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I believe we first need to answer the question of whether the copyright of the AI model’s source text or images affects the output. My opinion — and note I’m a

I believe we first need to answer the question of whether the copyright of the AI model’s source text or images affects the output. My opinion — and note I’m a software engineer, not a lawyer — is that an AI, being a statistical model and not generally intelligent, should not be allowed to disregard the copyright of its source material. This would, I think, require the AI’s creator to secure a license for all of its sources that allows this sort of transformation and presentation. And further, a user of the AI would themselves require a license to use the output. The alternative seems to be “anything goes”.

idle_zealot 3y ago
Is intelligence really a factor here? Say I use the same training set as one of these LLMs, copyright protected text and all, and use it to derive a compression algorithm that uses very little space to store tokens and token sequences that are common in that huge collection of text. The resulting compression scheme includes some sort of statistical artifact derived from that copyrighted text. Is that allowed? And if so why is an LLM different?
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  LLMs are generative though not just compressive
  - orbital-decay 3y ago
    Generation, prediction, and compression are all the same - the only different thing is the intent.
- cj 3y ago
  Very good question indeed. A lot of these questions are somewhat ethical/moral in nature. E.g. is it okay to take someone else's creative work, process it through some algorithm, to create a service like ChatGPT? Or a compression algorithm? I don't know. It's awesome to see the Copyright office request input from both sides of the argument.
  - chii 3y ago
    > is it okay to take someone else's creative work, process it through some algorithm, to create a service like ChatGPT? Or a compression algorithm? and the test i use is: if they currently allow a human to perform this same task, then it is allowed to be done using an AI model.
  - livrem 3y ago
    It worries me that so much focus is on two sides that may not have the end-users' best interest much in mind. The companies building the models may have an incentive to regulate models to keep smaller players or open source projects away. Artists mostly seem totally anti any solutions as even laws that allow models trained on purely public domain art would be bad for them. If laws around this are shaped primarily by the wishes of those two groups I am not sure things will end up well at all for those of us that want the tools to keep improving and remain reasonably free (including applications you can install locally and run on your own GPU).
stale2002 3y ago
> is that an AI, being a statistical model and not generally intelligent, should not be allowed to disregard the copyright of its source material None of what you are saying has anything to do with copyright. The tool Photoshop isn't generally intelligent either. And yet, yes it can be used to create art using other people's stuff. And it could be done legally if the results are transformative.
- jtr1 3y ago
  Photoshop doesn’t install with a massive directory of other people’s copyrighted works to draw snippets from.
  - tick_tock_tick 3y ago
    Yes it does...
    - devsda 3y ago
      If it does, then Adobe would have commissioned or acquired the license. In either case they would have _paid_ someone to get those images. It is very unlikely Adobe would be shipping their software with copyrighted material without paying for them first.
gnopgnip 3y ago
Is there any precedent where copyright was focused on the input rather than the final published work?
- jj999 3y ago
  Compilers
  - lstodd 3y ago
    Object code is a derivative work I think. So no. Compilers do not count.
    - kevinmchugh 3y ago
      The US had to update copyright law to explicitly protect binaries
      - freejazz 3y ago
        That just means some judges got it wrong and congress really wanted to make sure others didn't. I'm not sure what proposition that stands for here, except that sometimes new things are hard to get right at first.
- kevinmchugh 3y ago
  Remixes, generally?
Natsu 3y ago
My problem with this is that artists learn by studying other artists, cutting that off because it's AI rather than focusing on whether the resulting work is derivative, seems more of a problem to me. It seems to me that an AI can be used for either original work or derivatives, proving that you can get derivatives out of it has always struck me as no different than commissioning a copy of someone's work from a human artist and being shocked that you got what you asked for.
- skydhash 3y ago
  You can ask someone to produce a pin-up version of Minnie Mouse, but good luck using it in any commercial activities. Most LLMs are just profiteering from people’s labor without their consent. And there’s nothing new being produced. It’s always a statistical output of previous works.
  - chii 3y ago
    > a pin-up version of Minnie Mouse that's not because of copyright, but because of trademark. If you make the minnie mouse sufficiently different that it cannot be mistaken for not being Minnie to the average person, and don't call it minnie mouse (to get rid of trademark), disney will have a much harder time suing you. Of course, they will still try, and steam roll you with just money instead.
  - JamesBarney 3y ago
    > And there’s nothing new being produced. It’s always a statistical output of previous works. I don't think you can define those terms such that what you say is true of AI but not true of people.
  - Natsu 3y ago
    I think you're misunderstanding that, I don't expect it in either case, I'm saying you have to judge the output not the input. So even if it trained on a ton of copyrighted artwork, if the output isn't a ripoff of something in the training data, I don't think there should be any copyright issues.
  - 3y ago
judge2020 3y ago
> This would, I think, require the AI’s creator to secure a license for all of its sources that allows this sort of transformation and presentation That is a fairly illogical leap. From your text alone, “should not be allowed to disregard the copyright of its source material” would be: “the AI’s maintainer should have a fairly reliable (but not infallible) system to output how likely it generated something that is a direct derivative work of something in its dataset”. As a human you don’t need to attribute/license every piece of art you’ve seen of clouds if you draw a cloud. So if an AI draws a cloud that is actually derivative of the millions of clouds it has seen, then it doesn’t need any permission from the millions of creators to draw one either.
Nevermark 3y ago
I don’t think it makes sense for both model builders and the model’s users to separately obtain licenses for the same works used in the training set. A model trained on several copyrighted data sources cannot somehow be used in a way depending on a subset of those sources. So all parameters of usage and compensation should be settled by contract between the model builder and copyrighted data supplier, before the copyrighted material is used. Or to put it simply: using copyrighted material to create a model would NOT be considered fair use. That’s it. That’s the standard. No complicated new laws required. Model builders obtain permission to use copyrighted material from copyright holders based on any terms both agree to. Terms might involve model usage limits, term limits, one time compensation, per use compensation, data source credits, or anything else either party wants. The likely result will be some standard sets of terms becoming popular and well known. But nobody has to agree to anything they don’t want to.
- Retric 3y ago
  Yes, someone using a model can’t know if the generated text/image/sound is a nearly identical copy of the original material they don’t recognize. If use of the output of these systems comes at significant legal risk then then such systems become nearly useless.
  - chii 3y ago
    > if the generated text/image/sound is a nearly identical copy of the original material they don’t recognize how does the industry today deal with artists that "copy" off some other works? This isn't a problem with AI at all - just that AI provides a tool to generate such works faster.
    - skydhash 3y ago
      Someones comes to me to ask for a drawing of Batman or to write an erotic story around Supergirl. I can do it, but I cannot claim ownership over the characters. And I think I will quickly get a letter from DC or Marvel if I try to do this at scale.
meowkit 3y ago
My opinion as a SWE who is dating a lawyer (joke, not a serious qualification but it does provide some insight): Generative models traverse and interpolate high dimensional state spaces. These state spaces are created from input data. I would argue people do the exact same thing - the first main difference is we can use novel inputs (e.g. we can use images or words to develop our music/temporal state spaces and vice versa). People also are recursive and self referential in a way that doesn't collapse. Until we solve the interpretability problem (e.g. can you decode the feature space of a neural network into something we can comprehend) there is no good solution. Either traditional copyright wins and we get even more draconian policies (think Disney and their desire to never put anything in the public domain), or we have a free for all (which I don't think is bad for creative works, but certainly for more practical things like stock photos or nonfiction).
- cj 3y ago
  I can appreciate how this line of thinking might be attractive. But IMO the human<>machine comparison doesn't lend itself much credence. We shouldn't assume that just because a human is allowed to do something, a machine is automatically allowed to do the same thing, too. I think some care should be taken when considering if we allow machines to have the same privileges as humans.
  - raincole 3y ago
    > We shouldn't assume that just because a human is allowed to do something, a machine is automatically allowed to do the same thing, too. Generally speaking, even one machine can do something, it doesn't automatically mean another machine is allowed to do that. For example you can drive car with a normal driving license, but not a truck. In some states you can own a pistol but no automatic rifle.
    - hexage1814 3y ago
      It also depends on where this happening. For instance, you don't need a license to drive a car inside your own private propriety. You need a license to drive it on public streets because society needs some assurance that you know what you are doing. So in many cases the laws and restrictions also happen in relation to a given scenario.
rickmode 3y ago
Generic reply to siblings here… I get the intelligence argument. My _main_ point is that there’s a non-trivial question to answer here. I’m not qualified to answer (though I’ve offered up my non-expert opinion). It certainly seems to quickly veer in to philosophy!
mensetmanusman 3y ago
Because the cat is out of the bag so to speak, any attempt to force ai companies to generate their own content to train on means we are signing up for a future where only multi billion dollar companies are in control.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  If they were truly forced to do this, even they would find it difficult.
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    And everyone else would find it impossible. Hence the headlong rush to implement regulatory capture.
paulusthe 3y ago
I agree completely. AI model trainers should have to pay the people who provide their training materials, and there should be a default assumption of opting out until someone or their company explicitly opts in. Unfortunately the Peter thiels and all those bizarrely out of touch silicon valley assholes have already effectively scraped the Internet because ethics don't matter if you're special like them, so to a degree regulations are way behind the ball. That said it's still worth doing, and I'd love to see it done retroactively as well. It's not as if "I forgot that I had a public Myspace 25 years ago" is an implicit user opt-in for some startup to save your data - however anonymized they claim it is (lol!) - and train its AI on it.
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paxys 3y ago
> is that an AI, being a statistical model and not generally intelligent, should not be allowed to disregard the copyright of its source material But then you are just shifting the problem forward by an inch. What happens when tomorrow someone declares that their model is generally intelligent and is therefore allowed to disregard copyright when training just like a person can?
- jasonzemos 3y ago
  This point is of the utmost importance from a public policymaking perspective. Laws such as these are easy to craft now and difficult to change later. I feel like we are previewing an unfolding disaster here. The future will clearly yield a class of "beings" striving for some degree of indistinguishability from or coexistence with humans. Proposals that discriminate --literally discriminate -- without respect for the principles of universality and equal treatment under law are creating and condemning a marginalized group before it even reaches maturity. This is an old and tired theme repeated through history. Let's foresee this and not get it wrong.
- freejazz 3y ago
  Is it your experience that people's facial declarations cary the day in legal disputes? It's not mine. Rather, it seems like the whole thing is designed to provide scrutiny against bare facial declarations that something is true or false. I see this on HN all the time "someone just has to claim" "someone just has to say". Yeah... that's not how it works. People can say whatever they want, that doesn't mean it satisfied their burden of proof. Self serving testimony is the lowest form of evidence imaginable.
  - orbital-decay 3y ago
    Intelligence lacks any legal definition, for starters. And if a law like that will provide an arbitrary line in the sand, it will just disincentivize AI research in general.
    - freejazz 3y ago
8note 3y ago
Why is being a statistical model relevant? The simplest statistical model is an average. Why would the average pixel rgba of a bunch of images invoke the copyright of those images?
- chii 3y ago
  The crux of the AI copyright argument sits in economics. Those currently producing content want future content generated from AI to benefit them financially, as long as a thin sliver of their own content was used in the training. This is like asking all the student to pay their teachers a (small) percentage of their future economic output.
zmmmmm 3y ago
> The alternative seems to be “anything goes”. Seems like a huge false dichotomy. You really can't imagine anything in between total shutdown of AI training on public data sources and no rules at all? I think we should try a bit harder for a middle ground.
fluidcruft 3y ago
I personally have a really hard time finding any meaningful difference or distinction between "AI" and "lossy compression". Copyright and "lossy compression" are pretty easy to reason about. Model "building" is "compression". Model "use" is "decompression". Everything about these AI models seems to be about the "lossy" part, but "lossy" is just an adjective to the main show. It's very difficult to not conclude that copyright of a trained model should be treated identically to the copyright of a zip file.
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  When you perform lossy compression, you feed it one file at a time, not every file in existence.
  - fluidcruft 3y ago
    If you concatenate images into a stream container (say as tar) and then compress the stream, the compression coding will (generally) cross over the individual images. True, that's generally not lossy compression. But concatenating images is also how you create video. Lossy video compression does typically cross over frames. So I don't actually see a difference. If you want to think about mkv or mp4 instead of zip it's still the same concept. There's nothing stopping you from putting every available image into a video and figuring out how to compress it lossily. Maybe there's some bounds for how much information was lost? Obviously piping everything into /dev/null destroys the input. And piping /dev/random from a true random source creates information. So somewhere between that and lossless compression there's the nebulous "plagarism" threshold. And then there's another threshold that is copyright infringement that's considered "fair use". But the general structure of the "AI" this is about are fundamentally storage and retrieval.
    - freejazz 3y ago
      What does any of this have to do with creating a new expression?
      - 3y ago
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
Why would any non-lunatic want to live in a world where someone can't import an image into software? If only some software is disallowed, then why permit Excel but prohibit Stable Diffusion? Can someone even look at a SD-generated image, and claim with certainty that their own art was used to train it? Any more than claiming that another artist was inspired by it, looking at their output? I'm fine with anything goes. The alternative seems to be copyright maximalist clownworld.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
It shows you are not a lawyer. You misunderstand how copyright works. Creating copies or derivative works and distributing those is all that matters under copyright. This is not "disregarding" copyright (which is not an actual thing) but something that is either fair use or may require some kind of permission from the creators of the original by those distributing some kind of derived work or copy. That's why it's called copyright. Copyright merely restricts the distribution of original works or their derivatives. In case of an infringement, copyright holders can insist you stop distribution and/or compensate them for that. If I sell you a paint brush, I'm not liable for you putting a red nose on the mona lisa and trying to sell it off as an original work. Doing that on the original would be an act of vandalism (because you don't own it) and doing that on a replica that you got from somewhere infringes on the rights of those that created the replica. Which is a derived work or copy in itself of course and the distribution of that is regulated by copyright. Distribution of such a replica is of course fine because Da Vinci has been dead for a very long time and his work would no longer be protected under copyright. Distributing your red nosed mona lisa would therefore be fine too. Either way, the paint brush seller is no party in this case this is between you, Da Vinci, his descendants, and the replica creators. Now your assertions as to what AIs are of aren't, are simply not relevant. You assert it's a statistics algorithms thingy. That sounds like a tool to me. Yet another paint brush. Using a paint brush is not infringing on anyone's rights. For that you have to distribute the results of your work. The nature of the tool does not matter. How you use the tool does not matter either. You merely create (potentially) derivative works with the tool and what you do with those matters. Especially when you distribute them to others. One of those derivative works is of course the AI model itself. Creating one is fine. Copyright gets potentially infringed when you distribute one. Now we get to the core of the matter. Can you with a straight face say the AI model resembles the original and is a derivative work. It doesn't actually look like or resemble the original in any shape or form. Even proving the AI model is derived from the original is tricky. Copyright is not about protecting vague ideas or notions but the concrete shape or form of things. And it's only an infringement if you distribute a derived work or a copy of a thing to others. So, merely creating an AI model is not distributing anything to anyone. You are merely using tools to create something for yourself. An AI model in this case. Distributing a verbatim copy of a book is an infringement. Citing the book in your own work is fair use (up to a point). Paraphrasing elements from the book, acknowledging it exists, taking inspiration of it, or reading it aren't copyright infringements. The legal problem with AI models is that their concrete shape or form doesn't resemble the original inputs in any shape or form. Besides, companies like OpenAI don't actually distribute their AI models. They are huge; it's not very practical. They merely exploit those models to generate outputs to inputs from their users and customers. Are those outputs derivative works? Maybe, but that's where it gets tricky. They clearly aren't in the classical sense. Not even close. But if you somehow could conclude that they are, who is distributing that derivative work? Secondly, it the AI model is a tool, who actually creates those outputs and are those outputs protected under copyright? Who actually holds those rights? And how would you tell apart such an output from a human created one? It's questions like this that make all this extremely murky from a legal point of view. IMHO without dramatic changes to copyright law or the way it has been commonly interpreted legally, it's just very poorly suited to do anything about stopping AI companies from doing what they are doing. You'd have to bend the conventional interpretation quite a bit for that. No doubt, there will be court cases where people will try to do that. But it will take many years before the dust settles on that. And I wouldn't get my hopes up on some unexpected/dramatic outcome.
harshreality 3y ago
This is more of a problem for images, where similar output to inputs is likely, than for LLMs, where no matter what you prompt it with I doubt you can get it to regurgitate any significant parts of Harry Potter well enough to be a classical copyright violation of any of the novels. Maybe you could generate a copyright violation of character traits. The output space of images (MB for larger images) tends to be larger than books (a few hundred KB of text for a long novel), but the perceptual output space of books is much larger. Any determination that licensing is required for AI generation, or use of AI-generated works, is unacceptable until Congress or courts put some reasonable objective tests in place to determine what is and isn't a copyright violation for various types of works of various lengths. Not the ambiguous 4-factor test that is basically whatever the judge feels like. It will be a complete mess otherwise. They can't just define a new AI policy for copyright with a few types of works in mind; it has to work for all works. You could look at this mathematically from a complexity perspective and try to define a similarity function that's true when a second work is close enough to a first work to be a derived work (assuming the first one had been seen by the creator of the second). Unfortunately that won't work because nobody can define such a function to everyone's satisfaction, and the courts wouldn't accept any informal suggestion of a definition when it didn't come from Congress. Specifically, you'd get into trouble with consistency in the function determining derived works depending on length of the work: short works, like a haiku, are much more sensitive to copyright violation in some ways... a mere 17 syllables is a complete reproduction and therefore a copyright violation, yet a single word isn't; for a novel, reproducing 1/17 of the content is almost certainly a copyright violation, but reproducing 17 syllables probably isn't. Different stakeholders and creative re-mixers would want different things from the function. It's untenable.
mjan22640 3y ago
The human brain is no different. It generates content from the things it learned.
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  Repost #4 I believe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37305580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37305580 "I'll keep saying it every time this comes up. I LOVE being told by techbros that a human painstaking studying one thing at a time, and not memorizing verbatin but rather taking away the core concept, is exactly the same type of "learning" that a model does when it takes in millions of things at once and can spit out copyrighted code verbatim."
JamesBarney 3y ago
My opinion is we should treat AI like photoshop/word/windows. If you use windows to copy a file and distribute it, Microsoft isn't liable you are. If you use word to type up a book and sell it, you're responsible. Same with a statistical model, if you general a copyrighted work and distribute it you are responsible. But the tool (GPT-4) maker isn't responsible just like Adobe isn't responsible for copyright infringement. The copyrighted text/image isn't generated until you ask it to. Your prompt is what reproduces the material.
lewhoo 3y ago
I think you are right. People argue if LLM's store or maybe generalize. I propose an experiment for anyone interested. Try and do this prompt multiple times and change the appropriate verse numbers: > Provide quote from King James' Bible Genesis :25-31 or > Provide quote from King James' Bible Genesis :1-25 or whatever you fancy. I didn't go through the whole Bible, but I got pretty much a verbatim chapter. I argue that you can't do this with copyrighted books only because of guardrails and not chatgpt's lack of capability so the information is there, and it's verbatim. Plus other books don't have such nifty indexing.
rmbyrro 3y ago
AI is taking work away from lawyers, and instantly creating more work for lawyers. Ain't that interesting to reflect upon? I speculate there is a hidden force in the universe, something physicists are yet to identify, which mandates: "they shall always have something to do".
gaganyaan 3y ago
I hope your opinion isn't shared by lawmakers. Copyright is a relic of the past, and it needs to be put out of its misery. Trying to (mis)apply copyright here would just lobotomize the US. Existing companies would just technically operate out of a saner jurisdiction, and we'd be handing other countries a golden opportunity to leapfrog the US.
scotty79 3y ago
"anything goes" is the best and most natural solution. Just don't let people copyright the output if they don't have full copyright on all of the inputs. This should finally get rid of the cancer that is copyright in a generation or two.

idle_zealot 3y ago

Is intelligence really a factor here? Say I use the same training set as one of these LLMs, copyright protected text and all, and use it to derive a compression algorithm that uses very little space to store tokens and token sequences that are common in that huge collection of text. The resulting compression scheme includes some sort of statistical artifact derived from that copyrighted text. Is that allowed? And if so why is an LLM different?

quickthrower2 3y ago
LLMs are generative though not just compressive
- orbital-decay 3y ago
  Generation, prediction, and compression are all the same - the only different thing is the intent.
cj 3y ago
Very good question indeed. A lot of these questions are somewhat ethical/moral in nature. E.g. is it okay to take someone else's creative work, process it through some algorithm, to create a service like ChatGPT? Or a compression algorithm? I don't know. It's awesome to see the Copyright office request input from both sides of the argument.
- chii 3y ago
  > is it okay to take someone else's creative work, process it through some algorithm, to create a service like ChatGPT? Or a compression algorithm? and the test i use is: if they currently allow a human to perform this same task, then it is allowed to be done using an AI model.
- livrem 3y ago
  It worries me that so much focus is on two sides that may not have the end-users' best interest much in mind. The companies building the models may have an incentive to regulate models to keep smaller players or open source projects away. Artists mostly seem totally anti any solutions as even laws that allow models trained on purely public domain art would be bad for them. If laws around this are shaped primarily by the wishes of those two groups I am not sure things will end up well at all for those of us that want the tools to keep improving and remain reasonably free (including applications you can install locally and run on your own GPU).

stale2002 3y ago

> is that an AI, being a statistical model and not generally intelligent, should not be allowed to disregard the copyright of its source material None of what you are saying has anything to do with copyright. The tool Photoshop isn't generally intelligent either. And yet, yes it can be used to create art using other people's stuff. And it could be done legally if the results are transformative.

jtr1 3y ago
Photoshop doesn’t install with a massive directory of other people’s copyrighted works to draw snippets from.
- tick_tock_tick 3y ago
  Yes it does...
  - devsda 3y ago
    If it does, then Adobe would have commissioned or acquired the license. In either case they would have _paid_ someone to get those images. It is very unlikely Adobe would be shipping their software with copyrighted material without paying for them first.

gnopgnip 3y ago

Is there any precedent where copyright was focused on the input rather than the final published work?

jj999 3y ago
Compilers
- lstodd 3y ago
  Object code is a derivative work I think. So no. Compilers do not count.
  - kevinmchugh 3y ago
    The US had to update copyright law to explicitly protect binaries
    - freejazz 3y ago
      That just means some judges got it wrong and congress really wanted to make sure others didn't. I'm not sure what proposition that stands for here, except that sometimes new things are hard to get right at first.
kevinmchugh 3y ago
Remixes, generally?

Natsu 3y ago

My problem with this is that artists learn by studying other artists, cutting that off because it's AI rather than focusing on whether the resulting work is derivative, seems more of a problem to me. It seems to me that an AI can be used for either original work or derivatives, proving that you can get derivatives out of it has always struck me as no different than commissioning a copy of someone's work from a human artist and being shocked that you got what you asked for.

skydhash 3y ago
You can ask someone to produce a pin-up version of Minnie Mouse, but good luck using it in any commercial activities. Most LLMs are just profiteering from people’s labor without their consent. And there’s nothing new being produced. It’s always a statistical output of previous works.
- chii 3y ago
  > a pin-up version of Minnie Mouse that's not because of copyright, but because of trademark. If you make the minnie mouse sufficiently different that it cannot be mistaken for not being Minnie to the average person, and don't call it minnie mouse (to get rid of trademark), disney will have a much harder time suing you. Of course, they will still try, and steam roll you with just money instead.
- JamesBarney 3y ago
  > And there’s nothing new being produced. It’s always a statistical output of previous works. I don't think you can define those terms such that what you say is true of AI but not true of people.
- Natsu 3y ago
  I think you're misunderstanding that, I don't expect it in either case, I'm saying you have to judge the output not the input. So even if it trained on a ton of copyrighted artwork, if the output isn't a ripoff of something in the training data, I don't think there should be any copyright issues.
- 3y ago

judge2020 3y ago

> This would, I think, require the AI’s creator to secure a license for all of its sources that allows this sort of transformation and presentation That is a fairly illogical leap. From your text alone, “should not be allowed to disregard the copyright of its source material” would be: “the AI’s maintainer should have a fairly reliable (but not infallible) system to output how likely it generated something that is a direct derivative work of something in its dataset”. As a human you don’t need to attribute/license every piece of art you’ve seen of clouds if you draw a cloud. So if an AI draws a cloud that is actually derivative of the millions of clouds it has seen, then it doesn’t need any permission from the millions of creators to draw one either.

Nevermark 3y ago

I don’t think it makes sense for both model builders and the model’s users to separately obtain licenses for the same works used in the training set. A model trained on several copyrighted data sources cannot somehow be used in a way depending on a subset of those sources. So all parameters of usage and compensation should be settled by contract between the model builder and copyrighted data supplier, before the copyrighted material is used. Or to put it simply: using copyrighted material to create a model would NOT be considered fair use. That’s it. That’s the standard. No complicated new laws required. Model builders obtain permission to use copyrighted material from copyright holders based on any terms both agree to. Terms might involve model usage limits, term limits, one time compensation, per use compensation, data source credits, or anything else either party wants. The likely result will be some standard sets of terms becoming popular and well known. But nobody has to agree to anything they don’t want to.

Retric 3y ago
Yes, someone using a model can’t know if the generated text/image/sound is a nearly identical copy of the original material they don’t recognize. If use of the output of these systems comes at significant legal risk then then such systems become nearly useless.
- chii 3y ago
  > if the generated text/image/sound is a nearly identical copy of the original material they don’t recognize how does the industry today deal with artists that "copy" off some other works? This isn't a problem with AI at all - just that AI provides a tool to generate such works faster.
  - skydhash 3y ago
    Someones comes to me to ask for a drawing of Batman or to write an erotic story around Supergirl. I can do it, but I cannot claim ownership over the characters. And I think I will quickly get a letter from DC or Marvel if I try to do this at scale.

meowkit 3y ago

My opinion as a SWE who is dating a lawyer (joke, not a serious qualification but it does provide some insight): Generative models traverse and interpolate high dimensional state spaces. These state spaces are created from input data. I would argue people do the exact same thing - the first main difference is we can use novel inputs (e.g. we can use images or words to develop our music/temporal state spaces and vice versa). People also are recursive and self referential in a way that doesn't collapse. Until we solve the interpretability problem (e.g. can you decode the feature space of a neural network into something we can comprehend) there is no good solution. Either traditional copyright wins and we get even more draconian policies (think Disney and their desire to never put anything in the public domain), or we have a free for all (which I don't think is bad for creative works, but certainly for more practical things like stock photos or nonfiction).

cj 3y ago
I can appreciate how this line of thinking might be attractive. But IMO the human<>machine comparison doesn't lend itself much credence. We shouldn't assume that just because a human is allowed to do something, a machine is automatically allowed to do the same thing, too. I think some care should be taken when considering if we allow machines to have the same privileges as humans.
- raincole 3y ago
  > We shouldn't assume that just because a human is allowed to do something, a machine is automatically allowed to do the same thing, too. Generally speaking, even one machine can do something, it doesn't automatically mean another machine is allowed to do that. For example you can drive car with a normal driving license, but not a truck. In some states you can own a pistol but no automatic rifle.
  - hexage1814 3y ago
    It also depends on where this happening. For instance, you don't need a license to drive a car inside your own private propriety. You need a license to drive it on public streets because society needs some assurance that you know what you are doing. So in many cases the laws and restrictions also happen in relation to a given scenario.

rickmode 3y ago

Generic reply to siblings here… I get the intelligence argument. My _main_ point is that there’s a non-trivial question to answer here. I’m not qualified to answer (though I’ve offered up my non-expert opinion). It certainly seems to quickly veer in to philosophy!

mensetmanusman 3y ago

Because the cat is out of the bag so to speak, any attempt to force ai companies to generate their own content to train on means we are signing up for a future where only multi billion dollar companies are in control.

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
If they were truly forced to do this, even they would find it difficult.
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  And everyone else would find it impossible. Hence the headlong rush to implement regulatory capture.

paulusthe 3y ago

I agree completely. AI model trainers should have to pay the people who provide their training materials, and there should be a default assumption of opting out until someone or their company explicitly opts in. Unfortunately the Peter thiels and all those bizarrely out of touch silicon valley assholes have already effectively scraped the Internet because ethics don't matter if you're special like them, so to a degree regulations are way behind the ball. That said it's still worth doing, and I'd love to see it done retroactively as well. It's not as if "I forgot that I had a public Myspace 25 years ago" is an implicit user opt-in for some startup to save your data - however anonymized they claim it is (lol!) - and train its AI on it.

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paxys 3y ago

> is that an AI, being a statistical model and not generally intelligent, should not be allowed to disregard the copyright of its source material But then you are just shifting the problem forward by an inch. What happens when tomorrow someone declares that their model is generally intelligent and is therefore allowed to disregard copyright when training just like a person can?

jasonzemos 3y ago
This point is of the utmost importance from a public policymaking perspective. Laws such as these are easy to craft now and difficult to change later. I feel like we are previewing an unfolding disaster here. The future will clearly yield a class of "beings" striving for some degree of indistinguishability from or coexistence with humans. Proposals that discriminate --literally discriminate -- without respect for the principles of universality and equal treatment under law are creating and condemning a marginalized group before it even reaches maturity. This is an old and tired theme repeated through history. Let's foresee this and not get it wrong.
freejazz 3y ago
Is it your experience that people's facial declarations cary the day in legal disputes? It's not mine. Rather, it seems like the whole thing is designed to provide scrutiny against bare facial declarations that something is true or false. I see this on HN all the time "someone just has to claim" "someone just has to say". Yeah... that's not how it works. People can say whatever they want, that doesn't mean it satisfied their burden of proof. Self serving testimony is the lowest form of evidence imaginable.
- orbital-decay 3y ago
  Intelligence lacks any legal definition, for starters. And if a law like that will provide an arbitrary line in the sand, it will just disincentivize AI research in general.
  - freejazz 3y ago

8note 3y ago

Why is being a statistical model relevant? The simplest statistical model is an average. Why would the average pixel rgba of a bunch of images invoke the copyright of those images?

chii 3y ago
The crux of the AI copyright argument sits in economics. Those currently producing content want future content generated from AI to benefit them financially, as long as a thin sliver of their own content was used in the training. This is like asking all the student to pay their teachers a (small) percentage of their future economic output.

zmmmmm 3y ago

> The alternative seems to be “anything goes”. Seems like a huge false dichotomy. You really can't imagine anything in between total shutdown of AI training on public data sources and no rules at all? I think we should try a bit harder for a middle ground.

fluidcruft 3y ago

I personally have a really hard time finding any meaningful difference or distinction between "AI" and "lossy compression". Copyright and "lossy compression" are pretty easy to reason about. Model "building" is "compression". Model "use" is "decompression". Everything about these AI models seems to be about the "lossy" part, but "lossy" is just an adjective to the main show. It's very difficult to not conclude that copyright of a trained model should be treated identically to the copyright of a zip file.

CamperBob2 3y ago
When you perform lossy compression, you feed it one file at a time, not every file in existence.
- fluidcruft 3y ago
  If you concatenate images into a stream container (say as tar) and then compress the stream, the compression coding will (generally) cross over the individual images. True, that's generally not lossy compression. But concatenating images is also how you create video. Lossy video compression does typically cross over frames. So I don't actually see a difference. If you want to think about mkv or mp4 instead of zip it's still the same concept. There's nothing stopping you from putting every available image into a video and figuring out how to compress it lossily. Maybe there's some bounds for how much information was lost? Obviously piping everything into /dev/null destroys the input. And piping /dev/random from a true random source creates information. So somewhere between that and lossless compression there's the nebulous "plagarism" threshold. And then there's another threshold that is copyright infringement that's considered "fair use". But the general structure of the "AI" this is about are fundamentally storage and retrieval.
  - freejazz 3y ago
    What does any of this have to do with creating a new expression?
    - 3y ago

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago

Why would any non-lunatic want to live in a world where someone can't import an image into software? If only some software is disallowed, then why permit Excel but prohibit Stable Diffusion? Can someone even look at a SD-generated image, and claim with certainty that their own art was used to train it? Any more than claiming that another artist was inspired by it, looking at their output? I'm fine with anything goes. The alternative seems to be copyright maximalist clownworld.

jillesvangurp 3y ago

It shows you are not a lawyer. You misunderstand how copyright works. Creating copies or derivative works and distributing those is all that matters under copyright. This is not "disregarding" copyright (which is not an actual thing) but something that is either fair use or may require some kind of permission from the creators of the original by those distributing some kind of derived work or copy. That's why it's called copyright. Copyright merely restricts the distribution of original works or their derivatives. In case of an infringement, copyright holders can insist you stop distribution and/or compensate them for that. If I sell you a paint brush, I'm not liable for you putting a red nose on the mona lisa and trying to sell it off as an original work. Doing that on the original would be an act of vandalism (because you don't own it) and doing that on a replica that you got from somewhere infringes on the rights of those that created the replica. Which is a derived work or copy in itself of course and the distribution of that is regulated by copyright. Distribution of such a replica is of course fine because Da Vinci has been dead for a very long time and his work would no longer be protected under copyright. Distributing your red nosed mona lisa would therefore be fine too. Either way, the paint brush seller is no party in this case this is between you, Da Vinci, his descendants, and the replica creators. Now your assertions as to what AIs are of aren't, are simply not relevant. You assert it's a statistics algorithms thingy. That sounds like a tool to me. Yet another paint brush. Using a paint brush is not infringing on anyone's rights. For that you have to distribute the results of your work. The nature of the tool does not matter. How you use the tool does not matter either. You merely create (potentially) derivative works with the tool and what you do with those matters. Especially when you distribute them to others. One of those derivative works is of course the AI model itself. Creating one is fine. Copyright gets potentially infringed when you distribute one. Now we get to the core of the matter. Can you with a straight face say the AI model resembles the original and is a derivative work. It doesn't actually look like or resemble the original in any shape or form. Even proving the AI model is derived from the original is tricky. Copyright is not about protecting vague ideas or notions but the concrete shape or form of things. And it's only an infringement if you distribute a derived work or a copy of a thing to others. So, merely creating an AI model is not distributing anything to anyone. You are merely using tools to create something for yourself. An AI model in this case. Distributing a verbatim copy of a book is an infringement. Citing the book in your own work is fair use (up to a point). Paraphrasing elements from the book, acknowledging it exists, taking inspiration of it, or reading it aren't copyright infringements. The legal problem with AI models is that their concrete shape or form doesn't resemble the original inputs in any shape or form. Besides, companies like OpenAI don't actually distribute their AI models. They are huge; it's not very practical. They merely exploit those models to generate outputs to inputs from their users and customers. Are those outputs derivative works? Maybe, but that's where it gets tricky. They clearly aren't in the classical sense. Not even close. But if you somehow could conclude that they are, who is distributing that derivative work? Secondly, it the AI model is a tool, who actually creates those outputs and are those outputs protected under copyright? Who actually holds those rights? And how would you tell apart such an output from a human created one? It's questions like this that make all this extremely murky from a legal point of view. IMHO without dramatic changes to copyright law or the way it has been commonly interpreted legally, it's just very poorly suited to do anything about stopping AI companies from doing what they are doing. You'd have to bend the conventional interpretation quite a bit for that. No doubt, there will be court cases where people will try to do that. But it will take many years before the dust settles on that. And I wouldn't get my hopes up on some unexpected/dramatic outcome.

harshreality 3y ago

This is more of a problem for images, where similar output to inputs is likely, than for LLMs, where no matter what you prompt it with I doubt you can get it to regurgitate any significant parts of Harry Potter well enough to be a classical copyright violation of any of the novels. Maybe you could generate a copyright violation of character traits. The output space of images (MB for larger images) tends to be larger than books (a few hundred KB of text for a long novel), but the perceptual output space of books is much larger. Any determination that licensing is required for AI generation, or use of AI-generated works, is unacceptable until Congress or courts put some reasonable objective tests in place to determine what is and isn't a copyright violation for various types of works of various lengths. Not the ambiguous 4-factor test that is basically whatever the judge feels like. It will be a complete mess otherwise. They can't just define a new AI policy for copyright with a few types of works in mind; it has to work for all works. You could look at this mathematically from a complexity perspective and try to define a similarity function that's true when a second work is close enough to a first work to be a derived work (assuming the first one had been seen by the creator of the second). Unfortunately that won't work because nobody can define such a function to everyone's satisfaction, and the courts wouldn't accept any informal suggestion of a definition when it didn't come from Congress. Specifically, you'd get into trouble with consistency in the function determining derived works depending on length of the work: short works, like a haiku, are much more sensitive to copyright violation in some ways... a mere 17 syllables is a complete reproduction and therefore a copyright violation, yet a single word isn't; for a novel, reproducing 1/17 of the content is almost certainly a copyright violation, but reproducing 17 syllables probably isn't. Different stakeholders and creative re-mixers would want different things from the function. It's untenable.

mjan22640 3y ago

The human brain is no different. It generates content from the things it learned.

CatWChainsaw 3y ago
Repost #4 I believe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37305580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37305580 "I'll keep saying it every time this comes up. I LOVE being told by techbros that a human painstaking studying one thing at a time, and not memorizing verbatin but rather taking away the core concept, is exactly the same type of "learning" that a model does when it takes in millions of things at once and can spit out copyrighted code verbatim."

JamesBarney 3y ago

My opinion is we should treat AI like photoshop/word/windows. If you use windows to copy a file and distribute it, Microsoft isn't liable you are. If you use word to type up a book and sell it, you're responsible. Same with a statistical model, if you general a copyrighted work and distribute it you are responsible. But the tool (GPT-4) maker isn't responsible just like Adobe isn't responsible for copyright infringement. The copyrighted text/image isn't generated until you ask it to. Your prompt is what reproduces the material.

lewhoo 3y ago

I think you are right. People argue if LLM's store or maybe generalize. I propose an experiment for anyone interested. Try and do this prompt multiple times and change the appropriate verse numbers: > Provide quote from King James' Bible Genesis :25-31 or > Provide quote from King James' Bible Genesis :1-25 or whatever you fancy. I didn't go through the whole Bible, but I got pretty much a verbatim chapter. I argue that you can't do this with copyrighted books only because of guardrails and not chatgpt's lack of capability so the information is there, and it's verbatim. Plus other books don't have such nifty indexing.

rmbyrro 3y ago

AI is taking work away from lawyers, and instantly creating more work for lawyers. Ain't that interesting to reflect upon? I speculate there is a hidden force in the universe, something physicists are yet to identify, which mandates: "they shall always have something to do".

gaganyaan 3y ago

I hope your opinion isn't shared by lawmakers. Copyright is a relic of the past, and it needs to be put out of its misery. Trying to (mis)apply copyright here would just lobotomize the US. Existing companies would just technically operate out of a saner jurisdiction, and we'd be handing other countries a golden opportunity to leapfrog the US.

scotty79 3y ago

"anything goes" is the best and most natural solution. Just don't let people copyright the output if they don't have full copyright on all of the inputs. This should finally get rid of the cancer that is copyright in a generation or two.