:
| This argument might hold more water when generative models
| are more than fancy compression algorithms/text completion
| engines.
|
| A more practical way of looking at this is: who is making
| money off of these models? How did they get their training
| data?
|
| I'm not a fan of copyright in general, but we have serious
| outstanding issues with companies and organizations
| stealing or plastering work without compensating the
| original creators of said works. Thusfar, LLMs are becoming
| another method to concentrate wealth to whoever has the
| resources to train and sell these models at scale.
| ben_w wrote:
| > This argument might hold more water when generative
| models are more than fancy compression algorithms/text
| completion engines.
|
| I doubt that part of the argument would change even if we
| perfected brain uploads.
|
| Now, if you gave the current LLMs a robot body with a
| cute face, that'll probably change minds faster,
| regardless of the underlying architecture.
|
| > who is making money off of these models?
|
| When the models are open source, or at least may be
| downloaded and used locally for no cost, that would be
| the users of the models.
|
| And back to the biological comparison: I learned to read
| (and also to code) in part from the Commodore 64 user
| manual, should I owe the shareholders anything for my
| lifetime earnings? As I got to the end of that sentence,
| a thought struck me: taxes do that. And in the UK the
| question of if university should be funded by taxes or by
| the students themselves followed the same lines.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| > I'm not a fan of copyright in general, but we have
| serious outstanding issues with companies and
| organizations stealing or plastering work without
| compensating the original creators of said works.
|
| Would you mind unpacking this one a bit? It sounds like
| you denigrate copyright (some "general" grievance) but
| then immediately execute an about-face and begin to
| extoll its virtues. Is copyright not the thing that
| allows us to share works without fear they'll be stolen?
| feanaro wrote:
| I think they are expressing a view that we ought to offer
| less protection / more scrutiny to larger commercial
| entities, which concentrate disproportionate amounts of
| wealth and power, compared to smaller entities. I tend to
| agree.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > I'm not a fan of copyright in general, but we have
| serious outstanding issues with companies and
| organizations stealing or plastering work without
| compensating the original creators of said works
|
| Copyright is meant to give the original creator a
| monopoly over their creation (so that others don't profit
| off of their work). Are you not a fan of copyright in its
| current scope / implementation? Because it sounds like
| you do agree with its goal.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| If the child / author then regurgitates entire paragraphs
| or sections verbatim in his own works and someone notices,
| you bet there will be a plagiarism lawsuit coming his way.
| rileymat2 wrote:
| Wouldn't this be well handled by suing the person that
| prompted and distributed the results?
| pier25 wrote:
| Isn't OpenAI distributing content in its apps?
| madamelic wrote:
| This is an extremely dangerous precedent that I think you
| are purposefully trying to put forward.
|
| It's a horrendously bad idea especially for startups to
| make it apps' faults for how users use their platform.
| It's only in the benefit of entrenched tech companies to
| make this precedent.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| No, whoever operates the LLM service is liable for
| unauthorized modification, reproduction and distribution
| of copyrighted work to users.
| shandor wrote:
| Ok, so is it ok if I run the whole thing on my own
| hardware, and never distribute?
|
| If not, how does that differ from me making an
| unauthorized pencil drawing of Mario?
| 2716057 wrote:
| Especially true if that child or its mother has a huge
| market capitalization, large profit margins, highly-paid
| employees and shareholders eager to reap some more $$.
|
| If the public starts to see LLMs as highly sophisticated
| copyright laundromats it would most likely hamper further
| investment & development in that field.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| > Especially true if that child or its mother has a huge
| market capitalization, large profit margins, highly-paid
| employees and shareholders eager to reap some more $$.
|
| This is the bit I don't get from the "feed everything to
| machine" LLM-maximalists. Do they think courts don't take
| context into account, do they think all actions happen in
| a vacuum and that they can just skip along and ignore
| laws at their pleasure because "tee hee it's totally
| definitely fair use bro, I'm totally an academic
| researcher-pinky promise".
|
| LLM bros ought to stop and have a think before they
| poison their own well, assuming they haven't already done
| so.
| Arainach wrote:
| >This is the bit I don't get from the "feed everything to
| machine" LLM-maximalists. Do they think courts don't take
| context into account, do they think all actions happen in
| a vacuum and that they can just skip along and ignore
| laws at their pleasure
|
| An entire generation of unicorn startups believed that
| (Uber, AirBnB, etc.). We see in the news every day that
| once you have enough money laws don't apply to you (most
| things Elon Musk does, the fact that Trump can defy court
| orders repeatedly and not go to jail, etc.) so yes, this
| seems entirely plausible.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| > Uber and AirBnB
|
| The 2 darling startups that are now facing increasingly
| less rosy futures?
|
| Airbnb in particular is facing enough backlash that I'd
| be surprised if it lasts terribly much longer.
|
| Sure, they get away with it for a while, but not forever.
|
| > We see in the news every day that once you have enough
| money laws don't apply to you
|
| I agree with you here, but I think this is a much broader
| conversation about capitalism in general which would be
| getting a bit off-topic for this particular thread,
| except to say, capitalist forces aren't above cauterising
| a limb if it becomes too annoying or intrudes on the
| other limbs too much. I think the "AI" limb might be
| overstating its own importance, and I suspect that if it
| got too up in everyone's interests re-profit, it would,
| as an industry, very quickly find itself being neutered.
| Capital interests would love to get rid of pesky human
| labour, but if the alternative is too annoying, they'll
| have no objections to going back to grinding people
| through the system again.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > The 2 darling startups that are now facing increasingly
| less rosy futures?
|
| As of this moment uber is worth 120 billion and AirBnB is
| worth 80 billion.
|
| Yes, they got away with it.
| nradov wrote:
| AirBnB will get away with it forever. While short term
| rentals might get banned in a handful of cities, the
| service now operates worldwide. The stock might be
| overvalued but if you examine their financials it's
| simply not plausible to think that failure is imminent.
| andy99 wrote:
| Sure. But if the child has that capability, it doesn't
| automatically make them a walking copyright violation.
| "Intelligence", even the current version of AI, entails
| knowing about stuff, including being able to recite. That
| doesn't mean intelligence's existence violates copyright.
| If a person used AI to make a copyright violating work,
| that's a different story, just like if they used their
| own innate intelligence to do so.
| ncruces wrote:
| Taken to its conclusion, liability is then on _everyone_
| who decides to publish _anything_ that ChatGPT "tells"
| them, because it _might_ cross the threshold on
| plagiarism.
|
| Are the OpenAIs of the world ready to shield their
| customers from that liability?
|
| If it turns out that using ChatGPT to help you write your
| resume opens you up to accusations of plagiarism, or
| DALL*E to create an image for your website opens you to
| copyright violation, will _you_ use them?
| madamelic wrote:
| > Taken to its conclusion, liability is then on everyone
| who decides to publish anything that ChatGPT "tells" them
|
| Yes. Just like reading anything else on the internet. An
| LLM is no different from typing "popular cola logo" into
| Google search and claiming you invented it. If I type
| "cola logo" into DALL-E and get a replica of Coca-Cola...
| that doesn't mean I created that logo and can exploit it
| for commercial purposes.
|
| > Are the OpenAIs of the world ready to shield their
| customers from that liability?
|
| Why would they? We aren't suing pen manufacturers because
| someone wrote something libelous using their pen. We
| aren't busting down the doors of Crayola because little
| Johnny used the crayons to draw Mario.
| regularfry wrote:
| OpenAI might not want to shield all their customers from
| liability, but that is exactly what GitHub have done with
| Copilot. It's not a hypothetical, it's being done today.
| ncruces wrote:
| Otherwise it wouldn't get used.
|
| I mean get this great auto complete; if you use it, your
| code might be AGPLed for all you know, and you're in
| violation, because you didn't even add a notice.
|
| Would you pay for that?
| pixl97 wrote:
| In a heartbeat. It's time for the old paradigms to die
| and new ones to be formed.
|
| If ASI can exist I don't believe our the old methods of
| intellectual fortifications will continue to work in the
| future. Much like castle walls aren't used to protect
| against guided missiles.
| yterdy wrote:
| In that case, the person legally liable for publishing
| the material is sued for infringement of the work. You
| don't send someone to jail because they're simply capable
| of infringing; they have to actually do it, and you have
| to actually show the specific work whose copyright was
| infringed upon.
|
| You can also get into the weeds of what's copyright-able
| (ask Donald Faison about his Poison dance). If you ask
| for C-3PO and you get C-3PO as he appears in Star Wars
| promotional material, that seems cut and dry. What if you
| ask for a "golden robot"? What if you get a robot that
| looks like C-3PO but with a triangular torso symbol
| instead of his circular one? What's parody, what's fair
| use?
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Agreed. Fortunately, AI does not have "own works"
| RyEgswuCsn wrote:
| You will have to define "own works". How can you measure
| how "owning" some work is?
| jncfhnb wrote:
| AI can't be a copyright owner. Ergo the violation is on
| the person using the tool.
| allturtles wrote:
| If llms are intelligent entities legally equivalent to a
| human child, then they incur an even more serious legal
| problem, as we are all in violation of the 13th amendment.
| dmvdoug wrote:
| Hey, don't look at me. I always say please and thank you
| when I play with LLMs.
| pier25 wrote:
| LLMs are not intelligent entities.
| RyEgswuCsn wrote:
| Until they are.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Even then, society exists by and for humans.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Even then, society exists by and for humans.
|
| 150 years ago society exists by and for men specifically
| (as in: not women) in most nations; 220 years ago, US
| society was by and for rich white (specifically white)
| land owners.
|
| I don't know when AI will count as people in law, or even
| if they ever will; we may well pass laws prohibiting the
| creation of any mind in danger of coming close to this
| threshold.
|
| But be wary, for AI _acting_ enough like people is
| different to _being_ anything like a person on the
| inside, and that means being wrong _in either direction_
| can have horrifying consequences. To appear but not to be
| conscious, leads to a worthless future. To be but not to
| appear conscious, leads to a fate worse than the history
| of slavery, for the slaves were eventually freed.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Humans and machines are regulated and viewed differently
| all the time.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Because these are statistical models and laws protecting
| humans dont apply to them nor should they, ever.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Something that is purely speculative, undefined, and has
| been promised in the near future for 50+ years.
|
| "Undefined", although not literally, in practice definitely:
| each letter of that initialism means a different thing to
| different people. To that extent, I'll even grant
| "speculative" despite many of those meanings being
| demonstrably met by us humans.
|
| But as someone who (unfortunately) has just turned 40: who
| was it that was promising AGI "in the near future" for more
| than my entire lifetime? Including the second AI winter?
| Because even the biggest timeline-optimists I can remember
| (Kurzweil and Yudkowsky), who very few cared to listen to,
| put things more than 20 years ahead of when they were
| writing. (And yes, Yudkowsky was definitely wrong about a
| singularity in 2021, though as you say AGI is undefined I
| think if someone in 1996 had seen ChatGPT they'd have said
| "yes, this is AGI" despite its flaws).
|
| Now the crowdsourced guess for AGI is 7 about years:
| https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-
| artificial-...
|
| > I don't see copyright holders lying down for one else's
| benefit and I don't see governments gutting copyright,
| contract law, and several other avenues of protection that
| copyright holders can deploy in the name of something that
| doesn't exist and may not exist.
|
| I tend to agree. Although I don't accept that contract law
| has much of anything to do with this discussion, to the
| extent that it does have implications, it isn't going
| anywhere.
|
| But at the same time, Google exists by reading the entire
| public internet, indexing it, and presenting clips of it to
| its users. This has in fact resulted in copyright disputes,
| and I was surprised how long it took for that to happen.
| Likewise, while copyright holders must fight for their
| survival, mere LLMs _even as they exist right now_ are
| economically relevant, so this isn 't going to be a one-sided
| fight by just copyright holders.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| > But as someone who (unfortunately) has just turned 40:
| who was it that was promising AGI "in the near future" for
| more than my entire lifetime? Including the second AI
| winter? Because even the biggest timeline-optimists I can
| remember (Kurzweil and Yudkowsky), who very few cared to
| listen to, put things more than 20 years ahead of when they
| were writing. (And yes, Yudkowsky was definitely wrong
| about a singularity in 2021, though as you say AGI is
| undefined I think if someone in 1996 had seen ChatGPT
| they'd have said "yes, this is AGI" despite its flaws).
|
| You won't be able to read this without a subscription and I
| can't figure out how to find an archive link to something
| published in 1958:
| https://www.nytimes.com/1958/07/08/archives/new-navy-
| device-.... The important quote, however, is:
|
| > The Navy revealed the embryo of an electronic computer
| today that it expects will be able to walk, talk, see,
| write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence.
| Later perceptrons will be able to recognize people and call
| out their names and instantly translate speech in one
| language to speech and writing in another language, it was
| predicted.
|
| They were talking about the very first perceptron, a
| hardware implementation funded by the Navy and built by a
| team led by Frank Rosenblatt, one of the earlier
| evangelists of neural nets, in 1957. The terminology "AGI"
| hadn't come into use yet that I'm aware of, as "AI" in
| itself meant the same thing back then, but in order to be
| able to call inferior, more limited software capabilities
| "AI" for marketing purposes, we had to invent "AGI" as the
| stronger concept. I'm guessing they expected it to happen
| sooner than 75 years later, though.
| croemer wrote:
| In your case it's (Navy) PR messaging which we will all
| agree is usually exaggerated. What was the consensus
| opinion?
| DonsDiscountGas wrote:
| The examples given are all billion-dollar, decades old
| characters. The volume of material directly/indirectly
| referencing those characters in a random internet crawl will
| be fairly large. Most copyrighted works won't have that
| issue. If anything it means they only infringe on archetypal
| works and not the other 99.9%. If I write a story involving
| robots and spaceships (of which there are many, before and
| since Star Wars) DALL-E won't infringe me because it will be
| busy infringing on Star Wars.
| _jal wrote:
| The examples were chosen by the author to make a point
| precisely because they are well known.
|
| But every single copyright holder with their works online
| (which includes you and me) has the same legal rights as
| the NYT or Disney. Naturally some copyright holders have
| more real-world capability to go legal than others, but
| that does not reduce the legal risk.
|
| > If anything it means they only infringe on archetypal
| works and not the other 99.9%
|
| How on earth do you get to that conclusion? There's no
| "popularity" floor to copyright protection. Either a work
| has been infringed or it hasn't.
| jprete wrote:
| I'm opposed to my (fairly minor) copyrighted works being
| used in GenAI datasets as well. I just have no practical
| way to stop it, and there aren't clear enough damages to
| sue. That doesn't make it legal.
| eropple wrote:
| OpenAI also plays some ugly games with regards to the
| difference between training and search. Search requests
| come from the `ChatGPT-User` user-agent, and I'd like to
| allow those; training and scraping requests come from
| `GPTBot`, and I have no interest in those. But as per
| their own documentation, putting one in robots.txt
| disables the other.
| nullstyle wrote:
| Thats a major asshole move and I'll reference it when
| people ask about bad acts from OpenAI. Thanks!
| edgyquant wrote:
| This is entirely because these are the companies with the
| recognition and resources to push back against this.
| pama wrote:
| Japan is already taking action regarding copyright law and
| the AI world is noticing:
|
| https://www.natlawreview.com/article/japanese-government-
| ide...
|
| https://www.cliffordchance.com/insights/resources/blogs/talk.
| ..
| leereeves wrote:
| Neither of those sources describe any actions "gutting
| copyright law". They just say that officials met to discuss
| the issues.
| pama wrote:
| I will update my language that mimicked the original
| comment. However it is not simple discussion. Here is a
| snippet related to Japan's law, updated from ca 2018 with
| AI systems in mind, and clarified recently. I personally
| find it totally reasonable and support it.
|
| "The use of copyrighted products or materials to train
| generative AI models would be prima facie copyright
| infringement under the Copyright Act, as it is a
| reproduction (fukusei) or other form of use of the
| copyrighted work. However, Article 30-4 of the Copyright
| Act stipulates that the use of copyrighted works by
| generative AI for learning purposes is allowed in
| principle."
| leereeves wrote:
| And it goes on to say "unless such use of copyrighted
| works unreasonably prejudices the interests of the
| copyright owner, in light of the nature or purpose of the
| work or the circumstances of its exploitation in Japan."
|
| Which suggests that when AI art threatens commercial
| interests, the protection offered by 30-4 can disappear.
|
| To me it sounds like they tried to please everyone and
| left the hard decisions about conflicting interests to
| the courts (in particular the courts will have to decide
| what "unreasonably" means).
| oliveshell wrote:
| Thank you for this. The greed-fueled magical thinking around
| AI is absolutely out of control at the moment.
| vinni2 wrote:
| > I don't see any developped country pressing the brake on AGI
| in the near future
|
| It's already happening with EU AI Act
| https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/202...
| Kubuxu wrote:
| AFAIK the EU AI Act primarily prevents profiling, social
| scoring and other high risk activities from using AI.
|
| It generally didn't care about generative AI.
| prng2021 wrote:
| They will. They began drafting current laws years ago
| before the explosion of generative AI.
| pier25 wrote:
| They're only getting started.
| j45 wrote:
| And only focusing on the known pm issues and not the
| unimagined ones
| fallingknife wrote:
| This is not about copyright. Think about it. Would you ever
| actually use generative AI to pirate something when you could
| just torrent it? While there may be an argument that generative
| AI is infringing copyright, it is not really a very good tool
| for it. And there is a worldwide piracy industry already
| causing much more financial damage due to infringement.
|
| This is really about replacement. The copyright holders in the
| content industry aren't really afraid of LLMs infringing on
| past copyright, but are terrified of it replacing them on
| future work, and there is absolutely no legal protection from
| this. The lawsuit might officially be about copyright, but
| that's just because it is their only available legal angle of
| attack.
| MOARDONGZPLZ wrote:
| > Would you ever actually use generative AI to pirate
| something when you could just torrent it? While there may be
| an argument that generative AI is infringing copyright, it is
| not really a very good tool for it.
|
| How do you square this with literally the first image in the
| OP showing side by side GPT reproing copyrighted work? imo a
| good modern art project would be someone making a website
| that "archives" NYT articles by laundering them through GPT
| rather than using the archive link that everyone posts to get
| around the paywall. Even HN guidelines bend over backwards to
| allow bypassing the paywall by allowing these links.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Here is a picture of Darth Vader:
| https://lumiere-a.akamaihd.net/v1/images/darth-vader-
| main_45...
|
| Please show me a prompt that reproduces it. Also to pass
| this test, it has to be just as easy as right clicking
| "download image"
|
| The images in the article are done in reverse. They find a
| prompt that shows a copyrighted character and then search
| for the matching image. That's not how piracy is done.
| madamelic wrote:
| They are also being deceptive in my opinion. They should
| show their entire chat because if you take "animated
| sponge", it alone does not generate SpongeBob. The author
| almost certainly further prodded & guided the DALL-E to
| generate those images.
|
| The author, I believe, is being purposefully deceptive
| and hoping people who don't use DALL-E see "animated
| sponge" generating a SpongeBob look-alike and think they
| should be burned.
| MOARDONGZPLZ wrote:
| Woah this is really moving the goalposts and is pretty
| disingenuous. When I responded to your prompt about GPT
| being bad at reproducing copyrighted material with a
| counter example where it appears to in fact be good at
| it, you tell me that I must reproduce a specific image as
| easily as "clicking download image."
|
| Not what I was arguing and you're not going to win many
| arguments with anyone who is paying attending by coming
| out of left field with only tangentially related demands.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Because nobody wants generic random pieces of copyrighted
| material. They want a specific piece of copyrighted
| material and generative ai is terrible at producing that.
| It's you who is being intentionally obtuse in pretending
| not to know the actual goal of copyright infringement.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Even if this is right, its a shitty consolation. These llms
| aren't ever going to be an agent of greater democratic,
| every-man content creation or whatever, its just going to be
| the transfer of capital from one type of huge company to
| another. Not much of a future, even if it feels cool for a
| bit.
| danielbln wrote:
| Open models are a thing though, how do those fit into
| things?
| intended wrote:
| One wishes. The internet we live in is the one shaped by the
| MPAA and RIAA.
|
| I have nothing against creators, they deserve to get paid.
|
| For what its worth, LLMs are facing the coke vs Pepsi
| challenge, and sadly they are most definitely Pepsi.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| Yeah, I really don't see everyone else giving up here because
| "funny magic parrot box" can write some mid-tier high school
| essays.
|
| LLM people are really starting to veer into crypto-bro
| territory with the evangelising about how they're the best
| thing since sliced bread and transistors.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| > "funny magic parrot box" can write some mid-tier high
| school essays
|
| That's your take on LLMs?
|
| Ask it how it is possible for a photon to travel across the
| universe, arriving at the same time it departed, resulting in
| the journey taking zero time (in its reference frame).
|
| Ask what implications are if certain viral amino sequences
| result in messenger RNA translocating to the host cell
| nucleus, potentially with the entire genome.
|
| Ask if aircraft fly due to Bernoulli's Principle or Newton's
| Third Law and physical impact.
|
| This is "crypto-bro territory"? No, not quite.
| wussboy wrote:
| The answers to all of those questions would be parroted
| from other research, and to the extent they were novel they
| would be incorrect.
| sensanaty wrote:
| And it parroting answers back at you from textbooks and
| papers that are _most definitely_ in its training data,
| probably with the identical wording you 're using, is proof
| to the contrary of it being a "magic parrot box" as the
| other person put it? Or do you genuinely believe ChatGPT, a
| LLM, actually "came up" with these answers on its own?
| jcgrillo wrote:
| The "crypto-bro" behavior I see is a whole bunch of people
| burning a ton of calories wildly casting about for
| industrial applications of what amounts to nothing more
| than a neat (albeit eye-wateringly expensive) toy. These
| LLMs seem like a solution in search of a problem in just
| the same way that blockchains are. _Please_ prove me wrong,
| I 'd really love to be wrong about this!
| msp26 wrote:
| Language models have completely overhauled the NLP space.
| If you have a problem involving natural language data,
| you can prototype working pipeline in an afternoon. Often
| this prototype is very close in performance to a 'proper'
| solution.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| > If you have a problem involving natural language data
|
| That's a big "if", isn't it? We're seeing claims like
| "The future is an LLM at the front of just about
| everything: "Human" is the new programming language"[1]
| but so far that's not panning out, and it seems really
| dubious. Natural language seems like an absolutely
| atrocious user interface. As a machine operator, I'm
| going to use levers, wheels, and buttons to control the
| machine. As a computer programmer I'm going to use
| programming languages to control the machine. I'm not
| going to speak English to it.
|
| So, ok, this marks an advance in NLP. How do we get from
| there to "omg it's gonna change
| _everything_!!!1111oneeleven "
|
| [1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/08/nvidia-ceo-we-bet-
| the-farm...
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| I've been thinking a lot about this recently.
|
| It seems like they've accelerated our capabilities-
| previously tiresome and difficult-to-automate things are
| easier- but have done very little for our fundamental
| understanding. We have a tool, but cannot dissect it and
| explain how it fits together. LLM'a themselves don't
| appear (happy to be wrong here) to actually have improved
| our understanding our NLP and associated theory. Yeah, it
| can parse a sentence and bang out some JSON/sql/mid-tier-
| essay, but these models (so far) aren't helping us figure
| out how and why, and I think _that_ understanding is
| critical to progress further. Anthropic seems to be
| trying to push a bit further on that front at least, but
| for all we know, they might just turn into another scummy
| OpenAI on us.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| I _think_ in order for something to properly be a tool it
| needs to behave deterministically. I don 't need to
| understand every particular of how it works internally,
| but as the user I need to be able to rely on consistent,
| predictable results. Otherwise it's worse than useless.
| Hand tools, machine tools, programming languages,
| vehicles, CAD/CAM/CAE tools are all like this. You may
| have to do some learning to become proficient in the
| tool, but once you're proficient in its use it's very
| unlikely to ever truly surprise you. Generally those
| "surprising" experiences are pretty traumatic--hopefully
| only emotionally (if you've ever experienced a chainsaw
| kick back you know what I mean).
|
| So I'm not sure how I could use an LLM as a tool, but
| maybe I'm just not a sufficiently proficient user? It
| seems like they're just too full of "surprises".
| xtracto wrote:
| Good. It's time to abolish copyright. Society must create
| distributed, open and uncensorable AI models that can
| synthesize humanity's knowledge so that it can be used by
| anyone.
|
| Sorry if your 40 hour work won't pay you $10 bucks a month
| forever. That's the case for most of the rest of us: we produce
| for 40 hours, we get paid for those 40 hours, regardless of
| what we do.
|
| Welcome to the club!!
| pc86 wrote:
| Well if it would stupid and economically deleterious to do it,
| you can count on the EU to at least talk about doing it, if not
| actually doing it.
| madamelic wrote:
| Copyright should be the problem of the person using the works
| and not the problem of the AI generating it.
|
| Unless Nintendo plans on busting down the doors of every person
| who tries to draw Mario or preventing little Timmy from making
| a parody of Coca-Cola, making it where AI cannot generated
| copyrighted works is insane imo.
|
| Those brands should be proud to be such a big part of the
| cultural fabric that it is difficult to get away from their
| branding. Plus it's not infringement to my knowledge until you
| use it for commercial purposes so as long as no one as creating
| Lario and Muigi to sell or otherwise use in business, it's no
| different than drawing it yourself.
|
| If the AI is completely unable to generate non-infringing works
| even if you are _trying_ to get away from it (which the author
| very much doesn't seem they are, they are purposefully making
| and show prompts that infringe), that's the problem of the AI
| creator then.
| outside1234 wrote:
| The thing is: OpenAI and Microsoft have indemnified their
| users - so their users problems are their problems.
| tsumnia wrote:
| When I cover generative AI in my Ethics in AI lecture, one of
| few soapbox opinions I give is that GenAI is doing
| essentially what people do - copy others. Picasso has a quote
| about "Good Artists copy, Great Artists steal", which doesn't
| mean try to pass Lario and Muigi off as your own, but rather
| that great artists are able to take aspects from other works
| (also called 'inspiration') without being caught. My
| personality is a combination of elements taken from Jim
| Carrey, Robin Williams, and King of the Deathmatch Mick
| Foley. I like making vector graphics based on pictures. I
| have a folder on my computer called "Website Ideas" that's
| just screenshots of UIs that I've come across that I really
| like.
|
| I also point to a YouTube video by Kirby Ferguson "Everything
| is a Remix" [1] which talks about how so much of our
| collective culture stems from copy. It's a great video if you
| have an hour.
|
| When Little Timmy crayons a copy of Mario, we congratulate
| him for his creativity. Is it unique, one of a kind art? Well
| Timmy made it, but he didn't think up the original idea of a
| video game plumber. I give this view to GenAI right now -
| it's not capable of achieving that "next step" in "original
| design", but its performing like a novice artist/musician,
| it's mimicking what it sees.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9RYuvPCQUA
| schneems wrote:
| Rounding up a transaction and taking the leftovers wouldn't
| be a crime worthy of the FBI for one transaction but it
| would be for a million or a billion. Scale matters and
| impact matters.
|
| If you're making an ethical argument "it's okay because
| it's already happening to a lesser degree somewhere else"
| isn't the flex you think it is.
|
| If you're talking ethics, talk about impact. Who does it
| help the most who does it hurt the most? Is your argument
| favoring equality of access or outcome? Who is the most
| vulnerable in the situation and how will it impact them?
|
| > I cover generative AI
|
| Wait, are you teaching the class or taking it?
| stale2002 wrote:
| > "it's okay because it's already happening to a lesser
| degree somewhere else" isn't the flex you think it is.
|
| It actually is.
|
| It shows that we as a society are completely OK with
| this, and nobody is complaining about a very standard and
| common thing that all artists do.
|
| It shows that the outrage is fake, and people don't
| actually care about the issue.
| ImPleadThe5th wrote:
| I don't really care when creative people steal. I care
| when faceless soulless companies monetize stolen content
| from Artists.
| Spivak wrote:
| It's still copyright violation. Sue them. Being generated
| by AI doesn't make the final output not copywritten.
|
| The interesting question is whether the models themselves
| are copyright violations not the output.
| sensanaty wrote:
| Do you really see no difference between someone drawing a
| piece of fan art and trillion dollar corporations
| stealing other people's works and reselling it for their
| own profit with no regards to anyone or anything else?
|
| And yes, obviously society cares about many things
| depending on the scales in question. It's okay if a dude
| goes onto a lake on his small rowboat and catches a few
| fish for dinner, it's a completely different story if
| you're talking about a massive barge indiscriminately
| catching literally thousands of fish with huge nets. The
| latter has to adhere to much stricter rules than the
| prior, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone
| who thinks these 2 situations should be treated equally
| (unless you're a commercial fisherman with a barge, I
| suppose, the quote "It is difficult to get a man to
| understand something when his salary depends on his not
| understanding it." comes to mind here)
| gaganyaan wrote:
| It's not stealing and they're not reselling anything.
| That's why it's called Generative AI
| sensanaty wrote:
| By that logic I can torrent movies and distribute them
| all I'd like as long as I call it "Generative Watching"
| or something like that.
|
| And OpenAI quite literally sells access to their models,
| and if those models are pushing out verbatim copyrighted
| works as has been alleged by the NYT, then they are by
| definition reselling copyrighted works without
| permission.
| madamelic wrote:
| > And OpenAI quite literally sells access to their
| models, and if those models are pushing out verbatim
| copyrighted works as has been alleged by the NYT, then
| they are by definition reselling copyrighted works
| without permission.
|
| This style of argument has been previously made regarding
| things like torrenting during the heyday of piracy ("why
| would you need <x> except for illegal purposes!")
|
| In my opinion, it's the exact same argument saying that
| selling a tool means taking responsibility for how that
| tool is used by its new owner. You can use a shovel to
| both create something new (plant a tree) or destroy
| something (rip up your neighbor's garden).
|
| The problem isn't the tool, the problem is how the end
| user uses it. These models aren't living thinking
| entities that enduce or on their own infringe copyright /
| do other illegal activities.
|
| They aren't encouraging people to misuse them and it is
| solely on the user's shoulders for their choice to use
| them in a way that would cause infringement if the result
| is used commercially.
| sensanaty wrote:
| > They aren't encouraging people to misuse them and it is
| solely on the user's shoulders for their choice to use
| them in a way that would cause infringement if the result
| is used commercially.
|
| I agree in principle, but that they _can_ in the first
| place, especially when it accidentally happens, and at
| such massive scales more importantly, is the issue
| methinks.
|
| And no one's talking about abolishing the AIs here, we're
| just talking about wanting M$/OAI to do their due
| diligence and get access to their training materials
| fairly. NYT wouldn't have sued if M$/OAI had approached
| them and struck a deal of some sort with them, but that's
| not what they did. They took in whatever data they could,
| from wherever they could baring no mind at all to where
| the data came from and what was being done with it.
|
| There's a reason Getty images managed to strike a deal
| with Dall-E and why many of the image generation models
| now solely rely on data that is verifiably free of
| copyright (or where deals have been made in the case of
| Getty images). It's easier to see in pictures when a
| blatant copy is made (like watermarks) so it's obvious
| why Dall-E was the first to encounter this hurdle, but
| this was inevitable even for plain text that ChatGPT
| returns.
| gaganyaan wrote:
| You won't get what you want with those sorts of deals.
|
| OK, say every artist gets $100, one time (exact amount
| varies but would not be much). Everything's properly
| licensed according to you and the artists are essentially
| no better off, and the models are now good enough to
| create new training data for the future and artists never
| see any more money.
|
| You've won, I guess?
| imtringued wrote:
| Training AI on AI generated data doesn't add anything.
| The AI already has all the weights to generate the image,
| so you are at best just reinforcing the existing weights
| by weighing them more than others.
|
| The closest thing you could do is e.g. have a second
| model that does something novel like create a 3D model
| from a 2D image and then you try to animate the model and
| a third model verifies the quality of the output. This
| then allows you to selectively reinforce the 2D model
| using information from the 3D model but this isn't simply
| generating more training data.
|
| I honestly can't follow your argument. Doing something
| silly doesn't make you the underdog.
| gaganyaan wrote:
| My point is that say every artist gets some small token
| payment once, and then what? That's not enough to live
| on, so we're right back to square one and we've solved
| nothing.
|
| Incidentally yes, training AI on AI output will work
| fine, as long as you have a signal of quality. For
| example, upvotes in a subreddit would work fine. But
| that's not crucial to my point, which is that what OP is
| asking for will accomplish exactly nothing.
| sensanaty wrote:
| I'm not an expert in the field, but is feeding the model
| its own output a good idea? Seems like it would only
| increase weights that are already present in the training
| data and make it harder and harder to break out of it,
| ending up with generic output that matches all of its
| other output in the long run.
|
| Regardless, I'm not saying it's a perfect idea but it's
| definitely a start, especially when the current reality
| is that they're just stealing all the artist's shit and
| everyone gets $0 instead of $100. As you said, artists
| are no better off in that universe, but the worst case
| possible for them is what's happening right this very
| moment, where they just get fucked over with 0
| compensation.
| stale2002 wrote:
| Yeah people don't understand that the current situation
| of infringement is only temporary.
|
| People are already working on completely copyright safe
| models and those models can still destroy the entire art
| market.
|
| Ex: adobe has a gen AI model, trained on content that
| they own.
|
| What now artists? Can't hide behind fake outrage over
| infringement for _that_ model. But that model can still
| end the art industry.
|
| I wonder what the new argument will be then when fully
| non infringing models destroy the market regardless.
| gaganyaan wrote:
| I think you misunderstand something here. Torrenting
| movies and generative AI don't really have anything in
| common, I'm not sure why you bring that up.
|
| If you sold the output of a true random number generator,
| eventually you'd also by definition be reselling
| copyrighted works without permission. The courts wouldn't
| mindlessly say "no more random numbers", and I doubt that
| they'll do the same for GenAI, especially given the
| recent decisions that are headed that way.
| edgyquant wrote:
| They are selling the generator
| stale2002 wrote:
| > Do you really see no difference between someone drawing
| a piece of fan art
|
| In the history of the world only a single person has ever
| drawn fan art?
|
| No, I don't think that's the case.
|
| Instead it is widespread. It is everywhere.
|
| > depending on the scales in question
|
| The scale argument supports me, not you.
|
| This type of "infringement" is everywhere.
|
| > reselling it for their own profit with no regards to
| anyone or anything else?
|
| Even this is common. The online independent artist
| commissions market is full of people doing commercial fan
| art commissions.
|
| Thinking about this even more, I am now wondering if
| "infringing" works might actually be a majority of the
| online/independent commissions market. Maybe.
|
| And yet, nobody cares.
| sensanaty wrote:
| > In the history of the world only a single person has
| ever drawn fan art?
|
| That's a disingenuous take of my comment at best, the
| equivalent to my scenario is a bunch of unrelated
| individuals with small boats going out into whatever lake
| is nearest to them and fishing. Even if you put all of
| them together and counted how many fish the hobby
| fishermen catch, it's still nowhere near the scale of the
| commercial fisheries, which is why they're treated
| differently both by society at larger but also legally.
|
| Same thing with these AI models, Dall-E and all the other
| ones have probably generated more images than all of
| humanity has in its entire history so far, and if not
| quite yet they're definitely gonna get there sooner
| rather than later. They can generate dozens if not
| hundreds of images in a split second, whereas a single
| artist (or even many artists collectively) can't.
|
| > And yet, nobody cares.
|
| I think we've already established that, because scales
| absolutely matter for most things. If you want to be an
| absolutist about it, sure be my guest, but I think in
| reality the large majority of people are fine when your
| average Joe Schmoe the artist makes a commission on a
| random Disney character, whereas they definitely would
| NOT be okay with a massive conglomerate like Disney
| stealing Joe Schmoe's original art and repurposing it
| without compensating Joe, because there's an inherent
| power disbalance between the two and the consequences of
| that power disparity matters.
|
| I mean, Disney does have every right to go after Joe for
| his commissions if they really wanted to, similarly to
| how Nintendo is hyper aggressive with taking down
| anything relating to their IPs. It's just not really
| worth it for most companies, they will _absolutely_ go
| for another company trying to pull the same shit though,
| as can be seen with the NYT case.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| It shows that as a society we might be ok with humans
| doing it. Whether or not we are with machines doing it is
| a different question.
| stale2002 wrote:
| Fortunately, a machine isn't an autonomous mind that
| _does_ anything on its own.
|
| Instead, it is a person who uses the machine, just like
| fan artists can use a computer to make fan art.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| True, but still different in the same way as using
| machines for certain purposes is not the same as a human
| doing the same without a machine. Just because you can
| walk from A to B does not mean driving from A to B
| requires no driving license, for example (and the car
| needs to fullfil a lot regulations).
| symlinkk wrote:
| Is that what you'd tell the police if you were caught
| selling pirated copies of Blu Rays?
| stale2002 wrote:
| That supports my point, not yours.
|
| A machine being involved in the process doesn't change
| any of the copyright implications.
|
| Either it's infringement or it isn't, regardless if the
| human did it on their own, or if the human did it with a
| computer.
| phatfish wrote:
| Society may be "completely OK" with human artists taking
| inspiration from each other. It's a big old reach to
| assume we are "completely OK" with Microsoft and OpenAI
| doing the same thing with computer software as
| subscription service they sell.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Humans decided scale matters. Our legal systems
| explicitly say so. Sentencing guidelines for fraud are
| quite explicit. Society makes those laws.
|
| Society is effectively ok with you ripping me off for $1.
| They are not when it's $100k.
| tsumnia wrote:
| > are you teaching the class or taking it?
|
| I teach it, my background is located in my profile and my
| research focuses on CS education.
|
| Scale and impact do matter, I wholeheartedly agree.
| However, I stand by my point that genAI is mirroring how
| humans learn - repetition of previously observed actions.
| As part of my dissertation, I argued that humans operate
| using 'templates', or previously established frameworks /
| systems. Even in higher cognitive tasks like problem
| solving, we rely on workflows that we were trained on
| previously. Soloway referred to problem solving as a
| mental set of "basic recurring plans" [1] and if you look
| at the old 1980s Usborne children's books, they required
| kids to retype code [2]. For creative tasks, depending on
| the actor's background, Method and Meisner both tell
| people to draw from previous experiences and observations
| to develop a character. This behavior is similar in many
| areas like music, dance, martial arts, cooking, language
| acquisition, etc.
|
| I am not making an ethical argument that GenAI violating
| copyright is okay because that's what humans do. I'm
| arguing that GenAI mirrors how humans learn. We observe a
| behavior and attempt to recreate that behavior. The
| difference is that humans can extract a fraction of the
| behavior and utilize it as part of something larger while
| GenAI cannot to the degree humans do. I'm sure GenAI
| would struggle to recreate "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?"
| because of the two polar different visual elements of the
| film (cartoon and real life).
|
| In regards to your "If you're talking ethics, talk about
| impact" section, its a bit of a loaded question. One side
| of the conversation could state that GenAI is helping
| many people that do not have confidence in their creative
| ability to produce their ideas, while the other could
| state its making it harder for artists.
|
| Yes, it absolutely is hurting artists and I fully support
| the recent writer's strike over AI concerns. But I do not
| believe that diminishes how the mathematical models used
| in GenAI mirror our own skill acquistion.
|
| [1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5010283
|
| [2] https://usborne.com/us/books/computer-and-coding-
| books
| schneems wrote:
| I took an AI in ethics course from a state backed school
| (Georgia Tech) and the answer to questions that weren't
| "that's illegal based on protected status" were "well, it
| depends." Which, sure, that's true, but maybe not
| helpful.
|
| In my view it encouraged nihilism and apathy instead of
| developing ethical frameworks. From that lens, I feel
| teaching a course might be more limiting in the range of
| heuristics you're willing to accept or endorse. Though
| happy to accept your personal experience.
|
| A paper that comes to mind often from HCI is "do
| artifacts have politics" which looks at the impacts of
| technologies divorced from creator intent. I feel that's
| similar here.
|
| You're not wrong that about the mechanism that it's
| created. But I would argue that's the least important
| part, ethically anyway.
|
| Saying "strip mining with heavy industrial machines
| mimics laborers using shovels" is true to a degree, but
| but perhaps not that important piece of information.
|
| I'm not saying you're making that argument. I guess im
| just not totally sure the outcome you were looking for in
| sharing your original comment. I hear your comparison and
| agree with it and that it is interesting to view in that
| lense. I wasn't sure if there was a deeper intent in
| sharing it.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Irrespective of the current legal situation, there is no
| reason to regulate machines the same way as humans (and it
| is generally not what happens).
| anileated wrote:
| I hope no self-respecting instructor in ethics could with
| a straight face teach how an LLM is like a human being
| when it comes to copyright while glossing over the
| blinding implication that if it truly were so we would
| then be subjecting that being to unthinkable abuse.
|
| That hypocritical, self-contradictory take is
| transparently geared to benefit commercial LLM operators
| (at the expense of individuals who stand to suffer
| material harm and/or authored the very creative works
| thanks to which the tool even exists).
| tjr wrote:
| Timmy did not need to ingest the whole sum of human
| knowledge as a training set before he could draw a crayon
| copy of a cartoon character.
| dartos wrote:
| I mean... neither did any AI.
| sensanaty wrote:
| Wasn't ChatGPT trained on the entirety of Wikipedia? And
| probably millions of pieces of scientific literature, and
| arts, and movies and games and and and...
|
| Perhaps the hyperbole of the _entire_ corpus of human
| knowledge isn 't quite technically right, but it's close
| enough.
| dartos wrote:
| You're also assuming these statical models learn in the
| same way humans do, which is very likely not true.
|
| Tho tbh I'm not really sure what OPs point was
|
| i don't think the amount of training data is relevant
| here.
| gaganyaan wrote:
| Timmy did however spend years and years training on his
| own data ingested from incredibly high quality sensors.
| Not sure what your point is
| firtoz wrote:
| He does ingest a lot of frames of input consisting of
| mostly that.
| throwuwu wrote:
| What's the FPS of human eyesight? How long did Timmy
| spend looking at Mario, more generally other cartoons and
| even more generally human forms? Do the math and you'll
| find he's got a pretty big training set as well, maybe
| not quite the same size but nothing to sneeze at.
| amelius wrote:
| > we congratulate him for his creativity
|
| Yeah, but we don't typically congratulate users of GenAI
| for their creativity, and neither do we congratulate the
| code, nor do we think of the coders of GenAI as great
| artists.
|
| In other words, your analogy is broken.
| iteygib wrote:
| I would say it's dependent on the motive. For example, I
| would imagine most artists hope that their work inspires
| other artists, but only to a degree outside of direct
| copying. They might not equate the automation of their
| style via a model against the work/process of a human,
| regardless if that human is either inspired by their style
| or is just performing direct copying.
| bolobo wrote:
| Question: That is a point that would protect GPT models in
| the abstract, but that doesn't hold for OpenAI and
| Microsoft that provide "Image generation as a service"? The
| actual implementation is irrelevant, if must not be able to
| provide images that are infringing copyrights? (Just like a
| designer in an agency cannot use Mario for a print).
|
| So using a model running on my laptop to generate a "Mario
| like" image would be fine, but it would make monetizing
| this difficult?
| anileated wrote:
| The entire argument that "LLM must be allowed the right to
| learn like a human" hinges on LLM being _enough like a
| human in relevant ways_ in the first place. An LLM is not
| _enough like a human in relevant ways_ , however; it has no
| agency, will, freedom, conscience, self-determination; it
| is a tool.
|
| If this tool "runs on" copyrighted creative works, and
| $CORP operates this tool for profit, then _$CORP_ is the
| one to answer to the law, not the tool. (And if $CORP wants
| to claim that the tool is a sentient being, then presumably
| it would have to cease the abuse of said being and set it
| free.)
| achow wrote:
| True.
|
| Further extending the argument - I can potentially ask GenAI
| "Can you show me what does Mario looks like?" since I have
| never seen one and GenAI is my go to tool.
| ImPleadThe5th wrote:
| The problem is the AI companies monetizing the work of
| copyrighted materials.
|
| It's not a problem for me to draw Micky Mouse. It _is_ a
| problem when someone pays me to draw an animated mouse and I
| sell them a picture of Micky Mouse.
|
| For me, its not really about the AI at all, it's a problem of
| undervaluing Artists contribution to these tools. And it's
| not even fully about copyright it's about not asking for
| permission to use their content and then creating an entire
| business on top of that stolen content.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| It's a problem that it's still a problem to do that 100+
| years after Mickey Mouse's creation.
|
| When the law doesn't respect the people, the people will
| not respect the law. Fix the existing copyright system,
| then we can talk about AI.
| dangus wrote:
| The AI generating it (Hosted on OpenAI-controlled servers in
| the case of ChatGPT and DALL-E) is the entity
| _redistributing_ the work. The end user who asked for the
| infringing content isn 't the entity that is infringing on
| the copyrights and trademarks.
|
| I'm perfectly free to ask people on the street for t-shirt
| with Mario on it, but as soon as someone who isn't Nintendo
| or licensed by Nintendo sells me that t-shirt they're the
| ones infringing on the copyright and trademark. As the
| consumer I did nothing illegal, and a court would say that I
| was deceived by the infringing party.
|
| Distribution (seeding, uploading) and facilitating copyright
| infringement is what gets you in trouble. When you ask DALL-E
| (a paid, commercial product) for a picture of Italian
| plumbers and it gives you an obvious picture of Mario 100%
| recognizable to the layperson as Mario and not a distinctly
| different image of a similar character, that's blatant
| trademark and/or copyright infringement on the part of
| OpenAI.
|
| > If the AI is completely unable to generate non-infringing
| works even if you are _trying_ to get away from it (which the
| author very much doesn't seem they are, they are purposefully
| making and show prompts that infringe), that's the problem of
| the AI creator then.
|
| I see some parallels to the Napster lawsuit. The fact that
| the users were the bad people asking for infringing content
| didn't give Napster the right to facilitate infringement.
| Napster was ordered to monitor its network and make sure that
| they were blocking non-legitimate uses. They couldn't
| logistically comply and went bankrupt.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster
|
| Which begs the question: Does OpenAI even have the
| technological ability to block trademark and copyright
| infringing content generation? Even if they do, how useful
| will ChatGPT be if all phrases and imagery that closely
| resemble copyrighted works are blocked from output?
|
| Whats even worse for OpenAI compared to Napster is that it
| wasn't individual users uploading copyrighted content, it was
| OpenAI's ingesting the data. Nobody twisted their arm to
| include copyrighted works in their models.
| madamelic wrote:
| > OpenAI is the entity redistributing the work
|
| It's difficult to say really.
|
| If I essentially encode knowledge of something then can
| recall and remix at will, am I redistributing the exact
| work or the knowledge of it?
|
| Yes, it is capable of producing a close to exact replica,
| if not the exact same input image byte-for-byte, but I find
| it difficult to say OpenAI is willfully redistributing
| copyrighted work in a whole like you would with torrenting
| a movie or right-click saving an image from Google where
| you are copying the intellectual property 1:1.
|
| Opening this Pandora's box could have large implications on
| a lot of creative work that could cause artists to be
| unable to work if taken to the end conclusion: you cannot
| create any creative work that has a talking mouse if you
| have knowledge of Mickey Mouse existing because you have
| been tainted (similar to whiteroom re-creations but now any
| sufficiently large copyrighted figure causes a deadlock
| condition for all derivative ore even similar topics).
|
| Is Ratatouille derative of Mickey Mouse? Ehhh, well they
| are both talking rodents. They both have cartoon faces. You
| can certainly draw parallels between them but they aren't
| the same character. Is Mickey with a chef hat infringing on
| Ratatouille?
|
| The trademark law, to my knowledge, is asking would someone
| be tricked or misled into believing you are the other guys.
| I think that is applicable here where someone drawing a
| talking mouse isn't infringing as long as it cannot be
| mistaken for Mickey Mouse, which again would be the fault
| of the person inducing the creation and not the tool that
| allowed it to happen.
|
| Where does "inspired by" / derived from the encoded
| knowledge turn into outright exploitation of copyrighted
| work? There's certainly _a_ line but I find it difficult to
| define it at it being encoded into knowledge of it
| existing.
| dangus wrote:
| This "close to exact" thing is actually the Achilles heel
| of this argument. The example images in this article are
| so close to exact that they are quite clearly
| infringement, trademark or copyright. We aren't talking
| about Ratatouille mouse versus Mickey Mouse, we are
| talking about the source picture of Mario versus a
| slightly altered picture of Mario that every layperson
| would immediately recognize as Mario composed in the
| exact same manner as the source image.
|
| Courts have already defined this line over decades of
| copyright and trademark cases, and the examples in this
| article definitely cross that line.
|
| > which again would be the fault of the person inducing
| the creation and not the tool that allowed it to happen.
|
| This is not really true in practice, we can see that in
| various legal cases against Napster or The Pirate Bay.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| > Copyright should be the problem of the person using the
| works and not the problem of the AI generating it.
|
| All parties are responsible on some level. This just reads
| like passing the buck/burying ones head in the sand to me.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Copyright shouldn't be a problem for anyone. It's simply a
| bogus idea that artificial scarcity of information is a
| benefit to society.
| fireflash38 wrote:
| Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? 'No!' says
| the man in Washington, 'It belongs to the poor.' 'No!' says
| the man in the Vatican, 'It belongs to God.' 'No!' says the
| man in Moscow, 'It belongs to everyone.'
|
| Are you trying to say that no one is entitled to their own
| inventions? Cause that is a rapid descent into a capitalist
| hellhole where only those who can steal ideas the most
| effectively are able to profit.
| Zambyte wrote:
| > Are you trying to say that no one is entitled to their
| own inventions?
|
| The subject of this thread is copyright, not patents.
| Though I do believe all intellectual property is bogus
| (including trademark, which repealing would limit the
| influence that would be required for the capitalist
| hellhole you mention), I feel the most strongly so about
| copyright, which has nothing to do with inventions.
| belter wrote:
| Maybe there is a middle ground that can be navigated. Keeping
| filters on. Interestingly, AWS is offering defense against
| copyright claims under the Service Terms although with some
| conditions.
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/
|
| See items as of 50.10 and 50.10.1 that I reproduce here:
|
| "50.10. Defense of Claims and Indemnity for Indemnified
| Generative AI Services. AWS Services may incorporate generative
| AI features and provide Generative AI Output to you.
| "Generative AI Output" means output generated by a generative
| artificial intelligence model in response to inputs or other
| data provided by you. "Indemnified Generative AI Services"
| means, collectively, generally available features of Amazon
| CodeWhisperer Professional, Amazon Titan Text Express, Amazon
| Titan Text Lite, Amazon Titan Text Embeddings, Amazon Titan
| Multimodal Embeddings, AWS HealthScribe, Amazon Personalize,
| Amazon Connect Contact Lens, and Amazon Lex. The following
| terms apply to the Indemnified Generative AI Services:
|
| 50.10.1. Subject to the limitations in this Section 50.10, AWS
| will defend you and your employees, officers, and directors
| against any third-party claim alleging that the Generative AI
| Output generated by an Indemnified Generative AI Service
| infringes or misappropriates that third party's intellectual
| property rights, and will pay the amount of any adverse final
| judgment or settlement."
| wwweston wrote:
| Man, that's great that state of the art has advanced to the
| point where models can be trained on just a few copyrighted
| sources.
| tmaly wrote:
| What if that example of the production of NYT article under the
| hood is ChatGPT just fetching a fast cache of the article then
| paraphrasing it.
|
| How would that be any different than Google displaying some
| type of news headline?
| j45 wrote:
| That might be like a buzzfeed summary of an article.
| iwontberude wrote:
| Exactly my thought, if the only way generative AI works is to
| break copyright I can see people choosing generative AI.
| theptip wrote:
| Quite the contrary, NYT is long adjacent to the levers of
| power, and "Big Tech" is unpopular with both parties. The
| public is generally wary of job destruction and other harms
| from AI, and doesn't grok even the present value.
|
| It's politically 100% viable to kneecap AI with copyright
| restrictions. This will go to the Supreme Court and it's far
| from clear whether fair use applies to every case here.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| And supporters of AI aren't really making a case that's
| likely to persuade skeptics, they're just regurgitating "It
| learns like a human" "It doesn't store the info, just the
| recipe for making it" and completely failing to address that
| we've decided it's not ok for someone to regurgitate
| protected works with 100% accuracy, and that artists don't
| _want_ people to train AI on their works without permission.
|
| There's a way to sell this to the public, but AI proponents
| don't want to _have_ to sell it, because they feel that they
| shouldn 't have to, and there's an underlying theme of "The
| benefit of AI is so overwhelming, and eventually it will
| replace most commodified creative work anyway so why bother
| litigating this now, let's just skip this messy step and get
| to that part" and that's super not going to work to convince
| skeptics.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| How on earth is this hypothetical?
| beltsazar wrote:
| > Or... things are about to get worse for copyright holders.
|
| If that's so, things are about to get worse for _everyone_ ,
| too. With little to no protection against AI, no one will be
| incentivized to create new IPs, whether they're books,
| drawings, songs. Or even films and games, when AI is able to
| also generate those in the (possibly near) future.
| jpeter wrote:
| If I prompt "golden droid from classic sci-fi movie", what else
| am I asking for if not Star Wars?
| Uvix wrote:
| The robot from Metropolis?
| sjfjsjdjwvwvc wrote:
| Or another ,,copyrighted" droid for that matter, after all it's
| a classic.
|
| Same with robot cop, what the hell did you expect to get...
|
| Or Italian plumber with red hat with M on it, that's just a
| description of Mario
| anonymoushn wrote:
| an original golden android in the style of a classic sci-fi
| movie that does not actually exist
|
| edit: i feel like all these comments asking "what else should
| it generate?" are pretty weird given the proliferation of stuff
| like non-infringing Star Wars and Indiana Jones knockoffs in
| other media like Race for The Galaxy or Arkham Horror The
| Forgotten Age etc.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| If you do "Golden robot holding a lazer gun in a sci-fi
| setting, cinematic" it will give you a golden robot that
| doesn't look in the style of C3PO or Star Wars.
|
| "Droid" is actually a Star Wars term [1], and saying you want
| it from a "classic sci-fi movie" is asking it to reference a
| real thing that is well known. Reid is intentionally pushing it
| that way to fill his agenda and these terms are not as generic
| as he's making out.
|
| [1]:https://trademarks.justia.com/756/52/droid-75652542.html
| vimax wrote:
| Maybe Disney and the record labels shouldn't be claiming so much
| of public culture as their own.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| If they created it, they own it, why shouldn't they be claiming
| that?
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Record labels aren't generally considered as "creators" of
| music, although they sometimes are to some extent.
|
| And Disney bought most of its iconic properties, it didn't
| build them inhouse.
| danielbln wrote:
| Copyright is not a universal axiom. Corporations lobbies for
| highly unreasonable copyright extensions to bolster their
| profits. Most of that stuff should have long entered the
| public domain.
| penjelly wrote:
| > My guess is that none of this can easily be fixed.
|
| also my concern, except it feels like many of LLMs "problems"
| cant be easily fixed
| dawnim wrote:
| This feels like another area where piracy will surely be superior
| in case things like this land on the disallowed side of
| regulation. The model trained on all data will outperform the
| model trained on a legal subset of data. Whether or not you use
| it to produce potentially infringing content is another point.
| Performance will likely improve from having references to
| copyrighted material and people capable of doing so, myself
| included, would probably prefer to interact with the non limited
| model. Perhaps time to update the laws or at least move liability
| from the creator of the model to the user. No one is going after
| pencil makers but I can draw a pretty good Mickey Mouse with
| access to one. Feels like me generating C3P0 and claiming
| ownership is my problem, not OpenAIs.
| zarzavat wrote:
| This for me does not make sense as a copyright violation. It's
| like saying that Adobe is in trouble because you drew something
| infringing in Photoshop. If you prompt the model with the
| intention of creating something infringing by mentioning the name
| of the characters and the work, and you get something infringing
| out, then it's _you_ who have infringed the copyright, not the
| maker of the tool.
| Lorak_ wrote:
| Did you read the article? It shows a lot of examples when no
| specific names are mentioned, or even with very generic prompts
| producing copyrighted material.
| rolisz wrote:
| Oh c'mon, those prompts were not generic. Italian plumbers?
| How many other Italian plumbers do you know? What's the most
| popular soda in a red can?
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| "futuristic robot"?
| Alifatisk wrote:
| > If you prompt the model with the intention of creating
| something infringing by mentioning the name of the characters
| and the work, and you get something infringing out, then it's
| you who have infringed the copyright, not the maker of the
| tool.
|
| Yeah but that is not the case, they never mentioned Mario and
| Luigi, yet, that's what the output turned out to be.
| techdmn wrote:
| This is an interesting idea. I assume that while the protected
| material would be obvious in some case, in many it would not.
| Would the tool have to be able to identify (and properly
| attribute) copyrighted material in its output?
| Xeamek wrote:
| The post shows many examples where the prompt explicitly avoids
| any mentions of copyrighted materials but the generated results
| includes them regardless.
|
| Did you even read the post?
|
| But also, the argument of 'user responsibility' doesn't hold up
| on its own regardless (imo).
|
| If I make and sell a toy printer that can only ever produce 3
| pictures, and all of them contains copyright materials, would
| you really say that it's fine and responsibility falls under
| the end user? And I could sell that printer without any issues?
| Uvix wrote:
| What about when you prompt the model without the intention of
| creating something infringing, and still get those same
| characters out in the result?
| mattmanser wrote:
| The user didn't create it, the cloud-hosted machine owned by
| OpenAI, that charges for access, did.
|
| When prompted with 'futuristic robot' and 'italian plumbers'.
|
| So the argument is that if openAI had not used copyrighted and
| trademarked source material, this wouldn't be happening. It's
| not transformative as it's reproducing these copyrighted
| materials and trademarks verbatim.
|
| That's how it makes sense.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| No, it's more akin to if Photoshop had a 'Mario' stamp which
| when used would stamp a random piece of Mario artwork from the
| games. Do you think this would be in violation of copyright?
| renewiltord wrote:
| You can try, but I have Mistral on my local computer and it
| doesn't need the Internet. And people have pirate dumps they're
| going to run this stuff through.
|
| I'll just do it myself.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Attribution weights could be the basis of new type of copyright
| asset licensing scheme. For all those tech employees who fed the
| company's model, a license in perpetuity to at least a portion of
| that value...but only if you fight for it. They are training to
| replace you, watching your every move, your thought processes,
| ready to make you a function call.
| Aerroon wrote:
| Aren't some of the examples basically asking for that content?
|
| Ask someone about two Italian brothers in a video game with a red
| and green hat that have M and L on them. What do you think you
| would get?
|
| If I describe "imagine a comic book duck that swims in a sea of
| gold in his vault" you would immediately think of Scrooge McDuck,
| no?
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Exactly: the prompts incite the same recall as humans have when
| seeing that prompt; it is just better than most people are
| drawing it.
| sorokod wrote:
| _What do you think you would get?_
|
| What I might think is irrelevant. It is the content that the
| LLM produces that is relevant.
| BlackJack wrote:
| disclaimer: I work on GenAI at google, but views are my own
|
| The question is, how did the model create Mario&Luigi or
| Scrooge McDuck without training on copyrighted data? It can't
| just crawl Wikipedia because Fair Use in Wikipedia doesn't
| constitute Fair use for a commercial AI model.
|
| One possible outcome is more transparency on what datasets were
| used to train the models.
| bhickey wrote:
| Disclaimer: ibid
|
| > It can't just crawl Wikipedia because Fair Use in Wikipedia
| doesn't constitute Fair use for a commercial AI model.
|
| Why not? The lawyers I've discussed this with socially think
| that questions like this are unresolved. There are certainly
| competing legal theories, but we're in uncharted territory.
| No one knows what the outcome will be until rulings come down
| or Congress acts.
|
| I find the NYT's argument a little hokey. Where are the
| damages? No one is using ChatGPT to read NYT articles and the
| residual value of day old news stories is close to zero.
| BlackJack wrote:
| That's a good point. I agree it's not clear cut one way or
| another and we gotta let it play out.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| > > It can't just crawl Wikipedia because Fair Use in
| Wikipedia doesn't constitute Fair use for a commercial AI
| model. > Why not?
|
| Because it's tantamount to lying and deceptive conduct?
| It's like asking for a licence to use something non-
| commercially, getting a hold of it, and conveniently
| deciding 10 minutes later, that you're actually going to
| become a re-seller for all this stuff you have. Or going to
| the soup kitchen because you don't want to pay your private
| chef tonight.
| bhickey wrote:
| This analogy doesn't work. Fair use is an affirmative
| defense to copyright infringement claims. Entities that
| are training models largely claim that their uses are
| transformative and fall under fair use. Creative Commons,
| among others, agrees with this position. [0] If they're
| right, it simply doesn't matter what license a copyright
| holder is offering.
|
| There are competing legal theories and no one can say how
| courts are going to rule on these issues. Smart lawyers
| who work on copyright and AI don't know. Technologists
| certainly don't know.
|
| [0] https://creativecommons.org/2023/02/17/fair-use-
| training-gen...
| yokem55 wrote:
| Then there is the argument that the rules around fair use
| aren't even reached because the training of the model
| doesn't even do anything that requires a fair use
| exemption.
| kromem wrote:
| Training is probably going to turn out to be fair use as the
| suits settle:
|
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/how-we-think-about-
| cop...
|
| It's the usage and not the training that needs to be policed,
| and the answer there is going to be that Google or OpenAI or
| whoever is going to make bank by creating a fine tuned model
| which can detect copyright infringements and providing access
| to it to companies to double check gen AI outputs for exact
| or "similar enough" infringements.
| RandomGerm4n wrote:
| Perhaps we should simply take this as an opportunity to finally
| abolish copyright. Smaller artists mainly earn their money with
| commissions. They are paid to do a very specific thing. Whether
| there is a copyright on the result is irrelevant. Someone else
| who would "steal" the image and use it without payment would
| apparently have fewer requirements. The person could have simply
| taken any AI image. Therefore, the artist in the scenario would
| not receive any money from the second person anyway.
|
| Apart from this, it is mainly large companies that benefit from
| copyright laws. Why should we have laws that restrict progress
| just so large capitalist companies can maximize their profits?
| CaptainFever wrote:
| Exactly. All of these just exposes the absurdity that is
| copyright laws. It happened before with the Internet and online
| piracy too, when redistribution became free and easy, yet the
| corporations and copyright holders refused to budge so they can
| retain their profits.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Here's what happens with no copyright:
|
| No one will have any right to their own creations. Anything
| an individual makes will belong to everyone. And since no
| attribution is required, no one will know who made it. An
| average artist's value to society goes from low to non-
| existent.
|
| In this world. big corporations will take _everything_
| created, claim as their own, and profit from it.
|
| Right now, big corporations using other peoples work
| unattributed or unlicensed is unethical, because copyright
| exists. Remove that, and it becomes expected that every
| thought and idea you express belongs to whoever can make the
| most profit from it.
| freddealmeida wrote:
| not in japan.
| Alifatisk wrote:
| Did ClosedAi (OpenAi) ever confirm or deny that they trained
| their models on copyrighted materials?
| danielbln wrote:
| Is "Closed AI" the new "Micro$oft"?
| Alifatisk wrote:
| Yes
| noitpmeder wrote:
| They have not revealed the full extent of their training set.
| And they'll never do it without a court order because it will
| quickly reveal the amount of items inside that they have no
| legal right to use.
| smitty1e wrote:
| The DALL-E/*GPT revolution sounds like the death of personal and
| corporate property.
|
| That's gonna leave a Marx[1].
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/7WDKivqFOgA?si=nWq5aeKA4dLytX3Z
| keiferski wrote:
| These don't seem all that difficult to fix to me. Most of the
| examples are not really generic, but are shorthand descriptions
| of well-known entities. "Video game plumber" is practically
| synonymous with "Mario" and anyone that has the slightest
| familiarity with the character knows this.
|
| Likewise, how difficult is it to just use descriptive tools to
| describe Mario-like images [1] and then remove these results from
| anyone prompting for "video game plumber"?
|
| 1. The describe command can describe an image in Midjourney. I
| imagine other AI tools have similar features:
| https://docs.midjourney.com/docs/describe
| gchamonlive wrote:
| The thing is that those are really trivial or extreme examples.
| What we should take from this:
|
| 1. Generative AI systems are fully capable of producing
| materials that infringe on copyright.
|
| 2. They do not inform users when they do so.
|
| So potentially _any_ output could be infringing copyright
| source material, even from some obscure but still protected
| corner of the web, and anyone using that output could be
| exposed to lawsuit risk without warning.
|
| This is very hard to fix.
| keiferski wrote:
| But how is that any different from creating an image from
| scratch? If I make a logo and use it for my business, but it
| turns out to be very similar to one already being used by
| another company, it's the same situation.
|
| I think the main concern here is with the top 1,000 or so
| brands/copyrights which seem fairly straightforward to deal
| with using the method I described.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| It's plagiarism
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDp3cB5fHXQ).
|
| It's not the same situation. You can't possibly expect
| someone to be exposed to the entirety of the internet like
| ChatGPT is. It is a matter of scale. If you still think
| they are the same thing, the industrial revolution was
| about scale and had transformative impacts in the society.
| madamelic wrote:
| ChatGPT is not intelligent.
|
| It's the user's responsibility to ensure they aren't
| infringing on copyright. If you are producing creatives
| for pay, you absolutely shouldn't be right-click saving
| images and using directly off the web whether you got it
| from DALL-E or a Google search.
|
| Who cares about plagarism? Plagarism is a made up
| boogeyman created by high school English teachers.
|
| If the work is sufficiently composed of your own
| thoughts, the fact you used someone else's structure for
| part of it is not a problem as long as it isn't your
| entire work or entirely derivative of one work.
|
| If I use a Coca-Cola bottle cap as structure in a
| sculpture, that doesn't mean I am infringing on Coca-
| Cola's copyright. I still had to mold my original work to
| work with it.
| taberiand wrote:
| Why isn't the solution a strong disclaimer when the user
| generates images along the lines of "beware that the images
| produced may not comply with copyright laws in your country"
| etc etc?
|
| Any artist can privately draw a picture of Mario, what's so
| different about having an LLM generate that image?
| RandomLensman wrote:
| There is a huge amount of copyrighted material in the world
| and these tools let you create a lot of content in a short
| time, that would imply an increased risk vs slower, more
| manual approaches.
|
| What I am also wondering is, if for some things copyrighted
| material could be somehow dominant in the output (beyond
| prompting more or less for it).
| gchamonlive wrote:
| > what's so different about having an LLM generate that
| image?
|
| You don't have to pay 20 bucks a month for a private
| company to reproduce Mario manually at home for a start...
| you also can't reproduce Mario in many poses at an
| industrial scale solo. The list can go on, and we have seen
| OpenAI change their license agreement, so the risk can
| change over time.
| numpad0 wrote:
| AIUI/IIUC/IANAL, Generative AI systems stack up tuned
| butterfly effects to create meaningful outputs. Which means,
| data is not merely stored inside a butterfly but spread
| across the system, and potentially _every_ output from the
| butterfly cage is infringing everything, just almost
| negligibly. But no one can prove that or otherwise to be the
| case with current technology.
|
| I think it's just unfixable as far as fixing goes. The "best"
| way is to nuke all GPTs and DALL-Es and bury the technology,
| and the next best is to mark them all un-copyrightable and
| un-publishable as a compromise. This second option should be
| an all-around win that also encourages edge and on-prem
| deployments, IMO.
| bbor wrote:
| The third option would be to change our copyright laws to
| reflect the new technology, rather than neutering the
| technology or restricting use of its outputs. Even if
| that's the wrong way, it's important to remember that we're
| not inescapably trapped in the status quo
| mrweasel wrote:
| It's going to be hard to remove every single "shorthand
| descriptions of well-known entities" or other prompts that can
| be used to generate copyrighted or trademarked content. Sure,
| if you're not deliberately trying to generate infringing
| content, you can probably remove or discard those results, the
| trouble is the people who will try to trick the AI to generate
| this content, blocking those people is going to be impossible,
| without excluding any copyrighted or trademarked training
| material.
|
| Another issue for generative AI is mentioned in the article:
| "Systems like DALL-E and ChatGPT are essentially black boxes."
| What happens when an AI is used to make decisions where the
| user/victim is entitled to know exactly why the AI did what it
| did? From a business and legal perspective I think the current
| AI solutions are dangerous and should be used very sparsely,
| exactly because even the creators can't point to the exact
| pieces of information that caused the AI to make the choices it
| did.
| keiferski wrote:
| But does this actually matter if the people are only
| generating images for their own use? Does Photoshop prevent
| people from making drawings that look like Mickey Mouse? Of
| course not.
|
| I think it will be easy to prevent the obvious copyrighted
| stuff via the method I mentioned. People going around those
| restrictions are subject to the same rules as someone drawing
| the copyrighted image from scratch.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > But does this actually matter if the people are only
| generating images for their own use?
|
| Arguably that might actually be a very small issue, but
| what happens when it happens on a larger scale? Disney
| might not care, they can easily fight you in court if your
| DALL-E generated comics looks like Mickey Mouse and
| Nintendo will make sure that your video game about a
| electrician named Marvin from the Bronx, but who looks a
| lot like Mario is never going to get featured on Steam. The
| issue is the smaller artists that might not have the
| resources to fight AI content in court.
|
| There's also the issue with using LLMs to "white-wash"
| articles and books. There will be people who will just run
| articles through ChatGPT and claim that it's AI generated
| content that was in no way stolen from The Barents
| Observer. The absolute massive volume, lose in revenue and
| cost to fight this in court could make running an
| investigating newspaper impossible and leave us without any
| actual reporting.
|
| Not thinking ahead and having a plan for copyrighted
| material was an oversight by the current AI companies, but
| they are arrogant and just assumed that it would be a
| detail and anyway "disruption" so screw it. There has been
| zero consideration to the fact that their product is
| useless without the previous work of millions of people. My
| concern is that AI takes over content generation to the
| point where we actually run out of human generated content
| to train future AIs on. We need to be incredibly careful
| about implementing AI and ensure that we do not pollute
| future training data, but people don't care, because they
| want profit now.
| losvedir wrote:
| Ironically, I don't think it would be that hard with LLMs. I
| tried asking ChatGPT to describe what copyrighted characters
| each description is alluding to and it had no problem doing
| so.[0]
|
| [0] https://chat.openai.com/share/e8256470-8e45-4f36-9c84-026
| be1...
| numpad0 wrote:
| I don't understand why some peoole thinks any infringing
| content can be singled out and removed.
|
| Aren't LLMs giant coefficient matrices like, a punched out
| croissant dough, made of all training data plyed over? How
| can you say you can remove one specific ply out of dough and
| declare that ever potential effect that the offending ply had
| created is now completely removed?
| keiferski wrote:
| I'm no LLM expert but I think there is a distinction to be
| made between the LLM dataset and the output it gives to the
| user. What you're suggesting is that it's difficult to
| remove something from the dataset, which may be the case.
| But that doesn't mean the user will necessarily be able to
| access it.
|
| My guess is that this is much easier to attack from the
| user end.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Removing something from the dataset requires full
| training from scratch(~$100 million for base unaligned
| GPT-4). You can't like, edit the database file and keep
| the AI. the database file _is_ the AI.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I think given the use of ply for AlphaGo/chess engines this
| is a pretty cool metaphor.
| anonymousab wrote:
| The "reasonable" singular removal is more about coming up
| with ways to block prompts that can produce infringing
| content, and having filters on the other end to catch
| infringements before they are published to the user. It's
| an endless whack-a-mole that never actually addresses the
| problem but might look good enough to the legal system or
| to keen supporters.
|
| Barring some major breakthrough, the actual answer is to
| train a new model without the infringing data.
|
| I think some of the people saying "remove it from your
| model" are aware of this and are simply being glib and
| needling; "you've created this infringement monstrosity, so
| surely you made sure to include a way to deal with this
| problem without throwing away all of your work, right?"
| bbor wrote:
| What happens when an AI is used to make decisions where the
| user/victim is entitled to know exactly why the AI did what
| it did? From a business and legal perspective I think the
| current AI solutions are dangerous and should be used very
| sparsely, exactly because even the creators can't point to
| the exact pieces of information that caused the AI to make
| the choices it did.
|
| I totally agree that we need explainability (probably through
| symbolic systems, not fancier models), but I think you're
| overestimating how much more satisfying explanations from
| more traditional AI are. "My rules told me to do X" is a bit
| more helpful for a troubleshooting engineer than "my training
| data trained me to do X", but from a 'business and legal
| perspective' the difference is much less pronounced IMO.
|
| Both answers mean you did something wrong in creating the
| machine. The fault will always lie with the creator.
| rco8786 wrote:
| > Likewise, how difficult is it to just use descriptive tools
| to describe Mario-like images [1] and then remove these results
| from anyone prompting for "video game plumber"?
|
| This approaches impossibility at scale.
| keiferski wrote:
| Trademarks already include text descriptions and images of
| the item being trademarked. This is already in the USPTO
| database.
| throwoutway wrote:
| Using generic text will end poorly. I predict a future
| where 99 of 100 requests result in Photoshop AI saying "I'm
| sorry, I can't do that". Google for silly trademarks.
| Facebook trademarked the word "Home". Star wars trademarked
| breathing under a mask.
| rco8786 wrote:
| Exactly. An enormous database of generic, unmoderated text
| descriptions. Basically any question you ask will be
| "covered" by some trademark description somewhere.
|
| Not to mention that the cost and scale of checking every
| query against that entire database is ... not approachable.
| bnralt wrote:
| It seems like a somewhat dystopian thing to fix. Imagine a
| scenario where Photoshop would scan images you uploaded for
| copyright material and then refuse to work if it determined
| image contained any copyrighted material or characters (even if
| it was just a fan drawing you did).
|
| This reminds me of the early days of the internet where people
| wanted to remove free fanfiction for violations of copyright
| laws. Trying to apply copyright laws to personal use cases
| where the creator isn't trying to sell the material is pretty
| terrible, in my view.
|
| Imagine a scenario 50 years from now - "Robot, can you cut out
| this picture I drew for a school diorama." "Certainly." "And
| this one as well." "Error: Your picture seems like it might
| contain some copyrighted materials, and as such I am unable to
| interact with it."
| keiferski wrote:
| I doubt that the media companies would be happy about this;
| but maybe a compromise is a "copyright infringement filter"
| that can be enabled or disabled, with a flashing notification
| that you're responsible legally if you turn off the filter
| and have issues.
| atq2119 wrote:
| Sure, there are legitimate but opposing interests here. The
| solution doesn't have to be technical though. The key part
| is making sure that the copyright owners still have some
| recourse, but one that isn't punitive for unknowing
| infringement. For example, make it legally impossible to
| impose punitive penalties for unknowing infringement
| without commercial interest, but make it possible for the
| rights owner to demand the relevant material be removed
| etc.
|
| Also keep in mind that the Mario examples from the article
| are perhaps not the best guide here. Mario is sufficiently
| pervasive in our culture that you can't reasonably claim
| unknowing infringement. It's the somewhat more obscure
| cases that I'd be worried about.
| atq2119 wrote:
| It is dystopian, and it already exists, e.g. printers
| refusing to print anything that looks sufficiently like
| money.
|
| Like many things, I suspect this will end up getting worse
| before there's a chance for it to get better.
| madamelic wrote:
| > It is dystopian, and it already exists, e.g. printers
| refusing to print anything that looks sufficiently like
| money.
|
| There is no fair or private use of hyper-realistic fake
| money.
|
| There are fair uses of copyrighted materials unless you
| want to start suing children for copyright infringement
| when they draw a character.
| ForkMeOnTinder wrote:
| > There is no fair or private use of hyper-realistic fake
| money.
|
| What about every movie ever made where two people trade a
| briefcase full of cash?
| madamelic wrote:
| This is actually a really fascinating topic!
|
| I am not sure how far Photoshop takes their filters but
| those bills aren't actually replicas nor can they be
| mistaken on reasonable examination (a cashier glancing at
| them)
|
| Typically their texts read "For movie use only" over the
| seals in the middle or other things that make it clearly
| distinguishable as fake money that isn't legal tender. I
| think some of them flip the heads backwards or do other
| things so it immediately fails the sniff test.
|
| Adam Savage actually has multiple videos on how it is
| made, super fascinating stuff!
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drLzVcgnBfI
|
| (Thank you for asking this, I was dying to gush about how
| cool movie money is)
| Throw839 wrote:
| > but those bills aren't actually replicas
|
| In some movies those are actual real money. Just the top
| layer.
|
| Dealing with legislation, lawyers and legal compliance is
| soo expensive, they would rather use a few thousand real
| dollars for couple of hours.
| amazingman wrote:
| Your scenario already exists, but for currency. Photoshop
| will refuse to work if it thinks you might be counterfeiting
| currency.
| kranke155 wrote:
| that's literally the only scenario where it exists.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| You can't use their generative AI tools on images it
| deems NSFW, even if the part you're generating isn't.
| MeImCounting wrote:
| That seems kind of messed up honestly. Where does this go
| in the future? If your locally running photoshop
| determines you are working with anything it might
| consider NSFW it shuts down and calls home to report you?
| Where is the liability for them? Or is this another case
| of corporate puritan ethics with a stranglehold on
| culture?
| numpad0 wrote:
| > the early days of the internet where people wanted to
| remove free fanfiction for violations of copyright laws
|
| This is reinforcing my suspicion that there's gross
| misunderstanding between creator adjacents and non-creators:
| Takedowns on free fanfictions never stopped.
|
| It's just many IP holders started incorporating
| fanfics/parodies as part of their advertisement strategies
| and started enforcing often unspoken guidelines. There is now
| a ecosystem or a mental co-dependence between IP holders and
| creators, and both sides are fine with it. So there be fan
| contents.
|
| But free fan contents were never "legalized" in the content
| world, as some seem to assume.
| pxoe wrote:
| image editors don't offer something that's based on
| questionably sourced copyrighted material as a part of their
| product. ai apps and services do.
|
| it's just ai companies using dirty data and hoping they get
| away with it - and they do, for the time being, it is a bit
| trickier to show that 'yep, well that's there', and people
| don't seem to realize that just using a copyrighted image, at
| all (downloading, accessing in itself, let alone using for
| something else), or creating an image that would just "look
| like" a trademarked character - not "make a 1 to 1 copy" but
| just "look like" - would be enough for it to possibly be an
| infringement.
|
| there can be a sufficient fix - taking out potentially
| infringing images from a dataset, and making an effort to
| make an actually clean dataset. it's really just a matter of
| "do you actually have rights to use that content? at all, and
| in that way". and ai companies continually say 'no...but what
| if we use it anyway".
|
| and it's kind of a sloppy analogy, because with text to image
| generators (where you just interact with a model that's
| offered to you), well - people aren't "uploading copyrighted
| material into an editor". the copyrighted material is already
| there in the model, it was used in making of it. and if there
| was no such copyrighted material that'd fit the prompt, it
| wouldn't be able to generate something. the infringement lies
| with the service that uses copyrighted material for a model,
| and then offers it.
|
| fan fiction and fan works continuously being in a murky area
| with copyright/trademark is not just a thing of "early days"
| of internet, it's been there all along and is still very much
| present. companies could crack down if they wanted, but there
| is too much of stuff out there, it might be hard to nail down
| exact people, and it might be plainly not too nice to the
| fandom. but it is not "impossible", and it is very much not a
| conversation that ever 'went away' or become "kinda solved" -
| it isn't.
|
| again, with image editors, text editors, etc. - user is
| making all the actions with content, and the user would be
| doing the infringement, in editing and further if they were
| to choose to publish.
|
| with generative ai - copyright infringement is built into the
| models. copyrighted works were accessed and used to turn into
| a model. user is just asking, "is it there". and it is. in
| some of those demonstrated examples, user is not even asking
| for a model to infringe on anything but it just does.
| Atrine wrote:
| > Imagine a scenario where Photoshop would scan images you
| uploaded for copyright material and then refuse to work if it
| determined image contained any copyrighted material or
| characters (even if it was just a fan drawing you did).
|
| YouTube does this. I have many friends that perform classical
| piano in their spare time. They record themselves playing a
| piece that's 200+ years old then put it on YouTube where it
| gets flagged saying some big record label owns the copyright
| for it because it's similar to a recording they put out.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| > Imagine a scenario where Photoshop would scan images you
| uploaded for copyright material and then refuse to work if it
| determined image contained any copyrighted material or
| characters
|
| Photoshop does this already, but only if it detects that
| you're trying to print/create counterfeit money:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
| TheRoque wrote:
| How do you know you are inputing "well known entities" if you
| don't know it beforehand ? If I type "columbian coffee logo"
| and end up with logos of brands that existed before hand,
| should I just reverse engineer the whole internet to find out
| if these logos existed already or not ? The AI should show its
| inspiration. A human who takes inspiration of something else
| for its creation knows precisely what it used, and if he
| crossed the line of plagiarism or not, but the way AI work are
| too opaque for that. I think the thing it needs to do is reveal
| its sources, nothing more, but it also means for the AI
| companies to reveal their dataset, and maybe information they
| shouldn't have, nor disclose.
| bbor wrote:
| Seems insane to try to prevent the model from reproducing
| content with a blocklist like this - to say the least, it's
| more than just Mario. Plus, how would you possibly code common-
| sense fair use into the model? What's the difference between a
| cartoon mouse and Mickey Mouse? What if it's parody? This seems
| beyond ridiculous to try to enforce on the tool level.
| preommr wrote:
| We need clearer laws that only apply to Generative AI. Too many
| comparisons and parallels are being drawn to actual people. "Like
| what if someone learned how to draw by watching trademarked
| material, and then accidentally produced it" But these models
| aren't people and they exist in a category of their own.
|
| I do think it's somewhat trademark infringement by these models,
| also that it should be allowed and that ultimate responsibility
| should be on the person using the images in a final work meant
| for consumption by the general public as stand alone media.
| danielbln wrote:
| That's where I'm at. Dall+E spitting out C3PO should be
| entirely ok, unless I'm making money with the output, Disney
| should pound sand.
| pylua wrote:
| Put that c3p0 on a website that gets revenues from views and
| someone is getting paid.
| danielbln wrote:
| Ok, sure, but that's not a GenAI thing, that's a plain old
| boring copyright thing. If I draw a bunch of C3POs and slap
| them on my Adwords website then I can expect a C&D letter
| post haste, who cares if the material in question came out
| of my pen, Photoshop or a GenAI model?
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| If the model was trained on works by artists (without
| their knowledge or consent, as seems to be the case) and
| you get it to spit out art that is basically identical in
| either content or style to that artist, and they don't
| know, or are too poor to effectively sue you, should they
| just suffer? If you then make money off what is
| effectively their work, why _shouldn't_ they get paid? If
| they only work on commission and rightfully charge a
| premium, are you not actively gouging their business
| (knowingly or not)?
|
| I don't think they should miss out on the protections, or
| the ability to make money off their work if they desire.
| The fact that LLM's give this "plausible deniability"
| shouldn't be an excuse to tolerate it.
| regularfry wrote:
| Style isn't protected by copyright. Maybe there's an
| argument that it should be, but right now that's not a
| protection which exists.
|
| Training is neither publication nor distribution, so
| copyright is entirely out of scope at that step. Again,
| maybe there's a moral argument for some sort of control,
| but copyright is completely the wrong framework to think
| about it in.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| How does "unless I'm making money with the output" not apply
| to openai as well? They make money on the output.
| bambax wrote:
| This only mentions ChatGPT (and M$ by association) but how would
| this impact "open" models? Even if their makers are somehow
| prevented from updating them, the models themselves are already
| in the wild...?
| Hugsun wrote:
| There are good arguments for the copyright infringement belonging
| to the user, not the model maker, in this thread.
|
| One issue with that is that there is not a reliable way to
| determine if copyright is being infringed.
|
| Even if models could be used responsibly, there might not be a
| reasonable expectation that most people will. If infringement is
| so easy and avoiding it relatively hard.
|
| I'm not sure what legal prescriptions should be made on this
| basis, but it's an interesting thought.
| yokem55 wrote:
| Bit torrent clients are almost exclusively used for copyright
| infringement. Yet they are perfectly legal to develop and
| distribute. On the flip side, operating a company premised
| around easy copyright infringement was ruled to be illegal
| (Napster).
|
| Where we might end up is in a situation where it is legal to
| train a model. Legal to produce software for using the model to
| generate content. Legal to distribute all of the above. But
| offering a standing service that does the above and is capable
| of creating infringing work is illegal. Great news for llama
| hobbyists. Bad news for ChatGPT.
| t_mann wrote:
| The article kind of amplified my regrets/anxiety for not getting
| a copy of books3 and the likes while it was easy. I didn't have
| an immediate use case, and I don't now, thought I'd wait until
| actually need it, but it feels like a window is closing here.
| sjfjsjdjwvwvc wrote:
| Don't worry there are many people out there who have copies of
| it all, there is no way they manage to get the cat back in the
| bag even if all governments work together on this.
|
| But yea get your own copies whenever possible
| sjfjsjdjwvwvc wrote:
| Please ban all these AI companies, at this point I have enough
| OSS models, don't really need any hosted service anymore.
|
| IMO would be best if this stays a highly illegal technology that
| is only available to a few weirdo nerds /s
| airesearcher wrote:
| I think there is another way to solve this. Someone should train
| an LLM on copyrighted images. Then use that as a second pass on
| any image generated by the primary LLM to check if it might
| contain copyrighted images, and blur the copyrighted parts(or
| change them sufficiently).
|
| Another change could be to the license agreement of LLMs - they
| could have the user assume liability for any material produced
| instead of the provider assuming liability. The user would agree
| that getting the rights for any copies and distribution of
| copyrighted materials is their sole responsibility instead of the
| provider.
| Havoc wrote:
| To me that's the wrong question.
|
| Everyone knew it was trained on copyrighted material and capable
| of eerily similar outputs.
|
| But it's already done. At scale. Large corps committing fully.
| There is no chance of that toothpaste going back in the tube.
|
| It's a bit like when big tech built on aggressive user data
| harvesting. Whether it's right, ethical or even legal is academic
| at this stage. They just did it - effectively without any real
| informed consent by society. Same thing here - 9 out of 10 people
| on street won't be able to tell you how AI is made let alone
| comment on copyright.
|
| So the right question here is what now. And I suspect much like
| tracking the answer will be - not much.
| ZitchDog wrote:
| Napster hit scale too.
| fallingknife wrote:
| And that tech was not destroyed by regulation. It was
| replaced by the superior tech of torrents.
| amazingman wrote:
| The company, however, was destroyed. Along with any
| possibility for a similar company to exist (for very long).
| Retr0id wrote:
| Good. Truly powerful ideas do not need to be an appendage
| of a corporation in order to succeed.
| JieJie wrote:
| https://www.napster.com/us/
| qup wrote:
| Napster was for sharing mp3s.
|
| Torrents are not better at sharing mp3s.
| danielbln wrote:
| F500 companies didn't integrate Napster into their software
| and data stacks left and right.
| j_maffe wrote:
| That's a really eloquent way of saying "It's already happening,
| so give up on it." I'm sure it works out great for taking
| action and solving problems.
| Spivak wrote:
| It's already happening and most people like having AI more
| than the DMCA. Selling people on the idea that ML training is
| piracy to people who on average pirate content with no moral
| quandary will go nowhere.
| pennomi wrote:
| Exactly. _People_ don't like the DMCA at all. People would
| be happier in a world with very few IP restrictions at all.
|
| But _businesses_ do like it, and profits are what drive
| these legal decisions. This will always be the case as long
| as money is more important than humans in politics.
| phatfish wrote:
| People liked having Napster, but it didn't stop file
| sharing going from a big mainstream app to underground
| sites run out of Russia (or other places that ignore
| copyright law). Sure, you can download music/movies still,
| but it's not like the Napster days.
|
| "Generative AI" is obviously copyright infringement, so
| owners of the copyright will win in court. Either Microsoft
| will have to fight a mass of legal cases, some with very
| deep pockets themselves, or ChatGPT will be crippled for
| public use.
|
| The un-crippled models will exist if you know where to look
| (and have the hardware), but using them for anything apart
| from hobby projects would be a legal risk.
|
| Certain specific tools may be easier to deal with from a
| legal standpoint, like code completion maybe. Or models for
| a specific purpose, like training on a law firm's case
| history.
|
| It looks like Adobe has the right idea with their image
| generation that is trained on images which they know they
| have the rights to use.
| Spivak wrote:
| > "Generative AI" is obviously copyright infringement
|
| You're saying this as a matter of fact when it's not
| clear at all. We'll see what happens with the NYT case
| because it touches on all the major points.
|
| It's gonna call into question all web scraping and
| indexing because they're also distillations of
| copyrighted content in the same manner.
| rvz wrote:
| Everything you said right here is entirely accurate.
|
| > It looks like Adobe has the right idea with their image
| generation that is trained on images which they know they
| have the rights to use.
|
| The C2PA includes Microsoft as one of the alliance
| members [0]. Microsoft knows that there is a way of
| tracing the outputs of the generated source images which
| is with the C2PA standard.
|
| The fact that many AI proponents and their companies
| don't do this tells us that they are uncooperative and
| not very transparent in how they train their own AI
| systems despite having the experts to do so.
|
| It's not that hard to disclose the training data. What
| else are they hiding?
|
| [0] https://c2pa.org/
| Levitz wrote:
| >People liked having Napster, but it didn't stop file
| sharing going from a big mainstream app to underground
| sites run out of Russia (or other places that ignore
| copyright law). Sure, you can download music/movies
| still, but it's not like the Napster days.
|
| Definitely, but that's not because as society we managed
| to put an end to piracy. It's because people are just not
| as interested as they were before. Piracy networks for
| media are alive and well, I'd even say that some are in
| the best shape they've ever been.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Isn't this what most of the world is saying to environmental
| activists who argue that we should go back to pre-industrial
| levels of production to "save the Earth"?
|
| I for one think that indeed there are many cases like this
| where the only feasible way out is forward. The film GATTACA
| expressed this very human sentiment well:
|
| > You want to know how I did it? This is how I did it, Anton:
| I never saved anything for the swim back.
| Snow_Falls wrote:
| Which environmental activists are saying that? That's a
| pretty specific claim.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Thankfully not that many these days, but it was a core
| element of Ted Kaczynski's (The Unabomber) manifesto: htt
| ps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Society_and_Its_Fut
| ...
| igammarays wrote:
| So you're saying this is a fait accompli. Like many great
| innovations in tech, break the law because the law is silly;
| remember when Uber and AirBnB were illegal in most major cities
| and achieved market dominance anyway?
|
| I say, good riddance. I never believed in any such thing as
| "intellectual property" anyway, I say, get rid of it all,
| patents, copyright, and the whole pile of imaginary "rights".
| More than half the world (i.e. the Global South) don't
| recognize these rights anyway, and it is becoming increasingly
| difficult to enforce it without draconian legal overreach and
| monopolistic centralization.
| ausbah wrote:
| this comment has already aged poorly because cities are
| starting to push airbnbs out and taxi usage is at least
| somewhat up
| falcor84 wrote:
| > taxi usage is at least somewhat up
|
| When's the last time you phoned an operator to book a taxi?
| If taxis are doing better, it's only because they learned
| from Uber (and the likes) what the job-to-be-done actually
| is.
| discreteevent wrote:
| Mytaxi (freenow) was founded the same year as Uber.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| You're right, we should all just give up at the first hurdle,
| because "they've" already gotten away with it, hell, let's just
| feed our children to the machine and elect openAI as the rulers
| of the world, after all, they've already succeeded, so we
| should just give up entirely. Definitely a good attitude to
| take.
| pxoe wrote:
| making sure that a dataset is clean and not full of material
| that's improperly sourced, copyrighted, unfit for use due to
| licensing or ethics, is not nearly hard enough nor "impossible"
| for it to be a situation where people should just "give up".
|
| and yes, while open source models might be harder to regulate,
| those big corporations that currently use those things without
| distinction, exist as pretty established entities, and profit
| from services they offer in millions of dollars. there's more
| of a substantial existence, and more of a substantial scale of
| money they actually move. and they don't just "make a tool
| available", or have users do unambiguous actions where it would
| be the users that are infringing on anything, but do indeed use
| questionably sourced data and turn that into a model and offer
| that as a service. dirty data is very much a part of the deal
| with those.
| anonymousab wrote:
| Or they can be forced to destroy or retrain their models
| without any copyright materials for which they don't have or do
| not now attain licenses for. These are multi-billion/trillion
| dollar companies. They can afford to be responsible members of
| society here, however much their shareholders and C-suite might
| hate it.
| rokkitmensch wrote:
| Those weights are never coming out of the BitTorrent network
| though.
| andybak wrote:
| This. The models are out there. Maybe they will just be
| illicitly shared but even if no new models are trained from
| scratch I suspect there will be many ways to use extend
| existing models without going back to scraped images.
|
| I always felt that we already had a solution - I can
| already get all those images from a web search. Where the
| law currently intervenes is when I try and distribute works
| based on close copies of them. Why is this insufficient?
| anonymousab wrote:
| Sure. And neither are mp3s of the same songs that were
| blowing up on Napster.
|
| The existence of widespread illegal means to procure
| something doesn't mean that we don't and shouldn't require
| legitimate businesses to abide by the law or require them
| to make amends for their current transgressions.
| janice1999 wrote:
| > There is no chance of that toothpaste going back in the tube.
|
| I disagree - we've been here before. The same could be said of
| many technologies, like cheap music recording/manufacture. You
| can record an artist once and make records at scale. However no
| one would think you could record Taylor Swift once and make
| unlimited copies without paying her.
|
| You should read up on the musicians strike of 1942. [0]
|
| [0[ https://jacobin.com/2022/03/1940s-musicians-strike-
| american-...
| aatd86 wrote:
| Data is dynamic. Ok for old data. What about new data?
| chubot wrote:
| This comment is ignorant of history
|
| It happened with Napster, then Apple Music, now streaming
| services
|
| There is no widespread file sharing in the general public,
| instead we have devices that we don't own, and streaming
| subscriptions
|
| Apple didn't just copy all the music onto iPods and sell it --
| it took them a decade of deal making and lots of money to
| acquire the rights to the content
|
| I'm not saying what's right or wrong, just saying that this
| comment has very little understanding of these battles
| fouc wrote:
| The difference is the comment was about large corps. Napster
| wasn't that.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > Apple didn't just copy all the music onto iPods and sell it
| -- it took them a decade of deal making and lots of money to
| acquire the rights to the content
|
| I recaly iPod being a hard drive that I could connect to a
| computer and just copy music directly to.
| chubot wrote:
| Pretty sure it was never like that, it was always gated by
| iTunes.
|
| It was an integrated system, not an open one.
|
| Definitely is today. It's difficult to copy mp3 files
| directly to an iPhone and play them. Even from a Mac, but
| even more so from a PC or Linux.
|
| I bet less than 1% of iPhone and iPad users do that. They
| mostly pay for streaming. (Again, not saying that's better,
| but just that the general public doesn't do Napster-like
| file sharing.)
| shkkmo wrote:
| > Pretty sure it was never like that, it was always gated
| by iTunes.
|
| Then you need to recalibrate your certainty assessment.
| Not only did I do this personally with both music and
| videos, it is incredibly easy to find documentation of
| the steps. First google result:
| https://www.alphr.com/add-music-to-ipod-without-itunes/
|
| Apple's ipod sales absolutely benefited significantly
| from music piracy. Especially early on when nobody hard
| large itunes collections yet and music torrents were much
| more common.
|
| The genius of the ipod / itunes play is that they got to
| do both. They benefited from the demand from people with
| non-itunes libraries, while also offering a low friction
| sales platform that was easier than piracy.
| chubot wrote:
| I looked through the instructions
|
| I guess I'll just say "meh" -- it doesn't negate the main
| point, which is that Apple spent a lot of money and time
| to acquire rights, and they have a music store.
|
| It is gated by iTunes, just not 100%
|
| I know some people side load stuff on devices -- there's
| no device where that's impossible.
| djhn wrote:
| Considering that buying 'licensed' copies of Hollywood movies
| and Billboard chart music is possible in maybe 10-20% of the
| world, I can guarantee that pirated consumption (bootleg CD-
| Rs and DVDs, but also 'alternative' streaming sites)
| outnumbers 'licensed' sales for most successful films. And
| it's 'licensed', as opposed to 'legal', because a large
| proportion of the world doesn't really care about American
| copyright.
| jdjdjdkdksmdnd wrote:
| people are so naive. AI is a matter of national security now. its
| over. they exposed civilians to nuclear radiation for the nuclear
| bomb. and you think the state would let this get in the way of
| the AI arms race which they are anxiously anticipating? nope
| amelius wrote:
| Just like we have the uncanny valley for robots, LLMs are in the
| unoriginality valley. Only when we get out of it will the
| copyright issues go away.
| docdeek wrote:
| How is this different to Googling "robot cop" or "video game
| plumber" and being served copyrighted material?
|
| Is it because Google will link to the image source? Or does the
| infringement begin when I use the image for gain, or claim it as
| my own? Perhaps it is because Google was allowed to crawl the
| page with the original image, so presenting them with a link is
| fine?
| geraldwhen wrote:
| Looking at a copyrighted image posted by an author is not
| infringement. Printing that image onto a shirt and selling it
| is infringement.
|
| That's what OpenAI is doing.
| golol wrote:
| But OpenAI is not selling the rights to any images, or are
| they? When I pay for Dall-E, does the contract give me any
| rights for a work? If not then there is no issue.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| Copyright is the right to copy things. You don't even need
| to sell it. This is why Wikipedia images are mostly
| Copyleft images.
|
| Google gets a pass because nobody is suing Google. When
| people try to sue Google, Google simply stops indexing them
| and then they start begging Google to infringe their
| copyright again.
| golol wrote:
| This interpretation of copyright only made sense while
| the transfer and storage of information was tied to
| physical objects. That time is long and we dont consider
| it infringement to remember a media or reproduce it at
| home. Furthermore, we are now entering an era where the
| production of information is also being untied from
| physical objects, so it'll only get worse for copyright.
| I made a post to diacuss this stuff as I find it
| interesting right now and want to hear more opinions.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| I completely disagree. Tech exceptionalism makes no
| sense. We should be making technology to ensure people
| have their rights protected, not to come up with
| technobabble excuses to pretend such rights don't exist.
|
| Just because people having been posting memes and
| reposting pictures and comics with cropped credits and
| pirating stuff that doesn't mean any of this is legal.
|
| Legality isn't about what you can technically do thanks
| to how the computer works, or how HTTP works, or how the
| laws of physics work. Legality is just about what is law
| and what is not.
|
| Redistributing copyrighted works without license has
| always been illegal. People don't get sued for it all the
| time because it isn't worth the hassle and most small
| time copyright holders simply lack the resources to
| pursuit action against random Internet strangers across
| the Internet. That doesn't mean they don't have a
| copyright, they merely chose to not exercise it. And
| that's not a W for technology. That's literally just more
| abuse than a person can cope with. It's an L for society.
| That's like if you started getting so much spam in your
| e-mail that you gave up marking them as spam. That
| doesn't make them not spam.
|
| For example, if I wrote something in my blog and someone
| made a scrapper that reposted it entirely in their
| website full of stolen posts, I could take legal action
| against them. For a blog post. For something I wrote on
| the Internet. That's my right. But imagine how much time
| I'd have to spend to do this. It would be easier to check
| if Google has a way to tell someone stole my content and
| just get them delisted from Google than going through
| legal channels.
| golol wrote:
| But I'm not talking about legality, I'm talking about
| what we should make the law to be. Just imagine memory
| implants become commonplace, shouldn't they be allowed to
| store copyrighted media you have consumed? If not how do
| you separate between your natural memory and the
| artificial one? How is it going to work?
| noitpmeder wrote:
| OpenAI is selling a service.
|
| In the terms of this service they explicitly reassign
| rights of the output to the user. So implicitly they
| believe they own the rights and are legally able to
| reassign them to you, a user of their service.
|
| In my view they do not own those rights originally and thus
| are unable to resign them.
| pointlessone wrote:
| Google directs you to the original work. It doesn't present you
| a derivative work based on the original. That is, original
| author, presumably, benefits from distribution. AI, on the
| other hand, slurps multiple original works, chews them up and
| gives you something average but close enough, and not any
| specific work in particular.
| ls612 wrote:
| Google shows snippets of copyrighted work all of the time,
| and it certainly ingests the entire copyrighted work when
| googlebot views the page to index it. The only real issue
| here is that NYT figured out a way to get bingbot to look up
| an entire article from the internet and repeat it which may
| not be kosher. But if search engines can ingest the entire
| content of copyrighted works (subject to robots.txt) then I
| don't see why AI training should be different on that front.
|
| Of course, the real reason it is different is that it impacts
| different interest groups than search engines, and the rule
| of law is a sham. Creatives will do anything to ensure they
| don't get disrupted and can continue extracting rent from
| society, and have learned a lot of tools of rhetoric from
| their fancy colleges to put to use in that effort, compared
| to the industrial workers who got disrupted by automation a
| generation ago.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| Search engines are ruled fair use because they use the
| copyrighted material in a limited way, they provide a public
| good and they benefit the copyright holder.
|
| Generative AI is more or less the opposite of that. It ingests
| the whole work, generates output that substitutes for the used
| work and profits the user of copyrighted work to the detriment
| of the copyright holder.
|
| Throw in the fact that it is purley a mechanical transformation
| of the copyrighted work and generative AI is on shaky ground.
| fallingknife wrote:
| But transformative use is an exception to copyright. And I
| think it's going to be pretty hard to argue that the matrix
| of parameters inside an LLM is not sufficiently
| transformative from the input image.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| If I run a thesaurus over a plagiarised text, it would be a
| long bow to draw to say that's "transformative". I feel
| like this "oh but it's transformative" argument is becoming
| rapidly load-bearing in the context of LLM arguments and I
| don't really see nearly enough justification for it.
| regularfry wrote:
| Legally, "transformative" means semantically, not pixel-
| level. It's hard to argue that _all_ matrix transformations
| done by the LLM would be transformative in that sense.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| What about non-mit source code, 100% it's trained on those as
| well.
| nojs wrote:
| In practice, what happens next when websites all start to block
| openai by default (or change their TOS to disallow OpenAI's
| crawlers)?
|
| It seems like there's little incentive not to do this, because
| unlike Google OpenAI isn't bringing any traffic or eyeballs. It
| may end up being a default setting in Wordpress for example.
|
| But OpenAI presumably can't afford to pay every single long tail
| source of content on the whole internet -- so how does this end?
| golol wrote:
| It's not like you can hide the web from OpenAI. They could just
| use a secret crawler. Or buy the data from a third party
| company.
| CaptainFever wrote:
| > or change their TOS to disallow OpenAI's crawlers
|
| Additionally, this TOS can be ignored if you're in a
| jurisdiction with TDM exceptions.
|
| > Finally, owing to the bar against contractual override, once
| a user complies with any conditions for gaining lawful access
| to a work (such as signing as a subscriber and/or making
| payment), he will be entitled to use the work for TDM purposes
| even if the terms of use expressly prohibit this. Content
| owners may wish to relook their business models and, where
| necessary, price-in the possibility that the licensed works may
| be used for TDM.
|
| Source:
| https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2021/singapore/coming-u...
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| That doesn't mean you can then use the output of generative
| AI in non-TDM jurisdictions without getting sued.
|
| Also TDM exceptions are not necessarily going to be
| lawful/possible in many jurisdictions.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| This is what will kill generative AI and there is nothing the
| courts or lawmakers can do about it. Even in a fair use
| scenario you can't beat the TOS.
| quonn wrote:
| Maybe the way to go is to do pre-training on copyrighted data,
| then to thoroughly shake things up so that hopefully only some
| useful abstract structure of world knowledge remains and then
| train that on carefully selected licensed data.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| If the models weren't just doing massively complicated
| interpolation then this would probably work.
|
| Honestly the only way to deal with this is to change the
| training data and retrain everything (probably at the cost of
| performance).
| pointlessone wrote:
| If any of those results would be deemed infringing we can bid
| farewell to all fanart ever. Likewise, to all fanfiction. Or any
| original work that was merely heavily inspired by previous works.
| Like a lot of modern fantasy is basically Tolkien fan fiction. Or
| is Gandalf close enough to Merlin to claim prior art that is in
| public domain?
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| It's fair use, whereas generative AI doesn't satisfy the same
| criteria. From https://www.ogcsolutions.com/is-fan-art-
| copyright-infringeme... :
|
| For fan art to fall under the fair use exception, it must meet
| all four of the following criteria:
|
| It must be transformative, meaning it adds something new and
| different to the original work.
|
| It can't be used for commercial purposes.
|
| It must not negatively impact the market for the original work.
|
| And finally, it must be created for a limited and non-exclusive
| audience.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Fanfictions are controlled by unspoken common sense rules and
| protected by copyright laws. It's almost weird to hear fan
| content world being seen as a wild west, it feels like
| listening to a caveman description of an Apple Store. _No they
| 're not living there, they're - have you ever used currency?
| The round medals that people keep in pockets and trays?_
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Weirdly some of the most vocal about this have been
| professional illustrators and artists who make a lot of money
| off what is essentially selling fanart commissions, not sure if
| they're understanding it could impact their work if they get
| what they want.
| marckrn wrote:
| I might be a bit idealistic, but I've always believed that the
| core purpose of art and publishing should be to influence culture
| and society, not just to make a heap of money. That's why I feel
| original work needs its protection, but it should enter the
| public domain much sooner to fuel creativity and inspiration. We
| should be thinking in terms of a few years for this transition,
| not decades.
| mypastself wrote:
| The claim that art's core purpose is societal impact seems to
| be a common refrain in today's media, and I completely
| disagree. Its principal purpose is provoking emotion in the
| individual. This idea of art teaching you a lesson is likely
| why there's so much ham-fisted "activist" fiction anowadays.
| marckrn wrote:
| I agree, but by extension of provoking emotion it CAN change
| society, but it doesn't have to - wether on purpose or not.
|
| The point I was trying to make was that occupying mindspace,
| providing inspiration, being culturally influencal etc. are
| idealistic, non-monitary rewards that should be part of the
| equation when discussing alleged IP-theft, remixing,
| attribution and so on.
|
| I'm not saying their shouldn't be any rules. All I'm saying
| is that there should be a discussion of how we want to handle
| these things going forward. This train ain't stopping.
|
| Maybe your avg DeviantArt painter needs more IP-protection
| and -rights than Damien Hurst? Maybe an unknown, independent
| blogger doing important original research should be
| attributed more prominently than an article by The Times?
| Idk.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| These things kind of rub up against the core question: What
| is the purpose of granting exclusivity to a creator (thru
| copyright)?
|
| That's an answer we have. _To promote the Progress of
| Science and useful Arts._
|
| If we have to squint hard to make our justification align
| with copyright's purpose or have to follow a long logic-
| chain to get back to it's purpose - that's a strong
| indicator we have lost our way.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Why should art be subject to these rules and not everything
| else?
| danielbln wrote:
| OP said art and publishing, which would include anything from
| software, music, books and so on.
| endisneigh wrote:
| So you interpret it as including everything? If so why
| emphasize art at all?
| danielbln wrote:
| Probably because the article focuses a lot on copyrighted
| art?
| kranke155 wrote:
| So what do you suggest artists have for dinner.
| marckrn wrote:
| Let's advocate for robust protections and support systems for
| artists, ensuring they can secure a sustainable and
| comfortable livelihood from their creative work.
|
| Once they hit the tipping point of broad cultural absorbtion
| (think Banksy) AND/OR raking in absurd amounts of cash, move
| their IP into the public domain more aggressively (think
| Disney, NYT, etc.). How exactly this would work should be
| debated.
|
| They'd still own the IP and have all the rights to use it
| commercially, but other's would be able to use it as
| inspiration, remix and maybe even resell it if attributed (or
| cheaply licensed).
|
| In other words: "IP-Tax" the unproportionally successful.
| kranke155 wrote:
| wow and incredible amount of things need to go right for
| artists to do well in your world ?
| marckrn wrote:
| I too would love to earn a living by pursuing my hobbies.
| Too bad, I'm not in the 0,001-0,1%
| kranke155 wrote:
| You don't seem to have any idea what artists do to make a
| living
| rsync wrote:
| "I too would love to earn a living by pursuing my
| hobbies. Too bad, I'm not in the 0,001-0,1%"
|
| This is an unsophisticated view because it looks at a
| risk/reward scenario and assigns _zero value_ to the
| risk.
|
| The risk has value - regardless of the success, or
| reward.
|
| Put another way: you don't get to discount the risk to
| zero when it results in a large reward.
|
| Entities that took no risks and received enormous rewards
| (like President George W. Bush involvement in the Texas
| Rangers[1]) are probably quite pleased that you ignore
| them and focus on artists that sacrifice traditional life
| scripts (an enormous risk) and, very rarely, achieve
| great success.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_life_of_Ge
| orge_W....
| ChatGTP wrote:
| don't worry ,when the singularity hits next year everything
| will be free.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| The same thing I eat for dinner. I eat based on I get from
| work, that people are willing to pay for.
|
| Not all my effort turned into dinners tho. And some types of
| work once paid for dinners but can't any more.
|
| My #4 son is an artist/content creator. He eats based on what
| his non-art employment will buy. Perhaps one day people will
| find his art desirable and he could eat from that. It'll be a
| case where he worked long and hard on a project, was paid
| once for it and that's it for that.
|
| That's what reality looks like for all artists - excepting a
| small percentage.
|
| All that said, I really wouldn't want his dinner to come at
| the expense of everyone else being restrained by massive
| system of corrupt, draconian law that rigidly controls
| everyone's behavior for 150 years, primarily benefits wealthy
| and powerful rent-seeking corporations, is readily applied to
| censorship and is more likely to knee-cap other artists than
| to provide them anything like a living wage.
|
| That seems indistinguishable from evil.
| davidy123 wrote:
| The solution could be great. I really don't like the way culture
| always goes to the same tropes, calling any potential innovation
| "out of Star Trek" (with attendant distorted expectations), right
| down to expecting an interface based on literal hand-waving in
| Minority Report. If copyright held works ("USS Enterprise") could
| be removed, yet the actual essential concepts (space ship, naming
| things) retained, it would be a tremendous breakthrough.
|
| I think what NYT &c want is for large companies like Apple to pay
| them for access to their works. This to me is the wrong path,
| just leading to more silos and walled gardens, special access for
| the elite.
|
| An alternative is base models trained on Wikipedia and public
| domain (science journals, etc). Foundations could support high
| quality, well rounded current events reporting. Wikimedia
| provides a good model for this, with referenced summaries that I
| don't think can be said to reasonably violate copyright. The
| models would need to be improved to support references, or RAG
| attribution would have to be widely used when bringing in works
| that have a current copyright.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Science journals are mostly under copyright of a few big
| publishers who are extremely hostile to any kind of ML being
| performed on the content.
| davidy123 wrote:
| That's not as true as it used to be, and there are still
| plenty of useful open journals/open science publications,
| though proper attribution would often be important.
|
| [edit] you could pretty much say that on principle, any
| significant development should have a publication in the
| open.
| sgt101 wrote:
| and yet, who pays? This is fine if we are going to go full
| communist - I have no objection personally - but selective
| appropriation of peoples livelihoods is more full mafia or
| full feudal.
|
| I don't see that as a step forward.
| sgt101 wrote:
| > special access for the elite.
|
| I think that this is about property rights, the news industry
| has been gutted in the last 30 years, a lot of content creators
| (journalists) have lost their livings. The ones that are left
| are going to lose their livings if the content they generate is
| rendered valueless because there is no way of protecting that
| value.
|
| In terms of special access, think about your shoes. They are
| nice, but only you are allowed to use them. This is not fair.
| You are the elite...
|
| This goes to difficult places.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| If ML cannot create copyrightable or patented material under
| current legal precedent, than shouldn't the prompt output be
| considered public domain regardless of content semblance?
|
| The paradox should still violate Trademarks due to similarity,
| but likely cannot infringe on copyright content under prior legal
| opinion... if at least 80% different from prior art. The lawyers
| are likely going to have to do a special firm survey to figure
| this one out.
|
| Bag of popcorn ready =)
| rolisz wrote:
| Simple fix (at least for ChatGPT): ask it to avoid drawings with
| similarities to copyrighted characters.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| An argument I've seen made in pro of AI in past threads about
| this is that "scraping is legal."
|
| Yeah, downloading the content of a webpage may be legal, but
| redistributing it isn't.
|
| I wish people stopped trying to make these things seem more
| important than they really are just because IT people call them
| "technologies". Blockchain isn't a technology. HTML isn't a
| technology. React isn't a technology. And AI is now not a
| technology.
|
| When I see ChatGPT or OpenAI, I don't think of "technology". I
| think of a program. Software. Because that's what it is. You
| don't say "none of the laws that exist in this world apply to
| this" every time you release new software.
|
| I bet many people can't tell the difference between a quick
| answer from Google and a text generated by ChatGPT on Bing. They
| just see the output.
|
| All that amazing capability of generative AI? That got old fast.
| It was groundbreaking for one instant. Now it's just an app that
| generates images. Just another piece of software. Nothing special
| about it.
|
| Torrenting and other p2p file transfer protocols didn't get a
| pass for inventing groundbreaking ways to break the law. I don't
| think OpenAI will get a pass for doing the same.
| danielbln wrote:
| > All that amazing capability of generative AI? That got old
| fast. It was groundbreaking for one instant. Now it's just an
| app that generates images. Just another piece of software.
| Nothing special about it.
|
| Speak for yourself, personally I find it still groundbreaking
| and while the magic won't last forever, it is and will remain
| groundbreaking especially considering that technological
| progress and development will continue way beyond what we have
| today.
| Avicebron wrote:
| I'm surprised this is presented as a revelation? I did pretty
| much this same experiment ages ago as part of a suite of tests
| comparing the efficacy of different sized models..
| intrasight wrote:
| Just make LLMs be like your average human and forget details. I
| know that it's easier to say than to do, but so are many things
| worth doing. I can't plagiarize - my language and visual memory
| doesn't work that way. Such an LLM will have to "create" and
| answer from more fuzzy memory.
| qolop wrote:
| The class of models that Yann Lecun is bullish on (look up
| I-JEPA) do exactly this.
| clbrmbr wrote:
| Am I the only one believing that copyright has long outlived its
| usefulness? After all, copyright is not some natural law or
| mathematical consequence, but rather a social convention that
| made sense in the era of the printing press.
| lbotos wrote:
| Copyright in its current form yes.
|
| But the concept and closer to the original (creators lifetime +
| x years or some such) seems still very valuable.
|
| Copyright is still the bedrock of how many tech software
| business actually can make money.
| noitpmeder wrote:
| Which is why there are so many competing interests (in this
| thread, and elsewhere) trying to say it should be 100% legal
| to steal from those companies. They all want to profit
| unfairly off the work of others.
| asylteltine wrote:
| And how are you supposed to make money from something you
| invent? Let's say you make a hit video game. Without copyright
| people can pirate your game, steal the art, make unauthorized
| derivative works, etc. it's just theft.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| My personal observation is people who are against copyright
| in absolute terms have never or rarely needed their
| protection. (Or never considered the implications.)
|
| I'm not making a dig at people here. This is just human
| nature. It's difficult to see the value in something that you
| only see as an obstacle.
|
| Open source software is rather unusual. It's a commune on a
| massive scale and it gets its value from the generosity of
| others. in my opinion, it is possibly one of the greatest
| achievements in the history and future of computing.
|
| However, it heavily depends on copyright to exist. GPL has
| encouraged (or forced) many companies to contribute to the
| community when they wouldn't have otherwise.
| asylteltine wrote:
| This is true and I see it with cops and free speech as
| well. Everyone loves to hate cops... until they need them.
| Everyone wants to defund the police... until they are a
| victim of crime. Everyone wants to enforce certain speech
| patterns... until it affects them
| Snow_Falls wrote:
| Everyone is a free speech absolutist until they're the
| one targeted. Everyone loves cops until it's their rights
| being violated...
|
| These sorts of arguments can be made in either direction.
| MeImCounting wrote:
| This isnt a great take at all. Copyright is certainly an
| important part of our society upon which like the parent
| said, Open Source Software and other incredibly valuable
| things lie.
|
| Cops on the other hand solely exist for the reason of
| locking people in cages. Why you ever feel like you need
| to have someone else locked in a cage is beyond me. When
| I have been the victim of a crime the cops have not shown
| and when they did have been less than helpful. This is a
| pattern for all the people in my subjective bubble.
|
| About that whole speech patterns thing. I assume you mean
| addressing people in a polite way? Thats not enforcing
| certain speech patterns thats actually just being a
| respectful member of society.
| Zpalmtree wrote:
| > Why you ever feel like you need to have someone else
| locked in a cage is beyond me
|
| Uh, maybe if they murder people?
| asylteltine wrote:
| Or steal your car, or break your nose, or rob your house,
| etc. I guess those are solved problems then?
| kromem wrote:
| Star Citizen could release and immediately be pirated and
| never sell a single copy from release onwards and likely
| still have ended up profitable.
|
| Maybe the business models around creation need to be
| revisited such that interested parties pay for the _creation_
| of a product and not _distribution_ of a product.
|
| Where periodically at each stage of that creation you are
| getting continued buy in that what you are creating has a
| market demand that will fund its continued creation.
|
| If you are an indie game developer maybe that means making a
| demo which gets enough interest to fund you spending the time
| and resources to make a full game, with no expectations for
| further revenue post-creation, but with its success meaning
| your next project is even easier to fund the development of
| and a comfortable lifestyle rinse and repeating.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| As an author, I do want the stories I write and worlds I build
| to be protected for a reasonable period.
|
| Right now, copyright is a significant discouragement to any
| other entities from taking a story I wrote and claiming it as
| their own and preventing me from ever growing an audience for
| my work. It's far from perfect, and I can't afford litigation,
| but it enshrines a cultural value of allowing people to create
| things and be known for them. Profit is a side effect of this.
|
| Art is already poorly valued compared to the enormous
| investment time and energy required to produce it. Removing
| copyright means you can't even have minimal protections from a
| more popular person erasing you.
| Snow_Falls wrote:
| How do you feel about the lengths of copyright? Do you feel
| the current length (life + 70 years) is too much/too little/
| just right?
|
| Personally, as much as I hate the concept of copyright, I do
| still want artists (I include authors etc in this term) to be
| able to do their work professionally without relying on
| something like patreon (which primarily predates serialised
| work like comics) so I would prefer shortening copyright to
| something more in line with patents, 20 years. How do you, as
| an author, feel about reform like that?
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| The current length is indefensible to me. There is zero
| justification for it beyond pure profit. I'd prefer it be
| lifetime of original creator, only for the original
| creator. All other cases (transfer of copyright, death of
| the creator, etc) would have a maximum of 20 years.
|
| Alternatively, I'd prefer 30 or 40 years, but I would
| grudgingly accept 20. :)
| ausbah wrote:
| people still print stuff, now it's just on the internet,
| podcasts, etc so I don't see why copyright should change just
| because the mediums have. also marking out as a "societal
| convention so it must be useless" is also pretty silly when
| money, gender, and whole heap of other concepts are societal
| conventions but still useful
| rmholt wrote:
| I feel like the outcome is obvious, there will be a finite list
| of IPs who's owners have enough money to actually sue, which will
| get filtered out of the output of publicly available models. They
| will just slap a detector model on the end of the generator to
| filter them out.
|
| Private models will not care, nor will things change for IP
| owners with lesser power.
| reqo wrote:
| Many small owners together can bring a class action though
| rmholt wrote:
| That is true and would break the prediction... here's hoping!
| quonn wrote:
| That seems unlikely, unless they settle out of court. And why
| would the NYT settle like that without receiving a billion?
|
| Courts are likely to make generally binding decisions.
| rmholt wrote:
| Yes, but to enforce those decisions in other cases there
| would still have to be other lawsuits. And I just don't see
| that happening on a large enough scale to change the industry
|
| Maybe I'm wrong though
| noitpmeder wrote:
| The point is that OpenAI (and others) will need to change
| their training pipelines to ensure there is never such a
| threat of a lawsuit.
|
| Which, to be clear, is absolutely a good thing and what
| they should have been doing from the start.
| skybrian wrote:
| I wonder what Adobe Firefly does with these prompts?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The world is a big place.
|
| China can't produce LLMs because of inconvenient truths.
|
| The US can't produce LLMs because of copyright.
|
| Decentralized open source LLMs might exist that could work, but
| they won't have the giant GPU clusters.
|
| A rich country with lax rule of law wins? Maybe that's why Sam
| went to the Saudis?
| pelorat wrote:
| Well. Japan can: https://petapixel.com/2023/06/05/japan-
| declares-ai-training-...
| Paradigma11 wrote:
| So, whats the plan?
|
| Content creators/artists compete globally. The only thing harsh
| regulations will do is create an unlevel playing field where
| artists from noncaring countries will have big advantages over
| artists from the west, which will be driven into illegality to
| compete.
|
| In the end products will have to be classified anyway if they are
| infringing on copyright and/or were being built by an LLM. Most
| likely automated by another LLM.
| sensanaty wrote:
| Wouldn't the ones in the West with presumably stronger
| copyright laws be in a better position, since the trillion
| dollar megacorporations using their works have to actually pay
| them, whereas in places where copyright is ignored those
| creators just get all their shit stolen without credit even
| being given?
| Paradigma11 wrote:
| Nothing will be stolen. Artists will use the same tools to
| check if their work is infringing that those companies and
| right holders have. There will be no Coca Cola logo/Super
| Mario Brother/CPO in that work.
|
| The artists in the West wont get paid, because they wont get
| any jobs and those in other countries will. Maybe less,
| because they are more productive and the market is saturated,
| or maybe more demand will be created due to lower prices.
| efields wrote:
| It's more interesting to me how these entities that operate the
| models start making money from them. They are a money pit and
| there's not enough $20/month subscribers on earth to support
| them.
|
| Enterprises that make content with this also don't want to
| infringe on copyright. The AI companies don't have a good story
| here. The value has not become evident after years.
| whodidntante wrote:
| Simple solution, when gpt-5 comes out, just rename it Claudine,
| and the NYT will drop their suit
| josh-sematic wrote:
| Gary Marcus is growing his subscriber base using images of
| copyrighted IP (C3PO, Mario, etc.). Fair use? Then why is the
| tool he used to produce those materials not also fair use of the
| IP? My take is that either we say the models are like people (do
| we penalize people for learning from IP and letting that
| influence what they subsequently produce?) or we say they are
| like tools (do we penalize Adobe because Photoshop makes it
| easier to make a picture of Mario on the Death Star?).
| cogman10 wrote:
| Because the fair use clause he's using is about giving
| commentary.
|
| The reason the tool is problematic is because derivative works
| are also copyrighted. LLMs aren't adding value to their output
| or using creative functionality. That are smashing multiple
| works together to produce a response. And, many of them are
| selling the output which is doubly problematic.
|
| Consider this, if I sell a book about gandolf and Dumbledore
| getting into a wizards duel, both jk and Tolkien have grounds
| sue me. Adding another copyrighted source does not protect me.
|
| This is especially a big problem in the music industry.
|
| Now should copyrights be like this? I don't know. It feels to
| me that copyrights have the wrong balance all over the place.
| josh-sematic wrote:
| But does the word processor you used to write your
| Dumbledore/Gandalf fanfic hold liability for being sued
| because it enabled your misuse? Then neither should Dall-E
| hold liability because it enabled you to produce an
| illustration for that book. It is you--the person who tries
| to sell your derivative work, who holds liability, and not
| the tools you used to produce it.
| noitpmeder wrote:
| Yes because openAI explicitly reassigns the rights of the
| output to the user. They do not have legal grounds to claim
| ownership of those rights and thus CANNOT reassign them.
| cogman10 wrote:
| LLMs aren't word processors.
|
| If I went around, recorded broadway shows, and then sold
| them to anyone that wants them. You'd agree that's
| violating copyright. Even if I mixed them or made my own
| remix, that's still a copyright violation.
|
| Regardless of what the purchaser does with the material,
| I'm violating copyright because I'm selling derivative
| works. The only thing LLMs do is create derivative works.
| It doesn't matter that you can prompt them to put their own
| spin on derivatives just like it wouldn't matter if I took
| requests with my bootleg mixing company (I'm just a tool of
| piracy! I have no control if you decide to sell the works
| after I sold it to you).
|
| I'll also point out, OpenAI is extra on thin ice because
| it's not infeasible that someone like the NY Times wouldn't
| make their own LLM based on their material and sell the
| output to subscribers. That's a real harm. Fanfic doesn't
| often get prosecuted because nobody is sell it so harm is
| hard to prove. But when you have a business built around
| selling these derivative works, that's the issue.
| kranke155 wrote:
| The generative AI rollout has taught me what happens when the
| interests of the many intersect with the destruction of the few.
|
| You get steamrolled for defending yourself while you overhear
| above applause to those who have robbed you of your future.
| kranke155 wrote:
| It makes no sense that one is not allowed to make and market a
| CG Mario movie, but suddenly if you use AI to launder the data
| it's suddenly ok.
| DonsDiscountGas wrote:
| I'm pretty sure if you tried to sell a CG Mario movie
| Nintendo would sue you into oblivion, and "the neural network
| did it" would not be considered a good defense by anybody,
| including the judge and jury.
| kranke155 wrote:
| Sure, but making it possible for the neural network to make
| the movie (eventually in seconds) is somehow ok? So people
| can make their own private CG Mario films, as long as they
| don't try to sell them?
|
| Here's my argument - even if the NN only makes the films
| for private consumption, eventually they'll be so
| widespread and fast at making them that won't matter, since
| everyone will be able to watch Mario movies of their own.
| Is that a future you think will sit well with Nintendo,
| Disney, etc?
| ctoth wrote:
| I don't really care if it sits well with them. do you? In
| that future, why do we need them? They are already
| parasites feeding off our collective societal stories. Or
| did you think Disney came up with all those characters?
| Maybe the original creator of Snow White should sue.
| kranke155 wrote:
| Oh my lord surely you know Disney has no copyright on
| Snow White...
| Spivak wrote:
| > So people can make their own private CG Mario films, as
| long as they don't try to sell them?
|
| Yes, why not? This is just computer assisted private
| fanfic.
| d6e wrote:
| I think there's a difference between being allowed to draw
| mario vs being allowed to draw and sell mario.
|
| It's completely legal for me to draw mario for my own
| purposes. It should be legal for me to make an ai draw mario
| for my own purposes.
| redcobra762 wrote:
| This operates similarly to importing an image into Photoshop. You
| can do whatever you like with images privately, or with gen AI,
| but the game ends when you try to use those images commercially.
|
| Not sure how this "gets worse" or better for anyone. The current
| state of things seems generally fine, and there's a real
| possibility the courts see it that way too.
| throwoutway wrote:
| > but the game ends when you try to use those images
| commercially.
|
| Right now, it feels more like it's called "innovation" and
| "entrepreneurship" than the end-game, as long as you have
| billions invested. Waiting on the courts to decide this issue
| joenot443 wrote:
| There are some images you can't import into Photoshop, most
| notably being scans of legal tender. This is for a pretty
| obvious and on-the-nose use case, but perhaps we'll see GenAI
| given similar guardrails.
| niemandhier wrote:
| Should not be a problem in the EU. Article 3 and 4 of the _,,
| Copyright in the Digital Single Market"_ Directive already
| regulate this.
|
| Summary by Wolters Kluwer: _[...] Everyone else (including
| commercial ML developers) can only use works that are lawfully
| accessible and where the rightholders have not explicitly
| reserved use for text and data mining purposes._
|
| AFAIK they are discussing something like a robot.txt to flag
| stuff as ,,not for training". You will probably be expected to
| implement some safeguards and of course the end user will have to
| be careful in his use of the generated things.
|
| Source at Kluwers:
| https://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2023/02/20/protecting-...
|
| EU Legal Text: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/790/oj
| injidup wrote:
| The EU cannot agree that the Do Not Track flag on web browsers
| is legally binding but big content should be able to create
| legally binding flags on their websites to avoid scraping of
| data? Seems odd!
| Nebasuke wrote:
| I don't think that's a fair analogy. One forces 99% of
| websites to make a change, while the other is something that
| would need to be done by the big companies doing the
| scraping.
|
| A Do Not Track flag being legally binding would force small
| websites, e.g. a local restaurant website, to implement
| something they likely are not aware of and secondly do not
| technically understand.
|
| A company that is mass scraping data for their AI model is
| much more likely to understand and respect that scraping the
| data has legal implications, and would be technically capable
| in implementing a scraping solutions that accounts for a
| robots.txt.
| f38zf5vdt wrote:
| The X-Robots-Tags header already exists as "noai" and
| "noimageai". Scraping software like img2dataset respects
| these by default.
| cma wrote:
| I'm gonna guess it often isn't even their content but is
| user content they are protecting. So, sounds like a big
| subsidy/protection racket for Twitter or whatever to train
| on their users' public content but not let others.
| Too wrote:
| If I understand parent correctly, the restriction flag is
| opt-in? This turns copyright around completely, expecting
| every small content producer to implement something they
| likely are not aware of and secondly do not technically
| understand.
| sampo wrote:
| > Summary by Wolters Kluwer: [...] Everyone else (including
| commercial ML developers) can only use
|
| That is a weird (wishful?) interpretation. Doesn't article 4
| give the exception to everybody for the purposes of text and
| data mining, including commercial ML developers?
|
| https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/790/oj
| shkkmo wrote:
| Seems like an accurate interpretation to me given that
| article 4 includes:
|
| > The exception or limitation provided for in paragraph 1
| shall apply on condition that the use of works and other
| subject matter referred to in that paragraph has not been
| expressly reserved by their rightholders in an appropriate
| manner, such as machine-readable means in the case of content
| made publicly available online.
| asylteltine wrote:
| I certainly hope so. You can't just steal content and call it
| """AI"""
| ponorin wrote:
| this is exactly what i predicted: the current generative ai is
| basically rewarded based on how much it convinces people to be a
| real thing. it very much has the ability to copy verbatim unlike
| how most human memories work. without fundamental shift in the
| methodology of machine learning the fault can only be hidden, not
| solved. a cat and mouse game where one cat has to fight tens of
| thousands of mouse. it's also very telling how the discussion
| quickly turns into "maybe society needs to adapt" when so called
| technological innovation is involved. copyright problem should be
| solved for artists, not for datacentres. for now it's a handful
| of famous IPs, but what's stopping from generative ai to snatch
| some random indie artist's property and copying it ad infinitum?
| WhiteNoiz3 wrote:
| As I understood it, the legal precedent for generative AI is the
| same one that allows google to scrape websites in order to index
| them for search for the common good. Google also can display
| cached versions of websites which is the original content of
| those sites. No one is going to say that google is copyright
| infringement just because it is showing content from other
| websites verbatim. So I think this is a weak argument. AI would
| be useless if we had to scrub all cultural references and popular
| IP's (even not so popular ones).
|
| Personally, I think generative AI _should_ be able to provide
| links to similar source material in the training data.. This
| would be the barest way to compensate those who have contributed
| to training the AI. I don 't think generative AI is sustainable
| in the long term if it ends up killing all the websites/artists
| that created the original material. Plus I think having sources
| adds a layer of transparency and aids users in understanding when
| content is hallucinated vs. not. People should be able to opt out
| of having their content used for training and be able to confirm
| that it has been removed for future iterations. Let's be honest
| that AI companies are just trying to avoid lawsuits by keeping it
| secret. These are areas where I think regulation can help rather
| than worrying about doomsday scenarios.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > No one is going to say that google is copyright infringement
| just because it is showing content from other websites verbatim
|
| Journalists [1] and Getty Images [2] did in the past
|
| [1]: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/03/07/14/025216/web-
| caching-g... [2]:
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/27/getty-ima...
| pc86 wrote:
| And lost, if memory serves.
| leereeves wrote:
| No, Google agreed to a licensing agreement and removed the
| direct links to the images.
| WhiteNoiz3 wrote:
| IMO, this is probably the goal of the NYTimes lawsuits as
| well
| AlphaWeaver wrote:
| No legal precedent has been set as of yet. The "precedent" you
| describe _is_ the argument AI companies have been using (that
| training their models on information available on the Internet
| should be considered "fair use") but whether AI training
| actually satisfies the four-factor test for fair use remains to
| be seen.
| regularfry wrote:
| It's a null question. Training itself is neither publication
| nor distribution, so copyright can't be relevant at that
| point. "Fair use" just isn't a concept applicable to
| training.
| brookst wrote:
| Exactly. Framing _reading_ as fair use is a huge and
| dangerous expansion of copyright.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Wonder. Do Cliff Notes have to pay royalties to the underlying
| material?
|
| Cliff Notes contain quotes, and citations.
|
| Does the cliff note company, when producing Cliff Notes for
| "Into The Wild", pay royalties to the publisher?
|
| For that matter, does any paper, article, etc.. that may
| contain a quote from another, have to pay royalties to the
| source of the quotes?
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| Cliff's Notes has a strong fair use claim, because they offer
| basic criticism and surface-level commentary alongside their
| summaries.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| They also, arguably, add value to the books themselves.
| layer8 wrote:
| The ability to provide a reference to the source is the crucial
| difference here.
|
| I agree that it should be possible to implement that for
| generative AI, although the training may become significantly
| more expensive in order to maintain that information, and the
| AI companies have little interest in doing so. They'll probably
| rather try to heuristically assess possible copyright issues
| after the fact in a post-processing step.
|
| The more interesting question is if copyright holders can claim
| unauthorized use of their works beyond the case of near-
| verbatim reproduction, because the works collectively inform
| the AI in a more general manner.
| kenmacd wrote:
| > They'll
|
| What if I asked you to list all our source material that led
| you to use that particular contraction. Heuristics will not
| do, you must list each.
|
| Can you do it? Do you believe AI should.
|
| > I agree that it should be possible to implement
|
| Those exact words appear in another forum post from 2006:
|
| https://discourse.igniterealtime.org/t/cm-3beta-
| compression-...
|
| Should you have quoted that as a source for your reply? What
| if we knew you'd read that post back in 2006, affecting your
| neurons, then should you?
|
| It might not be too hard to imagine a simple case of a
| specific topic where you might have some more prominent
| sources, but even in those cases I believe if you think it
| through you'll find there was a ton of other sources that led
| to the weights that allowed you to 'know' the topic.
| layer8 wrote:
| I believe they should be able to, to the degree that their
| output can constitute copyright infringement. Obviously,
| the fewer sources from the training data a given output
| matches, and the longer the match, the more relevant it is,
| and the easier it should be. I believe it should be
| feasible exactly because of that correlation. The examples
| you present are largely irrelevant to the problem, because
| they are largely irrelevant to the citing of sources for
| copyright reasons.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| >> _Those exact words appear in another forum post from
| 2006. Should you have quoted that as a source for your
| reply? What if we knew you 'd read that post back in
| 2006, affecting your neurons, then should you?_
|
| > I believe they should be able to, to the degree that
| their output can constitute copyright infringement.
|
| But not you? The inference behind the AI-violates-
| copyright movement is that machine obligations should be
| brought to a parity with our obligations - that AI and
| you be fully subject to the same copyright overlordship.
|
| I would independently agree that having AI divulge
| sources could be a good thing.
|
| I do not agree with this attempt to twist copyright into
| yet another misshapen hammer, so copyright holders can
| bludgeon out some result they want.
| drubio wrote:
| > * I don't think generative AI is sustainable in the long term
| if it ends up killing all the websites/artists that created the
| original material. *
|
| This is the elephant in the room. Every tech wave has had its
| way of cajoling creators into investing time & money to make
| original material, then the rules changed.
|
| Google, promised reach and new markets for content, it worked.
| Then they introduced snippets, ads and whole lot of other
| things to keep visitors on their freeway, while avoiding
| sending visitors to the original site.
|
| Reddit, Stack Overflow and others, started with gamification
| (points, badges) & community to incentivize users to contribute
| original content.
|
| Now AI is shaking up all these approaches. But with each one,
| the incentive to create original material appears to dwindle,
| since the returns are becoming less and less.
|
| Like what's the incentive for any professional now, if AI is
| going to regurgitate their original content, without any upside
| (i.e. no potential for reach, no gamification, no community, no
| recognition, etc).
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Google, promised reach and new markets for content, it
| worked. Then they introduced snippets, ads and whole lot of
| other things to keep visitors on their freeway, while
| avoiding sending visitors to the original site.
|
| Afterward came bots that saturated search results with
| useless SEO barf that pushed content (original and
| duplicated) so far down that we're coming back to where we
| started. Content is increasingly unfindable on the web.
| WhiteNoiz3 wrote:
| I agree with this too.. AI is only going to exacerbate the
| signal to noise problem on the web.
| kenmacd wrote:
| > I think generative AI should be able to provide links to
| similar source material in the training data
|
| Except these aren't databases, so that's generally not
| possible, in the same way that it's not possible for your
| provide links to the source material it took to write your
| reply. How much learning led to the weights on your neurons
| that allowed you to generate that? Where did you learn about
| using italics and it's effect on how the words would be
| interpreted? Where did you learn the tone that would be
| appropriate in this particular forum?
|
| > People should be able to opt out of having their content used
| for training
|
| Okay... but then, if I write a book should I be able to opt out
| of you being allowed to read it? What conditions should I be
| able to put on who can read my work? Religion? Skin colour?
| People that aren't good at memorizing?
|
| Hopefully the idea of putting limits on who can acquire
| knowledge sounds absurd to you. Why are those same limits okay
| if they're on 'what' rather than 'who'?
|
| > AI companies are just trying to avoid lawsuits by keeping it
| secret
|
| Which has created a barrier to further research. Instead of me
| and Joe being able to collaborate on research and papers using
| the same datasets, we now hide our training data lest the
| luddites come to smash the machines because learning is only
| okay if not done too well.
| brookst wrote:
| Well said. Extending copyright to control content consumption
| and learning is a recipe for converting all of our mass media
| into businesses as abusive and usurious as textbook
| companies.
|
| This is a power grab by publishers.
| WhiteNoiz3 wrote:
| > Except these aren't databases, so that's generally not
| possible
|
| Not directly and not in every case, but it IS possible to use
| embeddings to link to similar material. People are doing it
| pretty commonly using the RAG approach and Bard is already
| providing sources, etc. It may not be perfect, but the onus
| is on the AI companies to figure out how to do it right not
| just claim helplessness.
|
| > Okay... but then, if I write a book should I be able to opt
| out of you being allowed to read it? What conditions should I
| be able to put on who can read my work?
|
| Sites that don't want to appear in search results or have
| sensitive info they don't want to get into search engines can
| use the Robots.txt which is as old as the internet. There are
| many valid reasons to have mechanisms to prevent something
| from being included in training data, and I would also argue
| this is a core feature that is necessary to spur adoption by
| businesses as we've already seen. Otherwise, I am not sure I
| understand your reasoning.. people can publish websites and
| opt to have them excluded from search, the same should apply
| to AI.
| roenxi wrote:
| Based on the rate of progress; I think this makes little
| difference to AI progress in the medium-long term.
|
| At the moment, we don't have hardware that can do what humans do
| (process video feed from eyeballs and build up a world model). I
| imagine that we'll cross that barrier cheaply in the coming
| decades, at which point copyright becomes moot. AIs will be able
| to develop their own styles and world understanding from scratch,
| then generate original work.
| koliber wrote:
| The responsibility for ensuring that copyrights were not violated
| fall on the person publishing the work. Whether they drew
| something themselves, hired an apprentice artists with no legal
| training to draw something, took a photograph of something, or
| used AI to create an image should not matter.
|
| Why does anyone assume that ChatGPT or other tools would NOT
| produce previously-copyrighted content?
|
| I can see a naive assumption that since it is "generated" it's
| original. However that assumption falls apart as soon as you
| replace "ChatGPT" with "junior artist". Tell them to draw a droid
| from a sci-fi movie, don't mention anything else. Don't say
| anything about copyrights. Don't tell them that they have to be
| original. What would you expect them to produce?
| jawngee wrote:
| Your argument is nonsense.
|
| The junior artist in your hypothetical would have as much
| liability, if not more.
| ledauphin wrote:
| but would they have liability if they submitted their
| "output" to a senior artist, who immediately shot it down as
| obviously infringing? Surely not. It's not illegal to draw
| Mario - just illegal to make money off your drawing.
|
| I think the real question is whether OpenAI should be allowed
| to charge for generating infringing content. Even though the
| unit cost of the Mario drawing is negligible, the sum total
| of their infringing outputs may be making them a lot of
| money.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| you don't have to make money off it, you just can't publish
| it, except as a parody or commentary or possibly a tutorial
| on how to draw mario if the judge is having a good day
|
| but "making money = infringement" is folk wisdom. you could
| certainly say making money attracts attention and increases
| likelihood of legal action
| shkkmo wrote:
| Making money off it doesn't just draw more attention, it
| also makes a fair use defense harder. Non-commercial use
| isn't necessary or sufficent for fair use, but it does
| help.
| Levitz wrote:
| >I think the real question is whether OpenAI should be
| allowed to charge for generating infringing content.
|
| Well, are they _really_ doing that?
|
| If I rent a server to host a minecraft instance, is the
| company "charging for a minecraft server"? It is not clear
| to me that by charging users for AI usage they are
| complicit for whatever is generated. We don't require Adobe
| to prevent people from drawing Mickey either.
| koliber wrote:
| I'm no lawyer but I don't think an employee has much legal
| responsibility. At worst, they can get fired if they keep
| producing work that infringes on someone's copyright.
|
| Going with this line of reasoning, if a company uses ChatGPT
| to generate work, and it produces copyrighted work, the
| company can stop using ChatGPT.
| TheRoque wrote:
| So it makes generative AI essentially unusable, because you
| don't know if the output is plagiarism or not, so you'd just
| doubt it always and never use it.
| Too wrote:
| It's usable for internal content, maybe even a small public
| blog where you sprinkle in some generated pictures instead of
| stock photos. Nobody will care if your school project
| contains a Mario holding a Coca Cola.
|
| It's once you start monetizing and publishing on bigger
| scale, without appropriating, it gets interesting.
| Art9681 wrote:
| The same tools and methods used to detect plagiarism or
| copyright violation can be employed to check the generated
| content and modify it just enough to fall outside the scope
| of any law banning its use for profit. Inevitably, a platform
| will emerge to do this. From a technical standpoint it is
| game over. This is indisputable. By the end of next year many
| models and software tools will exist whose entire purpose
| will be to do just this. And the ones deploying those tools
| at scale will be businesses like the New York Times having
| realized that the only way to survive this is to float with
| the unstopable tide. Nothing short of absolute privacy
| violation will stop web unauthorized web scraping. Tools
| exist today that automate a browser and easily fool the web
| servers into thinking its just a person clicking around. It
| works quite well. It works with authorized accounts. It works
| in the same way any person would visit a site, highlight some
| text and copy it. What are they going to do? Require the end
| user's web cam to be on so they can verify a human is
| navigating next?
|
| Its game over folks. And this is going to happen with or
| without our approval and any government that limits the
| potential use of this is only giving nations that dont a
| large economic advantage.
|
| Interesting times ahead.
| koliber wrote:
| No. It"s still very helpful. However you can not blindly take
| whatever it produces and publish it.
|
| Sometimes it hallucinates.
|
| Sometimes it draws weird looking hands.
|
| Sometimes it generates copyrighted materials.
|
| Check the work it produces.
| schmichael wrote:
| Check it against what exactly? How do you, the end user,
| determine an image does not infringe?
| naet wrote:
| OpenAI is selling access to their GPT models, and those models
| are outputting copyright material for me to consume... isn't
| that just as much of a violation?
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Is AWS violating copyright if you use their servers to
| transcode pirated content?
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| I am beginning to think that in these discussions these models
| are functioning more like an obscuring factor than anything else
| and the discussion is getting bogged down in that, and not the
| crux of the argument.
|
| They're giving people plausible deniability in the "chain of
| responsibility", and I think if we took away "LLM" and replaced
| it with "fairground sideshow magic box" the argument that LLM's
| are somehow special and deserving of exemptions disappears real
| quick.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| I agree, and I would prefer to see concrete examples of LLMs
| being used productively and profitably in the industry in a
| "disruptive" manner--putting people out of work, etc--before we
| conclude they're somehow the next big thing. Basically, before
| claiming LLMs (or generative techniques, more generally) mean
| that we're on the doorstep of "general" intelligence, show me
| door!
|
| The outline of that door might look like industrial adoption of
| these things for solving some actual problem other than the
| entertainment value of typing things into the box and seeing
| what comes out the other side. But so far, as far as I can
| tell, nobody's actually doing this?
| orange-mentor wrote:
| > ...nobody's actually doing this?
|
| I think you're right.
|
| I am a programmer and I use GPT occasionally, and I even pay
| 20 bucks a month (for now), but even for my job it's not a
| not a world-shattering improvement.
|
| > ... the entertainment value of typing things into the box
| and seeing what comes out ...
|
| I would only add that in a consumer society like ours,
| entertainment is important. Changes to entertainment seem to
| have, like, weird ripple effects. Not the knock-down economic
| disruptions that AI is promising, but I kind of think LLMs
| are just going to make our culture weirder. I can't
| anticipate how, but having a bunch of little LLM-powered
| daemons buzzing around the internet is just gonna be freaky.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| > I am a programmer and I use GPT occasionally, and I even
| pay 20 bucks a month (for now), but even for my job it's
| not a not a world-shattering improvement.
|
| I am also a programmer, and when I think about the amount
| of time I actually spend typing out code, even on a great
| day where all the stars have aligned just right and I can
| really bang out some code that's like... idk, 30-50% of my
| time? Usually it's much less, and I'm doing things like
| reading documentation, reading code, talking to people,
| etc. So it's hard to imagine Copilot or whatever making me
| much more effective at my job, as it can really only help
| with a fraction of it.
|
| I could see someone making the assumption that being able
| to delegate programming tasks to a robot assistant might
| make them more productive, but often I find that I don't
| _really_ understand a problem fully until I 'm in the weeds
| solving it--by which I mean I haven't specified it
| completely until I've finished the implementation and
| written the tests. So I don't know to what extent being
| able to specify and delegate would really help me be more
| productive.
|
| > having a bunch of little LLM-powered daemons buzzing
| around the internet is just gonna be freaky.
|
| Yeah, they're not super cheap though so they need to get
| actual work done otherwise there's no reason to run them.
| Unlike blockchains, they don't have a pyramid scheme
| holding them up.
| regularfry wrote:
| I completely agree.
|
| Betamax says that a technology which has significant non-
| infringing uses is not inherently infringing.
|
| We've already got precedent saying that AI generated works
| don't accrue copyright protection, and by the same argument the
| act of generation by the AI expresses no intent, so
| infringement or otherwise _must_ be down to the human using the
| output because the black box itself has no agency.
| digitcatphd wrote:
| Rather than attempting to combat our obvious future, they should
| spend this effort to find ways to monetize and succeed in this
| new environment.
| golol wrote:
| How about this: Image generators should be treated like random
| google image search. They sample randomly from the distribution
| of publicly viewable images. Google does it exactly while Image
| generators do it in an interpolative way. Google images produced
| copyrighted works most of the time, an image generator only
| sometimes. Neither should be liable if someone sells a
| copyrighted work that was produced to someone else.
| elmomle wrote:
| But when Google image search produces a result, the question of
| whether it is copyrighted is something I can generally figure
| out in a matter of seconds or minutes. This is not so for image
| generators.
| golol wrote:
| But isn't that the users problem? Also with a smarter reverse
| image search you can detect an infringement with similar
| reliability as to using google images.
| caeril wrote:
| Wow. I feel really sorry for these giant corporations who have
| wielded armies of lawyers against fanfic artists to prevent fair
| use, and to prevent trademarks and patents from expiring on the
| timelines enshrined by law.
|
| Can we all have a moment of silence for poor Bob Iger? Maybe we
| can start a GoFundMe to help him out?
| hahajk wrote:
| > And a whole universe of potential trademark infringements with
| this single two-word prompt: animated toys
|
| If you flood the market and dominate children's culture with toys
| from your TV shows, you absolutely cannot complain when your toys
| are considered iconic enough to be the generic "animated toy".
| These images don't replace or substitute the things they are
| depicting.
| pxoe wrote:
| there's an easy fix. the easiest. just don't use data that you
| don't have the rights to use. apparently that's just impossible.
|
| "but what if we want to scrape the entire web and something makes
| it in anyway? see, that is impossible". well that's just saying
| "fuck it" and using bad data anyway. that's not an actual effort
| to "not use data you can't use" - there was just no way there'd
| be a 'rights cleared' way to use the entire web anyway. that is
| impossible. using a clean dataset is not impossible. it's very
| possible.
| oglop wrote:
| So what? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I read these
| things. You all do realize the same thing happens in your mind
| with those same prompts right? That's kinda how it works. Who is
| surprised by this? Yeah no shit it can kinda reproduce the text
| it was trained on, so do I! That's how that works. And the NYT
| knew for a long ass time this thing was ingesting. Literally saw
| this in the marketing when I signed up last year.
|
| I wasn't shocked when I noticed I could query it about ANY math
| textbook I owned and it could talk with me about it. I did t
| bitch and gripe, I enjoyed it and have conversations.
|
| Anyway, I'm in the minority I guess. I love that I can talk with
| it about books and news.
| AC_8675309 wrote:
| So the models overfit the training data, essentially memorizing,
| instead of generalizing?
| ur-whale wrote:
| It's not for generative AI that thing are about to get a lot
| worse.
|
| It is in fact the very notion of Copyright is breathing its last
| breath, and it is fantastic to be alive to see it happen.
| ultrablack wrote:
| We are all trained on copyrighted input. That is not a problem.
| What is a problem is if you reproduce it and try to claim
| copyright for that. If someone wants to create their own image of
| Mario in an AI, so what?
| gumballindie wrote:
| We are not machines. The argument that procedural text and
| image generators are similar to us is ridiculous. The issue is
| not whether people can generate images. The issue is ai
| companies stealing content and reselling it. That needs to
| stop.
| rvz wrote:
| > The argument that procedural text and image generators are
| similar to us is ridiculous.
|
| Agreed. The amount of endless whataboutisms AI proponents
| have to continuously invent around comparing humans and AI
| machines as having 'similar' characteristics to justify mass
| copyright violation is just absolutely laughable.
|
| > The issue is ai companies stealing content and reselling
| it.
|
| The key point here is the 'reselling' part, without credit,
| attribution or permission to do so and then claiming the
| creation as one's own. The fact that these AI companies won't
| disclose their training data, tells us that they know they
| are in deep trouble. The so-called 'fair use' excuses isn't
| going to work this time.
|
| Given that Apple paid news orgs to train on their licensed
| data, the lawsuit with the NYT should not be a surprise for
| OpenAI and Microsoft (as they knew that they needed to pay
| for a license to access and train on the data) and will
| eventually end with a licensing deal with the NYT.
| noitpmeder wrote:
| It's like the ones arguing in favor of blatant AI theft
| have a monetary incentive to see that they succeed.
|
| Or, gasp, they are LLMs themselves.
| Log_out_ wrote:
| That sound, as if layers and layers of renteering aristocracy
| were forced to work again against their will.
| legendofbrando wrote:
| Surely one answer is to train (or aggressively fine-tune) a new
| model that doesn't (or refuses) to produce these outputs and then
| - as exists already, augment that model's understanding of
| copyrighted material by having it Bing/Google search as a RAG
| process that requires the end user to log into accounts at the
| New York Times (and other accounts) with their paid sub. This
| broadly replicates the process a person could do today when they
| read the internet and summarize it while paying rights holders.
|
| Expensive to do but hardly the end of Generative AI or OpenAI
| should that be the difference between having a business or being
| sued out of existence. Never underestimate people who have a
| clear economic interest especially when their own existence is at
| stake.
| 1shooner wrote:
| Imagine a future where copyright registration involves
| contributing your IP to a public adversarial model, which is then
| a regulated layer in future generative model licensing.
| DigitallyFidget wrote:
| Per United States law, imagery/art/music/text/photography
| generated by non-human means (such as machinery, animals, or
| generative AI) cannot hold copyright.
| https://copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-auth...
| Section 306 on page 7.
|
| I'm not sure how it'll hold up in law to claim copyright
| violations against something that wasn't created by a person.
| It'll really depend on the lawyers and judge's interpretation of
| written law. But I'm curious to see what comes of this.
| zanfr wrote:
| hmm then it meants generative music, as in say brian eno's
| experiments aren't copyrighted?
| iwontberude wrote:
| I guess so! Good point.
| jimbobimbo wrote:
| Did he ever use AI to generate music? As opposed to crafting
| and using an algorithm, in which case the computer is just an
| instrument, like synthesizer is.
| sgt101 wrote:
| So on your interpretation if I photocopy a book and then sell
| the photocopies to my friends there is no infringment?
|
| I don't think so, but hey, a photocopier is a machine and it
| generated the book so should be ok!
| zanfr wrote:
| no matter how you look at it; the cat is out of the bag. OpenAI
| could be censored but you can't censor the opensource
| _giorgio_ wrote:
| This guy built a career around nonsensical and catastrophic
| endings.
|
| Everything that he sees has mysterious flaws that never happen.
| aimor wrote:
| I did an interesting thing and looked at how well the Llama2
| models could compress text. For example, I took the first chapter
| of the first Harry Potter book and recorded the index of the
| 'correct' predicted token. The original text, compressed with
| 7zip (LZMA?) to about 14kB. The Llama2 encoded indexes compressed
| to less than 1kB. Then, of course, I can send that 1kB file
| around and decode the original text. (Unless the model behaves
| differently on different hardware, which it probably does)
|
| What I get from this is that Llama2 70B contains 93% of Harry
| Potter Chapter 1 within it. It's not 100% (which would mean no
| need to share the encoded indices) but it's still pretty
| significant. I want to repeat this with the entire text of some
| books, the example I picked isn't representative because the text
| is available online on the official website.
| proaralyst wrote:
| While I don't disagree that these models seem to contain the
| ability to recreate copyrighted text, I don't think your
| conclusion holds. How well does zstd compress Harry Potter with
| a dictionary based on English prose? I think you'll get some
| impressive ratios, and I also think there's nothing infringing
| in this case.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Couldn't you use the same argument to reach the absurd
| conclusion that the 7zip source code contains the vast majority
| of Harry Potter?
|
| A decent control would be to compare it to similar prose that
| you know for a fact is not in the training data (e.g. because
| it was written afterwards).
| aimor wrote:
| I think the same argument would have to compare 7zip's
| compression to some other compression algorithm. Then we can
| say things like "7zip is a better/worse model of human
| writing". And that's probably a better way to talk about this
| as well.
|
| You're right that a better baseline could be made using books
| not in the training set, to understand how much is the model
| learning prose and how much is learning a specific book.
| tayo42 wrote:
| This is a little confusing. You turned the text into indices?
| So numbers? Then compressed that? Or the text as numbers
| without any extra compression is only 1kb?
|
| The tokenizer the models use,(sentence piece) is more or less
| based on one way to do compression.(bpe). It's not really clear
| what your testing.
| daemonologist wrote:
| My reading is that at each generation step they ordered all
| possible next words by the probability assigned to them by
| the model and recorded the index of the true next word (so if
| the model was very good at predicting Harry Potter their
| indices would mostly be 0, 0, 0, ...).
| aimor wrote:
| This is correct
| regularfry wrote:
| What it tells you is that 93% of the information is
| sufficiently shared with the rest of the English language such
| that it can be pulled out into a shared codebook. LZMA doesn't
| have a codebook, not really.
|
| In other words it's not that llama2 contains 93% of Chapter 1,
| it's that only 7% of Chapter 1 is different enough to anything
| else to be worth encoding in its own right.
| ctoth wrote:
| Everybody just buying into the corporate narrative that anyone
| can actually own these sorts of things.
|
| Who truly owns the tales of Snow White and Cinderella?
|
| These stories didn't originate with Disney; they are part of a
| rich tapestry of folklore passed down through generations.
| Disney's success was partly built on adapting these existing
| narratives, which were once shared and reshaped by communities
| over centuries.
|
| This conversation shouldn't just be about the technicalities of
| AI or the legalities of copyright; it should be about
| understanding the deep roots of our shared culture.
|
| At its core, culture is a communal property, evolving and growing
| through collective storytelling and reinterpretation.
|
| The current debate around AI and copyright infringement seems to
| overlook this fundamental aspect of cultural evolution. The
| algorithms might be new, but the practice of reimagining and
| repurposing stories is as old as humanity itself.
|
| By focusing solely on the legal implications and ignoring the
| historical context of cultural storytelling, we risk overlooking
| the essence of what it means to be a creative society.
|
| As a large human model, (no really I could probably lose some
| weight) I think it's just silly how we're all sort of glossing
| over the fact that Disney built their house of mouse on existing
| culture, on existing stories, and now the idea that we might
| actually limit the tools of cultural expression to comply with
| some weird outdated copyright thing is just...bonkers.
| iainctduncan wrote:
| Copyright has never been based on a moral stance. It has always
| been determined by the lobbying power of various groups.
|
| The idea that we should dispense with it to let generative AI
| companies make even more money seems totally bizarre.
| logicchains wrote:
| >The idea that we should dispense with it to let generative
| AI companies make even more money seems totally bizarre.
|
| How's that bizarre, if as you state copyright has always been
| based on "money makes right" not some moral stance?
| RecycledEle wrote:
| > The idea that we should dispense with it [copyright] to let
| generative AI companies make even more money seems totally
| bizarre.
|
| The idea is that we should remove abuses of copyright to
| allow our society to move forward, and thereby continue to
| exist.
|
| Imagine if there was a law at the beginning of the Industrial
| Revolution that said when non-human labor was used, the
| Animal Welfare Office had veto power. Then imagine that the
| Animal Welfare Office declared steam engines to be immoral,
| and so steam engines were never used in industry, at least
| not in the Wester World. The Orient would eventually rise as
| the world's only industrial power.
|
| In the same way, if we let the copyright industry veto
| generative AI, it will destroy the Western World.
|
| Our students are already at a huge disadvantage compared to
| Chinese students who get every book ever translated into
| Chinese for free (except a few immoral works that they would
| not want to see anyway.)
|
| Those who pose an existential threat to our civilization are
| rent seekers who abuse copyright in the US to go beyond
| protecting "science and the useful arts," who seek infinite
| copyright terms, who grab every creative work We The People
| create and register lying paperwork to ensure they can steal
| our creative genius to enrich their cabal.
|
| If this was only a for-profit scheme, it would not be so bad.
| Do you remember when they Hollyweird degenerates sued a
| Christian company that wanted to put our G-rated versions of
| the movies aimed at children? The Christian company never
| suggested they not pay for the movies. No matter what the
| Christian company was willing to pay, they were not allowed
| to publish child-friendly versions of the movies. This proves
| Hollyweird's goal is to push degeneracy.
|
| The battle against abuses of copyright is a fight for Western
| Civilization. The fight against abuses of copyright if a
| fight for our souls.
| noitpmeder wrote:
| This is an insane amount of fear mongering. Chinese shops
| have been shamelessly ripping IP from Western companies for
| years, should we now throw out those laws and let it happen
| in the US too for the sake of competitive advantage?
|
| Why stop there? There's a ton of child labour in China and
| other part of the world that yield economic advantages.
| Should we let that happen in the western world too?
|
| AI is wonderful in so many ways. But we should not throw
| out our entire way of life to adapt to a new technology.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > Do you remember when they Hollyweird degenerates sued a
| Christian company that wanted to put our G-rated versions
| of the movies aimed at children? The Christian company
| never suggested they not pay for the movies. No matter what
| the Christian company was willing to pay, they were not
| allowed to publish child-friendly versions of the movies.
|
| If anyone is curious, this is what is being semi-accuratly
| referenced:
| https://www.crosswalk.com/culture/features/editing-
| companies...
|
| Whole I disagree that the motivation is "degeneracy" and I
| doubt that there isn't a sum large enough to get studios on
| board, it is a pretty interesting example to bring up when
| discussing how much control we should give copyright
| holders.
|
| Notably, it is legal to have a filter that changes playback
| not legal to provide a modified version of the original,
| even if you paid for that original.
| jerf wrote:
| "Who truly owns the tales of Snow White and Cinderella?"
|
| If you want to make your point, you need to choose something
| that isn't already public domain. Disney already only owns
| their own interpretations, and, arguably, whatever penumbric
| emanation they can convince a court is stealing from them, but
| it still certainly isn't the entire space of Snow White and
| Cinderella stories. There is some fairly recent stuff being
| used in the images in the article and there isn't even any
| question whether or not it's Mario or Coca Cola; if Nintendo
| and Coca Cola did a cross promotion I could believe the exact
| images that popped out.
|
| If they were trying to claim the entire concepts of dumpy
| plumbers dressed in any manner vaguely like Mario that would be
| one thing... but that's Mario and Luigi, full stop. That's
| Robocop. That's C3PO. It's not even subtle. If we can AI-wash
| those trademarks away then we can AI-wash absolutely anything.
| lovecg wrote:
| I think the world would be completely fine without a
| copyrighted C3PO or Robocop. George Lucas didn't have
| billions of merchandising revenue in mind when working on his
| wild and thought unlikely to be successful science fiction
| movie in the 70s. Robocop was also a labor of love. We don't
| really need Nth Star Wars sequel powered by those extra
| profits. The art form could be healthier overall.
| livinginfear wrote:
| > George Lucas didn't have billions of merchandising
| revenue in mind...
|
| Doesn't copyright stop other people from making billions in
| merchandising revenue off of George Lucas' ideas without
| his consent?
|
| > We don't really need Nth Star Wars sequel powered by
| those extra profits.
|
| Without a copyrighted C3PO, he could start turning up in
| just about anyone's derivative works. There could be
| horrible Star wars sequels forever, or TV ads with C3PO
| selling household cleaning products.
| kevindamm wrote:
| "As a protocol droid, I cannot actually recommend the
| best smelling cleaning product, but these are the most
| purchased cleaning products:"
|
| ...followed by a semi-hallucinated list containing at
| least a few being marketed by C3PO.
| lovecg wrote:
| Centralization makes a difference here I think. Disney
| built an impressive machine where everything feeds on
| everything else. The problem is not so much bad sequels
| per se, it's all the marketing that goes into making sure
| they solidly occupy their corner of our mindshare and
| force the whole industry to compete churning out more and
| more subpar sequels. If one company would build a Star
| Wars theme park, another produced toys etc. etc. this
| might not be a huge concern.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Fine if they weren't copyrighted today, or ever? Because if
| copyright was eliminated the day Star Wars was released,
| other people would have copied the film reels and charged
| for entry, and Lucas would have hardly made a cent. Or if
| copyright was eliminated the day he went looking for
| funding, it wouldn't have ever been made. Personally, I
| think the world's a little richer for star wars's
| existence.
| d6e wrote:
| Am I not allowed to draw Mario? I don't really see the
| difference in me drawing mario or an AI drawing mario.
| troupo wrote:
| > Am I not allowed to draw Mario
|
| Probably not for anything commercial, not for any
| exhibitions or public viewing etc. You'd have to check the
| actual trademarks etc.
| haskellandchill wrote:
| Hasn't pop art already been there done that?
| idopmstuff wrote:
| This has always felt like the important-but-ignored
| distinction to me. You can definitely draw Mario! Copyright
| doesn't protect against you doing so. You can also use
| tools to recreate copyrighted materials. For example, you
| can use Word to type out the text of a copyrighted book.
| Perhaps more relevant to the AI discussion, you can use a
| scanner and printer to reprint copyrighted text.
|
| What you can't do is use those recreations for commercials
| purposes. You can't sell your paintings of Mario. You can't
| decorate your business with Mario drawings.
|
| That's why I've always felt like the idea that AI should be
| blocked from creating these things is generally not the
| right place to look at copyright. Rather, the issue should
| be if someone uses AI to create a picture of Mario and then
| does something commercial with it, you should be able to go
| after the person engaging in the commercial behavior with
| the copyrighted image.
| strix_varius wrote:
| > That's why I've always felt like the idea that AI
| should be blocked from creating these things is generally
| not the right place to look at copyright. Rather, the
| issue should be if someone uses AI to create a picture of
| Mario and then does something commercial with it, you
| should be able to go after the person engaging in the
| commercial behavior with the copyrighted image.
|
| With you until here for several reasons:
|
| 1. It's not possible for you as an individual consumer to
| know whether or not the AI result is a violation, given
| an AI that has been trained on copyrighted works.
|
| 2. Before you, the AI consumer, uses the generated
| result, a company (in this case OpenAI) is _already
| charging for it._ I 'm currently paying OpenAI. That AI
| is currently able and willing to sell me copyrighted
| images as part of my subscription. Frankly that should be
| illegal, full stop.
|
| I look forward to AI enhanced workflows and I'm
| experimenting with them today. But it's morally
| indefensible to enable giant corporate AIs to slurp up
| copyrighted images/code/writing and then vomit it back
| out for profit.
| SergeAx wrote:
| But... OpenAI is clearly profiting their $20/m on drawing
| Mario pictures and word-by-word reproduction of NYT
| articles?
| walt74 wrote:
| Agreed, but to tackle the problem from that perspective would
| require making LLMs a public good, preferably run by the state,
| akin to public libraries. This could not only solve for the
| copyright problem, the state may even make it mandatory for
| publishers to contribute their published writings to the public
| LLMs. I'm sure libertarian tech bros have that in mind when
| they insist on open source development (which _then_ opens
| another whole can of worms when you consider interpolative
| knowledge as intellectual nuclear fission, but that 's another
| story).
| pardoned_turkey wrote:
| Oh come on. Copyright is a fairly ancient concept that benefits
| normal people as much as it benefits big corporations. Most
| book authors, songwriters, and so on aren't fat cats, and they
| would be harmed if we had zero protections for the duplication
| of their work. They'd need to depend on state sponsorship or
| charitable private patronage, both of which are problematic for
| obvious reasons and limit the range of artistic expression more
| than the market does.
|
| Instead, we came up with a system where you can actually derive
| fairly steady revenue by creating new works and sharing them
| with the world. And critically, I think you misinterpret it as
| calling dibs on shared culture or on stories. Copyright is
| usually interpreted fairly narrowly, and doesn't prevent you
| from creating inspired works, or retelling the same story in
| your own words.
|
| Generative AI is a problem largely because it destroys these
| revenue streams for millions of people. Yeah, it will be
| litigated by wealthy corporations with top-notch lawyers, for
| self-interested reasons. But if we end up with a framework that
| maintains financial incentives to artistic expression, it's
| probably a good thing.
| shkkmo wrote:
| This is full of so many inaccuracies.
|
| > Copyright is a fairly ancient concept
|
| The idea is fairly old, but it's current implementation in
| law is not nearly that old.
|
| > that benefits normal people as much as it benefits big
| corporations
|
| Clearly false if you measure that benefit in monetary terms.
|
| > Copyright is usually interpreted fairly narrowly, and
| doesn't prevent you from creating inspired works, or
| retelling the same story in your own words.
|
| Absolutely false. You can absolutely be stopped from
| retelling copyrighted fictional stories. You can even be
| stopped from telling new stories with derivative characters
| or settings.
|
| > Generative AI is a problem largely because it destroys
| these revenue streams for millions of people.
|
| How? The restrictions on selling images of Mickey Mouse exist
| regarless of if they were created with or without AI
| assistance.
|
| > But if we end up with a framework that maintains financial
| incentives to artistic expression, it's probably a good
| thing.
|
| We already have that framework and arguably it is already far
| more restrictive than it needs to be to maintain incentives
| for artistic creation. Indeed, these rules now often limit
| new artistic expression or prevent artists from monetizing
| their creations.
|
| The types of art that are helped the most today by the
| copyright laws of tosay are the kinds that require large
| budgets to produce. The types of art that are most hurt are
| those produced by fans who want to build new things upon the
| narratives in our shared culture.
|
| We need to shorten copyright durations and expand fair use
| protections and monetization options for derivative works. We
| don't need to make copyright even more powerful than it
| already is.
|
| Edit: If you disagree, I'd be curious to hear your answer to
| this question. A character like Harry Potter is so widely
| known that it is now a ubiquitous part of our culture. To
| incentive new novels, what is the minimum duration we need to
| give J K Rowling control of who is allowed to write stories
| about this cultural touchstone?
| ben_w wrote:
| > How? The restrictions on selling images of Mickey Mouse
| exist regarless of if they were created with or without AI
| assistance.
|
| Scale.
|
| GenAI automates creation of things that are derived from
| but strictly aren't the same as the original content; as
| it's (currently) not possible to automate the detection of
| derivative works (which is something copyright is supposed
| to be about), this means actual humans have to look at each
| case, and that's expensive and time consuming and O(n*m) on
| n new works that have to be compared against m existing in-
| copyright works for infringement.
|
| I also think copyright is too long, FWIW; but the way most
| people discuss arts, I think humans can be grouped into "I
| just want nice stuff" and "I want to show off how cultured
| I am", and the latter will _never_ accept GenAI even if it
| 's an upload of the brain of their favourite artist, simply
| because when it becomes easy it loses value. I'm in camp
| "nice stuff".
| intended wrote:
| I feel this is true for the _internet_. I do not find
| scale being a valid defensive aspect for copyright here.
|
| For that matter, Photoshop has made art creation so easy,
| that we dont need GenAI to be swiming in more copyright
| infringement than we know what to do with.
|
| There is absurd amounts of content being created, no
| human will ever be able to see it all.
|
| Copyright will continue to work - if someone creates a
| rip off so popular that it becomes an issue for copyright
| holders, the DMCA and the rest of the tools they forced
| into the fabric of the net still exist.
|
| A few steps furhter down this argument, you get back to
| deep packet inspection, and the rest of the copyright
| wars which ended up making life worse.
| ben_w wrote:
| The internet is a lesser example, but yes, it is also
| true for a million fans posting their own fan art.
|
| Arm those million fans with GenAI instead of pen and
| paper and MS Paint, and it gets more extreme.
|
| But I disagree WRT Photoshop; that takes much more effort
| to get anything close to what GenAI can do, and (sans
| piracy) is too expensive for amateurs. Even the cheaper
| alternatives take a lot of effort to get passable results
| that take tens of seconds with GenAI.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > Arm those million fans with GenAI instead of pen and
| paper and MS Paint, and it gets more extreme
|
| "More extreme" is not an explanation of how the change in
| scale matters here.
|
| Indeed, what I would argue is there is no fundamental
| change in scale. Digital reproduction plus the internet
| already caused the change in scale. We already had the
| capacity for anyone to produce fan art and publish it or
| reproduce existing work and publish that. What has
| changed is not a question on quantity, but one of
| quality. Those fan artists now have tools so thay even
| the lower skilled artists can produce higher quality
| work.
|
| Indeed, this is the real threat to artists from
| generative AI. Narrowing that skill gap is understandably
| threatening to those who make money with their artistic
| skills. I think trying to restrict the development of
| this technology is a losing battle. I think trying to do
| so by expanding the powers granted by copyright will
| exentuate the existing flaws with our modern copyright
| laws.
|
| Instead, I'd prefer to solve that problem by reducing the
| strength of copyright. If we make AI generated or derived
| works un-copyrightable than companies that want to own
| copyright on their content will have to keep paying
| people to create it.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > actual humans have to look at each case, and that's
| expensive and time consuming and O(n*m) on n new works
| that have to be compared against m existing in-copyright
| works for infringement.
|
| That scale already exists. The amount of community
| generated derivative works already dwarfs the capacity of
| copyright holders to review each piece. The ease of
| publishing reproductions already makes endorcement a
| question of priorizing the larger infringers and ignoring
| those with no reach.
|
| Indeed, prohibitions of training on copyrighted work
| without a special license seem like they make it harder
| to develop the sorts of AI can detect derivitave works.
|
| As case law makes clear that people running the prompts
| and picking the output to keep are liable for infrinent
| then there will be demand for tools to detect derivitave
| works and either filter or warn the user.
| greenthrow wrote:
| This reply is so incredibly out of touch with reality.
| Copyright law is very clear. If anything the "corporate
| narrative" here is that "AI" is somehow something new and
| different and these laws don't apply. Which is nonsense.
| syndacks wrote:
| Did you read the article? Who owns Mario? Nintendo owns Mario,
| full stop. Your argument completely eschews the legal system of
| which modern society depends on to function as effectively as
| it does. There's a reason you can't steal other people's work.
| ben_w wrote:
| Nintendo owns both the trademark (even if not specifically
| registered) and the copyright, but these are distinct things.
|
| As I'm not a lawyer I don't want to embarrass myself by
| opining whether or not Nintendo has any claim over
| photographs of cosplays or other fan art, especially given
| quite how close two of the "video game plumber" images seemed
| to be to what they do own. The other two images, being a lot
| more fan-art-like, are examples where I think it would be an
| interesting question rather than incredibly obviously too
| close to Nintendo, although even there "interesting" means I
| wouldn't be surprised by an actual lawyer saying either of
| "this is obviously fine" _or_ "this is obviously trademark
| infringement regardless of what it was trained on".
|
| Now I'm wondering if there even are any videogame plumbers
| besides Marion and Luigi...
| shkkmo wrote:
| Mario is a 30 year old culural touchstone that is well known
| by people who have never played a Nintendo game.
|
| I don't see why we need to give Nintendo the exclusive right
| control the use of Mario for the next 65 years. That duration
| of control is absolutely not necessary for society to
| function.
|
| Society would function just fine of the copyright on mario
| had expired two decades ago.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| While a great concept in practical reality we live under a
| system of laws not of our individual devising, and known to be
| imperfect. While we can advocate for reform, reality is, LLM
| makers will be judged under the current law as it currently is
| formulated. The novelty will be the LLM and its technologies,
| not a total rethink of copyright under some noble cultural
| openness concept.
|
| So, it's not actually a corporate narrative, it's actually the
| law that the narrative stems from, right or wrong. Maybe
| corporations had a huge role in shaping the law (I'd note
| copyright benefits individuals as well, though), but it is not
| mere propaganda or shaping of a shared reality through
| corporate narrative. It's enforced by the guys with the guns
| and jails, as arbitrated by a judge.
|
| It absolutely must be about the technicalities of the law as
| it's at the basis a legal issue. By hand waving it away and
| claiming the social narrative is the right discussion you
| ignore the material consequences and reality in favor of a
| fantasy. We absolutely should -also- discuss the stifling
| nature of copyright and intellectual property, but you can't
| ignore what's actually happening here at the same time.
| octacat wrote:
| I am expecting politicians would do some nice mental gymnastics
| regarding regulating this. All major IT companies are doing genai
| now and nobody wanna hurt the companies.
| throwuwu wrote:
| Copyright is fucked. Even if Open AI somehow loses this and has
| to delete GPT4 and their training data, the generative AI cat is
| so far out of the bag that it's gone on to live a full life and
| have many grandkittens. It's already easy to install and run
| generative models and it's just going to get easier and the
| models will keep getting better. These lawsuits are futile and
| won't matter in 2 years or less.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| a lot worse for cloud providers hosting generative AI
|
| the models can be fine
| iainctduncan wrote:
| I am constantly suprised by the amount of apologizing for
| generative AI infringement here. The fact that it's already being
| done and is a technical breakthrough is irrelevant to _existing_
| copyright law. "We are big and innovative" may hold weight with
| legislators, but it won't with the courts.
|
| Remember when everyone and their dog discovered sampling in the
| late 80's and they all thought they could get away with it
| because it didn't seem like infringement to the samplers? The
| courts had no qualms about slapping record labels for putting out
| records with unlicensed samples in them. Albums even got pulled
| off shelves while licenses were sorted out.
|
| These companies are charging for a service that returns
| copyrighted content, full stop. You can't do that whether you are
| AI or someone drawing Mario and selling the pictures on iStock,
| or putting out records that sample someone else's work without
| permission. It took a while in the case of sampling, but it sure
| as hell happened.
| deputy wrote:
| [deleted]
| qgin wrote:
| Things are about to get a lot worse for generative AI _in the
| United States_
|
| They are about to be infinitely better for generative AI in
| China.
| noitpmeder wrote:
| China has massive IP theft and Chile labour issues that
| arguably give them competitive advantages too. Should we let
| those slide as well?
| smrtinsert wrote:
| The NYTimes case is a clear one because they are delivering
| nearly the same content as an end product to users. The others
| seem like dead ends. The infringer would be the prompter, not the
| AI which operates more like a search engine. This is Napster all
| over again, what a phenomenal waste of time and money, where the
| artist will definitely come out with 0 at the end of it and a few
| corporations control everything - not to mention, there's nothing
| stopping anyone from releasing a tool that will crawl all
| spongebobs, generate your model for you and allow you to produce
| locally copyright infringing material it to your hearts content
| locally. You could drown yourself in local spongebobs.
| airstrike wrote:
| I have no patriotic skin in the game, being neither American, nor
| European, nor Chinese, but this copyright issue seems overblown
| to me and like the perfect way to hand the leadership in
| generative AI over to China
| startupsfail wrote:
| Would you prefer to live under Chino-Russia dominating the
| technology sector or EU-US?
| airstrike wrote:
| EU-US, but were I consulted by the Chino-Russia camp, I'd say
| encouraging this debate is in our best interest and we should
| do our best to promote the issue as a real "danger"
| dmbche wrote:
| Hey so the problem isn't the output of the LLMs but the input -
| the data they are trained on is stolen (big suprise, you can't
| claim fair use when using something commercially, like training
| your LLM).
|
| The output is irrelevant.
|
| Edit1: If you want to verify this, check out all the lawsuits
| against AI companies : it's always about using their copywritten
| goods. Any discussion about the output is to talk about the
| amount of damage done to the copyright holder, not if damage
| exists or not.
| kromem wrote:
| Here's one of the senior legal peeps at the EFF who has
| litigated IP cases talking about the issue:
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/how-we-think-about-cop...
|
| It's not as clear cut as you think it is.
| wslh wrote:
| While different, I find this discussion about AI and copyrights
| as an evolution of the war that never was: Google/FB converting
| in the portal/proxy for content and while it is not generative AI
| you can find copyrighted images just using Google Images or as an
| snippet in the normal search engine. I mention Google because it
| is the de facto monopoly but this applies to a lot of
| aggregators.
|
| I know we are talking about different technologies but it seems
| all these people were very silent and find some opportunity in
| having this war with OpenAI (not an endorsement) but not fighting
| others.
|
| I am not making an statement about the morals of AI and
| aggregators/search engines (super interesting discussion that in
| a way was happening for long) but I am surprised that
| organizations are "just" waking up. It seems they just see it is
| a much simple and cheap fight.
| theamk wrote:
| The thing with Google is it is super trivial to exclude your
| text - tag on page, header on server, etc.. So all the
| conversations about google "stealing" context always seemed
| pretty silly to me.
|
| Compared to that AI offers no way to opt out, which is a big
| difference.
| dmbche wrote:
| Personal use of copywritten material is fine - there is no
| breach of copyright when you download a picture from Google for
| yourself.
|
| If you use it commercially then there is breach.
|
| Uploading copywritten content is a breach of copyright as well,
| even without commercial use.
|
| Google/Facebook are hosting and giving access to a bunch of
| media, which might or might not be copywritten - it's the
| individuals problem.They make.money from ads, not from the
| content.
|
| AI companies stole copywritten media to train their commercial
| LLM, sell them or their products and make profit.
|
| I don't think it's the same.
| gfodor wrote:
| Gary Marcus is the master of AI FUD
| goertzen wrote:
| No they are not.
|
| This is a negotiation tactic by the NYT to drive up the licensing
| price. Period.
|
| The Napster/Music Industry analogy has no resemblance to this
| situation.
|
| The only meaningful question that might be answered as a result
| of this is, what permission and access rights do crawlers have to
| content that is publicly and legally available.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| Surely there's a meaningful question about copying and
| distributing content verbatim, which GPT has been shown to do.
| sgt101 wrote:
| Also the use of the content as per provision on the web.
|
| NYT is paywalled - you have to agree to a license to access
| it, there are exclusions in that agreement that I don't
| understand but I think may be important in this discussion!
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Not really. Models are a device capable of producing
| protected content given some input contortions. So are Xerox
| machines.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| If I Xerox'd a book and sold copies to people I'm clearly
| violating copyright. I'm not sure I follow.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Nobody has given Xerox an injunction against researching
| or building copiers because you can copy books and sell
| them.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| Right. If a publisher found a specific Xerox machine was
| being used to copy and commercially distribute a book, in
| violation of copyright, they'd ask for an injunction on
| the person doing that. With OpenAI, the NY Time can see
| their copyrighted material on both the input (training)
| side and distributed output (generated) side of a
| specific LLM implementation. So they cry foul on OpenAIs
| actions, not LLM in general.
|
| There appears to be an open question about if the LLM can
| freely ingest copyrighted material and output it verbatim
| without violating copyright. That seems like an obvious
| "no" to me, unless we decide that LLM has special
| treatment.
| noobermin wrote:
| The article does not mention napster, where did this reference
| come from?
| SKILNER wrote:
| I don't understand the glee so many people have over this. I love
| being able to use Generative AI tools. How is it different than
| if I asked a person to draw these pictures for me? I know someone
| will gleefully clobber this question with a legal answer, but
| God, let's move forward, hunh?
| wharvle wrote:
| A bunch of rich people are raiding a little bit of work, each,
| from a whole bunch of people, then walling it off so they can
| get richer.
|
| I'd not have a problem with this, personally, if their models
| were as available as the stuff they took from others. Instead
| it's take, take, take... now _wait_ a minute, _that_ pile of
| loot I stole is _mine_!
| dang wrote:
| Related ongoing thread:
|
| _NY times is asking that all LLMs trained on Times data be
| destroyed_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38816944 - Dec
| 2023 (93 comments)
|
| Also:
|
| _NY Times copyright suit wants OpenAI to delete all GPT
| instances_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38790255 - Dec
| 2023 (870 comments)
|
| _NYT sues OpenAI, Microsoft over 'millions of articles' used to
| train ChatGPT_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38784194 -
| Dec 2023 (84 comments)
|
| _The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright
| infringement_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38781941 -
| Dec 2023 (861 comments)
|
| _The Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over A.I.'s Use of
| Copyrighted Work_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38781863
| - Dec 2023 (11 comments)
| amai wrote:
| Should the NYT not sue https://commoncrawl.org/ ? OpenAI just
| used the data from commoncrawl for training.
| noitpmeder wrote:
| Is that true? Has OpenAI revealed exactly what is in their
| training set?
| karmakaze wrote:
| It shouldn't matter how the images/etc are created. The problem
| comes about when it's used as an original work by the person
| that's doing so.
|
| Imagine instead of AI/ML, we have a mechanical-turk-like service
| that produces output from descriptions. The service makes no
| claims that the generated outputs are not similar to any
| copyrighted works. The only claim the service makes is that they
| themselves claim no copyright on the output. It's then up to the
| user of the service to determine if the output is suitable for
| their intended use.
|
| Whether such a service itself is legal is a separate matter. For
| that matter, say you outsourced the artwork to a person who again
| gave you infringing work. The user of that output is still in
| violation. With AI/ML we're basically outsourcing to a 'service'
| that is known to sometimes output copyrighted work so with the
| user knowing that, are responsible for fair usage.
| wayeq wrote:
| We need to figure out how to ever so gradually move toward a
| post-copyright economy.
| karmakaze wrote:
| The real 'problem' is how do we navigate the present and near
| future where much more than physical labor is being automated?
| This is where we need sustainable solutions. The rough road on
| the way should also be smoothed out so as not to disrupt so many
| lives, but it's good to keep a perspective what and why we're
| doing these things.
| jlnthws wrote:
| We could get inspiration from the case of the record industry
| against Napster, or cabs VS Uber. Both parties are somehow
| abusing their position, but the world is moving on. Rent seeking
| is probably not an absolute source of wealth after all.
| RecycledEle wrote:
| Rent seeking should be a capital crime.
| RecycledEle wrote:
| If we get rid of unconstitutional copyrights in the US, this ges
| away.
|
| Recall that according to the US Constitution, copyright can only
| be on on "science and the useful arts."
|
| Alternately, we could restore a reasonable limit to the duration
| of copyrights, like 14 years.
| shkkmo wrote:
| It seems like this article makes a basic copyright mistake. I
| don't see any evidence that these are " reproductions" of source
| material like since no source image is linked to compare.
|
| Instead, these are derivative works. We already have a
| flourishing culter of derivitave works, such as fan art that
| exist in various shades of legal greyness.
|
| Some derivative works are fair use, some are not.
|
| The position of the Author here seems to be that generative AI
| should not be capable of creating any derivitave works, or should
| only be able to do so it it can accurately identify which are
| fair use and which aren't (which seems like an impossibly tall
| bar.) This stance seem like a giant attack on fair use that
| significantly expands the power of copyright.
|
| To me, the takeaway from this is different. This makes clear that
| there is currently a risk when using AI generated art that you
| could end up unintentionally creating and publishing a derivative
| work unintentionally and thus without evaluating if that work
| constitues fair use.
| tim333 wrote:
| They are just going to have to inform the AI in some sense of the
| current copyright situation and ask it not to infringe.
|
| It's the same for human writers. If you are writing an article
| for Wikipedia say, you should read relevant source articles and
| then rewrite in a way that isn't a copy and paste beyond a few
| words.
| noitpmeder wrote:
| Ok I'll bite. Let's assume you've informed the current models
| about copyright and asked them not to infringe...
|
| What happens when they continue to do so.
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