OpenAI now tries to hide that ChatGPT was trained on copyrighted books, including J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series::A new research paper laid out ways in which AI developers should try and avoid showing LLMs have been trained on copyrighted material.
Its a bit pedantic, but I’m not really sure I support this kind of extremist view of copyright and the scale of whats being interpreted as ‘possessed’ under the idea of copyright. Once an idea is communicated, it becomes a part of the collective consciousness. Different people interpret and build upon that idea in various ways, making it a dynamic entity that evolves beyond the original creator’s intention. Its like issues with sampling beats or records in the early days of hiphop. Its like the very principal of an idea goes against this vision, more that, once you put something out into the commons, its irretrievable. Its not really yours any more once its been communicated. I think if you want to keep an idea truly yours, then you should keep it to yourself. Otherwise you are participating in a shared vision of the idea. You don’t control how the idea is interpreted so its not really yours any more.
If thats ChatGPT or Public Enemy is neither here nor there to me. The idea that a work like Peter Pan is still possessed is such a very real but very silly obvious malady of this weirdly accepted but very extreme view of the ability to possess an idea.
Ai isn’t interpreting anything. This isn’t the sci-fi style of ai that people think of, that’s general ai. This is narrow AI, which is really just an advanced algorithm. It can’t create new things with intent and design, it can only regurgitate a mix of pre-existing stuff based on narrow guidelines programmed into it to try and keep it coherent, with no actual thought or interpretation involved in the result. The issue isn’t that it’s derivative, the issue is that it can only ever be inherently derivative without any intentional interpretation or creativity, and nothing else.
Even collage art has to qualify as fair use to avoid copyright infringement if it’s being done for profit, and fair use requires it to provide commentary, criticism, or parody of the original work used (which requires intent). Even if it’s transformative enough to make the original unrecognizable, if the majority of the work is not your own art, then you need to get permission to use it otherwise you aren’t automatically safe from getting in trouble over copyright. Even using images for photoshop involves creative commons and commercial use licenses. Fanart and fanfic is also considered a grey area and the only reason more of a stink isn’t kicked up over it regarding copyright is because it’s generally beneficial to the original creators, and credit is naturally provided by the nature of fan works so long as someone doesn’t try to claim the characters or IP as their own. So most creators turn a blind eye to the copyright aspect of the genre, but if any ever did want to kick up a stink, they could, and have in the past like with Anne Rice. And as a result most fanfiction sites do not allow writers to profit off of fanfics, or advertise fanfic commissions. And those are cases with actual humans being the ones to produce the works based on something that inspired them or that they are interpreting. So even human made derivative works have rules and laws applied to them as well. Ai isn’t a creative force with thoughts and ideas and intent, it’s just a pattern recognition and replication tool, and it doesn’t benefit creators when it’s used to replace them entirely, like Hollywood is attempting to do (among other corporate entities). Viewing AI at least as critically as actual human beings is the very least we can do, as well as establishing protection for human creators so that they can’t be taken advantage of because of AI.
I’m not inherently against AI as a concept and as a tool for creators to use, but I am against AI works with no human input being used to replace creators entirely, and I am against using works to train it without the permission of the original creators. Even in the artist/writer/etc communities it’s considered to be a common courtesy to credit other people/works that you based a work on or took inspiration from, even if what you made would be safe under copyright law regardless. Sure, humans get some leeway in this because we are imperfect meat creatures with imperfect memories and may not be aware of all our influences, but a coded algorithm doesn’t have that excuse. If the current AIs in circulation can’t function without being fed stolen works without credit or permission, then they’re simply not ready for commercial use yet as far as I’m concerned. If it’s never going to be possible, which I just simply don’t believe, then it should never be used commercially period. And it should be used by creators to assist in their work, not used to replace them entirely. If it takes longer to develop, fine. If it takes more effort and manpower, fine. That’s the price I’m willing to pay for it to be ethical. If it can’t be done ethically, then imo it shouldn’t be done at all.
Your broader point would be stronger if it weren’t framed around what seems like a misunderstanding of modern AI. To be clear, you don’t need to believe that AI is “just” a “coded algorithm” to believe it’s wrong for humans to exploit other humans with it. But to say that modern AI is “just an advanced algorithm” is technically correct in exactly the same way that a blender is “just a deterministic shuffling algorithm.” We understand that the blender chops up food by spinning a blade, and we understand that it turns solid food into liquid. The precise way in which it rearranges the matter of the food is both incomprehensible and irrelevant. In the same way, we understand the basic algorithms of model training and evaluation, and we understand the basic domain task that a model performs. The “rules” governing this behavior at a fine level are incomprehensible and irrelevant-- and certainly not dictated by humans. They are an emergent property of a simple algorithm applied to billions-to-trillions of numerical parameters, in which all the interesting behavior is encoded in some incomprehensible way.
Bro I don’t think you have any idea what you’re talking about. These AIs aren’t blenders, they are designed to recognize and replicate specific aspects of art and writing and whatever else, in a way that is coherent and recognizable. Unless there’s a blender that can sculpt Michelangelo’s David out of apple peels, AI isn’t like a blender in any way.
But even if they were comparable, a blender is meant to produce chaos. It is meant to, you know, blend the food we put into it. So yes, the outcome is dictated by humans. We want the individual pieces to be indistinguishable, and deliberate design decisions get made by the humans making them to try and produce a blender that blends things sufficiently, and makes the right amount of chaos with as many ingredients as possible.
And here’s the thing, if we wanted to determine what foods were put into a blender, even assuming we had blindfolds on while tossing random shit in, we could test the resulting mixture to determine what the ingredients were before they got mashed together. We also use blenders for our own personal use the majority of the time, not for profit, and we use our own fruits and vegetables rather than stuff we stole from a neighbor’s yard, which would be, you know, trespassing and theft. And even people who use blenders to make something that they sell or offer publicly almost always list the ingredients, like restaurants.
So even if AI was like a blender, that wouldn’t be an excuse, nor would it contradict anything I’ve said.
Super interesting response, you managed to miss every possible point.
I thought this way too, but after playing with ChatGPT and Mid Journey near daily, I have seen many moments of creativity way beyond the source it was trained on. I think a good example that I saw was on a YouTube video (sorry I cannot recall which to link) where thr prompt was animals made of sushi and wow, was it ever good and creative on how it made them and it was photo realistic. This is just not something you an find anywhere on the Internet. I just did a search and found some hand drawn Japanese style sushi with eyes and such, but nothing like what I saw in that video.
I have also experienced it suggested ways to handle coding on my VR Theme Park app that is very unconventional and not something anyone has posted about as near as I can tell. It seems to be able to put 2 and 2 together and get 8. Likely as it sees so much of everything at once that it can connect the dots on ways we would struggle too. It is more than regurgitated data and it surprises me near daily.
Just because you think it seems creative due to your lack of experience with human creativity, that doesn’t mean it is uniquely creative. It’s not, it can’t be by its very nature, it can only regurgitate an amalgamation of stuff fed into it. What you think you see is the equivalent of paradoilia.
Why you making personal jabs to make a point? How do you know my creative experience?
I disagree with your interpretation of how an AI works, but I think the way that AI works is pretty much irrelevant to the discussion in the first place. I think your argument stands completely the same regardless. Even if AI worked much like a human mind and was very intelligent and creative, I would still say that usage of an idea by AI without the consent of the original artist is fundamentally exploitative.
You can easily train an AI (with next to no human labor) to launder an artist’s works, by using the artist’s own works as reference. There’s no human input or hard work involved, which is a factor in what dictates whether a work is transformative. I’d argue that if you can put a work into a machine, type in a prompt, and get a new work out, then you still haven’t really transformed it. No matter how creative or novel the work is, the reality is that no human really put any effort into it, and it was built off the backs of unpaid and uncredited artists.
You could probably make an argument for being able to sell works made by an AI trained only on the public domain, but it still should not be copyrightable IMO, cause it’s not a human creation.
TL;DR - No matter how creative an AI is, its works should not be considered transformative in a copyright sense, as no human did the transformation.
if it’s being done for profit, and fair use requires it to provide commentary, criticism, or parody of the original work used. Even if it’s transformative enough to make the original unrecognizable
I’m going to need a source for that. Fair use is a flexible and context-specific, It depends on the situation and four things: why, what, how much, and how it affects the work. No one thing is more important than the others, and it is possible to have a fair use defense even if you do not meet all the criteria of fair use.
I’m a bit confused about what point you’re trying to make. There is not a single paragraph or example in the link you provided that doesn’t support what I’ve said, and none of the examples provided in that link are something that qualified as fair use despite not meeting any criteria. In fact one was the opposite, as something that met all the criteria but still didn’t qualify as fair use.
The key aspect of how they define transformative is here:
Has the material you have taken from the original work been transformed by adding new expression or meaning?
These (narrow) AIs cannot add new expression or meaning, because they do not have intent. They are just replicating and rearranging learned patterns mindlessly.
Was value added to the original by creating new information, new aesthetics, new insights, and understandings?
These AIs can’t provide new information because they can’t create something new, they can only reconfigure previously provided info. They can’t provide new aesthetics for the same reason, they can only recreate pre-existing aesthetics from the works fed to them, and they definitely can’t provide new insights or understandings because again, there is no intent or interpretation going on, just regurgitation.
The fact that it’s so strict that even stuff that meets all the criteria might still not qualify as fair use only supports what I said about how even derivative works made by humans are subject to a lot of laws and regulations, and if human works are under that much scrutiny then there’s no reason why AI works shouldn’t also be under at least as much scrutiny or more. The fact that so much of fair use defense is dependent on having intent, and providing new meaning, insights, and information, is just another reason why AI can’t hide behind fair use or be given a pass automatically because “humans make derivative works too”. Even derivative human works are subject to scrutiny, criticism, and regulation, and so should AI works.
I’m a bit confused about what point you’re trying to make. There is not a single paragraph or example in the link you provided that doesn’t support what I’ve said, and none of the examples provided in that link are something that qualified as fair use despite not meeting any criteria. In fact one was the opposite, as something that met all the criteria but still didn’t qualify as fair use.
You said "…fair use requires it to provide commentary, criticism, or parody of the original work used. " This isn’t true, if you look at the summaries of fair use cases I provided you can see there are plenty of cases where there was no purpose stated.
These (narrow) AIs cannot add new expression or meaning, because they do not have intent. They are just replicating and rearranging learned patterns mindlessly.
You’re anthropomorphizing a machine here, the intent is that of the person using the tool, not the tool itself. These are tools made by humans for humans to use. It’s up to the artist to make all the content choices when it comes to the input and output and everything in between.
These AIs can’t provide new information because they can’t create something new, they can only reconfigure previously provided info. They can’t provide new aesthetics for the same reason, they can only recreate pre-existing aesthetics from the works fed to them, and they definitely can’t provide new insights or understandings because again, there is no intent or interpretation going on, just regurgitation.
I’m going to need a source on this too. This statement isn’t backed up with anything.
The fact that it’s so strict that even stuff that meets all the criteria might still not qualify as fair use only supports what I said about how even derivative works made by humans are subject to a lot of laws and regulations, and if human works are under that much scrutiny then there’s no reason why AI works shouldn’t also be under at least as much scrutiny or more. The fact that so much of fair use defense is dependent on having intent, and providing new meaning, insights, and information, is just another reason why AI can’t hide behind fair use or be given a pass automatically because “humans make derivative works too”. Even derivative human works are subject to scrutiny, criticism, and regulation, and so should AI works.
AI works are human works. AI can’t be authors or hold copyright.
Isn’t your last sentence making his point?
Neural networks are based on the same principles as the human brain, they are literally learning in the exact same way humans are. Copyrighting the training of neural nets is the essentially the same thing as copyrighting interpretation and learning by humans.
These AIs are not neural networks based on the human brain. They’re literally just algorithms designed to perform a single task.
Well, I’d consider agreeing if the LLMs were considered as a generic knowledge database. However I had the impression that the whole response from OpenAI & cie. to this copyright issue is “they build original content”, both for LLMs and stable diffusion models. Now that they started this line of defence I think that they are stuck with proving that their “original content” is not derivated from copyrighted content 🤷
Well, I’d consider agreeing if the LLMs were considered as a generic knowledge database. However I had the impression that the whole response from OpenAI & cie. to this copyright issue is “they build original content”, both for LLMs and stable diffusion models. Now that they started this line of defence I think that they are stuck with proving that their “original content” is not derivated from copyrighted content 🤷
Yeah I suppose that’s on them.
Copyright definitely needs to be stripped back severely. Artists need time to use their own work, but after a certain time everything needs to enter the public space for the sake of creativity.
If you sample someone else’s music and turn around and try to sell it, without first asking permission from the original artist, that’s copyright infringement.
So, if the same rules apply, as your post suggests, OpenAI is also infringing on copyright.
If you sample someone else’s music and turn around and try to sell it, without first asking permission from the original artist, that’s copyright infringement.
I think you completely and thoroughly do not understand what I’m saying or why I’m saying it. No where did I suggest that I do not understand modern copyright. I’m saying I’m questioning my belief in this extreme interpretation of copyright which is represented by exactly what you just parroted. That this interpretation is both functionally and materially unworkable, but also antithetical to a reasonable understanding of how ideas and communication work.
That’s life under capitalism.
I agree with you in essence (I’ve put a lot of time into a free software game).
However, people are entitled to the fruits of their labor, and until we learn to leave capitalism behind artists have to protect their work to survive. To eat. To feed their kids. And pay their rent.
Unless OpenAi is planning to pay out royalties to everyone they stole from, what their doing is illegal and immoral under our current, capitalist paradigm.
Yeah, this is definitely leaning a little too “People shouldn’t pump their own gas because gas attendants need to eat, feed their kids, pay rent” for me.
A sample is a fundamental part of a song’s output, not just its input. If LLMs are changing the input’s work to a high enough degree is it not protected as a transformative work?
it’s more like a collage of everyone’s words. it doesn’t make anything creative because ot doesn’t have a body or life or real social inputs you could say. basically it’s just rearranging other people’s words.
A song that’s nothing but samples. but so many samples it hides that fact. this is my view anyway.
and only a handful of people are getting rich of the outputs.
if we were in some kinda post capitalism economy or if we had UBI it wouldn’t bother me really. it’s not the artists ego I’m sticking up for, but their livelihood
To add to that, Harry Potter is the worst example to use here. There is no extra billion that JK Rowling needs to allow her to spend time writing more books.
Copyright was meant to encourage authors to invest in their work in the same way that patents do. If you were going to argue about the issue of lifting content from books, you should be using books that need the protection of copyright, not ones that don’t.
Copyright was meant
I just don’t know that I agree that this line of reasoning is useful. Who cares what it was meant for? What is it now, currently and functionally, doing?
I’m a huge proponent of expanding individual copyright to extreme amounts (an individual is entitled to own the rights and usage rights to anything they create and can revoke those rights from anyone), but not in favor of the same thing for corporations.
I hold the exact opposite view as you. As long as it’s a truly creative work (a writing, music, artwork, etc) then you own that specific implementation of the idea. Someone can make something else based on it, but you still own the original content.
LLMs and companies using them need to pay for the content in some way. This is already done through licensing in other parallels, and will likely come to AI quickly.
To be clear, I’m still working through my thinking in this but it’s been something cooking for quite a while. I may not have all the words to express my meaning. For example, I think there are two routes to take in making my argument, one moral, the other technical. I’m not building on the morality of copyright, but focusing on the technical aspects of the limits of ideas.
I suppose I would ask you then about your views in authoritarianism. Because it seems to be that with out an extremely authoritarian state, it would be basically impossible to enforce your view of copyright. Are you okay with that kind of pervasiveness?
Also, from a technical perspective, how do you propose this view of copyright be applied? This is kind of towards the broader point I’m thinking I believe in. It’s not just that copyright laws are epifaci ridiculous, they are also technically almost unenforceable in their modern extremist interpretation with out an extremely pervasive form of surveillance.
Easy. The same way we already do it. We enforce music licensing, video licensing and other ip licensing. It’s been done. All this would do is extend those rights to the individual and remove them from corporations. Work product can be owned by companies, but not indefinitely. Individuals should always be in control of their creations.
Restrictions would more or less be strictly commercial, to where hobbyists wouldn’t be impacted, but as soon as it’s used to make money the original creators are owed as part of it.
It wouldn’t be any harder than it is now, as long as copyright is proved. (Hey look, this is the first time I’ve found an actual use of NFTs). In general anything being done for momentary gain is already monitored and surveilled, so this wouldn’t be a change there either.
Edit: Also most of us already live in authoritarian states. This won’t really change anything. Big corps already enforce their copyright when it makes monetary sense and are actively trolling for unauthorized uses.
It wouldn’t be any harder than it is now, as long as copyright is proved. (Hey look, this is the first time I’ve found an actual use of NFTs). In general anything being done for momentary gain is already monitored and surveilled, so this wouldn’t be a change there either.
Personally, I think you are describing a dystopian, authoritarian landscape which will be devoid of any real creativity or interesting ideas. I’m a believer that all ideas are free to be stolen, copied, improved upon; that imitation of ideas is a fundamental human right, and fundamental to what it means to be human. Likewise, I think our social and media landscape would be much poorer without this right. I don’t think any one has the inherent right to profit off of an idea.
I feel the exact opposite. There’s no reason for me to create anything if someone else can come along and steal it. Eliminating copyright will bring your dystopian landscape where nobody shares any sort of art or creative work because someone else will steal it.
What motivation is there for creatives if you’re just telling them their work has no implicit value and anyone else can come along and reappropriate it for whatever they’d like?
I feel the exact opposite. There’s no reason for me to create anything if someone else can come along and steal it. Eliminating copyright will bring your dystopian landscape where nobody shares any sort of art or creative work because someone else will steal it.
This is great because I think you are totally correct in your sentiment that we believe oppositely. I see art created only for the purpose of profit as drivel; true art is an expression of the self. If the only reason you make art is for profit, you aren’t an artist, you are an employee.
That’s a great theory and all, but it’s not even money. I make no money from my photos, but I also refrain from posting any of them because I’d rather they not be used for AI training. Same with any music I create and I’m getting there with my code.
The nobility of art has always been in question, and it’s consistently been proven that artists who aren’t compensated for their work also tend to create less.
This is also not explicitly about profit. If I write a song and then it’s used at a hate rally, I currently have no recourse. They’re not making money from that application (directly), but they are using my creation to promote something I don’t agree with.
I’m curious to know if you’re an artist yourself, as it’s very contrary to the opinions from other creatives I know.
I assume you’re against the communal and collective culture that modders for games enjoy?
I assume you also believe no technological innovations are produced in America anymore since China would simply steal it.
Nowhere did I say derivative works are not ok. If a game maker explicitly forbids using modded versions of their game, I think that should be up to them. Games that have vibrant modding communities are almost always at least partially supported by the developer anyways.
My points are individual copyright anyways, not corporate. With increasing individual protections I also propose decreasing corporate copyright protection.
I believe that China makes 90% of the same product for 80% of the price after ripping off their American counterparts. But that’s also entirely off topic and really has nothing to do with this. Art/Creative Works are entirely different than physical goods.
I hold whatever view makes George Lucas stop digitally remastering the original trilogy.
We have to distinguish between LLMs
- Trained on copyrighted material and
- Outputting copyrighted material
They are not one and the same
Yeah, this headline is trying to make it seem like training on copyrighted material is or should be wrong.
Legally the output of the training could be considered a derived work. We treat brains differently here, that’s all.
I think the current intellectual property system makes no sense and AI is revealing that fact.
I think this brings up broader questions about the currently quite extreme interpretation of copyright. Personally I don’t think its wrong to sample from or create derivative works from something that is accessible. If its not behind lock and key, its free to use. If you have a problem with that, then put it behind lock and key. No one is forcing you to share your art with the world.
Most books are actually locked behind paywalls and not free to use? Or maybe I don’t understand what you meant?
Following that, if a sailor is the sea were to put a copy of a protected book on the internet and ChatGPT was trained on it, how that argument would go? The copyright owner didn’t place it there, so it’s not “their decision”. And savvy people can make sure it’s accessible if they want to.
My belief is, if they can use all non locked data for free, then the model should be shared for free too and it’s outputs shouldn’t be subject to copyright. Just for context
Output from an AI has just been recently considered as not copyrightable.
I think it stemmed from the actors strikes recently.
It was stated that only work originating from a human can be copyrighted.
Output from an AI has just been recently considered as not copyrightable.
Where can I read more about this? I’ve seen it mentioned a few times, but never with any links.
They clearly only read the headline If they’re talking about the ruling that came out this week, that whole thing was about trying to give an AI authorship of a work generated solely by a machine and having the copyright go to the owner of the machine through the work-for-hire doctrine. So an AI itself can’t be authors or hold a copyright, but humans using them can still be copyright holders of any qualifying works.
They might’ve just been bringing it up conversationally as it’s in a similar vein too
Should we distinguish it though? Why shouldn’t (and didn’t) artists have a say if their art is used to train LLMs? Just like publicly displayed art doesn’t provide a permission to copy it and use it in other unspecified purposes, it would be reasonable that the same would apply to AI training.
Ah, but that’s the thing. Training isn’t copying. It’s pattern recognition. If you train a model “The dog says woof” and then ask a model “What does the dog say”, it’s not guaranteed to say “woof”.
Similarly, just because a model was trained on Harry Potter, all that means is it has a good corpus of how the sentences in that book go.
Thus the distinction. Can I train on a comment section discussing the book?
So did I so what? Is my brain property of Warner now?
If you then use your brain to reproduce a product based on copyrighted work owned by Warner (without their permission) and try to sell it, then you could be in violation of the law.
the thing is: AI and your brain are very different things
AI and your brain are very different things
How do you know that guy isn’t an AI?
I suppose you could say I’m making a good-faith assumption. It’s possible that he is.
my point is still valid.
His point is equally valid. Can an artist be compelled to show the methods of their art? Is it as right to force an artist to give up methods if another artist thinks they are using AI to derive copyrighted work? Haven’t we already seen that LLMs are really poor at evaluating whether or not something was created by an LLM? Wouldn’t making strong laws on such an already opaque and difficult-to-prove issue be more of a burden on smaller artists vs. large studios with lawyers-in-tow.
His point is equally valid.
but it’s irrelevant.
Can an artist be compelled to show the methods of their art? Is it as right to force an artist to give up methods if another artist thinks they are using AI to derive copyrighted work?
none of this is relevant in copyright law. the only thing that matters is who published it first and who is then using that copyrighted work for profit without first having gotten permission of the owner.
Haven’t we already seen that LLMs are really poor at evaluating whether or not something was created by an LLM?
also irrelevant
Wouldn’t making strong laws on such an already opaque and difficult-to-prove issue
laws are not written with the idea of whether on they’re hard or easy to prove as a consideration. also, your claims of such things being easy/hard to prove is a matter of opinion, and I don’t agree with you chain of deduction here. OpenAI admitted that Rowlong’s works (among many others) were used for training chatGPT.
be more of a burden on smaller artists vs. large studios with lawyers-in-tow.
also irrelevant, unless you’re arguing that, because it’s too difficult for small artists to defend their copyrighted work, they should just shut up and deal with it. currently, there is no legal precedent as to whether this is or is not copyright infringement, which is what a lawsuit like this is intended to set. For most, I would say, it Eem that it clearly is, for others, it’s not so clear.
Irrelevant. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.
If I read Harry Potter and wrote a novel of my own, no doubt ideas from it could consciously or subconsciously influence it and be incorporated into it. Hey is that any different from what an LLM does?
Not what happened in this case tho.
Your brain isn’t an AI model
OR IS IT?
You joke but AI advocates seem to forget that people have fundamentally different rights than tools and objects. A photocopier doesn’t get the right to “memorize” and “learn” from a text that a human being does. As much as people may argue that AIs work different, AIs are still not people.
And if they ever become people, the situation will be much more complicated than whether they can imitate some writer. But we aren’t there yet, even their advocates just uses them as tools.
You should read this article by Kit Walsh, who’s a senior staff attorney at the EFF too. The EFF is a digital rights group who most recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone.
But this falls exactly under what I just said. To say that using Machine Learning to imitate an artist without permission is fine, because humans are allowed to learn to each other, is making the mistake of assigning personhood to the system, that it ought to have the same rights that human beings do. There is a distinction between the rights of humans as opposed to tools, so to say that an AI can’t be trained on someone’s works to replicate their style doesn’t need to apply to people.
Even if you support that reasoning, that still doesn’t help the writers and artists whose job is threatened by AI models based on their work. That it isn’t an exact reproduction doesn’t change that it relied on using their works to begin with, and it doesn’t change that it serves as a way to undercut them, providing a cheaper replacement for their work. Copyright law as it was, wasn’t envisioned for a world where Machine Learning exists. It doesn’t really solve the problem to say that technically it’s not supposed to cover ideas and styles. The creators will be struggling just the same.
Either the law will need to emphasize the value of human autorship first, or we will need to go through drastic socioeconomic changes to ensure that these creators will be able to keep creating despite losing market to AI. Otherwise, to simply say that AI gets to do this and change nothing else, will cause enormous damage to all sort of creative careers and wider culture. Even AI will become more limited with less fresh new creators to learn elements from.
The system doesn’t get personhood, it is your tool, and as said in the article:
It is your right, not the system’s you’re upholding.
There is a difference between “analyzing” and derivating. The authorship of AI-created works is also not the user’s, it takes more than a prompt for that, and that seems to be the conclusion courts are leaning towards.
Still, even if that turns out to be technically correct, it still doesn’t help the creators getting undercut who might be driven out of their careers by AI.
It was just ruled AI can’t be authors or hold copyright. AI itself can’t be authors or hold a copyright, but humans using them can still be copyright holders of any qualifying works.
How do you see that as a difference? Tools are extensions of ourselves.
Restricting the use of LLMs is only restricting people.
When we get to the realm of automation and AI, calling tools just an “extension of ourselves” doesn’t make sense.
Especially not when the people being “extended” by Machine Learning models did not want to be “extended” to begin with.
Exactly. If I write some Loony toons fan fiction, Warner doesn’t own that. This ridiculous view of copyright (that’s not being challenged in the public discourse) needs to be confronted.
that’s not exactly what’s in dispute— the prodcut that LLMs produce. That would probably be ruled as a derivative work under the DMCA’s “Fair Use” clause, and, therefore, public domain.
the issue at hand is that the company accessed the copyrighted material without paying for it and is now using that training to earn more money without fair compensation.
these language models or even proper AI can’t create original creative works the way a human can. The best it can do it create a pastiche or composition that simulates originality but is really just a jumble of recycled ideas that it’s been trained on. There’s a fair argument to be made that the owners of the copyrights of those pesos works are entitled to fair compensation, especially since AI is a tool used by a company to churn out profit off the work of others.
They can own it, actually. If you use the characters of Bugs Bunny, etc., or the setting (do they have a canonical setting?) then Warner does own the rights to the material you’re using.
For example, see how the original Winnie the Pooh material just entered public domain, but the subsequent Disney versions have not. You can use the original stuff (see the recent horror movie for an example of legal use) but not the later material like Tigger or Pooh in a red shirt.
Now if your work is satire or parody, then you can argue that it’s fair use. But generally, most companies don’t care about fan fiction because it doesn’t compete with their sales. If you publish your Harry Potter fan fiction on Livejournal, it wouldn’t be worth the money to pay the lawyers to take it down. But if you publish your Larry Cotter and the Wizard’s Rock story on Amazon, they’ll take it down because now it’s a competing product.
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I think its more like writing a loony toons fanfic based only on pirated material
How are you gonna prove that I watched it on tv or torrented?
Can’t but theyre pretty open on how they trained the model, so like almost admitted guilt (though they werent hosting the pirated content, its still out there and would be trained on). Cause unless they trained it on a paid Netflix account, there’s no way to get it legally.
Idk where this lands legally, but I’d assume not in their favour
It’s honestly a good question. It’s perfectly legal for you to memorize a copyrighted work. In some contexts, you can recite it, too (particularly the perilous fair use). And even if you don’t recite a copyrighted work directly, you are most certainly allowed to learn to write from reading copyrighted books, then try to come up with your own writing based off what you’ve read. You’ll probably try your best to avoid copying anyone, but you might still make mistakes, simply by forgetting that some idea isn’t your own.
But can AI? If we want to view AI as basically an artificial brain, then shouldn’t it be able to do what humans can do? Though at the same time, it’s not actually a brain nor is it a human. Humans are pretty limited in what they can remember, whereas an AI could be virtually boundless.
If we’re looking at intent, the AI companies certainly aren’t trying to recreate copyrighted works. They’ve actively tried to stop it as we can see. And LLMs don’t directly store the copyrighted works, either. They’re basically just storing super hard to understand sets of weights, which are a challenge even for experienced researchers to explain. They’re not denying that they read copyrighted works (like all of us do), but arguably they aren’t trying to write copyrighted works.
No, because you paid for a single viewing of that content with your cinema ticket. And frankly, I think that the price of a cinema ticket (= a single viewing, which it was) should be what OpenAI should be made to pay.
I didn’t. I torrented it.
I got it to start but it quickly cut itself off.
I hope OpenAI and JK Rowling take each other down
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what if they scraped a whole lot of the internet, and those excerpts were in random blogs and posts and quotes and memes etc etc all over the place? They didnt injest the material directly, or knowingly.
That’s why this whole argument is worthless, and why I think that, at its core, it is disingenuous. I would be willing to be a steak dinner that a lot of these lawsuits are just fishing for money, and the rest are set up by competition trying to slow the market down because they are lagging behind. AI is an arms race, and it’s growing so fast that if you got in too late, you are just out of luck. So, companies that want in are trying to slow down the leaders, at best, and at worst they are trying to make them publish their training material so they can just copy it. AI training models should be considered IP, and should be protected as such. It’s like trying to get the Colonel’s secret recipe by saying that all the spices that were used have been used in other recipes before, so it should be fair game.
If training models are considered IP then shouldn’t we allow other training models to view and learn from the competition? If learning from other IPs that are copywritten is okay, why should the training models be treated different?
Not knowing something is a crime doesn’t stop you from being prosecuted for committing it.
It doesn’t matter if someone else is sharing copyright works and you don’t know it and use it in ways that infringes on that copyright.
“I didn’t know that was copyrighted” is not a valid defence.
Is reading a passage from a book actually a crime though?
Sure, you could try to regenerate the full text from quotes you read online, much like you could open a lot of video reviews and recreate larger portions of the original text, but you would not blame the video editing program for that, you would blame the one who did it and decided to post it online.
Training AI on copyrighted material is no more illegal or unethical than training human beings on copyrighted material (from library books or borrowed books, nonetheless!). And trying to challenge the veracity of generative AI systems on the notion that it was trained on copyrighted material only raises the specter that IP law has lost its validity as a public good.
The only valid concern about generative AI is that it could displace human workers (or swap out skilled jobs for menial ones) which is a problem because our society recognizes the value of human beings only in their capacity to provide a compensation-worthy service to people with money.
The problem is this is a shitty, unethical way to determine who gets to survive and who doesn’t. All the current controversy about generative AI does is kick this can down the road a bit. But we’re going to have to address soon that our monied elites will be glad to dispose of the rest of us as soon as they can.
Also, amateur creators are as good as professionals, given the same resources. Maybe we should look at creating content by other means than for-profit companies.
Also this argument if replacing human workers has been made with every single industrial revolution.
and it has happened every single time? what do you mean?
The point is fighting back against it is stupid. The point is people still have work. New technology opens up new was to work with new jobs.
So that explains the “problematic” responses.
This is just OpenAI covering their ass by attempting to block the most egregious and obvious outputs in legal gray areas, something they’ve been doing for a while, hence why their AI models are known to be massively censored. I wouldn’t call that ‘hiding’. It’s kind of hard to hide it was trained on copyrighted material, since that’s common knowledge, really.
I don’t get why this is an issue. Assuming they purchased a legal copy that it was trained on then what’s the problem? Like really. What does it matter that it knows a certain book from cover to cover or is able to imitate art styles etc. That’s exactly what people do too. We’re just not quite as good at it.
A copyright holder has the right to control who has the right to create derivative works based on their copyright. If you want to take someone’s copyright and use it to create something else, you need permission from the copyright holder.
The one major exception is Fair Use. It is unlikely that AI training is a fair use. However this point has not been adjudicated in a court as far as I am aware.
It is not a derivative it is transformative work. Just like human artists “synthesise” art they see around them and make new art, so do LLMs.
Transformative works are not a thing.
If you copy the copyrightable elements of another work, you have created a derivative work. That work needs to be transformative in order to be eligible for its own copyright, but being transformative alone is not enough to make it non-infringing.
There are four fair use factors. Transformativeness is only considered by one of them. That is not enough to make a fair use.
this is so fucking stupid though. almost everyone reads books and/or watches movies, and their speech is developed from that. the way we speak is modeled after characters and dialogue in books. the way we think is often from books. do we track down what percentage of each sentence comes from what book every time we think or talk?
Aye, but I’m thinking the whole notion of copyright is banking on the fact that human beings are inherently lazy and not everyone will start churning out books in the same universe or style. And if they do, it takes quite some time to get the finished product and they just get sued for it. It’s easy, because there’s a single target.
So there’s an extra deterrent to people writing and publishing a new harry potter novel, unaffiliated with the current owner of the copyright. Invest all that time and resources just to be sued? Nah…
Issue with generating stuff with 'puters is that you invest way less time, so the same issue pops up for the copyright owner, they’re just DDoS-ed on their possible attack routes. Will they really sue thousands or hundreds of thoudands of internet randos generating harry potter erotica using a LLM? Would you even know who they are? People can hide money away in Switzerland from entite governments, I’m sure there are ways to hide your identity from a book publisher.
It was never about the content, it’s about the opportunities the technology provides to halt the gears of the system that works to enforce questionable laws. So they’re nipping it in the bud.
I am sure they have patched it by now but at one point I was able to get chatgpt to give me copyright text from books by asking for ever large quotations. It seemed more willing to do this with books out of print.
Yeah, it refuses to give you the first sentence from Harry Potter now.
Which is kinda lame, you can find that on thousands of webpages. Many of which the system indexed.
If someone was looking to pirate the book there are way easier ways than issuing thousands of queries to ChatGPT. Type “Harry Potter torrent” into Google and you will have them all in 30 seconds.
They made it read Harry Potter? No wonder its gonna kill us all one day.
If I’m not mistaken AI work was just recently considered as NOT copyrightable.
So I find interesting that an AI learning from copyrighted work is an issue even though what will be generated will NOT be copyrightable.
So even if you generated some copy of Harry Potter you would not be able to copyright it. So in no way could you really compete with the original art.
I’m not saying that it makes it ok to train AIs on copyrighted art but I think it’s still an interesting aspect of this topic.
As others probably have stated, the AI may be creating content that is transformative and therefore under fair use. But even if that work is transformative it cannot be copyrighted because it wasn’t created by a human.
If you’re talking about the ruling that came out this week, that whole thing was about trying to give an AI authorship of a work generated solely by a machine and having the copyright go to the owner of the machine through the work-for-hire doctrine. So an AI itself can’t be authors or hold a copyright, but humans using them can still be copyright holders of any qualifying works.
How do you tell if a piece of work contains AI generated content or not?
It’s not hard to generate a piece of AI content, put in some hours to round out AI’s signatures / common mistakes, and pass it off as your own. So in practise it’s still easy to benefit from AI systems by masking generate content as largely your own.
I mean, this is the exact way the U.S. Copyright Office’s guidance says they think you should use it.
Sure, but even under this guidance copyright owners of the training data are still shafted, based on how the data is scraped pretty much freely. Can an opportunist generate an unofficial sequel to Harry Potter, do the minimum to ensure they get copyright and reap the reward from it?
That’s how copyright has always worked. Fair use is complex, but as long as you’re not straight up copying someone’s work you’re fine. 50 Shades of Grey started out as Twilight fanfiction. So yeah, you could.
Yes fair use has its stipulations but AI is breaking new grounds here. We are no longer dealing with the reaction videos but in an era where literally dozen of pages of content can be generated in a matter of minutes, with relatively little human involvement. Perhaps it’s time to revisit if the law still holds in light of these new technology and tools.
You should read this article by Kit Walsh, who’s a senior staff attorney at the EFF.
Interesting read! Definitely a useful breakdown and I see the reasoning. Thanks for sharing.
How are they going to prove if something was written by an AI? Also, you can take the AI’s output and then modify it.
That’s definitely an issue. At what point does copyright applies if you are just helped by an AI ?
I guess the courts will have to decide that…
That’s not how copyright works. I’m embarrassed for you, and all the people who blindly upvoted you. Like… Yikes. What’s happening to this world?
You can’t publish copyrighted work as your own just because you’re legally not able to publish copyrighted work. That’s a open and shut case of copyright infringement. Why do I have to say this? Am I on candid camera?
Well of course it was. It has to learn somehow.
People are acting like ChatGPT is storing the entire Harry Potter series in its neural net somewhere. It’s not storing or reproducing text in a 1:1 manner from the original material. Certain material, like very popular books, has likely been interpreted tens of thousands of times due to how many times it was reposted online (and therefore how many times it appeared in the training data).
Just because it can recite certain passages almost perfectly doesn’t mean it’s redistributing copyrighted books. How many quotes do you know perfectly from books you’ve read before? I would guess quite a few. LLMs are doing the same thing, but on mega steroids with a nearly limitless capacity for information retention.
but on mega steroids with a nearly limitless capacity for information retention.
That sounds like redistributing copyrighted books
Nope people are just acting like ChatGPT is making commercial use of the content. Knowing a quote from a book isn’t copyright infringement. Selling that quote is. Also it doesn’t need to be content stored 1:1 somewhere to be infringement. That misses the point. If you’re making money of a synopsis you wrote based on imperfect memory and in your own words it’s still copyright infringment until you sign a licensing agreement with JK. Even transforming what you read into a different medium like a painting or poetry cam infinge the original authors copyrights.
Now mull that over and tell us what you think about modern copyright laws.
it’s still copyright infringment until you sign a licensing agreement with JK.
no its not.
Yeah I don’t see how that’s true. If that were true wouldn’t every board walk tee shirt shop be sued into oblivion from Nickelodeon over Sponge Bob?
Lol, say that to the first (obscure) Harry Potter line I tried on ChatGPT.
Using Copyrighted Work as Art as example still influences the AI which their make Profit from.
If they use my Works then they need to pay thats it.
Still kinda blows my mind how like the most socialist people I know (fellow artists) turned super capitalist the second a tool showed like an inkling of potential to impact their bottom line.
Personally, I’m happy to have my work scraped and permutated by systems that are open to the public. My biggest enemy isn’t the existence of software scraping an open internet, it’s the huge companies who see it as a way to cut us out of the picture.
If we go all copyright crazy on the models for looking at stuff we’ve already posted openly on the internet, the only companies with access to the tools will be those who already control huge amounts of data.
I mean, for real, it’s just mind-blowing seeing the entire artistic community pretty much go full-blown “Metallica with the RIAA” after decades of making the “you wouldn’t download a car” joke.
Fuckin preach! I feel like I’m surrounded by children that didn’t live through the many other technologies that have came along and changed things. People lost their shit when photoshop became mainstream, when music started using samples, etc. AI is here to stay. These same people are probably listening to autotuned music all day while they complain on the internet about AI looking at their art.
I feel like a lot of internet people (not even just socialists) go from seeing copyright as at best a compromise that allows the arts to have value under capitalism to treating it like a holy doctrine when the subject of LLMs comes up.
Like, people who will say “piracy is always okay” will also say “ban AI, period” (and misrepresent organizations that want regulations on it’s use as wanting a full ban.)
Like, growing up with an internet full of technically illegal content (or grey area at best) like fangames and YouTube Poops made me a lifelong copyright skeptic. It’s outright confusing to me when people take copyright as seriously as this.
I say piracy is always okay but also am a big fan of AI. I had chat GPT write my last cover letter and got the job
Based
Nobody would defend copyright if it wasn’t already in place, it’s a sick idea. They ask us to cut the field of human knowledge for private benefit. Now they want to destroy a new technology in its name. Greed knows no bounds.
I defend the idea of copyright. The first copyright law was in 1710, to protect authors from the printing press. Without copyright, whoever owned the printing press would sell copies of books with no obligation to pay the author. When copying art is trivial, the artist needs copyright protection in order to make a living creating art.
There are major problems with modern copyrights. Like all things in capitalism it has been subverted to benefit the rich, but the core idea behind copyright is sound.
These lawsuits are not to stop the development if generative AI. These lawsuits are to stop the unlicensed use of copyrighted works as AI training data.
There are AI models that are only trained with licensed data. This doesn’t stop the development of AI.
Artists should have the right to choose whether their work is used as training data. And they should be compensated fairly for it. That will be the case if these lawsuits succeed.
Ultimately it’s a propertarian scheme of ownership imposed onto the realm of concepts and ideas. The first person to successfully lay claim to an idea is given a monopoly on that idea for some number of years. A book, an invention, a melody. To secure profit for that individual, the entire rest of humanity is prevented access to the idea except under his terms, and the naturally free exchange of information is curtailed by statute to accomplish this, via the imposition of punishments for anyone who goes against this scheme. I do not think that’s defensible. That is to say, I don’t think humanity sees a net benefit from this way of doing things. Even some hypothetical 20-30% reduction in the generation of different kinds of creative works would be well offset by the benefit humanity sees from being able to access them, and the funds that would be going to the artist still could if people saw fit.
Is this being used to stop the development of generative AI? Yes, literally the imprint on an AI of having parsed the works and understood them in some symbolic capacity, they want to curtail that. And the existing models that have already done that would likely be rendered illegal, setting the entire technology back a year or two.
In an ideal world without greed, you are right in saying that copyright is not beneficial for the human race as a whole. Unfortunately we don’t live in such a world. Look at what happened with insulin. The person invented it placed a ludicrously low priced patent of one dollar because he felt that it should be available cheaply to all who need and yet today in the US, insulin is a ridiculously expensive drug which many people struggle to afford. This is because while the inventor was not greedy and thought about the greater good, the pharmaceutical industry did not. They saw an opportunity to make money and are screwing people in the process
press would sell copies of books with no obligation to pay the author
can you imagine how faster knowledge would have traveled? what a waste of an opportunity
Nobody would defend copyright if it wasn’t already in place
I don’t know about that. Say you take a few years to write a handful of poems, and it turns out people in your neighborhood really like them. You compile the poems into a book, and sell it for $5, and it sells well. Seeing this, your neighbor buys one, copies it, and starts selling it one neighborhood over for $2, and representing themself as the author. I would think most people in that situation would want to say, ‘hey, that’s not fair’. I don’t think that’s sick or rooted in greed, copyright can be a check on greed.
So thanks to copyright, we’re now living in a world where artists are fairly compensated and not exploited by large corporations acting as middlemen that have seized control of their creative works and used it for their own profit?
“somebody think of the authooors”
Nah,I enjoyed many things without paying a dime and now I use them for my work.
As a Civilian Pirating is no Problem but if its a Company that behaves like they own their Neural Network to 100%.
Piracy is gonna live as long Services are Bad for Average Joe,but these US Corps can afford to pay for this.
lol i didnt pirate shit
