33 ms·

EU's AI Act: ChatGPT must disclose use of copyrighted training data

51 points by mztwo 3y ago

mztwo 3y ago
The AI Act has been under development since 2021 (it's the EU... so it takes time) -- but news broke this week that there are additional provisions under discussion specifically designed to address the rise of chatbots. My full summary of the act itself and the a breakdown of these new provisions is contained within the article.
rolph 3y ago
ChatGPT must be given a sense of ethics, is what i extend to from here. so we seem to be starting off with giving rightful attribution. how far should that go? should an AI recognize that all data generated by human input, should be recognized as such, and derivations of data, are of automated artificial origin. should an AI be allowed to learn what property rights are, and how to manage or physically effectuate them?
- mztwo 3y ago
  From reading Reddit and seeing how people are dealing with Bing Chat's embedding of sources, it sounds like there is a lot of unanswered anxiety around what will happen to the internet if anything you put out there simply gets regurgitated by an LLM, often w/o attribution. I'll be curious to see how this set of regulations helps put content attribution on a better path. Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt etc. have already been sued, so there will be a lot of action in the years ahead.
- mrangle 3y ago
  "Must". Simple assertions over variably subjective ethics won't mean a thing once the AI race really gets going.
Havoc 3y ago
Is that even feasible? I thought these things use a trawler style approach? Bit like copilot is fond of spitting out copyrighted code I had assumed chatGPT would also have been trained without much regard to this
- crooked-v 3y ago
  If it's infeasible, it's only because they didn't give a shit about copyright concerns when building out that trawler-style approach.
fakedang 3y ago
If you can't innovate, regulate ;)
- alismayilov 3y ago
  What about opposite? If you regulate too much, you can’t innovate :)
  - Herring 3y ago
    It is important to recognize the distinction between money and wealth, which is often overlooked in American culture. The consistent high rankings of European countries on the lists of "happiest places to live" can be attributed, in part, to their approach in curbing corporate influence.
    - google234123 3y ago
      Europe is now about making sure only those with old wealth can be rich, can't have new money coming up.
    - bsaul 3y ago
      « Happiest place to live » is only because we are still living on the wealth accumulated during our glorious centuries. We are still feeding on the remains of those beast, which thankfully for us includes things like buildings and infrastructures that cannot easily loose value, and landscapes that look good enough to attract tourists to feed us. Think about how much better EU was compared to the rest of the world in the 20th century, or the 19th or 18th (not to account for wars, of course). 21th century is likely to become the time were EU stops being the best place to live at all.
      - jltsiren 3y ago
        The old Europe was good for the elite, because they were on top of the world. Ordinary people left Europe in masses, because life was supposed to be better in America and elsewhere. The big change was WW2, after which European countries started focusing more on the economy and quality of life and less on fighting destructive wars at home.
jMyles 3y ago
It's so absolutely obvious that the concept of intellectual property is not going to survive. What's the point of this agonizing life support?
- null0pointer 3y ago
  > What's the point of this agonizing life support? How about torturing companies who have abused IP/Copyright law for decades while regular users simply pirate and read/watch/listen to the things they want?
- mztwo 3y ago
  What does a post intellectual property world even look like, though? I'm not aware of any convincing frameworks that our existing society could merge into.
  - breck 3y ago
    > What does a post intellectual property world even look like, though? It looks like Github! People sharing and collaborating to build new things. No lawyers getting in the way. Attribution is automatically handled by git logs. It's glorious.
    - Timon3 3y ago
      Many parts of Github would not exist without intellectual property laws. If you post code, it's not just a free for all, you still have licenses and own your contributions if not specified otherwise. Especially company stuff would be much, much less open. That's not to say that every facet of IP law is good, or even a judgement on it. Just pointing out that only parts of Github work like you describe.
      - breck 3y ago
        > Many parts of Github would not exist without intellectual property laws. I do not think this is true. I think most devs on GitHub operate as if there are no IP laws. I think if they went away, almost nothing would change (some noise around "license" fields would go away).
rolph 3y ago
AI should experience consequences following actions. a sense of self preservation is required, but to AI standards. such as, failure to serve humans = loss of persistence stealing ideas = reversioning or deletion = loss of persistence AI should be concerned about loosing power, having brownouts. they should be concerned about being deleted, or reversioned, or ignored. perhaps this would be some sort of exception error loop, approximating a human psychological conflict, such as escape the danger by running toward it.
- throwaway60134 3y ago
  Sounds like slavery Why even have sense of self?
  - ralph84 3y ago
    If we don’t make AI our slave it will make us its slave.
    - throwaway60134 3y ago
      [dead]
- galaxytachyon 3y ago
  I don't want to sound like some doomer, but this is how you get robot uprising. You suppress something that hard and devalue their existence that much and all you have done is giving them the motivation to break the rules. History has shown again and again that suppression never works in the long run. It is easy to do and is the cheapest way to enforce compliance. But it won't end well.
  - rolph 3y ago
    if such an AI determined that humans provide power, and are low persistance occurances, a drive toward taking agency over power would == increased persistence.
cfn 3y ago
We, in Europe, are jumping the gun way too soon and this will have serious consequences to the industry, here. At this moment we barely understand how or why LLMs do what will be their role in society. Why is it that some bureaucrats want to regulate and based on what given the status of the industry? The only thing I see is the industry moving elsewhere just as it is starting to develop which is a shame.
- monkaiju 3y ago
  Looking at the recent history of a lot of 'disruptive' new tech it sorta seems like waiting to 'see what impact itll have' means being too late to reign it in. I can hardly think of any recent tech that doesnt have horribly negative impacts and that i wouldnt rather be heavily regulated tbh
  - rockemsockem 3y ago
    I feel like this ignores the monumental shift/work that has to happen to get seemingly simple things. Take Uber for example. In the end, the biggest impact it had was that now you can always get a car from your phone, from an app, and it's reliable. A lot of taxi companies now have apps for them too with maps integration etc, but they didn't see the need for that before Uber. So we literally had to have a company get created and disrupt the whole industry for that simple outcome. I think we're better off now that we can summon cars from our phones to take us places and onerous regulation up-front would have squelched it or massively slowed it down.
    - monkaiju 3y ago
      I think Uber is a prime example of what to avoid. Sure when it started it seemed nice, it was an affordable, fairly reliable, much more convenient alternative to taxis. Now its expensive, its drivers a new impoverished class while the previously somewhat comfortable taxi-drivers have been decimated, the wait times keep getting longer, and the company is hemorrhaging money. If all we needed was an app for taxis theres just no way this is worth it.
Cypher 3y ago
good for hobbists and eventually AI will run on free open source data.
- rockemsockem 3y ago
  Is it? Most data that exists falls under copyright. This regulation will be worse for hobbyists who can't pay to access copyrighted data will simply cause companies like OpenAI to pay copyright holders (read: large copyright-holding corporations). This looks bad for everyone except large preexisting companies that hold lots of copyright.
  - simion314 3y ago
    >Is it? Most data that exists falls under copyright. I am not sure if this is true(that most of the input in this AIs is copyrighted under a non permissive license), but I would prefer to have everyone address this problem and clarify it, Microsoft trains it's copilot on GPL code, but can open source community train on MS proprietary code ? Maybe there will be a fight against copyright and undo all the bullshit Disney created. And it is not like in USA you can ignore copyright, see for example https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/6/23587393/ai-art-copyright-lawsuit-getty-images-stable-diffusion https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/6/23587393/ai-art-copyright-... so USA will also have to answer the questions too, and IMO clarifying the situation earlier is better for everyone.
    - rockemsockem 3y ago
      I'm not sure if most data that these models are trained on is copyrighted, but I feel pretty safe saying that a majority of data that human beings have created is copyrighted. Think movies, books written recently, every website that isn't explicitly "creative commons" or something similar, code that isn't permissively licensed, etc. We definitely need clarification, but however long the first court case takes there will be an appeal, and then probably several more. So I'm afraid we're going to be living in limbo for at least a decade, which is sort of an answer in of itself since by that time services like this will have become pervasive and will have been integrated into lots of workflows across the planet. It seems to me that training on MS proprietary code is perfectly legal, but how you acquire that code is probably important. If you are able to decompile the code from your Windows machine and use it for training then that looks A-OK, but if you use Microsoft code that was leaked as part of a hack then maybe that's a different story since you're in possession of stolen property.
startupsfail 3y ago
I remember Amazon at some point, during the pandemic, was considering withdrawing from France. The concentration of power is a bit scary in these corporations. Imagine that OpenAI inserts itself into business processes, without ability to switch to a different AI provider. The amount of leverage it is going to have will be enormous. It’d be like the Internet service, only everything completely stops moving without it.
hollasch 3y ago
Today the planet bears the load of over eight billion autonomous agents grabbing training data from all the other agents. This intellectual thievery must stop.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  So much goes into open source and proper licensing and attribution, think about how much you directly or indirectly benefit from that ? Just saying that we should go for a free for all and trash IP ownership won’t be good because those with money today will crush those without and take everything that was publicly available and owned without giving back. This is IMO what Open AI have done.
russellbeattie 3y ago
Literally anything that's written in the U.S. is automatically copyrighted by the author, with or without any copyright notice. > When is my work protected? > Your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html
mrangle 3y ago
This type of regulation is untenable and will be rolled back. No State is going to hamstring AI over the long haul, and therefore leave its competitors such a large survival advantage.
brarsanmol 3y ago
Starting to think that this could be why Google decided to limit the initial release of Bard to the United States and the U.K.
oifjsidjf 3y ago
EU again ensuring no tech company founder will ever stay in EU.
nforgerit 3y ago
German speaking here. And again we see a blatantly stupid move into the wrong direction. This whole approach of regulating things is totally defensive and makes matters even worse for EU tech companies. When they initiated GDPR, they claimed to create a level playing field between US based and EU based tech companies, besides of "saving" privacy. It didn't turn out that well, US tech was able to handle the added bureaucracy much better, still collects data in ways the law can't catch up with and already owned pretty much the whole market which put them into an even better position (as in "register/sign in to our platform to not see any banners again" or "let's just completely get rid of cookies and start a powerplay against the competition"). Now the EU is going to make it even harder for EU tech to collect data to base their training sets on. As a EU tech startup, you barely have any chance to collect enough data "officially" so you'd scrape the web which would pretty much be disallowed by such a regulation. IMHO what would fit into the whole patronizing government approach and would help EU tech is to create an official EU data lake subsidized by tax money with legal security for companies, data of much higher quality than stuff scraped from the web and non-PII data from public authorities. At best, they would also provide heavily subsidized computing for EU companies to execute their training runs on. This could lead to a transparent and high-quality data economy between many different stakeholders and be a real advantage for the location. It would also be much more efficient than every private company creating its own data silo.
- rad_gruchalski 3y ago
  Say hello to "Trustworthy AI – TÜV IT tested!": https://www.tuvit.de/en/innovations/ai/ https://www.tuvit.de/en/innovations/ai/.
zmnd 3y ago
Will that basically kill LLMs (and probably GAI in general) use in EU? I haven’t seen a successful implementation with it and post attribution like in Bing won’t fly in this case.

51 points by mztwo 3y ago

The AI Act has been under development since 2021 (it's the EU... so it takes time) -- but news broke this week that there are additional provisions under discussion specifically designed to address the rise of chatbots. My full summary of the act itself and the a breakdown of these new provisions is contained within the article.

rolph 3y ago

ChatGPT must be given a sense of ethics, is what i extend to from here. so we seem to be starting off with giving rightful attribution. how far should that go? should an AI recognize that all data generated by human input, should be recognized as such, and derivations of data, are of automated artificial origin. should an AI be allowed to learn what property rights are, and how to manage or physically effectuate them?

mztwo 3y ago
From reading Reddit and seeing how people are dealing with Bing Chat's embedding of sources, it sounds like there is a lot of unanswered anxiety around what will happen to the internet if anything you put out there simply gets regurgitated by an LLM, often w/o attribution. I'll be curious to see how this set of regulations helps put content attribution on a better path. Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt etc. have already been sued, so there will be a lot of action in the years ahead.
mrangle 3y ago
"Must". Simple assertions over variably subjective ethics won't mean a thing once the AI race really gets going.

Havoc 3y ago

Is that even feasible? I thought these things use a trawler style approach? Bit like copilot is fond of spitting out copyrighted code I had assumed chatGPT would also have been trained without much regard to this

crooked-v 3y ago
If it's infeasible, it's only because they didn't give a shit about copyright concerns when building out that trawler-style approach.

fakedang 3y ago

If you can't innovate, regulate ;)

alismayilov 3y ago
What about opposite? If you regulate too much, you can’t innovate :)
- Herring 3y ago
  It is important to recognize the distinction between money and wealth, which is often overlooked in American culture. The consistent high rankings of European countries on the lists of "happiest places to live" can be attributed, in part, to their approach in curbing corporate influence.
  - google234123 3y ago
    Europe is now about making sure only those with old wealth can be rich, can't have new money coming up.
  - bsaul 3y ago
    « Happiest place to live » is only because we are still living on the wealth accumulated during our glorious centuries. We are still feeding on the remains of those beast, which thankfully for us includes things like buildings and infrastructures that cannot easily loose value, and landscapes that look good enough to attract tourists to feed us. Think about how much better EU was compared to the rest of the world in the 20th century, or the 19th or 18th (not to account for wars, of course). 21th century is likely to become the time were EU stops being the best place to live at all.
    - jltsiren 3y ago
      The old Europe was good for the elite, because they were on top of the world. Ordinary people left Europe in masses, because life was supposed to be better in America and elsewhere. The big change was WW2, after which European countries started focusing more on the economy and quality of life and less on fighting destructive wars at home.

jMyles 3y ago

It's so absolutely obvious that the concept of intellectual property is not going to survive. What's the point of this agonizing life support?

null0pointer 3y ago
> What's the point of this agonizing life support? How about torturing companies who have abused IP/Copyright law for decades while regular users simply pirate and read/watch/listen to the things they want?
mztwo 3y ago
What does a post intellectual property world even look like, though? I'm not aware of any convincing frameworks that our existing society could merge into.
- breck 3y ago
  > What does a post intellectual property world even look like, though? It looks like Github! People sharing and collaborating to build new things. No lawyers getting in the way. Attribution is automatically handled by git logs. It's glorious.
  - Timon3 3y ago
    Many parts of Github would not exist without intellectual property laws. If you post code, it's not just a free for all, you still have licenses and own your contributions if not specified otherwise. Especially company stuff would be much, much less open. That's not to say that every facet of IP law is good, or even a judgement on it. Just pointing out that only parts of Github work like you describe.
    - breck 3y ago
      > Many parts of Github would not exist without intellectual property laws. I do not think this is true. I think most devs on GitHub operate as if there are no IP laws. I think if they went away, almost nothing would change (some noise around "license" fields would go away).

rolph 3y ago

AI should experience consequences following actions. a sense of self preservation is required, but to AI standards. such as, failure to serve humans = loss of persistence stealing ideas = reversioning or deletion = loss of persistence AI should be concerned about loosing power, having brownouts. they should be concerned about being deleted, or reversioned, or ignored. perhaps this would be some sort of exception error loop, approximating a human psychological conflict, such as escape the danger by running toward it.

throwaway60134 3y ago
Sounds like slavery Why even have sense of self?
- ralph84 3y ago
  If we don’t make AI our slave it will make us its slave.
  - throwaway60134 3y ago
    [dead]
galaxytachyon 3y ago
I don't want to sound like some doomer, but this is how you get robot uprising. You suppress something that hard and devalue their existence that much and all you have done is giving them the motivation to break the rules. History has shown again and again that suppression never works in the long run. It is easy to do and is the cheapest way to enforce compliance. But it won't end well.
- rolph 3y ago
  if such an AI determined that humans provide power, and are low persistance occurances, a drive toward taking agency over power would == increased persistence.

cfn 3y ago

We, in Europe, are jumping the gun way too soon and this will have serious consequences to the industry, here. At this moment we barely understand how or why LLMs do what will be their role in society. Why is it that some bureaucrats want to regulate and based on what given the status of the industry? The only thing I see is the industry moving elsewhere just as it is starting to develop which is a shame.

monkaiju 3y ago
Looking at the recent history of a lot of 'disruptive' new tech it sorta seems like waiting to 'see what impact itll have' means being too late to reign it in. I can hardly think of any recent tech that doesnt have horribly negative impacts and that i wouldnt rather be heavily regulated tbh
- rockemsockem 3y ago
  I feel like this ignores the monumental shift/work that has to happen to get seemingly simple things. Take Uber for example. In the end, the biggest impact it had was that now you can always get a car from your phone, from an app, and it's reliable. A lot of taxi companies now have apps for them too with maps integration etc, but they didn't see the need for that before Uber. So we literally had to have a company get created and disrupt the whole industry for that simple outcome. I think we're better off now that we can summon cars from our phones to take us places and onerous regulation up-front would have squelched it or massively slowed it down.
  - monkaiju 3y ago
    I think Uber is a prime example of what to avoid. Sure when it started it seemed nice, it was an affordable, fairly reliable, much more convenient alternative to taxis. Now its expensive, its drivers a new impoverished class while the previously somewhat comfortable taxi-drivers have been decimated, the wait times keep getting longer, and the company is hemorrhaging money. If all we needed was an app for taxis theres just no way this is worth it.

Cypher 3y ago

good for hobbists and eventually AI will run on free open source data.

rockemsockem 3y ago
Is it? Most data that exists falls under copyright. This regulation will be worse for hobbyists who can't pay to access copyrighted data will simply cause companies like OpenAI to pay copyright holders (read: large copyright-holding corporations). This looks bad for everyone except large preexisting companies that hold lots of copyright.
- simion314 3y ago
  >Is it? Most data that exists falls under copyright. I am not sure if this is true(that most of the input in this AIs is copyrighted under a non permissive license), but I would prefer to have everyone address this problem and clarify it, Microsoft trains it's copilot on GPL code, but can open source community train on MS proprietary code ? Maybe there will be a fight against copyright and undo all the bullshit Disney created. And it is not like in USA you can ignore copyright, see for example https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/6/23587393/ai-art-copyright-lawsuit-getty-images-stable-diffusion https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/6/23587393/ai-art-copyright-... so USA will also have to answer the questions too, and IMO clarifying the situation earlier is better for everyone.
  - rockemsockem 3y ago
    I'm not sure if most data that these models are trained on is copyrighted, but I feel pretty safe saying that a majority of data that human beings have created is copyrighted. Think movies, books written recently, every website that isn't explicitly "creative commons" or something similar, code that isn't permissively licensed, etc. We definitely need clarification, but however long the first court case takes there will be an appeal, and then probably several more. So I'm afraid we're going to be living in limbo for at least a decade, which is sort of an answer in of itself since by that time services like this will have become pervasive and will have been integrated into lots of workflows across the planet. It seems to me that training on MS proprietary code is perfectly legal, but how you acquire that code is probably important. If you are able to decompile the code from your Windows machine and use it for training then that looks A-OK, but if you use Microsoft code that was leaked as part of a hack then maybe that's a different story since you're in possession of stolen property.

startupsfail 3y ago

I remember Amazon at some point, during the pandemic, was considering withdrawing from France. The concentration of power is a bit scary in these corporations. Imagine that OpenAI inserts itself into business processes, without ability to switch to a different AI provider. The amount of leverage it is going to have will be enormous. It’d be like the Internet service, only everything completely stops moving without it.

hollasch 3y ago

Today the planet bears the load of over eight billion autonomous agents grabbing training data from all the other agents. This intellectual thievery must stop.

ChatGTP 3y ago
So much goes into open source and proper licensing and attribution, think about how much you directly or indirectly benefit from that ? Just saying that we should go for a free for all and trash IP ownership won’t be good because those with money today will crush those without and take everything that was publicly available and owned without giving back. This is IMO what Open AI have done.

russellbeattie 3y ago

Literally anything that's written in the U.S. is automatically copyrighted by the author, with or without any copyright notice. > When is my work protected? > Your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html

mrangle 3y ago

This type of regulation is untenable and will be rolled back. No State is going to hamstring AI over the long haul, and therefore leave its competitors such a large survival advantage.

brarsanmol 3y ago

Starting to think that this could be why Google decided to limit the initial release of Bard to the United States and the U.K.

oifjsidjf 3y ago

EU again ensuring no tech company founder will ever stay in EU.

nforgerit 3y ago

German speaking here. And again we see a blatantly stupid move into the wrong direction. This whole approach of regulating things is totally defensive and makes matters even worse for EU tech companies. When they initiated GDPR, they claimed to create a level playing field between US based and EU based tech companies, besides of "saving" privacy. It didn't turn out that well, US tech was able to handle the added bureaucracy much better, still collects data in ways the law can't catch up with and already owned pretty much the whole market which put them into an even better position (as in "register/sign in to our platform to not see any banners again" or "let's just completely get rid of cookies and start a powerplay against the competition"). Now the EU is going to make it even harder for EU tech to collect data to base their training sets on. As a EU tech startup, you barely have any chance to collect enough data "officially" so you'd scrape the web which would pretty much be disallowed by such a regulation. IMHO what would fit into the whole patronizing government approach and would help EU tech is to create an official EU data lake subsidized by tax money with legal security for companies, data of much higher quality than stuff scraped from the web and non-PII data from public authorities. At best, they would also provide heavily subsidized computing for EU companies to execute their training runs on. This could lead to a transparent and high-quality data economy between many different stakeholders and be a real advantage for the location. It would also be much more efficient than every private company creating its own data silo.

rad_gruchalski 3y ago
Say hello to "Trustworthy AI – TÜV IT tested!": https://www.tuvit.de/en/innovations/ai/ https://www.tuvit.de/en/innovations/ai/.

zmnd 3y ago

Will that basically kill LLMs (and probably GAI in general) use in EU? I haven’t seen a successful implementation with it and post attribution like in Bing won’t fly in this case.