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.
They made it read Harry Potter? No wonder its gonna kill us all one day.
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
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.
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 copyright. The original intent was to protect creators in order to foster more creativity. Most artists will have no incentive to create if their work can be reappropriated by a larger group to leverage it for monetary gain, which is directly being taken from the original creator.
I’m a photographer. I’ve removed all my pictures from the internet and plan to never post more. I don’t want my work being used to train AI. Right now we have no choice in that matter, so the only option is to no longer share our work.
I’ve released tons of stuff and it’s under Creative Commons/public domain. I welcome people to share it or create derivative works.
Cool. That’s a fine stance to have and one that plenty of other people will have too. I’m fine with actual people doing it. I’m not fine with AI. The point is the artist should have a choice if they’d like to allow training.
The problem right now is we can’t control that. Everything is being used for AI training if you want it to be or not. If I could explicitly forbid use of it for AI training (that could be backed in court) I’d be more willing to post them again.
Lemmy users are not an accurate representation of artists imo. This site skews extremely far left, to the points of such anti-corporate nonsense that I believe the majority of people just want to hurt anyone with more money than them as much as possible.
The problem with trying to restrict AI from scanning the art and making conclusions about it is that it’s the same as trying to ban humans from creating art that’s inspired by other art. It’s the same process even. If the AI is actually producing one-for-one copies of their work, you might have a leg to stand on in terms of arguing the AI shouldn’t be compensated for creating those specifically, but it’s creating works that are just loosely influenced by seeing the original art.
So the people who generate and curate that knowledge don’t deserve to be compensated? Are you going to be a full time wikipedia editor then? Or does your “greed know 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.
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
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
Insulin is ridiculously expensive because of monopoly status over methods on how to produce it (on top of any other laws restricting supply). I personally contributed to a project to create an open source method to make insulin.
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?
More so than we would be without copyright at all
Copyright needs to be extended for individuals and cut back for corporations. People should be allowed to own rights to their ip, but corps should have much higher levels of restrictions and how some knowledge must be shared.
“somebody think of the authooors”
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
Nah,I enjoyed many things without paying a dime and now I use them for my work.
What do you do for your work, and will you send it to me for free then? Can I sell it and keep all the money I get?
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
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.
Just adding, that, outside of Rowling, who I believe has a different contract than most authors due to the expanded Wizarding World and Pottermore, most authors themselves cannot quote their own novels online because that would be publishing part of the novel digitally and that’s a right they’ve sold to their publisher. The publisher usually ignores this as it creates hype for the work, but authors are careful not to abuse it.
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.
Google AI search preview seems to brazenly steal text from search results. Frequently its answers are the same word for word as a one of the snippets lower on the page
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.
ssuming they purchased a legal copy that it was trained on then what’s the problem?
i never purchased a copy of harry potter i got a loaner. now what?
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.
Transformativeness is only considered by one of them. That is not enough to make a fair use.
Somebody better let YouTube content creators know that. /s
LLMs don’t create anything new. They have limited access to what they can be based on, and all assumptions made by it are based on that data. They do not learn new things or present new ideas. Only ideas that have been already done and are present in their training.
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.
this brings up the question: what is a book? what is art? if an “AI” can now churn out the next harry potter sequel and people literally can’t tell that it’s not written by JK Rowling, then what does that mean for what people value in stories? what is a story? is this a sign that we humans should figure something new out, instead of reacting according to an outdated protocol?
yes, authors made money in the past before AI. now that we have AI and most people can get satisfied by a book written by AI, what will differentiate human authors from AI? will it become a niche thing, where some people can tell the difference and they prefer human authors? or will there be some small number of exceptional authors who can produce something that is obviously different from AI?
i see this as an opportunity for artists to compete with AI, rather than say “hey! no fair! he can think and write faster than me!”
Well, poor literature has always existed, which some might not even dignify to call literature. Are writers of such things threatened by LLMs? Of course they are. Every new technology has beought with it the fear of upending somebody’s world. And to some extent, every new technology has indeed done just that.
Personally, and… this will probably be highly unpopular, I honestly don’t care who or what created a piece of art. Is it pretty? Does it satisfy my need for just the right amount of weird, funny and disturbing to stir emotions or make me go ‘heh, interesting!’? Then it really doesn’t matter where it comes from. We put way too much emphasis on the pedigree of art and not on the content. Hell, one very nice short story I read was the greentext one about humans being AI and escaping from the simulation. Wonder how many would scoff at calling art something that came out of 4chan?
Maybe this is the issue? Art is thought of as a purely human endeavour (also birds do it, and that one pufferfish that draws on the seabed, but they’re “dumb” animals so they don’t count, right? hell, there’s even a jumping spider that does some pretty rad dances). And if code in a machine can do it just as well (can it? let it - we’ll be all the better for it. can’t it? let it be then - no issue) then what would be the significance of being human?
I hope OpenAI and JK Rowling take each other down
What’s the issue against openAI?
They’re stealing a ridiculous amount of copyrighted works to use to train their model without the consent of the copyright holders.
This includes the single person operations creating art that’s being used to feed the models that will take their jobs.
OpenAI should not be allowed to train on copyrighted material without paying a licensing fee at minimum.
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Also Sam Altman is a grifter who gives people in need small amounts of monopoly money to get their biometric data
So hypothetical here. If Dreddit did launch a system that made it so users could trade Karma in for real currency or some alternative, does that mean that all fan fictions and all other fan boy account created material would become copyright infringement as they are now making money off the original works?
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He’s not helping them. That’s my point. He’s taking advantage of them for his grift, so fuck him.
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They used to be a non profit, that immediately turned it into a for profit when their product was refined. They took a bunch of people’s effort whether it be training materials or training Monkeys using the product and then slapped a huge price tag on it.
I didn’t know they were a non profit. I’m good as long as they keep the current model. Release older models free to use while charging for extra or latest features
Sticky this comment
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.
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.
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
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.
Because in practical terms, writers and artists’ livelihoods are being threatened by AIs who were trained on their work without their consent or compensation. Ultimately the only valid justification for copyright is to enable the career of professional creators who contribute to our culture. We knew how ideas and communication worked when copyright was first created. That is why it’s a limited time protection, a compromise.
All the philosophical arguments about the nature of ideas and learning, and how much a machine may be like a person don’t change that if anyone dedicates years of their efforts to develop their skills only to be undercut by an AI who was trained on their own works, is an incredibly shitty position to be in.
Because in practical terms, writers and artists’ livelihoods are being threatened by AIs who were trained on their work without their consent or compensation.
So, why shouldn’t an author be able to sue another author for reading their book? Or do you think they should be able to sue?
AI is not a person. If you replace it with a person in an analogy, that’s a whole different discussion.
We actually do restrict how tools can engage with artworks all the time. You know, “don’t take pictures”.
All the philosophical arguments about the nature of ideas and learning, and how much a machine may be like a person don’t change that if anyone dedicates years of their efforts to develop their skills only to be undercut by an AI who was trained on their own works, is an incredibly shitty position to be in.
So should Dread Zeplin be hauled off to jail because they created derivative works without permission? I mean maybe they should, but not for copyright imo. How about the fan Star Wars movies getting their balls sued off by Disney?
writers and artists’ livelihoods are being threatened by AIs who were trained on their work without their consent or compensation
Guess what? The actual copyright owners of the world; those who own tens of thousands or millions of copyrighted works, will be the precise individuals paying for and developing that kind of automation, and in the current legal interpretation of copyright, its their property to do so with. This outrage masturbation the internet is engaged in ignores the current reality of copyright, that its not small makers and artists benefiting from it but billion dollar multinational corporations benefiting from it.
This is a philosophical argument and an important one: Should we legally constrain the flow and use of ideas because an individuals right to extract profit from an idea.
I don’t think so.
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You are conditioning the rights of artists making derivative works to the rights of systems being used to take advantage of those artists without consent or compensation. Not only those are two different situations but also supporting the latter doesn’t mean supporting the former.
Like I said somewhere in this discussion, AI are not people. People have rights that tools do not. If you want to argue in favor of parody and fan artists, do that. If you want to speak out again how the current state of copyright makes it so corporations rather than the actual artists gets the rights and profit over the works they create, do that. Leaping in defense of AI is not it.
I’m challenging the legal precedent of the barrier of creating derivative works in any media, including AI.
Dread Zeppelin could have been sued. They were just lucky to be liked by Robert Plant.
As for the Star Wars fan movie, the copyright claim about the music was dropped because it was frivolous. The video creator made a deal with Lucasfilm to use Star Wars copyrighted material, he didn’t just go yolo.
That’s actually not what copyright is for. Copyright was made to enhance the public culture by promoting the creation of art.
If these record label types impede public culture then they are antithetical to copyright
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I thought everyone knows that OpenAI has the same access to any books, knowledge that human beings have.
Yes, but it’s what it is doing with it that is the murky grey area. Anyone can read a book, but you can’t use those books for your own commercial stuff. Rowling and other writers are making the case their works are being used in an inappropriate way commercially. Whether they have a case iunno ianal but I could see the argument at least.
Harry potter uses so many tropes and inspiration from other works that came before. How is that different? wizards of the coast should sue her into the ground.
Because its not literally using the same stuff, you can be inspired by something ala Starcraft from Warhammer 40k, but you can’t use literally the same things. Also you can’t copyright as far as I understand it, broad subject matter. So no one can just copyright “wizard” but can copyright “Harry Potter the Wizard”. You also can tell the OpenAI company knows it may be doing something wrong because their latest leak includes passages on how to hide the fact the LLMs trained on copyrighted materials.
I would hide stuff too. Copyright laws are out of control. That doesn’t mean they did something wrong. Its CYA.
copyrights are for reproducing and selling others work not ingesting them. If they found it online it should be legal to ingest it. If they bought the works they should also be legally able to train off it
No it does matter where they got the materials. If they illegally downloaded a copy off a website “just cause its on the internet” its still against the law.
Shouldn’t be illegal. Give them a letter how angry they are and call it a day
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 they will decide it is wrong, so it doesn’t matter. Power is in money and those with the copyrights have the money.
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.
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
Most books are actually locked behind paywalls and not free to use? Or maybe I don’t understand what you meant?
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.
Good news, they already do! Artists can license their work under a permissive license like the Creative Commons CC0 license. If not specified, rights are reserved to the creator.
I know, but one of the biggest conflicts between artists and AI developers is that they didn’t seek a license to use them for training. They just did it. So even if the end result is not an exact reproduction, it still relied on unauthorized use.
Unfortunately AI training sets don’t tend to respect those licenses. Since it’s near impossible to prove they used it without permission they’re SoL
Just like publicly displayed art doesn’t provide a permission to copy it and use it in other unspecified purposes
But it kinda does. If I see a van Gogh painting, I can be inspired to make a painting in the same style.
When “ai” “learns” from an image, it doesn’t copy the image or even parts of the image directly. It learns the patterns involved instead, over many pictures. Then it uses those patterns to make new images.
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?
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
One of the first things I ever did with ChatGPT was ask it to write some Harry Potter fan fiction. It wrote a short story about Ron and Harry getting into trouble. I never said the word McGonagal and yet she appeared in the story.
So yeah, case closed. They are full of shit.
There is enough non-copywrited Harry Potter fan fiction out there that it would not need to be trained on the actual books to know all the characters. While I agree they are full of shit, your anecdote proves nothing.
While I agree they are full of shit, your anecdote proves nothing.
Why? Because you say so?
He brings up a valid point, it seems transformative.
The sentence they wrote right before your quoted sentence answers your braindead question.
I was questioning how much non- copyrightable material was available to train an AI on.
It’s not a brain dead question just because you may disagree with it.
Which he literally answers in the comment you questioned him on. You asked him something after he explained what you then asked.
That’s braindead, and not because I “disagree” with your question, whatever that means.
I wasn’t agreeing with him and I was asking him to back up what he said. But you carry on, Internet Warrior.
The anecdote proves nothing because the model could potentially have known of the McGonagal character without ever being trained on the books, since that character appears in a lot of fan fiction. So their point is invalid and their anecdote proves nothing.
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.
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.
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?
They are allegedly learning from copyrighted material, there is no actual proof that they have been trained on the actual material, or just snippets that have been published online. And it would be illegal for them to be trained on full copyrighted materials, because it is protected by laws that prevent that.
If it’s infringing on JK Rowling’s work, then it’s fine
So that explains the “problematic” responses.
Vanilla Ice had it right all along. Nobody gives a shit about copyright until big money is involved.
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.
ChatGPT has a ton of extra query qualifiers added behind the scenes to ensure that specific outputs can’t happen
Well of course it was. It has to learn somehow.
