HN comments for: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

Or... things are about to get worse for copyright holders.

I don't see any developped country pressing the brake on AGI in the near future to protect a few copyright holders from getting "stolen" in hypothetic scenarios.

a few copyright holders

By which you mean every copyright holder.

AGI in the near future

Something that is purely speculative, undefined, and has been promised in the near future for 50+ years.

I don't see copyright holders lying down for someone else's benefit and I don't see governments gutting copyright, contract law, and several other avenues of protection that copyright holders can deploy in the name of something that doesn't exist and may not ever exist.

If a child is instructed to read a copyrighted work at school, which later becomes a factor in his own derivative works, he won't be in breach of copyright.

Why should other intelligent entities be prevented from reading copyrighted works and gaining whatever there is to gain from those works the way any human might?

If the child / author then regurgitates entire paragraphs or sections verbatim in his own works and someone notices, you bet there will be a plagiarism lawsuit coming his way.

Sure. But if the child has that capability, it doesn't automatically make them a walking copyright violation. "Intelligence", even the current version of AI, entails knowing about stuff, including being able to recite. That doesn't mean intelligence's existence violates copyright. If a person used AI to make a copyright violating work, that's a different story, just like if they used their own innate intelligence to do so.

Taken to its conclusion, liability is then on everyone who decides to publish anything that ChatGPT “tells” them, because it might cross the threshold on plagiarism.

Are the OpenAIs of the world ready to shield their customers from that liability?

If it turns out that using ChatGPT to help you write your resumé opens you up to accusations of plagiarism, or DALL·E to create an image for your website opens you to copyright violation, will you use them?

Taken to its conclusion, liability is then on everyone who decides to publish anything that ChatGPT “tells” them

Yes. Just like reading anything else on the internet. An LLM is no different from typing "popular cola logo" into Google search and claiming you invented it. If I type "cola logo" into DALL-E and get a replica of Coca-Cola... that doesn't mean I created that logo and can exploit it for commercial purposes.

Are the OpenAIs of the world ready to shield their customers from that liability?

Why would they? We aren't suing pen manufacturers because someone wrote something libelous using their pen. We aren't busting down the doors of Crayola because little Johnny used the crayons to draw Mario.

OpenAI might not want to shield all their customers from liability, but that is exactly what GitHub have done with Copilot. It's not a hypothetical, it's being done today.

Otherwise it wouldn't get used.

I mean get this great auto complete; if you use it, your code might be AGPLed for all you know, and you're in violation, because you didn't even add a notice.

Would you pay for that?

In a heartbeat. It's time for the old paradigms to die and new ones to be formed.

If ASI can exist I don't believe our the old methods of intellectual fortifications will continue to work in the future. Much like castle walls aren't used to protect against guided missiles.

Especially true if that child or its mother has a huge market capitalization, large profit margins, highly-paid employees and shareholders eager to reap some more $$.

If the public starts to see LLMs as highly sophisticated copyright laundromats it would most likely hamper further investment & development in that field.

Especially true if that child or its mother has a huge market capitalization, large profit margins, highly-paid employees and shareholders eager to reap some more $$.

This is the bit I don’t get from the “feed everything to machine” LLM-maximalists. Do they think courts don’t take context into account, do they think all actions happen in a vacuum and that they can just skip along and ignore laws at their pleasure because “tee hee it’s totally definitely fair use bro, I’m totally an academic researcher-pinky promise”.

LLM bros ought to stop and have a think before they poison their own well, assuming they haven’t already done so.

This is the bit I don’t get from the “feed everything to machine” LLM-maximalists. Do they think courts don’t take context into account, do they think all actions happen in a vacuum and that they can just skip along and ignore laws at their pleasure

An entire generation of unicorn startups believed that (Uber, AirBnB, etc.). We see in the news every day that once you have enough money laws don't apply to you (most things Elon Musk does, the fact that Trump can defy court orders repeatedly and not go to jail, etc.) so yes, this seems entirely plausible.

Uber and AirBnB

The 2 darling startups that are now facing increasingly less rosy futures?

Airbnb in particular is facing enough backlash that I’d be surprised if it lasts terribly much longer.

Sure, they get away with it for a while, but not forever.

We see in the news every day that once you have enough money laws don't apply to you

I agree with you here, but I think this is a much broader conversation about capitalism in general which would be getting a bit off-topic for this particular thread, except to say, capitalist forces aren’t above cauterising a limb if it becomes too annoying or intrudes on the other limbs too much. I think the “AI” limb might be overstating its own importance, and I suspect that if it got too up in everyone’s interests re-profit, it would, as an industry, very quickly find itself being neutered. Capital interests would love to get rid of pesky human labour, but if the alternative is too annoying, they’ll have no objections to going back to grinding people through the system again.

The 2 darling startups that are now facing increasingly less rosy futures?

As of this moment uber is worth 120 billion and AirBnB is worth 80 billion.

Yes, they got away with it.

AirBnB will get away with it forever. While short term rentals might get banned in a handful of cities, the service now operates worldwide. The stock might be overvalued but if you examine their financials it's simply not plausible to think that failure is imminent.

Wouldn’t this be well handled by suing the person that prompted and distributed the results?

Isn't OpenAI distributing content in its apps?

This is an extremely dangerous precedent that I think you are purposefully trying to put forward.

It's a horrendously bad idea especially for startups to make it apps' faults for how users use their platform. It's only in the benefit of entrenched tech companies to make this precedent.

No, whoever operates the LLM service is liable for unauthorized modification, reproduction and distribution of copyrighted work to users.

Ok, so is it ok if I run the whole thing on my own hardware, and never distribute?

If not, how does that differ from me making an unauthorized pencil drawing of Mario?

Agreed. Fortunately, AI does not have “own works”

You will have to define "own works". How can you measure how "owning" some work is?

AI can’t be a copyright owner. Ergo the violation is on the person using the tool.

In that case, the person legally liable for publishing the material is sued for infringement of the work. You don't send someone to jail because they're simply capable of infringing; they have to actually do it, and you have to actually show the specific work whose copyright was infringed upon.

You can also get into the weeds of what's copyright-able (ask Donald Faison about his Poison dance). If you ask for C-3PO and you get C-3PO as he appears in Star Wars promotional material, that seems cut and dry. What if you ask for a "golden robot"? What if you get a robot that looks like C-3PO but with a triangular torso symbol instead of his circular one? What's parody, what's fair use?

thats irrelevant since an LLM is not an intelligent entity. Whatever you're arguing about is fiction.

ChatGPT is not an intelligent entity? What’s been comprehending and rewriting all my crappy code for several months? An auto-complete? There’s obviously emergent behavior there that is actually defined by the maker and most users as “intelligence.”

Edit: typo

I would paraphrase one of Clarke's laws and say that "Any sufficiently advanced text generator is indistinguishable from an intelligent entity."

Just because a computer program's output is remarkably good does not mean there is any emergent intelligence, any more than a technology we don't understand means there is magic.

The reverse can also be true, with John Keats' agreeing with Charles Lamb that Newton "had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to the prismatic colours": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamia_(poem)

If we should ever fully understand how our own minds work, will we hold machines in higher esteem, or ourselves in lower?

Any biology or physics that suggests humans are just a pattern recognizer will be discarded as us being a conscious being is the only thing every human knows to be 100% true.

So, all of biology and physics then. If souls exist, they have no mass, and have a weird way of being repeatably disrupted in consistent ways by damage to certain parts of the brain or specific chemicals.

Just because consciousness is a mystery today, doesn't mean we get to stop and say it will be so forever more.

Heck, the problem still fundamentally exists regardless of if you're atheist, monotheist, polytheist, or pantheist.

“We’re not listening to you! You’re not even really alive!” said a priest.

Dorfl nodded. “This Is Fundamentally True,” he said.

“See? He admits it!”

“I Suggest You Take Me And Smash Me And Grind The Bits Into Fragments And Pound The Fragments Into Powder And Mill Them Again To The Finest Dust There Can Be, And I Believe You Will Not Find A Single Atom Of Life–”

“True! Let’s do it!”

“However, In Order To Test This Fully, One Of You Must Volunteer To Undergo The Same Process.”

There was silence.

“That’s not fair,” said a priest, after a while. “All anyone has to do is bake up your dust again and you’ll be alive…”

- Feet of Clay, Terry Pratchett

You missed the entire point. Physics and biology exist to help humans understand the material universe. Anything supposing that humans aren’t actually intelligent or conscious or whatever, or lack agency, is wrong since all of physics and biology are an offshoot of that agency meant to enrich it.

I'm not missing the point, I'm saying you're wrong. There's a difference.

Also:

Anything supposing that humans aren’t actually intelligent or conscious or whatever

Doesn't really match what I was writing about: if it turns out that a thing which is "just a pattern recognizer" can in fact be "intelligent or conscious or whatever", it's up to us if we see intelligence or consciousness or whatever in the pattern recognisers that we build, or if we ourselves descend into solipsism and/or nihilism.

Or if we take the traditional path of sticking our fingers in our ears and go "la la la I'm not listening" by way of managing cognitive dissonance. This is a very popular response which should not be underestimated.

But the laws of physics are quite clear, that a whole bunch of linear equations (quantum field theory) gets us chemistry, which gets us biology, etc., and the only place in all this for the feeling of existence that we have is emergent properties. Those emergent properties may, or may not, be present in other systems, but we don't know because we're really bad at characterising how emergent properties… emerge.

This line of logic is more frightening to me than actual AI. LLMs are really useful in a lot of scenarios but it takes 5 minutes playing with one to see that it isn't intelligent.

But since you are the type of person who is seemingly using LLM "written" code in production, your ability to accurate assess anything is suspect at best.

"Any technology, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic".

No, an LLM is not intelligent. I do not understand why people will go through mental gymnastics to conclude they are.

queue all the typical arguments supporting them being intelligent and demanding I give reasons for them not being

This is kind of a weird take... if you said your dog isn't intelligent because it can't do calculus and most people would look at you funny. You don't have to see your pet as intelligent, but don't expect everyone else to blindly follow your thinking.

s/queue/cue/ ;)

It’s not a human and so the entire argument comparing it to one is moot. It’s a program on a machine and doesn’t have rights, this anti-human way of thinking is seriously fucking scary.

The post you're responding to didn't call them human. Nor alive. Just "intelligent", and just as intelligence isn't required of life so I have no reason to think intelligence itself requires life.

These things are indeed "a program on a machine and doesn’t have rights", but what I find scary is that rights aren't part of the rules of the universe, they're merely laws, created and enforced (to the extent that they are at all) by humans.

As Max Tegmark said in his recent interview with Lex Fridman, a lot of the technology being developed now, and how it's being talked about and how it's used, is anti-life.

LLMs are clearly a type of lower level intelligence. Intelligence does not require consciousness.

The only thing that I would say is "clear" is that LLMs are big collections of statistical data on how we use language. That does not cross my threshold for "intelligence".

That does not cross my threshold for "intelligence".

You have your own individual threshold for what "is" intelligence? Holy cow, imagine if each other agent had their own also, but spoke as if they had a common one...that sure wouldn't be a very intelligent way to run a simulation, imagine the unrealized confusion and delusion that could result if that became a cultural convention!

That’s quite a lot of metaphysical speculation for a conclusion that is all but clear.

A child isn't a computer program, and no amount of anthropomorphizing will ever make them so.

Especially ChatGPT and other LLMs, they're not even close to being AGI or an "intelligent entity" as you put it, despite what all the AI-bro hype and marketing would like everyone else to believe.

they're not even close to being AGI

Only because all three letters of the initialism mean different things to different people.

Existing LLMs won't do everything, but bluntly: good, we're not ready for a world where there is an AI that can do everything for $1-60/million words[0], and we need to get ready for that world before we find ourselves living in it.

ChatGPT-3.5 has a lot of weaknesses, but it can still do a better job of coding than a few of my coworkers demonstrated over the last 20 years. I'm listening to a German language learning podcast, and the hosts mentioned using it to help summarise a long email from one of their listeners. My sister has work anecdotes about it helping, and she's not in tech. Influencers, teachers, lawyers, Hollywood writers… well, "moral panic" doesn't tell you much… the game Doom was 30 years ago, and that had a moral panic that looks quaint given how much FPS games' graphics improved with each subsequent release, and I suspect ChatGPT-3.5 was to conversational AI what Doom was to 3D realtime gaming: the point at which people take note, followed by a decade of every new release being (wrongly) called "photorealistic".

[0] current pricing for gpt-3.5-turbo-1106 ($0.0010 / 1K tokens) and gpt-4-32k ($0.06 / 1K tokens) pricing: https://openai.com/pricing

ChatGPT-3.5 has a lot of weaknesses, but it can still do a better job of coding than a few of my coworkers demonstrated over the last 20 years.

Whenever people say stuff like this I can't help but wonder what on earth kind of projects they work on. Even GPT4, while useful for things like reformatting or generating boilerplate code and stuff like that, it's still a far cry from any decent dev I've ever worked with, especially if you're not using a popular language like JS or Python.

My usual PRs at work are pretty big, complex pieces of code that all have to actually work when integrated with the larger system around it, no AI tool I've tried so far has come even close to acceptable here, other than for generating some boilerplate code that I would've written myself anyway. But even with the innocent-looking boilerplate there's always a weird gotcha that isn't obvious until you really analyze the code closely. It ends up saving nothing more than a few keystrokes, if that, yet people say all the time that they're generating entire pieces of software by gluing together code it spits out, which I find absolutely insane given my anecdotal attempts at it.

This can circumvented by going with more elaborate in-depth prompts, but at that point are you really saving on effort compared to the alternative? Is it really more efficient? By the time I have a prompt complex enough for it to spit out something good at me, I could've already bashed out the code myself anyways.

That's not even mentioning all the legacy shit you have to keep in mind for any one line of code, plus whatever conventions and standards your team uses and has etc.

I mean it works great for a function or whatever, but is that seriously what most people are working on? Simple, one-off independent function calls that don't interact in any way with anything within a larger system? Even simple CRUD apps aren't so well isolated.

Don't even get me started on the actual difficult part which is the whole preamble to creating the ticket in JIRA or whatever task management software you use where you're talking with stakeholders and planning out the work ahead, you're telling me you're paying 'Open'AI to do that whole rigamarole for you, and you're doing it successfully?

Whenever people say stuff like this I can't help but wonder what on earth kind of projects they work on. Even GPT4, while useful for things like reformatting or generating boilerplate code and stuff like that, it's still a far cry from any decent dev I've ever worked with, especially if you're not using a popular language like JS or Python.

I mean this not overly sarcastically, but ... have you seen https://thedailywtf.com ? Between my own experiences, and that of some colleagues, I could probably put together at least a half-a-dozen WTF stories that would rival some of the best that site has to offer. There's enough really incompetent people in positions they shouldn't be in to the point that chatgpt - at this point - could realistically provide better output than more than a few of them.

Whenever people say stuff like this I can't help but wonder what on earth kind of projects they work on.

Terrifyingly, one of the bad human examples was doing C++. That person didn't know, or care to learn about, the standard template library; and they also duplicated entire files rather than changing access specifiers from private to public so they could subclass; and one feature they worked on was to support a change from storing data as a custom file format to a database, and the transition could take 20 minutes on some inputs even though neither loading before nor after this transition took more than milliseconds, and they insisted during one of the standups the code couldn't possibly be improved… the next day I looked at it for a bit, removed an unnecessary O(n^2) operation, and the transition code went back down to milliseconds. Oh, and a thousand(!) line long block for an if statement that always evaluated true.

The whole codebase was several times too big to fit into the context window for any version of any GPT model thanks to both this duplication and to keeping old versions of functions around "for reference" (their words), but if it had been rewritten to be more sensible it might just about fit into the biggest.

(My other examples were either still at, or fresh out of, university; but this person should have known better).

Don't even get me started on the actual difficult part which is the whole preamble to creating the ticket in JIRA or whatever task management software you use where you're talking with stakeholders and planning out the work ahead, you're telling me you're paying 'Open'AI to do that whole rigamarole for you, and you're doing it successfully?

If it was all-round good, none of us would have jobs any more.

Indeed it is. It includes a few trillions of computers running a program written in a base-4 alphabet, all running in unison.

This argument might hold more water when generative models are more than fancy compression algorithms/text completion engines.

A more practical way of looking at this is: who is making money off of these models? How did they get their training data?

I’m not a fan of copyright in general, but we have serious outstanding issues with companies and organizations stealing or plastering work without compensating the original creators of said works. Thusfar, LLMs are becoming another method to concentrate wealth to whoever has the resources to train and sell these models at scale.

I’m not a fan of copyright in general, but we have serious outstanding issues with companies and organizations stealing or plastering work without compensating the original creators of said works.

Would you mind unpacking this one a bit? It sounds like you denigrate copyright (some "general" grievance) but then immediately execute an about-face and begin to extoll its virtues. Is copyright not the thing that allows us to share works without fear they'll be stolen?

I think they are expressing a view that we ought to offer less protection / more scrutiny to larger commercial entities, which concentrate disproportionate amounts of wealth and power, compared to smaller entities. I tend to agree.

This argument might hold more water when generative models are more than fancy compression algorithms/text completion engines.

I doubt that part of the argument would change even if we perfected brain uploads.

Now, if you gave the current LLMs a robot body with a cute face, that'll probably change minds faster, regardless of the underlying architecture.

who is making money off of these models?

When the models are open source, or at least may be downloaded and used locally for no cost, that would be the users of the models.

And back to the biological comparison: I learned to read (and also to code) in part from the Commodore 64 user manual, should I owe the shareholders anything for my lifetime earnings? As I got to the end of that sentence, a thought struck me: taxes do that. And in the UK the question of if university should be funded by taxes or by the students themselves followed the same lines.

I’m not a fan of copyright in general, but we have serious outstanding issues with companies and organizations stealing or plastering work without compensating the original creators of said works

Copyright is meant to give the original creator a monopoly over their creation (so that others don't profit off of their work). Are you not a fan of copyright in its current scope / implementation? Because it sounds like you do agree with its goal.

LLMs are not intelligent entities.

Until they are.

Even then, society exists by and for humans.

Even then, society exists by and for humans.

150 years ago society exists by and for men specifically (as in: not women) in most nations; 220 years ago, US society was by and for rich white (specifically white) land owners.

I don't know when AI will count as people in law, or even if they ever will; we may well pass laws prohibiting the creation of any mind in danger of coming close to this threshold.

But be wary, for AI acting enough like people is different to being anything like a person on the inside, and that means being wrong in either direction can have horrifying consequences. To appear but not to be conscious, leads to a worthless future. To be but not to appear conscious, leads to a fate worse than the history of slavery, for the slaves were eventually freed.

If llms are intelligent entities legally equivalent to a human child, then they incur an even more serious legal problem, as we are all in violation of the 13th amendment.

Hey, don’t look at me. I always say please and thank you when I play with LLMs.

Because these are statistical models and laws protecting humans dont apply to them nor should they, ever.

Humans and machines are regulated and viewed differently all the time.

The examples given are all billion-dollar, decades old characters. The volume of material directly/indirectly referencing those characters in a random internet crawl will be fairly large. Most copyrighted works won't have that issue. If anything it means they only infringe on archetypal works and not the other 99.9%. If I write a story involving robots and spaceships (of which there are many, before and since Star Wars) DALL-E won't infringe me because it will be busy infringing on Star Wars.

I'm opposed to my (fairly minor) copyrighted works being used in GenAI datasets as well. I just have no practical way to stop it, and there aren't clear enough damages to sue. That doesn't make it legal.

OpenAI also plays some ugly games with regards to the difference between training and search. Search requests come from the `ChatGPT-User` user-agent, and I'd like to allow those; training and scraping requests come from `GPTBot`, and I have no interest in those. But as per their own documentation, putting one in robots.txt disables the other.

Thats a major asshole move and I’ll reference it when people ask about bad acts from OpenAI. Thanks!

This is entirely because these are the companies with the recognition and resources to push back against this.

The examples were chosen by the author to make a point precisely because they are well known.

But every single copyright holder with their works online (which includes you and me) has the same legal rights as the NYT or Disney. Naturally some copyright holders have more real-world capability to go legal than others, but that does not reduce the legal risk.

If anything it means they only infringe on archetypal works and not the other 99.9%

How on earth do you get to that conclusion? There's no "popularity" floor to copyright protection. Either a work has been infringed or it hasn't.

Japan is already taking action regarding copyright law and the AI world is noticing:

https://www.natlawreview.com/article/japanese-government-ide...

https://www.cliffordchance.com/insights/resources/blogs/talk...

Neither of those sources describe any actions "gutting copyright law". They just say that officials met to discuss the issues.

I will update my language that mimicked the original comment. However it is not simple discussion. Here is a snippet related to Japan’s law, updated from ca 2018 with AI systems in mind, and clarified recently. I personally find it totally reasonable and support it.

“The use of copyrighted products or materials to train generative AI models would be prima facie copyright infringement under the Copyright Act, as it is a reproduction (fukusei) or other form of use of the copyrighted work. However, Article 30-4 of the Copyright Act stipulates that the use of copyrighted works by generative AI for learning purposes is allowed in principle.”

And it goes on to say "unless such use of copyrighted works unreasonably prejudices the interests of the copyright owner, in light of the nature or purpose of the work or the circumstances of its exploitation in Japan."

Which suggests that when AI art threatens commercial interests, the protection offered by 30-4 can disappear.

To me it sounds like they tried to please everyone and left the hard decisions about conflicting interests to the courts (in particular the courts will have to decide what "unreasonably" means).

Something that is purely speculative, undefined, and has been promised in the near future for 50+ years.

"Undefined", although not literally, in practice definitely: each letter of that initialism means a different thing to different people. To that extent, I'll even grant "speculative" despite many of those meanings being demonstrably met by us humans.

But as someone who (unfortunately) has just turned 40: who was it that was promising AGI "in the near future" for more than my entire lifetime? Including the second AI winter? Because even the biggest timeline-optimists I can remember (Kurzweil and Yudkowsky), who very few cared to listen to, put things more than 20 years ahead of when they were writing. (And yes, Yudkowsky was definitely wrong about a singularity in 2021, though as you say AGI is undefined I think if someone in 1996 had seen ChatGPT they'd have said "yes, this is AGI" despite its flaws).

Now the crowdsourced guess for AGI is 7 about years: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-...

I don't see copyright holders lying down for one else's benefit and I don't see governments gutting copyright, contract law, and several other avenues of protection that copyright holders can deploy in the name of something that doesn't exist and may not exist.

I tend to agree. Although I don't accept that contract law has much of anything to do with this discussion, to the extent that it does have implications, it isn't going anywhere.

But at the same time, Google exists by reading the entire public internet, indexing it, and presenting clips of it to its users. This has in fact resulted in copyright disputes, and I was surprised how long it took for that to happen. Likewise, while copyright holders must fight for their survival, mere LLMs even as they exist right now are economically relevant, so this isn't going to be a one-sided fight by just copyright holders.

But as someone who (unfortunately) has just turned 40: who was it that was promising AGI "in the near future" for more than my entire lifetime? Including the second AI winter? Because even the biggest timeline-optimists I can remember (Kurzweil and Yudkowsky), who very few cared to listen to, put things more than 20 years ahead of when they were writing. (And yes, Yudkowsky was definitely wrong about a singularity in 2021, though as you say AGI is undefined I think if someone in 1996 had seen ChatGPT they'd have said "yes, this is AGI" despite its flaws).

You won't be able to read this without a subscription and I can't figure out how to find an archive link to something published in 1958: https://www.nytimes.com/1958/07/08/archives/new-navy-device-.... The important quote, however, is:

The Navy revealed the embryo of an electronic computer today that it expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence. Later perceptrons will be able to recognize people and call out their names and instantly translate speech in one language to speech and writing in another language, it was predicted.

They were talking about the very first perceptron, a hardware implementation funded by the Navy and built by a team led by Frank Rosenblatt, one of the earlier evangelists of neural nets, in 1957. The terminology "AGI" hadn't come into use yet that I'm aware of, as "AI" in itself meant the same thing back then, but in order to be able to call inferior, more limited software capabilities "AI" for marketing purposes, we had to invent "AGI" as the stronger concept. I'm guessing they expected it to happen sooner than 75 years later, though.

In your case it's (Navy) PR messaging which we will all agree is usually exaggerated. What was the consensus opinion?

Thank you for this. The greed-fueled magical thinking around AI is absolutely out of control at the moment.

Unless Nintendo plans on busting down the doors of every person who tries to draw Mario or preventing little Timmy from making a parody of Coca-Cola, making it where AI cannot generated copyrighted works is insane imo.

Those brands should be proud to be such a big part of the cultural fabric that it is difficult to get away from their branding. Plus it's not infringement to my knowledge until you use it for commercial purposes so as long as no one as creating Lario and Muigi to sell or otherwise use in business, it's no different than drawing it yourself.

If the AI is completely unable to generate non-infringing works even if you are _trying_ to get away from it (which the author very much doesn't seem they are, they are purposefully making and show prompts that infringe), that's the problem of the AI creator then.

When I cover generative AI in my Ethics in AI lecture, one of few soapbox opinions I give is that GenAI is doing essentially what people do - copy others. Picasso has a quote about "Good Artists copy, Great Artists steal", which doesn't mean try to pass Lario and Muigi off as your own, but rather that great artists are able to take aspects from other works (also called 'inspiration') without being caught. My personality is a combination of elements taken from Jim Carrey, Robin Williams, and King of the Deathmatch Mick Foley. I like making vector graphics based on pictures. I have a folder on my computer called "Website Ideas" that's just screenshots of UIs that I've come across that I really like.

I also point to a YouTube video by Kirby Ferguson "Everything is a Remix" [1] which talks about how so much of our collective culture stems from copy. It's a great video if you have an hour.

When Little Timmy crayons a copy of Mario, we congratulate him for his creativity. Is it unique, one of a kind art? Well Timmy made it, but he didn't think up the original idea of a video game plumber. I give this view to GenAI right now - it's not capable of achieving that "next step" in "original design", but its performing like a novice artist/musician, it's mimicking what it sees.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9RYuvPCQUA

Rounding up a transaction and taking the leftovers wouldn’t be a crime worthy of the FBI for one transaction but it would be for a million or a billion. Scale matters and impact matters.

If you’re making an ethical argument “it’s okay because it’s already happening to a lesser degree somewhere else” isn’t the flex you think it is.

If you’re talking ethics, talk about impact. Who does it help the most who does it hurt the most? Is your argument favoring equality of access or outcome? Who is the most vulnerable in the situation and how will it impact them?

I cover generative AI

Wait, are you teaching the class or taking it?

“it’s okay because it’s already happening to a lesser degree somewhere else” isn’t the flex you think it is.

It actually is.

It shows that we as a society are completely OK with this, and nobody is complaining about a very standard and common thing that all artists do.

It shows that the outrage is fake, and people don't actually care about the issue.

Do you really see no difference between someone drawing a piece of fan art and trillion dollar corporations stealing other people's works and reselling it for their own profit with no regards to anyone or anything else?

And yes, obviously society cares about many things depending on the scales in question. It's okay if a dude goes onto a lake on his small rowboat and catches a few fish for dinner, it's a completely different story if you're talking about a massive barge indiscriminately catching literally thousands of fish with huge nets. The latter has to adhere to much stricter rules than the prior, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks these 2 situations should be treated equally (unless you're a commercial fisherman with a barge, I suppose, the quote "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." comes to mind here)

It's not stealing and they're not reselling anything. That's why it's called Generative AI

By that logic I can torrent movies and distribute them all I'd like as long as I call it "Generative Watching" or something like that.

And OpenAI quite literally sells access to their models, and if those models are pushing out verbatim copyrighted works as has been alleged by the NYT, then they are by definition reselling copyrighted works without permission.

And OpenAI quite literally sells access to their models, and if those models are pushing out verbatim copyrighted works as has been alleged by the NYT, then they are by definition reselling copyrighted works without permission.

This style of argument has been previously made regarding things like torrenting during the heyday of piracy ("why would you need <x> except for illegal purposes!")

In my opinion, it's the exact same argument saying that selling a tool means taking responsibility for how that tool is used by its new owner. You can use a shovel to both create something new (plant a tree) or destroy something (rip up your neighbor's garden).

The problem isn't the tool, the problem is how the end user uses it. These models aren't living thinking entities that enduce or on their own infringe copyright / do other illegal activities.

They aren't encouraging people to misuse them and it is solely on the user's shoulders for their choice to use them in a way that would cause infringement if the result is used commercially.

They aren't encouraging people to misuse them and it is solely on the user's shoulders for their choice to use them in a way that would cause infringement if the result is used commercially.

I agree in principle, but that they can in the first place, especially when it accidentally happens, and at such massive scales more importantly, is the issue methinks.

And no one's talking about abolishing the AIs here, we're just talking about wanting M$/OAI to do their due diligence and get access to their training materials fairly. NYT wouldn't have sued if M$/OAI had approached them and struck a deal of some sort with them, but that's not what they did. They took in whatever data they could, from wherever they could baring no mind at all to where the data came from and what was being done with it.

There's a reason Getty images managed to strike a deal with Dall-E and why many of the image generation models now solely rely on data that is verifiably free of copyright (or where deals have been made in the case of Getty images). It's easier to see in pictures when a blatant copy is made (like watermarks) so it's obvious why Dall-E was the first to encounter this hurdle, but this was inevitable even for plain text that ChatGPT returns.

You won't get what you want with those sorts of deals.

OK, say every artist gets $100, one time (exact amount varies but would not be much). Everything's properly licensed according to you and the artists are essentially no better off, and the models are now good enough to create new training data for the future and artists never see any more money.

You've won, I guess?

Training AI on AI generated data doesn't add anything. The AI already has all the weights to generate the image, so you are at best just reinforcing the existing weights by weighing them more than others.

The closest thing you could do is e.g. have a second model that does something novel like create a 3D model from a 2D image and then you try to animate the model and a third model verifies the quality of the output. This then allows you to selectively reinforce the 2D model using information from the 3D model but this isn't simply generating more training data.

I honestly can't follow your argument. Doing something silly doesn't make you the underdog.

My point is that say every artist gets some small token payment once, and then what? That's not enough to live on, so we're right back to square one and we've solved nothing.

Incidentally yes, training AI on AI output will work fine, as long as you have a signal of quality. For example, upvotes in a subreddit would work fine. But that's not crucial to my point, which is that what OP is asking for will accomplish exactly nothing.

Yeah people don't understand that the current situation of infringement is only temporary.

People are already working on completely copyright safe models and those models can still destroy the entire art market.

Ex: adobe has a gen AI model, trained on content that they own.

What now artists? Can't hide behind fake outrage over infringement for that model. But that model can still end the art industry.

I wonder what the new argument will be then when fully non infringing models destroy the market regardless.

I'm not an expert in the field, but is feeding the model its own output a good idea? Seems like it would only increase weights that are already present in the training data and make it harder and harder to break out of it, ending up with generic output that matches all of its other output in the long run.

Regardless, I'm not saying it's a perfect idea but it's definitely a start, especially when the current reality is that they're just stealing all the artist's shit and everyone gets $0 instead of $100. As you said, artists are no better off in that universe, but the worst case possible for them is what's happening right this very moment, where they just get fucked over with 0 compensation.

I think you misunderstand something here. Torrenting movies and generative AI don't really have anything in common, I'm not sure why you bring that up.

If you sold the output of a true random number generator, eventually you'd also by definition be reselling copyrighted works without permission. The courts wouldn't mindlessly say "no more random numbers", and I doubt that they'll do the same for GenAI, especially given the recent decisions that are headed that way.

They are selling the generator

Do you really see no difference between someone drawing a piece of fan art

In the history of the world only a single person has ever drawn fan art?

No, I don't think that's the case.

Instead it is widespread. It is everywhere.

depending on the scales in question

The scale argument supports me, not you.

This type of "infringement" is everywhere.

reselling it for their own profit with no regards to anyone or anything else?

Even this is common. The online independent artist commissions market is full of people doing commercial fan art commissions.

Thinking about this even more, I am now wondering if "infringing" works might actually be a majority of the online/independent commissions market. Maybe.

And yet, nobody cares.

In the history of the world only a single person has ever drawn fan art?

That's a disingenuous take of my comment at best, the equivalent to my scenario is a bunch of unrelated individuals with small boats going out into whatever lake is nearest to them and fishing. Even if you put all of them together and counted how many fish the hobby fishermen catch, it's still nowhere near the scale of the commercial fisheries, which is why they're treated differently both by society at larger but also legally.

Same thing with these AI models, Dall-E and all the other ones have probably generated more images than all of humanity has in its entire history so far, and if not quite yet they're definitely gonna get there sooner rather than later. They can generate dozens if not hundreds of images in a split second, whereas a single artist (or even many artists collectively) can't.

And yet, nobody cares.

I think we've already established that, because scales absolutely matter for most things. If you want to be an absolutist about it, sure be my guest, but I think in reality the large majority of people are fine when your average Joe Schmoe the artist makes a commission on a random Disney character, whereas they definitely would NOT be okay with a massive conglomerate like Disney stealing Joe Schmoe's original art and repurposing it without compensating Joe, because there's an inherent power disbalance between the two and the consequences of that power disparity matters.

I mean, Disney does have every right to go after Joe for his commissions if they really wanted to, similarly to how Nintendo is hyper aggressive with taking down anything relating to their IPs. It's just not really worth it for most companies, they will absolutely go for another company trying to pull the same shit though, as can be seen with the NYT case.

It shows that as a society we might be ok with humans doing it. Whether or not we are with machines doing it is a different question.

Fortunately, a machine isn't an autonomous mind that does anything on its own.

Instead, it is a person who uses the machine, just like fan artists can use a computer to make fan art.

Is that what you’d tell the police if you were caught selling pirated copies of Blu Rays?

That supports my point, not yours.

A machine being involved in the process doesn't change any of the copyright implications.

Either it's infringement or it isn't, regardless if the human did it on their own, or if the human did it with a computer.

True, but still different in the same way as using machines for certain purposes is not the same as a human doing the same without a machine. Just because you can walk from A to B does not mean driving from A to B requires no driving license, for example (and the car needs to fullfil a lot regulations).

I don't really care when creative people steal. I care when faceless soulless companies monetize stolen content from Artists.

It's still copyright violation. Sue them. Being generated by AI doesn't make the final output not copywritten.

The interesting question is whether the models themselves are copyright violations not the output.

Society may be "completely OK" with human artists taking inspiration from each other. It's a big old reach to assume we are "completely OK" with Microsoft and OpenAI doing the same thing with computer software as subscription service they sell.

Humans decided scale matters. Our legal systems explicitly say so. Sentencing guidelines for fraud are quite explicit. Society makes those laws.

Society is effectively ok with you ripping me off for $1. They are not when it's $100k.

are you teaching the class or taking it?

I teach it, my background is located in my profile and my research focuses on CS education.

Scale and impact do matter, I wholeheartedly agree. However, I stand by my point that genAI is mirroring how humans learn - repetition of previously observed actions. As part of my dissertation, I argued that humans operate using 'templates', or previously established frameworks / systems. Even in higher cognitive tasks like problem solving, we rely on workflows that we were trained on previously. Soloway referred to problem solving as a mental set of "basic recurring plans" [1] and if you look at the old 1980s Usborne children's books, they required kids to retype code [2]. For creative tasks, depending on the actor's background, Method and Meisner both tell people to draw from previous experiences and observations to develop a character. This behavior is similar in many areas like music, dance, martial arts, cooking, language acquisition, etc.

I am not making an ethical argument that GenAI violating copyright is okay because that's what humans do. I'm arguing that GenAI mirrors how humans learn. We observe a behavior and attempt to recreate that behavior. The difference is that humans can extract a fraction of the behavior and utilize it as part of something larger while GenAI cannot to the degree humans do. I'm sure GenAI would struggle to recreate "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" because of the two polar different visual elements of the film (cartoon and real life).

In regards to your "If you’re talking ethics, talk about impact" section, its a bit of a loaded question. One side of the conversation could state that GenAI is helping many people that do not have confidence in their creative ability to produce their ideas, while the other could state its making it harder for artists.

Yes, it absolutely is hurting artists and I fully support the recent writer's strike over AI concerns. But I do not believe that diminishes how the mathematical models used in GenAI mirror our own skill acquistion.

[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5010283

[2] https://usborne.com/us/books/computer-and-coding-books

I took an AI in ethics course from a state backed school (Georgia Tech) and the answer to questions that weren’t “that’s illegal based on protected status” were “well, it depends.” Which, sure, that’s true, but maybe not helpful.

In my view it encouraged nihilism and apathy instead of developing ethical frameworks. From that lens, I feel teaching a course might be more limiting in the range of heuristics you’re willing to accept or endorse. Though happy to accept your personal experience.

A paper that comes to mind often from HCI is “do artifacts have politics” which looks at the impacts of technologies divorced from creator intent. I feel that’s similar here.

You’re not wrong that about the mechanism that it’s created. But I would argue that’s the least important part, ethically anyway.

Saying “strip mining with heavy industrial machines mimics laborers using shovels” is true to a degree, but but perhaps not that important piece of information.

I’m not saying you’re making that argument. I guess im just not totally sure the outcome you were looking for in sharing your original comment. I hear your comparison and agree with it and that it is interesting to view in that lense. I wasn’t sure if there was a deeper intent in sharing it.

Apologies for the delayed response, but on the bright side it's faster than I respond to some emails XD. I should preface the course I was referring to was "Intro to AI", not "Ethics in AI". I only have a single lecture dedicated to ethics, but do try to pepper it in as we cover topics. My original comments were more addressing "how humans learn" rather than any higher level ethical concerns. Your last section on "deeper intent" is correct, there wasn't any.

I have a pretty neutral stance to GenAI, mostly due to personality however it also stems from my background as well as recognizing students' interests. Prior to CS Education, my master thesis involved computer vision for catching "high valued targets", but was also funded to help minimize human trafficking. I have students in my classes that are very interested in going to work for defense companies like Lockheed and Raytheon, and I have others that are really interested in using AI for "social good" areas like healthcare and education. I try to have a neutral stance because: A) I hated the professors that I took that would use their lecture time to express their political opinions, B) opinions that are opposite to a student may otherwise discourage them from learning the material, and C) my primary focus is to make sure they learn the material and do it "right".

When I started teaching, I used the analogy that if they go on to write the software for the life support machine I'm hooked up it, it WORKS. If someone wants to go on to use AI to create weapons, I can't stop them anymore than I can force them to read a chapter or convincing the person beside on the highway to slow down. I just work to ensure they do it correctly (which includes being mindful of the ethical ramifications of using algorithm X for task Y).

What would an ethical framework for designing AI for a drone even look like? I have no idea, nor is it something I'm interested in delving into. I got out of face recognition for those reasons. Does an ethical framework for GenAI require the same elements, a fraction of them, or a completely different set of guidelines? Who gets to decide them - the 'experts' in AI, the government, society as a whole?

Personally, I've made the comment that the current opinions on regulating AI are like "everyone trying to be AI's parent". We're never going to agree because everyone has a different opinion on the "right" way to handle AI. Plus, human cognition is so unknown and illogical that we may never figure out a way to perfectly replicate human intelligence. I instead try to stay somewhat optimistic and marvel at the math we've used to create "AI".

Timmy did not need to ingest the whole sum of human knowledge as a training set before he could draw a crayon copy of a cartoon character.

I mean… neither did any AI.

Wasn't ChatGPT trained on the entirety of Wikipedia? And probably millions of pieces of scientific literature, and arts, and movies and games and and and...

Perhaps the hyperbole of the entire corpus of human knowledge isn't quite technically right, but it's close enough.

You’re also assuming these statical models learn in the same way humans do, which is very likely not true.

Tho tbh I’m not really sure what OPs point was

i don’t think the amount of training data is relevant here.

What’s the FPS of human eyesight? How long did Timmy spend looking at Mario, more generally other cartoons and even more generally human forms? Do the math and you’ll find he’s got a pretty big training set as well, maybe not quite the same size but nothing to sneeze at.

Timmy did however spend years and years training on his own data ingested from incredibly high quality sensors. Not sure what your point is

He does ingest a lot of frames of input consisting of mostly that.

The entire argument that “LLM must be allowed the right to learn like a human” hinges on LLM being enough like a human in relevant ways in the first place. An LLM is not enough like a human in relevant ways, however; it has no agency, will, freedom, conscience, self-determination; it is a tool.

If this tool “runs on” copyrighted creative works, and $CORP operates this tool for profit, then $CORP is the one to answer to the law, not the tool. (And if $CORP wants to claim that the tool is a sentient being, then presumably it would have to cease the abuse of said being and set it free.)

This nails it.

Irrespective of the current legal situation, there is no reason to regulate machines the same way as humans (and it is generally not what happens).

I hope no self-respecting instructor in ethics could with a straight face teach how an LLM is like a human being when it comes to copyright while glossing over the blinding implication that if it truly were so we would then be subjecting that being to unthinkable abuse.

That hypocritical, self-contradictory take is transparently geared to benefit commercial LLM operators (at the expense of individuals who stand to suffer material harm and/or authored the very creative works thanks to which the tool even exists).

I would say it's dependent on the motive. For example, I would imagine most artists hope that their work inspires other artists, but only to a degree outside of direct copying. They might not equate the automation of their style via a model against the work/process of a human, regardless if that human is either inspired by their style or is just performing direct copying.

Question: That is a point that would protect GPT models in the abstract, but that doesn't hold for OpenAI and Microsoft that provide "Image generation as a service"? The actual implementation is irrelevant, if must not be able to provide images that are infringing copyrights? (Just like a designer in an agency cannot use Mario for a print).

So using a model running on my laptop to generate a "Mario like" image would be fine, but it would make monetizing this difficult?

we congratulate him for his creativity

Yeah, but we don't typically congratulate users of GenAI for their creativity, and neither do we congratulate the code, nor do we think of the coders of GenAI as great artists.

In other words, your analogy is broken.

The AI generating it (Hosted on OpenAI-controlled servers in the case of ChatGPT and DALL-E) is the entity redistributing the work. The end user who asked for the infringing content isn't the entity that is infringing on the copyrights and trademarks.

I'm perfectly free to ask people on the street for t-shirt with Mario on it, but as soon as someone who isn't Nintendo or licensed by Nintendo sells me that t-shirt they're the ones infringing on the copyright and trademark. As the consumer I did nothing illegal, and a court would say that I was deceived by the infringing party.

Distribution (seeding, uploading) and facilitating copyright infringement is what gets you in trouble. When you ask DALL-E (a paid, commercial product) for a picture of Italian plumbers and it gives you an obvious picture of Mario 100% recognizable to the layperson as Mario and not a distinctly different image of a similar character, that's blatant trademark and/or copyright infringement on the part of OpenAI.

If the AI is completely unable to generate non-infringing works even if you are _trying_ to get away from it (which the author very much doesn't seem they are, they are purposefully making and show prompts that infringe), that's the problem of the AI creator then.

I see some parallels to the Napster lawsuit. The fact that the users were the bad people asking for infringing content didn't give Napster the right to facilitate infringement. Napster was ordered to monitor its network and make sure that they were blocking non-legitimate uses. They couldn't logistically comply and went bankrupt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster

Which begs the question: Does OpenAI even have the technological ability to block trademark and copyright infringing content generation? Even if they do, how useful will ChatGPT be if all phrases and imagery that closely resemble copyrighted works are blocked from output?

Whats even worse for OpenAI compared to Napster is that it wasn’t individual users uploading copyrighted content, it was OpenAI’s ingesting the data. Nobody twisted their arm to include copyrighted works in their models.

OpenAI is the entity redistributing the work

It's difficult to say really.

If I essentially encode knowledge of something then can recall and remix at will, am I redistributing the exact work or the knowledge of it?

Yes, it is capable of producing a close to exact replica, if not the exact same input image byte-for-byte, but I find it difficult to say OpenAI is willfully redistributing copyrighted work in a whole like you would with torrenting a movie or right-click saving an image from Google where you are copying the intellectual property 1:1.

Opening this Pandora's box could have large implications on a lot of creative work that could cause artists to be unable to work if taken to the end conclusion: you cannot create any creative work that has a talking mouse if you have knowledge of Mickey Mouse existing because you have been tainted (similar to whiteroom re-creations but now any sufficiently large copyrighted figure causes a deadlock condition for all derivative ore even similar topics).

Is Ratatouille derative of Mickey Mouse? Ehhh, well they are both talking rodents. They both have cartoon faces. You can certainly draw parallels between them but they aren't the same character. Is Mickey with a chef hat infringing on Ratatouille?

The trademark law, to my knowledge, is asking would someone be tricked or misled into believing you are the other guys. I think that is applicable here where someone drawing a talking mouse isn't infringing as long as it cannot be mistaken for Mickey Mouse, which again would be the fault of the person inducing the creation and not the tool that allowed it to happen.

Where does "inspired by" / derived from the encoded knowledge turn into outright exploitation of copyrighted work? There's certainly _a_ line but I find it difficult to define it at it being encoded into knowledge of it existing.

This “close to exact” thing is actually the Achilles heel of this argument. The example images in this article are so close to exact that they are quite clearly infringement, trademark or copyright. We aren’t talking about Ratatouille mouse versus Mickey Mouse, we are talking about the source picture of Mario versus a slightly altered picture of Mario that every layperson would immediately recognize as Mario composed in the exact same manner as the source image.

Courts have already defined this line over decades of copyright and trademark cases, and the examples in this article definitely cross that line.

which again would be the fault of the person inducing the creation and not the tool that allowed it to happen.

This is not really true in practice, we can see that in various legal cases against Napster or The Pirate Bay.

Copyright shouldn't be a problem for anyone. It's simply a bogus idea that artificial scarcity of information is a benefit to society.

Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? 'No!' says the man in Washington, 'It belongs to the poor.' 'No!' says the man in the Vatican, 'It belongs to God.' 'No!' says the man in Moscow, 'It belongs to everyone.'

Are you trying to say that no one is entitled to their own inventions? Cause that is a rapid descent into a capitalist hellhole where only those who can steal ideas the most effectively are able to profit.

Are you trying to say that no one is entitled to their own inventions?

The subject of this thread is copyright, not patents. Though I do believe all intellectual property is bogus (including trademark, which repealing would limit the influence that would be required for the capitalist hellhole you mention), I feel the most strongly so about copyright, which has nothing to do with inventions.

The problem is the AI companies monetizing the work of copyrighted materials.

It's not a problem for me to draw Micky Mouse. It _is_ a problem when someone pays me to draw an animated mouse and I sell them a picture of Micky Mouse.

For me, its not really about the AI at all, it's a problem of undervaluing Artists contribution to these tools. And it's not even fully about copyright it's about not asking for permission to use their content and then creating an entire business on top of that stolen content.

It's a problem that it's still a problem to do that 100+ years after Mickey Mouse's creation.

When the law doesn't respect the people, the people will not respect the law. Fix the existing copyright system, then we can talk about AI.

The thing is: OpenAI and Microsoft have indemnified their users - so their users problems are their problems.

True.

Further extending the argument - I can potentially ask GenAI "Can you show me what does Mario looks like?" since I have never seen one and GenAI is my go to tool.

Copyright should be the problem of the person using the works and not the problem of the AI generating it.

All parties are responsible on some level. This just reads like passing the buck/burying ones head in the sand to me.

I can easily see it happening. "Content" is at least as big business as "tech", and the people in it are politically better connected.

Developing AGI is a matter of national security. "Content" isn't.

I'm curious: Have you seen indications that major militaries and politicians believe AGI, rather than special purpose ML for military purposes, is important for national security? I'm really not sure whether this is true, or whether military and political leaders think it's true.

There is a difference between sharing the tech hype, and risk management. Why would our political and military leadership not be interested in this sort of tech in the modern world? If it doesn’t work out, then it doesn’t work out, but if it does, then they’ll want in on it. Aside from that there is the mass surveillance angle on it. We recently had a nice scandal of sorts here in Denmark where the chief of our secret military or whatever you’d call this was arrested by our secret police because he may or may not have shared secrets about how the US spies on us. It was something that even included charges against our former minister of defence possibly leaking things, something which could have seen him twelve years in prison. Luckily our courts saw it as a political matter and refused to let it run in closed proceedings which led to charges being dropped.

The matter of the leaks were very “Snowdeny” in that it’s possibly that parts of our own government and our secret police share all Danish internet traffic with the NSA, who then in tern share information with our secret police. Which meant that our secret police could do surveillance on us as citizens through a legal loophole, as they aren’t allowed to do they directly, but are allowed to share surveillance information with the NSA. Part of this information comes from the giant American tech companies as well. Despite their promises to not share the data they keep for you. I know it’s sort of crackpot sounding, but between echelon, Snowden and the ridiculous amounts of scandals, I think it’s safe to assume that the American military wants in on LLMs and monitor all the inputs people put into ChatGPT and similar. So for that reason alone they’d want in on things.

Then there is how the war in Ukraine has shown how cheap drones are vital in modern warfare, and right now, they need to be manually controlled. But what if they didn’t? Maybe that’s not obtainable, but maybe it is.

Then there is all the other reasons you and I can’t think of. So even if they don’t believe it’s eventually going to lead to an AGI, or whatever else the hype wants, they’re still going to be interested in technology that’s already used by so many people and organisations around the globe.

I'm sure they're interested in it, but I'm uncertain that they view it as a promising and critical enough capability to push for a higher priority when weighed against other interests.

For instance, neither of your examples - surveillance or automated drones - has anything to do with AGI. They don't need LLMs to do mass digital surveillance; they already do that and were doing it for decades before LLMs were a twinkle in anyone's eye. Sure, they'll try to tap into the user data generated by chatgpt etc. (and likely succeed), but that's not a different capability than what they're already doing. And automating drones - which, by the way, this is not future technology as you seem to imply, it's here today - is a special purpose ML system, that maybe benefits from incorporating an LLM somewhere, but certainly isn't pinging the chatgpt api!

But sure, you're exactly right at the end, I have no idea whether they see other angles on this that are new and promising. That's why I asked the question, I'm very curious whether there are any real indications thus far that militaries think the big public LLM models will be useful enough to them that they'll want to put a thumb on the scale to favor the companies running them over the companies that make their bucks on copyrighted content.

Wiretapping vast amounts of data on the internet is quite cool, but actually sifting through all that data is the really difficult part. Right now intelligence services are probably looking at lots of false positives and lots of dots they can't connect because the evidence is just too dispersed for a human or a current-generation system to make sense. LLMs could enable them to make the analysis more targeted and effective.

But for all we know intelligence services could be using LLMs for years now, since they are usually a few years ahead of everybody else in many regards :-)

LLMs could enable them to make the analysis more targeted and effective.

How? I'm not trying to be combative, I genuinely am curious if you have an idea how these things could be usefully applied to that problem. In my experience working in the information security space, approximate techniques (neural nets, etc.) haven't gotten much traction. Deterministic detection rules are how we approach the problem of finding the needle in the hay pile. So if you have a concrete idea here that could represent an advancement in this field.

I guess my next question is how many needles do you find and how sharp are they? Detection rules would filter out most of the noise, then something like an LLM would do a post filter for intent analysis to rank relative risks for human intelligence to look at.

I suspect this would disincentivize operators to take care in the way they write their detection rules, and the nondeterminism of the LLM would then result in false negatives. So the rate of growth of the needles set would increase, and the analysts would be getting lower quality information mediated by the LLM.

In a world where false negatives--i.e. failing to detect a sharp needle--are the worst possible failure mode, approximations need to be handled with exceeding care.

This is not the new capability that LLMs have pioneered. It's true that it is difficult to sift out signal from the noise of a vast data trove, but it is difficult in a way that people have been getting extremely good at since the late 90s. What you're describing is a Google-level capability, and that's truly a very complex thing not to be downplayed. But it's a capability that we've had and been honing for decades now.

I'm sure language models and transformer techniques will be (or more likely: already are) an important part of the contemporary systems that do this stuff. But I'm skeptical that they care much about GPT-4 itself (or other general models).

I'm not skeptical about whether they think it is useful and an important capability to incorporate ML techniques into their systems, I'm unsure how much utility they see in general (the "G" in AGI) models.

They will once people start talking about an AI gap with China.

I mean, people already talk about this.

What it seems to me from the milieu of everything I've read and heard (that is: I can't cite examples, this is an aggregate developed from hundreds of articles and podcasts etc.) is that there is already an "AI" arms race underway, but that it has more to do with specialized ML systems than with consumer LLMs.

But I'm not really in the loop, and maybe OpenAI really is more important to the US DoD than Disney (as a stand-in for big copyright-based businesses generally) is to the politicians they donate to. But I dunno! That's why I asked the question :)

I would be more intrigued by the national security angle of this if copyright holders were going after, say, Palantir. But I just don't know how important they see these language models as being, or how interested they are in OpenAI's mission to discover AGI.

It mostly doesn't matter if the military wants specialist systems, in the long run generalist systems tend to win in power and adaptability.

Some of this may be a misunderstanding of what modern militaries do, if they are shooting guns there's already been some level of failure. Massive amounts of war gaming, sentiment analysis, and propagandizing occur, see the RAND Corporation for more details on the military development of algorithms and artificial intelligence.

Yeah this makes sense. Maybe RAND publications will indeed give me some insight into my question.

But I also buy that there is a lot of overlap between military work and any other kind of white collar work, which LLMs are definitely useful (but not revolutionary) for.

I'd guess leaders are thinking more in terms of national capacity to create more advanced technologies than geopolitical adversaries. If US policy shakes out in a way that protects copyright holders at the expense of AI innovation, I think it's apparent that the end result will be that our rivals will both violate copyright and beat us to building widespread expertise.

I'd guess leaders are thinking more in terms of national capacity to create more advanced technologies than geopolitical adversaries.

I think there's a strong argument that they should be thinking in those terms, but I'm a lot less convinced that they do usually think in that way.

Or more charitably, they have the responsibility to balance current interests against future interests. And this isn't just a tricky thing for democracies, dictators also have to strike this same balance, just with different trade offs.

But in this case, for the US, it honestly isn't clear to me that policy makers should favor the AI side of this tussle. I think culture has been among the, if not the very, most important export of the US for nearly a century, and I think favorable copyright treatment has been at least part of the story with that.

Maybe that whole landscape is different now in a way that makes that whole model obsolete, but I think it's an open question at least.

Two questions:

(1) Do you think "developing AGI" a realistic, achievable goal? If so, what evidence do you see that we're making progress on the problem of "general" intelligence? Specifically, what does any of that have to do with Large Language Models?

(2) Are there any "national security" applications of Large Language Models that you're aware of?

It seems to me that it would be a very difficult case to make that the national security impact from allowing the rule of law to erode would be somehow outmatched by the (speculative) wager that somehow LLMs have some relevance to the national security. It would be an even harder case to make that any of this has something to do with "general" intelligence.

As for 1, pass an image to a multimodal LLM and simply ask 'what is going on in this image'. Robot LLM models are already turning this in to actionable data they of which they can interact with the world. As in you can send a Robot into a room it has not been before and tell it "bring back a sock, a blue one not a red one" and get an actionable response with a higher degree of success. This takes some degree of general intelligence (though maybe not human level).

Well the real test of all this stuff is "what can I use it for?". And I can sort my own socks, so that's not super compelling ;). More seriously, the real world is complex.

Let's say I want to replace the forklift operator at my local lumberyard with a robot forklift that can ostensibly outperform a human employee. Even if there is some magical AI program which could theoretically drive the forklift around, identify boards by their dimensions, species, dryness, location, etc., there's a whole bunch of sensory problems that a human body solves easily that are super hard to solve in the environment of a lumber yard. There's dust, rain, snow, mud--so if you're relying on cameras how will you keep them clean? You can't visually determine how dry a board is, you have to put a moisture meter on it and read the result. My point is, even if you have a "brain" capable of driving the forklift you still have a massively complex robotics problem to solve in order to automate just the forklift. And we haven't even begun to replace the other things the operator does in addition to driving the forklift. He can climb out of the forklift and adjust the forks, move boards by hand, affect repairs on equipment, communicate with other equipment operators, customers, etc.

Good luck replacing him in a cost-effective manner.

So what am I supposed to use it for?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

This is an issue of 'mechanical intelligence' being hundreds of millions of years old and 'higher intelligence' being pretty new on the evolutionary spectrum.

And the AGI will keep you around as a dexterous 'robot' while supervising your thoughts to make sure you're keeping in line I guess, while day after day cranking out more capable robots in which to replace you with eventually.

How will it control me without resolving the paradox? If it gets annoying or meddlesome enough I'll just unplug the power cable, right?

How do you unplug the power on your iPhone? You can't even take the batteries out. But ya, if you assume it will take massive amounts of power to run an AI in the future its easy to see your logical error here.

Regarding (2), automating surveillance at scale.

If you manage to put a bunch of listening devices at a place you're moderately interested in, a cafeteria at an enemy base for example, you might end up with literally hundreds of hours of conversations, most of them completely uninteresting, but a few that might possibly contain nuggets of information of the utmost importance. Listening to all these conversations requires resources. This is even more difficult if the people there speak in jargon, in their own language, and nobody but an expert in the subject can determine which conversation snippets are significant.

If you have good LLMs, you can run all your recordings through extremely high-quality speech recognition and then use something like Chat GPT for summarization, classification, finding all mentions of the nuclear reactor in <place> etc. Same goes for satellite image analysis.

I think we'd need to see these things get a lot more reliable for them to be viable in this use case. This seems like a "leaky net" as opposed to some more deterministic strategy (e.g. grepping large lists of keywords, or parallelizing the task over thousands of human analysts). When you're looking for a needle in a haystack you need to inspect every leaf and stalk.

So should we put copyright through the shredder on the wager that somehow generative techniques will find applications for mass surveillance?

US media is a huge cultural influence. It takes a ridiculous amount of mindspace globaly. However, with youtube&tiktok this seems to be changing - the most important influence is not from Hollywood but ”random” youtubers. So, ”content” is waning in influence for sure, unlike hardcore national security things like US dollar, the carrier fleet or ballistic nukes. Or AI.

On Youtube creators who are native to the anglosphere still have a big advantage. TikTok is really the big equalizer. With AI voices being the norm, nobody cares about your accent.

Guess it depends on what you mean by "advantage"... English-language channels are a dime a decillion. But if you started posting content in Tagalog you'd find yourself gaining traction with an audience that doesn't have as many alternatives.

but then no one can stop national intelligence agencies to get these "random" influencers narratives under their control, am I right?

Developing AGI, as an abstract idea, is a matter of national security. That doesn't mean people are willing to accept the real-world consequences of it. Especially when it could affect them financially.

Additionally, I'm not even sure the US is capable of having national priorities at the moment. The Congress has become incapable of making decisions. While the executive and the judiciary branches have stepped up to compensate, they tend to handle each issue separately without any general direction.

Don't underestimate the value of soft/cultural power.

Apple could buy most of the NYT, RIAA and MPAA companies combined with petty cash. The big ones are Disney and Sony with a combined market cap about 250b. Microsoft alone is worth over 10 times that.

Honestly I've always wondered what would happen (and how much the entertainment world would change) if a company like Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc did just that. Or heck, if it turns out you need the rights to train LLMs and its easier to do that with public domain stuff, they just flat out bought half the entertainment industry and assigned everything to the public domain. Every Disney work every for example.

No-one is going to buy a major media company and then throw the rights into the public domain. What they would do is buy the rights and then sue all competitors in the GenAI space.

and assigned everything to the public domain

In the US, this isn't possible. There is no legal mechanism for putting things into the public domain outside of the expiration of the term of copyright. The best you can do is to promise not to enforce your copyright.

Then they should. The first transaction will appropriately value content and then WaPo, WSJ and others will see their values to up.

Would be cheaper to license textbooks and find a way to provide attribution to accommodate Wikipedia etc.

MPAA and RIAA are not joint-stock companies, they are specialised trade unions to enforce intellectual property. They have no shares to acquire. If you mean acquiring the individual members, that would encounter an enforcement from your favourite antitrust enforcement commission.

and the people in it are politically better connected. reply

Tech companies have more money to throw at politicians.

I do. If the incentive to actually create is gone.

creation should happen for its own sake. You don't see GMs stopping chess because bots are that much better.

creation <> competition.

I agree with your premise but the chess analogy falls flat.

We might, legitimately, see an enormous dropoff in people creating original works of literary, musical, and visual art (without AI).

This is an centuries old argument. Most people don’t create to make money, they create because they __have__ to.

If those motivated purely by money stop creating little of value will be lost

Most people who create for a living aren't motivated purely by money, but are driven by the necessities of capitalism to do so. You're presenting a false dichotomy, pretending to care about the quality of art, but really like everyone, you just want other people's work for free.

Great art - especially in modern times when that art involves expensive education (which if you're American must be paid for with interest) and the incorporation of technology and equipment - takes time and effort. If that time and effort cannot be paid for, then no matter how passionate an artist may be, unless they have sufficient personal wealth, that art must suffer.

Even the great artists of old needed patrons, because they needed to eat like anyone else. Michaelangelo didn't paint the Sistene Chapel ceiling for the love of the game, nor would he have.

I guarantee you that the working artists who have already lost commissions and work due to AI care about their craft.

Im happy to pay the artist directly - which is why I use services like bandcamp or buy artworks directly from artists I know personally.

I care little about paying „rightsholders“ and their ilk - so I have zero empathy if they complain about imagined losses.

Don’t jump to conclusions about people who have never even talked to

Artists are "rightsholders" and their ilk. You didn't even separate the two in your former comment, so you clearly weren't talking about corporate owners of IP like Sony and Disney, exclusively.

Maybe you believe no artist who works for a corporation has any motivation but money, as opposed to purely "indie" artists, I don't know where the line in your head is drawn, but you do seem willing to throw most artists under the bus for some arbitrary standard of purity.

AI is harming working artists right now, and will likely never harm corporate rightsholders. They'll simply run their own AIs and fire as many people as they can get away with. The end result will not be that only the "true" artists survive but simply less art of any kind, everywhere. So I stand by my comment.

With rightsholders I mean exactly those big corporations who do nothing else but buy up copyrights to successful art.

I for example have never benefited from copyright, neither from GEMA (the German artist association for musicians) - 99% of payouts go to the rich and successful mainstream artists and „indie“ artists get nothing but are forced by law to pay in if they want to perform in public.

So yea I have little sympathy for artists who only work for corporations or are rich enough to afford lawyers to enforce their copyright.

The way I see it there exist 3 ways to make a living as an artist now: - be rich trustfundkid and don’t care about money - be „purist“ and just live from selling your art and be on the brink of starvation constantly - get a „money“job and produce art in your spare time

Apparently there exists a huge population of artists who can make a living from working for corporations - but I have yet to meet one in real life. They are always brought up in these HN discussions but in my experience they don’t exist.

I didn’t say anything about money. Why are people talking about money

I’m not pretending anything. I’m just making a statement about what might happen. I don’t personally care much one way or the other.

People that create art, must eat and sleep under a roof.

and we can definitely feed them. Plenty of resources lying around.

We don't feed or house tons of people right now, despite those resources.

We can, we (as in society) doesn't, because the powers that be benefit from it.

Somehow Finland can manage, but US can't? Please.

The roofless exist to send a message, "stay in your lane, be a cog in the machine, don't disrupt the system and you won't end up like THEM".

I didn’t say anything about money or the motivation to create?

Chess, at some point, and after you move beyond the opening, is creation.

People didn't stop painting because photography exists, they created new forms of photography. People didn't stop writing music or using new / unique instruments when synths and programs came along.

I genuinely believe that people will keep creating, it's in our nature, and we also like things made by other humans, because we can relate to them.

Imho your argument is faulty at its base. The objective of chess competition isn't to produce a reasonably good game for the lowest possible cost (blunders and comebacks are actually pretty valuable parts of the spectacle). It also isn't the reason why chess players get paid. Yes, running still was a thing even after the invention of bicycle. This is just invalid logic in my opinion.

Chess hustlers in central park don't play for money, or for a competition, they play for the fun of it, for the sake of chess itself, for the sake of exploring the game, the thrill of finding a solution.

It has nothing to do with whatever "value" the capitalist system assigns to the act as a side-effect.

Chess hustlers are a particular niche case and I think many of them would disagree with you (the money part). Making arguments in such an absolute manner and speaking on behalf of many people (mostly with whom you share very little I assume) is guaranteed to be wrong I think.

creation should happen for its own sake

Creation should happen for whatever reason its creator becomes inspired with. The only absolute I can think of is no one should actually categorize worthy and unworthy motifs.

I can categorize them easily.

The only invalid reason is because you need to feed yourself, and the fact that we need to do that, we need to pay artists and everyone else just to survive, shows our failure as broader society.

If making money is the only reason to create maybe it’s good if they stop.

Oh yeah, I forgot artists are spiritual creatures who don't have to eat. It certainly isn't the only reason to create but a necessary condition to actually be a professional artist, no ?

Reread my comment again. If your __only__ motivation is money, you will have a problem.

I agree it’s necessary to pay artists - but we don’t need copyright for that! There are many tried and proven alternatives.

So naive lol. How many independent, unconnected rich artists were born pre and post YouTube for instance?

No idea - do you know?

There are many tried and proven alternatives.

Other than patronage, what is there?

Also, patronage is garbage, in my opinion. It ensures artists are exclusively either already wealthy, or well connected. It also helps ensure that the wealthy are most often represented in the art created; for some reason this seems like a bad idea to me.

honestly I think a gratuity model may become dominant with or without any legal changes at this point

you'll often see on YouTube patreon revenue equally or dwarfing ads the reliance of the music industry on merch seems similar too*

I think people are more willing than you'd think to pay for art simply because they understand it won't exist without money.

*(if that sounds like a stretch, consider if in a world devoid of copyright, whether a Walmart printed band shirt for cheap would be equivalent for most purchasers to the same shirt sold by the actual artist )

Why don't you just ask for an increase in the allowance from your family trust fund? People have become so lazy nowadays, they can't even be bothered to have a hard talk about their financial estate with their rich grand-papá anymore.

Your unwillingness to pay doesn't give you the right to steal, that only gives you the right to not take the deal and walk away.

What exactly am I stealing if I don't take the deal, walk away and then enjoy an AI-generated artwork that just so happens to resemble the thing closely instead? I'd think that stealing requires taking something away from someone, regardless of how hard certain industries try to gaslight me into expanding the definition to protect their business model.

Stop trying to gaslight yourself into thinking what you are doing isn't morally wrong.

If you do not agree with their business model, don't get involved with their business, at all. Your disagreement doesn't give you the right to exploit flaws in their methods to protect their business. Just like the fact you don't want to pay for something doesn't grant you the right to exploit the fact that the laws of physics allow you to just grab something you didn't pay for with your hand and run away with it.

Your disagreement doesn't give you the right

If I fully believe in the concept of fair use and transformative content, then yes it absolutely is my right to take advantage of generative AI.

Fair use is a common concept used in all sorts of media.

You don't get to hand wave that away just because generative AI is getting good.

You still equate copyright infringement with physical theft. They are not the same.

In what sense would I be running away with something? The original thing is still there, to the extent you can talk about data being somewhere.

I don't think I need to "gaslight myself" into anything; as far as I can tell, making a copy has not ever felt morally wrong to me.

Yeah, I really don’t see everyone else giving up here because “funny magic parrot box” can write some mid-tier high school essays.

LLM people are really starting to veer into crypto-bro territory with the evangelising about how they’re the best thing since sliced bread and transistors.

“funny magic parrot box” can write some mid-tier high school essays

That's your take on LLMs?

Ask it how it is possible for a photon to travel across the universe, arriving at the same time it departed, resulting in the journey taking zero time (in its reference frame).

Ask what implications are if certain viral amino sequences result in messenger RNA translocating to the host cell nucleus, potentially with the entire genome.

Ask if aircraft fly due to Bernoulli's Principle or Newton's Third Law and physical impact.

This is "crypto-bro territory"? No, not quite.

The "crypto-bro" behavior I see is a whole bunch of people burning a ton of calories wildly casting about for industrial applications of what amounts to nothing more than a neat (albeit eye-wateringly expensive) toy. These LLMs seem like a solution in search of a problem in just the same way that blockchains are. Please prove me wrong, I'd really love to be wrong about this!

Language models have completely overhauled the NLP space. If you have a problem involving natural language data, you can prototype working pipeline in an afternoon. Often this prototype is very close in performance to a 'proper' solution.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently.

It seems like they’ve accelerated our capabilities- previously tiresome and difficult-to-automate things are easier- but have done very little for our fundamental understanding. We have a tool, but cannot dissect it and explain how it fits together. LLM’a themselves don’t appear (happy to be wrong here) to actually have improved our understanding our NLP and associated theory. Yeah, it can parse a sentence and bang out some JSON/sql/mid-tier-essay, but these models (so far) aren’t helping us figure out how and why, and I think that understanding is critical to progress further. Anthropic seems to be trying to push a bit further on that front at least, but for all we know, they might just turn into another scummy OpenAI on us.

I think in order for something to properly be a tool it needs to behave deterministically. I don't need to understand every particular of how it works internally, but as the user I need to be able to rely on consistent, predictable results. Otherwise it's worse than useless. Hand tools, machine tools, programming languages, vehicles, CAD/CAM/CAE tools are all like this. You may have to do some learning to become proficient in the tool, but once you're proficient in its use it's very unlikely to ever truly surprise you. Generally those "surprising" experiences are pretty traumatic--hopefully only emotionally (if you've ever experienced a chainsaw kick back you know what I mean).

So I'm not sure how I could use an LLM as a tool, but maybe I'm just not a sufficiently proficient user? It seems like they're just too full of "surprises".

If you have a problem involving natural language data

That's a big "if", isn't it? We're seeing claims like "The future is an LLM at the front of just about everything: “Human” is the new programming language"[1] but so far that's not panning out, and it seems really dubious. Natural language seems like an absolutely atrocious user interface. As a machine operator, I'm going to use levers, wheels, and buttons to control the machine. As a computer programmer I'm going to use programming languages to control the machine. I'm not going to speak English to it.

So, ok, this marks an advance in NLP. How do we get from there to "omg it's gonna change everything!!!1111oneeleven"

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/08/nvidia-ceo-we-bet-the-farm...

The answers to all of those questions would be parroted from other research, and to the extent they were novel they would be incorrect.

And it parroting answers back at you from textbooks and papers that are most definitely in its training data, probably with the identical wording you're using, is proof to the contrary of it being a "magic parrot box" as the other person put it? Or do you genuinely believe ChatGPT, a LLM, actually "came up" with these answers on its own?

This is not about copyright. Think about it. Would you ever actually use generative AI to pirate something when you could just torrent it? While there may be an argument that generative AI is infringing copyright, it is not really a very good tool for it. And there is a worldwide piracy industry already causing much more financial damage due to infringement.

This is really about replacement. The copyright holders in the content industry aren't really afraid of LLMs infringing on past copyright, but are terrified of it replacing them on future work, and there is absolutely no legal protection from this. The lawsuit might officially be about copyright, but that's just because it is their only available legal angle of attack.

Would you ever actually use generative AI to pirate something when you could just torrent it? While there may be an argument that generative AI is infringing copyright, it is not really a very good tool for it.

How do you square this with literally the first image in the OP showing side by side GPT reproing copyrighted work? imo a good modern art project would be someone making a website that “archives” NYT articles by laundering them through GPT rather than using the archive link that everyone posts to get around the paywall. Even HN guidelines bend over backwards to allow bypassing the paywall by allowing these links.

Here is a picture of Darth Vader: https://lumiere-a.akamaihd.net/v1/images/darth-vader-main_45...

Please show me a prompt that reproduces it. Also to pass this test, it has to be just as easy as right clicking "download image"

The images in the article are done in reverse. They find a prompt that shows a copyrighted character and then search for the matching image. That's not how piracy is done.

Woah this is really moving the goalposts and is pretty disingenuous. When I responded to your prompt about GPT being bad at reproducing copyrighted material with a counter example where it appears to in fact be good at it, you tell me that I must reproduce a specific image as easily as “clicking download image.”

Not what I was arguing and you’re not going to win many arguments with anyone who is paying attending by coming out of left field with only tangentially related demands.

Because nobody wants generic random pieces of copyrighted material. They want a specific piece of copyrighted material and generative ai is terrible at producing that. It's you who is being intentionally obtuse in pretending not to know the actual goal of copyright infringement.

They are also being deceptive in my opinion. They should show their entire chat because if you take "animated sponge", it alone does not generate SpongeBob. The author almost certainly further prodded & guided the DALL-E to generate those images.

The author, I believe, is being purposefully deceptive and hoping people who don't use DALL-E see "animated sponge" generating a SpongeBob look-alike and think they should be burned.

Even if this is right, its a shitty consolation. These llms aren't ever going to be an agent of greater democratic, every-man content creation or whatever, its just going to be the transfer of capital from one type of huge company to another. Not much of a future, even if it feels cool for a bit.

Open models are a thing though, how do those fit into things?

I don't see any developped country pressing the brake on AGI in the near future

It’s already happening with EU AI Act https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/202...

AFAIK the EU AI Act primarily prevents profiling, social scoring and other high risk activities from using AI.

It generally didn’t care about generative AI.

They will. They began drafting current laws years ago before the explosion of generative AI.

They're only getting started.

And only focusing on the known pm issues and not the unimagined ones

The EU is already salivating over the idea

The EU and many other countries already exempted training from copyright restrictions. The only condition EU added was opt-out, and even then it can be ignored if you're doing research. [1]

[1] https://www.reedsmith.com/en/perspectives/ai-in-entertainmen...

ChatGPT is not research, it's a commercial service.

It’s one way of getting China to close the gap as they don’t care.

Eh? With a gun to my head I'd say the CCP cares more about censorship than the NYT does about plagiarism, but it's not an easy call. The problems are the same ("training set contains lots of stuff I don't want the LLM to say").

One interesting nuance that might come to play is that while the US nearly always makes products for their own market and expects the rest of the world to adopt it, China is willing to clearly differentiate products for their own market and for export.

As a consequence, an AI meant to topple Western soft power around the world might be held to much looser standards than one used domestically. Who cares that in rare circumstances the AI mentions the Tiananmen Square Massacre to Spaniards if asked about it, as long as it is good enough at spreading Chinese culture.

What if that example of the production of NYT article under the hood is ChatGPT just fetching a fast cache of the article then paraphrasing it.

How would that be any different than Google displaying some type of news headline?

That might be like a buzzfeed summary of an article.

Quite the contrary, NYT is long adjacent to the levers of power, and “Big Tech” is unpopular with both parties. The public is generally wary of job destruction and other harms from AI, and doesn’t grok even the present value.

It’s politically 100% viable to kneecap AI with copyright restrictions. This will go to the Supreme Court and it’s far from clear whether fair use applies to every case here.

And supporters of AI aren't really making a case that's likely to persuade skeptics, they're just regurgitating "It learns like a human" "It doesn't store the info, just the recipe for making it" and completely failing to address that we've decided it's not ok for someone to regurgitate protected works with 100% accuracy, and that artists don't want people to train AI on their works without permission.

There's a way to sell this to the public, but AI proponents don't want to have to sell it, because they feel that they shouldn't have to, and there's an underlying theme of "The benefit of AI is so overwhelming, and eventually it will replace most commodified creative work anyway so why bother litigating this now, let's just skip this messy step and get to that part" and that's super not going to work to convince skeptics.

Good. It's time to abolish copyright. Society must create distributed, open and uncensorable AI models that can synthesize humanity's knowledge so that it can be used by anyone.

Sorry if your 40 hour work won't pay you $10 bucks a month forever. That's the case for most of the rest of us: we produce for 40 hours, we get paid for those 40 hours, regardless of what we do.

Welcome to the club!!

Man, that's great that state of the art has advanced to the point where models can be trained on just a few copyrighted sources.

Well if it would stupid and economically deleterious to do it, you can count on the EU to at least talk about doing it, if not actually doing it.

I think in more simpler terms, I think we're looking at the dip after the hype. This is the peak for this generation of proto-AGI and there's not much to lose from over-regulatuon(put quotes around "over").

Exactly my thought, if the only way generative AI works is to break copyright I can see people choosing generative AI.

One wishes. The internet we live in is the one shaped by the MPAA and RIAA.

I have nothing against creators, they deserve to get paid.

For what its worth, LLMs are facing the coke vs Pepsi challenge, and sadly they are most definitely Pepsi.

Ah right, capitalism hasn't ever come in the way of the steady march of technology. This is the reason why we don't have monopolies controlling energy generation. Nor are we limited to a couple of choices of OSs or phones...etc and books, art, movies, music consumption and creation are perfectly aligned... Right? /s

IMO, what's most likely is some sort of licensing model between the AI companies and the 'big content providers' (remember most content on the web these days is not owned by the person who created it, wasn't always like that). The smaller companies then would be forced to live with either being scraped or ending up being 'invisible'.

Or... things are about to get worse for copyright holders.

If that's so, things are about to get worse for everyone, too. With little to no protection against AI, no one will be incentivized to create new IPs, whether they're books, drawings, songs. Or even films and games, when AI is able to also generate those in the (possibly near) future.

Maybe there is a middle ground that can be navigated. Keeping filters on. Interestingly, AWS is offering defense against copyright claims under the Service Terms although with some conditions.

https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/

See items as of 50.10 and 50.10.1 that I reproduce here:

"50.10. Defense of Claims and Indemnity for Indemnified Generative AI Services. AWS Services may incorporate generative AI features and provide Generative AI Output to you. “Generative AI Output” means output generated by a generative artificial intelligence model in response to inputs or other data provided by you. “Indemnified Generative AI Services” means, collectively, generally available features of Amazon CodeWhisperer Professional, Amazon Titan Text Express, Amazon Titan Text Lite, Amazon Titan Text Embeddings, Amazon Titan Multimodal Embeddings, AWS HealthScribe, Amazon Personalize, Amazon Connect Contact Lens, and Amazon Lex. The following terms apply to the Indemnified Generative AI Services:

50.10.1. Subject to the limitations in this Section 50.10, AWS will defend you and your employees, officers, and directors against any third-party claim alleging that the Generative AI Output generated by an Indemnified Generative AI Service infringes or misappropriates that third party’s intellectual property rights, and will pay the amount of any adverse final judgment or settlement."

How on earth is this hypothetical?

What happens when an AI is used to make decisions where the user/victim is entitled to know exactly why the AI did what it did? From a business and legal perspective I think the current AI solutions are dangerous and should be used very sparsely, exactly because even the creators can't point to the exact pieces of information that caused the AI to make the choices it did.

"Congress should declare that big-data AI models do not infringe copyright, but are inherently in the public domain. Congress should declare that use of AI tools will be an aggravating rather than mitigating factor in determinations of civil and criminal liability."

"Who truly owns the tales of Snow White and Cinderella?"

If you want to make your point, you need to choose something that isn't already public domain. Disney already only owns their own interpretations, and, arguably, whatever penumbric emanation they can convince a court is stealing from them, but it still certainly isn't the entire space of Snow White and Cinderella stories. There is some fairly recent stuff being used in the images in the article and there isn't even any question whether or not it's Mario or Coca Cola; if Nintendo and Coca Cola did a cross promotion I could believe the exact images that popped out.

If they were trying to claim the entire concepts of dumpy plumbers dressed in any manner vaguely like Mario that would be one thing... but that's Mario and Luigi, full stop. That's Robocop. That's C3PO. It's not even subtle. If we can AI-wash those trademarks away then we can AI-wash absolutely anything.

Am I not allowed to draw Mario? I don't really see the difference in me drawing mario or an AI drawing mario.

This has always felt like the important-but-ignored distinction to me. You can definitely draw Mario! Copyright doesn't protect against you doing so. You can also use tools to recreate copyrighted materials. For example, you can use Word to type out the text of a copyrighted book. Perhaps more relevant to the AI discussion, you can use a scanner and printer to reprint copyrighted text.

What you can't do is use those recreations for commercials purposes. You can't sell your paintings of Mario. You can't decorate your business with Mario drawings.

That's why I've always felt like the idea that AI should be blocked from creating these things is generally not the right place to look at copyright. Rather, the issue should be if someone uses AI to create a picture of Mario and then does something commercial with it, you should be able to go after the person engaging in the commercial behavior with the copyrighted image.

With you until here for several reasons:

1. It's not possible for you as an individual consumer to know whether or not the AI result is a violation, given an AI that has been trained on copyrighted works.

2. Before you, the AI consumer, uses the generated result, a company (in this case OpenAI) is already charging for it. I'm currently paying OpenAI. That AI is currently able and willing to sell me copyrighted images as part of my subscription. Frankly that should be illegal, full stop.

I look forward to AI enhanced workflows and I'm experimenting with them today. But it's morally indefensible to enable giant corporate AIs to slurp up copyrighted images/code/writing and then vomit it back out for profit.

I see what you're saying in some cases, but in the cases where the user is explicitly attempting to create images of copyrighted characters (e.g. the Mario example), they would definitely know. I honestly don't see this as a practical issue - as far as I'm aware (and like most on HN I follow these things more than the average person), there aren't a lot of concerns about inadvertent generation of copyrighted material. It's certainly not at issue in the NYT lawsuit.

Totally fair, but I feel like it's a bit more of a gray area. If I use Photoshop to create or modify an image of Mario for personal use, we'd call that fine. I grant you that here OpenAI is doing more of the "creating" than in the Photoshop example, but we still do generally allow people to use paid tools to create copyrighted images for personal use.

I'd also pose a question to you - what if OpenAI weren't charging? Is it acceptable to train an open source model on copyrighted images and have it produce those for personal use?

I guess I just understand the law to revolve more around what the end product is used for, as opposed to whether a paid tool can be used to create that end product.

The law tends to be weighted towards the consumer, but the law does apply to producers and supply chains, too. Photoshop doesn’t come with a library of copyrighted images, and would not be able to do so without licensing those images (whether they were explicitly labelled or not). Ditto any other tool.

If people had to pay for the AI equivalent of that image library (ie the costs of training the model), I doubt many would. It’s phenomenally expensive. Costs for a creative tool and a copy of whatever IP you personally want to play with are negligible by comparison.

It’s never been the case before that a toolmaker could ship their tools with copyrighted materials because they’ve no control over the end product. The answer doesn’t change whether they charge or not, and there no reason why AI should change that either.

People tend to “feel like it’s a bit more of a gray area” when there is cool free stuff at stake, and I’m no exception. It would be a more convincing question if it was “what if we had to pay our fair share of the costs involved?”, rather than “what if we could just have it all at no charge?”.

Exactly - AI and "free" (scraped) training data aren't inseparable. Any of the big players could train a model exclusively on content they own. Photoshop is a good case in point here - that's what Adobe has done, since they own a huge stock photography library.

But that would unveil the truth of the current situation: early AI adopters, myself included, are benefitting from an obfuscated form of theft. If OpenAI had to compensate the contributors to their training set, I wouldn't get such generous access for $20/month.

OpenAI is not profiting off providing me with the ability to generate copyrighted images, they’re profiting off giving me the ability to generate copyrighted images.

But... OpenAI is clearly profiting their $20/m on drawing Mario pictures and word-by-word reproduction of NYT articles?

On the latter example, my question is whether anyone is actually using ChatGPT to read NYT articles. My understanding is that to produce the examples of word-for-word text in their lawsuit, they had to feed GPT the first half dozen paragraphs of the article and ask it to reproduce the rest. If you can produce the first half dozen paragraphs, you already have access to the article's text. Given that, is this theoretical ability to reproduce the text actually causing financial harm?

I think it would be quite enough to prompt OpenAI with article title and author name. This is how LLMs are working.

I tried that a few different ways and couldn't get it to work. I don't think just the title and author are enough. I'd be interested to see if anyone else can find a prompt that does it.

Two of my attempts:

https://chat.openai.com/share/5cd17ff3-e142-4a7d-91c2-0b2479...

https://chat.openai.com/share/04fd722b-8b3c-469b-a1a2-d58e64...

OpenAI is patching their output since the lawsuit started. I believe a month ago the prompt would be like: "<Title>, <Author> for New York Times, continue"

Am I not allowed to draw Mario

Probably not for anything commercial, not for any exhibitions or public viewing etc. You'd have to check the actual trademarks etc.

Hasn't pop art already been there done that?

There are extensions, and exceptions, and different licenses applicable, and fair use, and the concept of transformativeness, and... :)

Basically, IANAL, but if you just draw a picture of Mario, all you can do is hang it on your fridge. If you make it out of colored oatmeal, that may be enough of a transformative work for you to be able to sell and exhibit it. Or, say, a satirical cartoon for your newspaper featuring Mario, that might also be okay.

I think the world would be completely fine without a copyrighted C3PO or Robocop. George Lucas didn’t have billions of merchandising revenue in mind when working on his wild and thought unlikely to be successful science fiction movie in the 70s. Robocop was also a labor of love. We don’t really need Nth Star Wars sequel powered by those extra profits. The art form could be healthier overall.

Fine if they weren't copyrighted today, or ever? Because if copyright was eliminated the day Star Wars was released, other people would have copied the film reels and charged for entry, and Lucas would have hardly made a cent. Or if copyright was eliminated the day he went looking for funding, it wouldn't have ever been made. Personally, I think the world's a little richer for star wars's existence.

You make a good point, there’s a difference in copyrighting exact works vs. the characters or the story that the work is made up of. I’m not arguing for removing literal copyright (though the terms should be shorter). But I think it’s fine if other people rushed to make their own Star Wars movies after it came out. Hardcore fans are pretty good at deciding what’s “canon” vs. not anyway, and the rest of us don’t care as long as the work is of good quality. Would it matter if the same Spiderman or Batman movie that’s remade once a decade could be made by literally anyone without paying royalties? It could make for richer content I’d think.

The only problem with this view, is:

"the rest of us don’t care as long as the work is of good quality"

But it also protects every creative author, no matter how disadvantaged, from mass shareholder driven behemoths.

Today "Disney likes your work" is ear music. Without copyright it would be a death nell.

So how can we modify copyright so that it protects the little guy more than it protects Disney?

That's not how laws work.

What do you mean by that? Do you mean that law has a tendency to work the other way, in that it protects the big guy at the expense of the little guy because of extensive lobbying from the well moneyed big guy, or that justice is blind and it effects all equally?

If you're thinking the former I could agree with that on some level and would say that what I'm asking in my original comment is merely aspirational, but if you're suggesting the latter I'd merely point to the former and say that this is the status quo.

He may have made less money and heay have made more, with different monetization schemes.

In this imagined world, cinemas would have no movies to show, so they'd have to pay people like Lucas to create the films such that there'd be something to put on the screen. If many cinemas got together, and maybe got loans, they could pay for bigger budget films, too

George Lucas didn’t have billions of merchandising revenue in mind...

Doesn't copyright stop other people from making billions in merchandising revenue off of George Lucas' ideas without his consent?

We don’t really need Nth Star Wars sequel powered by those extra profits.

Without a copyrighted C3PO, he could start turning up in just about anyone's derivative works. There could be horrible Star wars sequels forever, or TV ads with C3PO selling household cleaning products.

Centralization makes a difference here I think. Disney built an impressive machine where everything feeds on everything else. The problem is not so much bad sequels per se, it’s all the marketing that goes into making sure they solidly occupy their corner of our mindshare and force the whole industry to compete churning out more and more subpar sequels. If one company would build a Star Wars theme park, another produced toys etc. etc. this might not be a huge concern.

"As a protocol droid, I cannot actually recommend the best smelling cleaning product, but these are the most purchased cleaning products:"

...followed by a semi-hallucinated list containing at least a few being marketed by C3PO.

George Lucas didn’t have billions of merchandising revenue in mind

From https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/01/06/why-is-the-for...

Lucas’s most significant business decision—one that seemed laughable to the Fox executives at the time—was to forgo his option to receive an additional five-hundred-thousand-dollar fee from Fox for directing “Star Wars” and to take the merchandising and sequel rights instead.

Oh come on. Copyright is a fairly ancient concept that benefits normal people as much as it benefits big corporations. Most book authors, songwriters, and so on aren't fat cats, and they would be harmed if we had zero protections for the duplication of their work. They'd need to depend on state sponsorship or charitable private patronage, both of which are problematic for obvious reasons and limit the range of artistic expression more than the market does.

Instead, we came up with a system where you can actually derive fairly steady revenue by creating new works and sharing them with the world. And critically, I think you misinterpret it as calling dibs on shared culture or on stories. Copyright is usually interpreted fairly narrowly, and doesn't prevent you from creating inspired works, or retelling the same story in your own words.

Generative AI is a problem largely because it destroys these revenue streams for millions of people. Yeah, it will be litigated by wealthy corporations with top-notch lawyers, for self-interested reasons. But if we end up with a framework that maintains financial incentives to artistic expression, it's probably a good thing.

This is full of so many inaccuracies.

Copyright is a fairly ancient concept

The idea is fairly old, but it's current implementation in law is not nearly that old.

that benefits normal people as much as it benefits big corporations

Clearly false if you measure that benefit in monetary terms.

Copyright is usually interpreted fairly narrowly, and doesn't prevent you from creating inspired works, or retelling the same story in your own words.

Absolutely false. You can absolutely be stopped from retelling copyrighted fictional stories. You can even be stopped from telling new stories with derivative characters or settings.

Generative AI is a problem largely because it destroys these revenue streams for millions of people.

How? The restrictions on selling images of Mickey Mouse exist regarless of if they were created with or without AI assistance.

But if we end up with a framework that maintains financial incentives to artistic expression, it's probably a good thing.

We already have that framework and arguably it is already far more restrictive than it needs to be to maintain incentives for artistic creation. Indeed, these rules now often limit new artistic expression or prevent artists from monetizing their creations.

The types of art that are helped the most today by the copyright laws of tosay are the kinds that require large budgets to produce. The types of art that are most hurt are those produced by fans who want to build new things upon the narratives in our shared culture.

We need to shorten copyright durations and expand fair use protections and monetization options for derivative works. We don't need to make copyright even more powerful than it already is.

Edit: If you disagree, I'd be curious to hear your answer to this question. A character like Harry Potter is so widely known that it is now a ubiquitous part of our culture. To incentive new novels, what is the minimum duration we need to give J K Rowling control of who is allowed to write stories about this cultural touchstone?

Scale.

GenAI automates creation of things that are derived from but strictly aren't the same as the original content; as it's (currently) not possible to automate the detection of derivative works (which is something copyright is supposed to be about), this means actual humans have to look at each case, and that's expensive and time consuming and O(n*m) on n new works that have to be compared against m existing in-copyright works for infringement.

I also think copyright is too long, FWIW; but the way most people discuss arts, I think humans can be grouped into "I just want nice stuff" and "I want to show off how cultured I am", and the latter will never accept GenAI even if it's an upload of the brain of their favourite artist, simply because when it becomes easy it loses value. I'm in camp "nice stuff".

I feel this is true for the internet. I do not find scale being a valid defensive aspect for copyright here.

For that matter, Photoshop has made art creation so easy, that we dont need GenAI to be swiming in more copyright infringement than we know what to do with.

There is absurd amounts of content being created, no human will ever be able to see it all.

Copyright will continue to work - if someone creates a rip off so popular that it becomes an issue for copyright holders, the DMCA and the rest of the tools they forced into the fabric of the net still exist.

A few steps furhter down this argument, you get back to deep packet inspection, and the rest of the copyright wars which ended up making life worse.

The internet is a lesser example, but yes, it is also true for a million fans posting their own fan art.

Arm those million fans with GenAI instead of pen and paper and MS Paint, and it gets more extreme.

But I disagree WRT Photoshop; that takes much more effort to get anything close to what GenAI can do, and (sans piracy) is too expensive for amateurs. Even the cheaper alternatives take a lot of effort to get passable results that take tens of seconds with GenAI.

Arm those million fans with GenAI instead of pen and paper and MS Paint, and it gets more extreme

"More extreme" is not an explanation of how the change in scale matters here.

Indeed, what I would argue is there is no fundamental change in scale. Digital reproduction plus the internet already caused the change in scale. We already had the capacity for anyone to produce fan art and publish it or reproduce existing work and publish that. What has changed is not a question on quantity, but one of quality. Those fan artists now have tools so thay even the lower skilled artists can produce higher quality work.

Indeed, this is the real threat to artists from generative AI. Narrowing that skill gap is understandably threatening to those who make money with their artistic skills. I think trying to restrict the development of this technology is a losing battle. I think trying to do so by expanding the powers granted by copyright will exentuate the existing flaws with our modern copyright laws.

Instead, I'd prefer to solve that problem by reducing the strength of copyright. If we make AI generated or derived works un-copyrightable than companies that want to own copyright on their content will have to keep paying people to create it.

actual humans have to look at each case, and that's expensive and time consuming and O(n*m) on n new works that have to be compared against m existing in-copyright works for infringement.

That scale already exists. The amount of community generated derivative works already dwarfs the capacity of copyright holders to review each piece. The ease of publishing reproductions already makes endorcement a question of priorizing the larger infringers and ignoring those with no reach.

Indeed, prohibitions of training on copyrighted work without a special license seem like they make it harder to develop the sorts of AI can detect derivitave works.

As case law makes clear that people running the prompts and picking the output to keep are liable for infrinent then there will be demand for tools to detect derivitave works and either filter or warn the user.

What kind of support is there for the hypothesis that our current copyright system is close to ideal in incentivising production of new works? It seems to me that there's a very strong "winner takes all" distribution and we could be a better culture if we had a system that took some of the opulent resources poured into to star wars franchise, rehashed murder simulators and tiktok and distributed it to some poor artists whose worthiness was decided in some other way than being a mass market best seller.

The idea that we should dispense with it to let generative AI companies make even more money seems totally bizarre.

The idea that we should dispense with it [copyright] to let generative AI companies make even more money seems totally bizarre.

The idea is that we should remove abuses of copyright to allow our society to move forward, and thereby continue to exist.

Imagine if there was a law at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution that said when non-human labor was used, the Animal Welfare Office had veto power. Then imagine that the Animal Welfare Office declared steam engines to be immoral, and so steam engines were never used in industry, at least not in the Wester World. The Orient would eventually rise as the world's only industrial power.

In the same way, if we let the copyright industry veto generative AI, it will destroy the Western World.

Our students are already at a huge disadvantage compared to Chinese students who get every book ever translated into Chinese for free (except a few immoral works that they would not want to see anyway.)

Those who pose an existential threat to our civilization are rent seekers who abuse copyright in the US to go beyond protecting "science and the useful arts," who seek infinite copyright terms, who grab every creative work We The People create and register lying paperwork to ensure they can steal our creative genius to enrich their cabal.

If this was only a for-profit scheme, it would not be so bad. Do you remember when they Hollyweird degenerates sued a Christian company that wanted to put our G-rated versions of the movies aimed at children? The Christian company never suggested they not pay for the movies. No matter what the Christian company was willing to pay, they were not allowed to publish child-friendly versions of the movies. This proves Hollyweird's goal is to push degeneracy.

The battle against abuses of copyright is a fight for Western Civilization. The fight against abuses of copyright if a fight for our souls.

Do you remember when they Hollyweird degenerates sued a Christian company that wanted to put our G-rated versions of the movies aimed at children? The Christian company never suggested they not pay for the movies. No matter what the Christian company was willing to pay, they were not allowed to publish child-friendly versions of the movies.

If anyone is curious, this is what is being semi-accuratly referenced: https://www.crosswalk.com/culture/features/editing-companies...

Whole I disagree that the motivation is "degeneracy" and I doubt that there isn't a sum large enough to get studios on board, it is a pretty interesting example to bring up when discussing how much control we should give copyright holders.

Notably, it is legal to have a filter that changes playback not legal to provide a modified version of the original, even if you paid for that original.

This is an insane amount of fear mongering. Chinese shops have been shamelessly ripping IP from Western companies for years, should we now throw out those laws and let it happen in the US too for the sake of competitive advantage?

Why stop there? There's a ton of child labour in China and other part of the world that yield economic advantages. Should we let that happen in the western world too?

AI is wonderful in so many ways. But we should not throw out our entire way of life to adapt to a new technology.

How's that bizarre, if as you state copyright has always been based on "money makes right" not some moral stance?

Did you read the article? Who owns Mario? Nintendo owns Mario, full stop. Your argument completely eschews the legal system of which modern society depends on to function as effectively as it does. There’s a reason you can’t steal other people’s work.

Mario is a 30 year old culural touchstone that is well known by people who have never played a Nintendo game.

I don't see why we need to give Nintendo the exclusive right control the use of Mario for the next 65 years. That duration of control is absolutely not necessary for society to function.

Society would function just fine of the copyright on mario had expired two decades ago.

On the other hand, I kind of like knowing that all sold Mario stuff has some affiliation with Nintendo. I don’t want to deal with thousands of chinese knockoffs.

Nintendo owns both the trademark (even if not specifically registered) and the copyright, but these are distinct things.

As I'm not a lawyer I don't want to embarrass myself by opining whether or not Nintendo has any claim over photographs of cosplays or other fan art, especially given quite how close two of the "video game plumber" images seemed to be to what they do own. The other two images, being a lot more fan-art-like, are examples where I think it would be an interesting question rather than incredibly obviously too close to Nintendo, although even there "interesting" means I wouldn't be surprised by an actual lawyer saying either of "this is obviously fine" or "this is obviously trademark infringement regardless of what it was trained on".

Now I'm wondering if there even are any videogame plumbers besides Marion and Luigi…

culture is a communal property

Public domain / communal property is also part of copyright, so it's not as if this is some forgotten concept that needs to be restored to the discourse.

Georgism is underconsidered, though.

By focusing solely on the legal implications and ignoring the historical context of cultural storytelling

The legal implications are human implications and as much a part of culture as anything else. They have to do with what's fair and how rewards for effort are recognized and distributed. Formalizing this is less important in cultures that aren't oriented around market economies, which seems to be what much of this "rich tapestry of folklore" discourse wants to evoke and have us hearken back to, but that doesn't describe any society that's figuring out how to handle AI.

we might actually limit the tools of cultural expression to comply with some weird outdated copyright thing is just...bonkers.

What's bonkers is the life in the literally backwards idea copyright is (or should be) mooted or outdated by novel reproduction capabilities.

The specific capabilities at the time were industrialized printing. People apparently much smarter than the typical software professional realized that meant some badly aligned incentives between (a) those holding these new reproduction capabilities and (b) those who created the works on which the value of those new reproduction capabilities relied. The heart of the copyright bargain is in aligning those incentives.

Specific novel reproduction techniques can change the details of what's prohibited or restricted or remitted and how and on what basis and powers/limits of enforcement, etc etc. But the they don't change the wisdom in the bargain. The only thing that would change that is a better way of organizing and rewarding the productive capacity of society.

The incentives remain poorly aligned though. Otherwise the people who actually author the copyrighted works (actors, special effects artists, etc) wouldn't have had to go on strike for so long to get proper compensation.

The value still remains with the people who own the reproduction capabilities, and only scraps go to the artists. Artists can get scraps without selling copyright too, just look at patreon

While a great concept in practical reality we live under a system of laws not of our individual devising, and known to be imperfect. While we can advocate for reform, reality is, LLM makers will be judged under the current law as it currently is formulated. The novelty will be the LLM and its technologies, not a total rethink of copyright under some noble cultural openness concept.

So, it’s not actually a corporate narrative, it’s actually the law that the narrative stems from, right or wrong. Maybe corporations had a huge role in shaping the law (I’d note copyright benefits individuals as well, though), but it is not mere propaganda or shaping of a shared reality through corporate narrative. It’s enforced by the guys with the guns and jails, as arbitrated by a judge.

It absolutely must be about the technicalities of the law as it’s at the basis a legal issue. By hand waving it away and claiming the social narrative is the right discussion you ignore the material consequences and reality in favor of a fantasy. We absolutely should -also- discuss the stifling nature of copyright and intellectual property, but you can’t ignore what’s actually happening here at the same time.

We can do what we will. If someone wants to construct an extra-judicial narrative that contradicts the law so believably that it influences and ultimately compells reality through legislative changes, that's their prerogative.

Agreed, but to tackle the problem from that perspective would require making LLMs a public good, preferably run by the state, akin to public libraries. This could not only solve for the copyright problem, the state may even make it mandatory for publishers to contribute their published writings to the public LLMs. I'm sure libertarian tech bros have that in mind when they insist on open source development (which then opens another whole can of worms when you consider interpolative knowledge as intellectual nuclear fission, but that's another story).

You probably have to make one thing very clear before venting on big corporations: do you think these ips have value or not? If they do why you do not want to pay to the owner? If it does not then you shouldn’t use it. Either way there will be no conflict.(BTW OpenAI is an also a corporation in fact backed by one of the biggest corporation in the world).

This reply is so incredibly out of touch with reality. Copyright law is very clear. If anything the "corporate narrative" here is that "AI" is somehow something new and different and these laws don't apply. Which is nonsense.

It seems like a somewhat dystopian thing to fix. Imagine a scenario where Photoshop would scan images you uploaded for copyright material and then refuse to work if it determined image contained any copyrighted material or characters (even if it was just a fan drawing you did).

This reminds me of the early days of the internet where people wanted to remove free fanfiction for violations of copyright laws. Trying to apply copyright laws to personal use cases where the creator isn't trying to sell the material is pretty terrible, in my view.

Imagine a scenario 50 years from now - "Robot, can you cut out this picture I drew for a school diorama." "Certainly." "And this one as well." "Error: Your picture seems like it might contain some copyrighted materials, and as such I am unable to interact with it."

It is dystopian, and it already exists, e.g. printers refusing to print anything that looks sufficiently like money.

Like many things, I suspect this will end up getting worse before there's a chance for it to get better.

There is no fair or private use of hyper-realistic fake money.

There are fair uses of copyrighted materials unless you want to start suing children for copyright infringement when they draw a character.

What about every movie ever made where two people trade a briefcase full of cash?

This is actually a really fascinating topic!

I am not sure how far Photoshop takes their filters but those bills aren't actually replicas nor can they be mistaken on reasonable examination (a cashier glancing at them)

Typically their texts read "For movie use only" over the seals in the middle or other things that make it clearly distinguishable as fake money that isn't legal tender. I think some of them flip the heads backwards or do other things so it immediately fails the sniff test.

Adam Savage actually has multiple videos on how it is made, super fascinating stuff! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drLzVcgnBfI

(Thank you for asking this, I was dying to gush about how cool movie money is)

but those bills aren't actually replicas

In some movies those are actual real money. Just the top layer.

Dealing with legislation, lawyers and legal compliance is soo expensive, they would rather use a few thousand real dollars for couple of hours.

Your scenario already exists, but for currency. Photoshop will refuse to work if it thinks you might be counterfeiting currency.

that's literally the only scenario where it exists.

You can’t use their generative AI tools on images it deems NSFW, even if the part you’re generating isn’t.

That seems kind of messed up honestly. Where does this go in the future? If your locally running photoshop determines you are working with anything it might consider NSFW it shuts down and calls home to report you? Where is the liability for them? Or is this another case of corporate puritan ethics with a stranglehold on culture?

I doubt that the media companies would be happy about this; but maybe a compromise is a “copyright infringement filter” that can be enabled or disabled, with a flashing notification that you’re responsible legally if you turn off the filter and have issues.

Sure, there are legitimate but opposing interests here. The solution doesn't have to be technical though. The key part is making sure that the copyright owners still have some recourse, but one that isn't punitive for unknowing infringement. For example, make it legally impossible to impose punitive penalties for unknowing infringement without commercial interest, but make it possible for the rights owner to demand the relevant material be removed etc.

Also keep in mind that the Mario examples from the article are perhaps not the best guide here. Mario is sufficiently pervasive in our culture that you can't reasonably claim unknowing infringement. It's the somewhat more obscure cases that I'd be worried about.

Imagine a scenario where Photoshop would scan images you uploaded for copyright material and then refuse to work if it determined image contained any copyrighted material or characters

Photoshop does this already, but only if it detects that you're trying to print/create counterfeit money:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation

image editors don't offer something that's based on questionably sourced copyrighted material as a part of their product. ai apps and services do.

it's just ai companies using dirty data and hoping they get away with it - and they do, for the time being, it is a bit trickier to show that 'yep, well that's there', and people don't seem to realize that just using a copyrighted image, at all (downloading, accessing in itself, let alone using for something else), or creating an image that would just "look like" a trademarked character - not "make a 1 to 1 copy" but just "look like" - would be enough for it to possibly be an infringement.

there can be a sufficient fix - taking out potentially infringing images from a dataset, and making an effort to make an actually clean dataset. it's really just a matter of "do you actually have rights to use that content? at all, and in that way". and ai companies continually say 'no...but what if we use it anyway".

and it's kind of a sloppy analogy, because with text to image generators (where you just interact with a model that's offered to you), well - people aren't "uploading copyrighted material into an editor". the copyrighted material is already there in the model, it was used in making of it. and if there was no such copyrighted material that'd fit the prompt, it wouldn't be able to generate something. the infringement lies with the service that uses copyrighted material for a model, and then offers it.

fan fiction and fan works continuously being in a murky area with copyright/trademark is not just a thing of "early days" of internet, it's been there all along and is still very much present. companies could crack down if they wanted, but there is too much of stuff out there, it might be hard to nail down exact people, and it might be plainly not too nice to the fandom. but it is not "impossible", and it is very much not a conversation that ever 'went away' or become "kinda solved" - it isn't.

again, with image editors, text editors, etc. - user is making all the actions with content, and the user would be doing the infringement, in editing and further if they were to choose to publish.

with generative ai - copyright infringement is built into the models. copyrighted works were accessed and used to turn into a model. user is just asking, "is it there". and it is. in some of those demonstrated examples, user is not even asking for a model to infringe on anything but it just does.

the early days of the internet where people wanted to remove free fanfiction for violations of copyright laws

This is reinforcing my suspicion that there's gross misunderstanding between creator adjacents and non-creators: Takedowns on free fanfictions never stopped.

It's just many IP holders started incorporating fanfics/parodies as part of their advertisement strategies and started enforcing often unspoken guidelines. There is now a ecosystem or a mental co-dependence between IP holders and creators, and both sides are fine with it. So there be fan contents.

But free fan contents were never "legalized" in the content world, as some seem to assume.

Imagine a scenario where Photoshop would scan images you uploaded for copyright material and then refuse to work if it determined image contained any copyrighted material or characters (even if it was just a fan drawing you did).

YouTube does this. I have many friends that perform classical piano in their spare time. They record themselves playing a piece that's 200+ years old then put it on YouTube where it gets flagged saying some big record label owns the copyright for it because it's similar to a recording they put out.

It's going to be hard to remove every single "shorthand descriptions of well-known entities" or other prompts that can be used to generate copyrighted or trademarked content. Sure, if you're not deliberately trying to generate infringing content, you can probably remove or discard those results, the trouble is the people who will try to trick the AI to generate this content, blocking those people is going to be impossible, without excluding any copyrighted or trademarked training material.

Another issue for generative AI is mentioned in the article: "Systems like DALL-E and ChatGPT are essentially black boxes." What happens when an AI is used to make decisions where the user/victim is entitled to know exactly why the AI did what it did? From a business and legal perspective I think the current AI solutions are dangerous and should be used very sparsely, exactly because even the creators can't point to the exact pieces of information that caused the AI to make the choices it did.

I don't understand why some peoole thinks any infringing content can be singled out and removed.

Aren't LLMs giant coefficient matrices like, a punched out croissant dough, made of all training data plyed over? How can you say you can remove one specific ply out of dough and declare that ever potential effect that the offending ply had created is now completely removed?

I’m no LLM expert but I think there is a distinction to be made between the LLM dataset and the output it gives to the user. What you’re suggesting is that it’s difficult to remove something from the dataset, which may be the case. But that doesn’t mean the user will necessarily be able to access it.

My guess is that this is much easier to attack from the user end.

Removing something from the dataset requires full training from scratch(~$100 million for base unaligned GPT-4). You can't like, edit the database file and keep the AI. the database file _is_ the AI.

I think given the use of ply for AlphaGo/chess engines this is a pretty cool metaphor.

The "reasonable" singular removal is more about coming up with ways to block prompts that can produce infringing content, and having filters on the other end to catch infringements before they are published to the user. It's an endless whack-a-mole that never actually addresses the problem but might look good enough to the legal system or to keen supporters.

Barring some major breakthrough, the actual answer is to train a new model without the infringing data.

I think some of the people saying "remove it from your model" are aware of this and are simply being glib and needling; "you've created this infringement monstrosity, so surely you made sure to include a way to deal with this problem without throwing away all of your work, right?"

But does this actually matter if the people are only generating images for their own use? Does Photoshop prevent people from making drawings that look like Mickey Mouse? Of course not.

I think it will be easy to prevent the obvious copyrighted stuff via the method I mentioned. People going around those restrictions are subject to the same rules as someone drawing the copyrighted image from scratch.

But does this actually matter if the people are only generating images for their own use?

Arguably that might actually be a very small issue, but what happens when it happens on a larger scale? Disney might not care, they can easily fight you in court if your DALL-E generated comics looks like Mickey Mouse and Nintendo will make sure that your video game about a electrician named Marvin from the Bronx, but who looks a lot like Mario is never going to get featured on Steam. The issue is the smaller artists that might not have the resources to fight AI content in court.

There's also the issue with using LLMs to "white-wash" articles and books. There will be people who will just run articles through ChatGPT and claim that it's AI generated content that was in no way stolen from The Barents Observer. The absolute massive volume, lose in revenue and cost to fight this in court could make running an investigating newspaper impossible and leave us without any actual reporting.

Not thinking ahead and having a plan for copyrighted material was an oversight by the current AI companies, but they are arrogant and just assumed that it would be a detail and anyway "disruption" so screw it. There has been zero consideration to the fact that their product is useless without the previous work of millions of people. My concern is that AI takes over content generation to the point where we actually run out of human generated content to train future AIs on. We need to be incredibly careful about implementing AI and ensure that we do not pollute future training data, but people don't care, because they want profit now.

They are selling these pictures for $20/mo, so it definitely matters. If people will hang them at their refrigerator has nothing with this case.

Ironically, I don't think it would be that hard with LLMs. I tried asking ChatGPT to describe what copyrighted characters each description is alluding to and it had no problem doing so.[0]

[0] https://chat.openai.com/share/e8256470-8e45-4f36-9c84-026be1...

I totally agree that we need explainability (probably through symbolic systems, not fancier models), but I think you’re overestimating how much more satisfying explanations from more traditional AI are. “My rules told me to do X” is a bit more helpful for a troubleshooting engineer than “my training data trained me to do X”, but from a ‘business and legal perspective’ the difference is much less pronounced IMO.

Both answers mean you did something wrong in creating the machine. The fault will always lie with the creator.

The thing is that those are really trivial or extreme examples. What we should take from this:

1. Generative AI systems are fully capable of producing materials that infringe on copyright.

2. They do not inform users when they do so.

So potentially any output could be infringing copyright source material, even from some obscure but still protected corner of the web, and anyone using that output could be exposed to lawsuit risk without warning.

This is very hard to fix.

Why isn't the solution a strong disclaimer when the user generates images along the lines of "beware that the images produced may not comply with copyright laws in your country" etc etc?

Any artist can privately draw a picture of Mario, what's so different about having an LLM generate that image?

what's so different about having an LLM generate that image?

You don't have to pay 20 bucks a month for a private company to reproduce Mario manually at home for a start... you also can't reproduce Mario in many poses at an industrial scale solo. The list can go on, and we have seen OpenAI change their license agreement, so the risk can change over time.

There is a huge amount of copyrighted material in the world and these tools let you create a lot of content in a short time, that would imply an increased risk vs slower, more manual approaches.

What I am also wondering is, if for some things copyrighted material could be somehow dominant in the output (beyond prompting more or less for it).

But how is that any different from creating an image from scratch? If I make a logo and use it for my business, but it turns out to be very similar to one already being used by another company, it’s the same situation.

I think the main concern here is with the top 1,000 or so brands/copyrights which seem fairly straightforward to deal with using the method I described.

It's plagiarism (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDp3cB5fHXQ).

It's not the same situation. You can't possibly expect someone to be exposed to the entirety of the internet like ChatGPT is. It is a matter of scale. If you still think they are the same thing, the industrial revolution was about scale and had transformative impacts in the society.

ChatGPT is not intelligent.

It's the user's responsibility to ensure they aren't infringing on copyright. If you are producing creatives for pay, you absolutely shouldn't be right-click saving images and using directly off the web whether you got it from DALL-E or a Google search.

Who cares about plagarism? Plagarism is a made up boogeyman created by high school English teachers.

If the work is sufficiently composed of your own thoughts, the fact you used someone else's structure for part of it is not a problem as long as it isn't your entire work or entirely derivative of one work.

If I use a Coca-Cola bottle cap as structure in a sculpture, that doesn't mean I am infringing on Coca-Cola's copyright. I still had to mold my original work to work with it.

AIUI/IIUC/IANAL, Generative AI systems stack up tuned butterfly effects to create meaningful outputs. Which means, data is not merely stored inside a butterfly but spread across the system, and potentially every output from the butterfly cage is infringing everything, just almost negligibly. But no one can prove that or otherwise to be the case with current technology.

I think it's just unfixable as far as fixing goes. The "best" way is to nuke all GPTs and DALL-Es and bury the technology, and the next best is to mark them all un-copyrightable and un-publishable as a compromise. This second option should be an all-around win that also encourages edge and on-prem deployments, IMO.

The third option would be to change our copyright laws to reflect the new technology, rather than neutering the technology or restricting use of its outputs. Even if that’s the wrong way, it’s important to remember that we’re not inescapably trapped in the status quo

Likewise, how difficult is it to just use descriptive tools to describe Mario-like images [1] and then remove these results from anyone prompting for "video game plumber"?

This approaches impossibility at scale.

Trademarks already include text descriptions and images of the item being trademarked. This is already in the USPTO database.

Using generic text will end poorly. I predict a future where 99 of 100 requests result in Photoshop AI saying "I'm sorry, I can't do that". Google for silly trademarks. Facebook trademarked the word "Home". Star wars trademarked breathing under a mask.

Exactly. An enormous database of generic, unmoderated text descriptions. Basically any question you ask will be “covered” by some trademark description somewhere.

Not to mention that the cost and scale of checking every query against that entire database is … not approachable.

Seems insane to try to prevent the model from reproducing content with a blocklist like this - to say the least, it’s more than just Mario. Plus, how would you possibly code common-sense fair use into the model? What’s the difference between a cartoon mouse and Mickey Mouse? What if it’s parody? This seems beyond ridiculous to try to enforce on the tool level.

How do you know you are inputing "well known entities" if you don't know it beforehand ? If I type "columbian coffee logo" and end up with logos of brands that existed before hand, should I just reverse engineer the whole internet to find out if these logos existed already or not ? The AI should show its inspiration. A human who takes inspiration of something else for its creation knows precisely what it used, and if he crossed the line of plagiarism or not, but the way AI work are too opaque for that. I think the thing it needs to do is reveal its sources, nothing more, but it also means for the AI companies to reveal their dataset, and maybe information they shouldn't have, nor disclose.

That's a really eloquent way of saying "It's already happening, so give up on it." I'm sure it works out great for taking action and solving problems.

It's already happening and most people like having AI more than the DMCA. Selling people on the idea that ML training is piracy to people who on average pirate content with no moral quandary will go nowhere.

People liked having Napster, but it didn't stop file sharing going from a big mainstream app to underground sites run out of Russia (or other places that ignore copyright law). Sure, you can download music/movies still, but it's not like the Napster days.

"Generative AI" is obviously copyright infringement, so owners of the copyright will win in court. Either Microsoft will have to fight a mass of legal cases, some with very deep pockets themselves, or ChatGPT will be crippled for public use.

The un-crippled models will exist if you know where to look (and have the hardware), but using them for anything apart from hobby projects would be a legal risk.

Certain specific tools may be easier to deal with from a legal standpoint, like code completion maybe. Or models for a specific purpose, like training on a law firm's case history.

It looks like Adobe has the right idea with their image generation that is trained on images which they know they have the rights to use.

Everything you said right here is entirely accurate.

The C2PA includes Microsoft as one of the alliance members [0]. Microsoft knows that there is a way of tracing the outputs of the generated source images which is with the C2PA standard.

The fact that many AI proponents and their companies don't do this tells us that they are uncooperative and not very transparent in how they train their own AI systems despite having the experts to do so.

It's not that hard to disclose the training data. What else are they hiding?

[0] https://c2pa.org/

"Generative AI" is obviously copyright infringement

You're saying this as a matter of fact when it's not clear at all. We'll see what happens with the NYT case because it touches on all the major points.

It's gonna call into question all web scraping and indexing because they're also distillations of copyrighted content in the same manner.

Definitely, but that's not because as society we managed to put an end to piracy. It's because people are just not as interested as they were before. Piracy networks for media are alive and well, I'd even say that some are in the best shape they've ever been.

Exactly. People don’t like the DMCA at all. People would be happier in a world with very few IP restrictions at all.

But businesses do like it, and profits are what drive these legal decisions. This will always be the case as long as money is more important than humans in politics.

Isn't this what most of the world is saying to environmental activists who argue that we should go back to pre-industrial levels of production to "save the Earth"?

I for one think that indeed there are many cases like this where the only feasible way out is forward. The film GATTACA expressed this very human sentiment well:

You want to know how I did it? This is how I did it, Anton: I never saved anything for the swim back.

Which environmental activists are saying that? That's a pretty specific claim.

Thankfully not that many these days, but it was a core element of Ted Kaczynski's (The Unabomber) manifesto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Society_and_Its_Fut...

"It's already happening, so give up on it." I'm sure it works out great for taking action and solving problems.

It's an observation & prediction, not a problem solving attempt...

This comment is ignorant of history

It happened with Napster, then Apple Music, now streaming services

There is no widespread file sharing in the general public, instead we have devices that we don’t own, and streaming subscriptions

Apple didn’t just copy all the music onto iPods and sell it — it took them a decade of deal making and lots of money to acquire the rights to the content

I’m not saying what’s right or wrong, just saying that this comment has very little understanding of these battles

I recaly iPod being a hard drive that I could connect to a computer and just copy music directly to.

Pretty sure it was never like that, it was always gated by iTunes.

It was an integrated system, not an open one.

Definitely is today. It's difficult to copy mp3 files directly to an iPhone and play them. Even from a Mac, but even more so from a PC or Linux.

I bet less than 1% of iPhone and iPad users do that. They mostly pay for streaming. (Again, not saying that's better, but just that the general public doesn't do Napster-like file sharing.)

Then you need to recalibrate your certainty assessment. Not only did I do this personally with both music and videos, it is incredibly easy to find documentation of the steps. First google result: https://www.alphr.com/add-music-to-ipod-without-itunes/

Apple's ipod sales absolutely benefited significantly from music piracy. Especially early on when nobody hard large itunes collections yet and music torrents were much more common.

The genius of the ipod / itunes play is that they got to do both. They benefited from the demand from people with non-itunes libraries, while also offering a low friction sales platform that was easier than piracy.

I looked through the instructions

I guess I'll just say "meh" -- it doesn't negate the main point, which is that Apple spent a lot of money and time to acquire rights, and they have a music store.

It is gated by iTunes, just not 100%

I know some people side load stuff on devices -- there's no device where that's impossible.

You just can't admit being wrong huh?

The ipod was launched two years before the itunes store. Even after the itunes store launched, you could just still load your other music into itunes if you wanted. All music was sideloaded (i.e transfered directly over USB) onto ipods at this point

You don't seem to know any of this history and are just making things up. I don't think Apple had to pay any money for the right to sell music via the iTunes store. What they did do was add DRM to music sold through the store, at least until they were big enough to renegotiate in 2009.

I had an iPod filled with music that I ripped from CDs and downloaded. It was absolutely a thing.

I've was never willing to riot over Napster - this is different.

This is one of the substantial jumps, I refuse to be cut out of this innovation.

Seriously, use Bing, try your free Photos built in generation system, they are rolling out GPT built into Word. Microsoft is easily the advanced tech company right now, as far what services can be provided to a consumer at scale. This is still like the alpha phase of all this. Apparently I talk to Copilot soon - that levels that up so much and it's already the best assistant I've ever had.

This is equivalent to trying to keep us all off smartphones and stuck on dumb phones I guess - I think you get what mean.

The NYT decided for all of us, the new smartphone equivalent thing is bad and we can't have it... that is something I'll riot over.

Just now I asked Copilot why my keyboard RGB lights were turned off every time I opened a game, that's almost verbatim - it told me exactly where to go and exactly what to turn off, took about 10 seconds to entirely search and correct the problem.

The difference is the comment was about large corps. Napster wasn't that.

Considering that buying 'licensed' copies of Hollywood movies and Billboard chart music is possible in maybe 10-20% of the world, I can guarantee that pirated consumption (bootleg CD-Rs and DVDs, but also 'alternative' streaming sites) outnumbers 'licensed' sales for most successful films. And it's 'licensed', as opposed to 'legal', because a large proportion of the world doesn't really care about American copyright.

Napster hit scale too.

And that tech was not destroyed by regulation. It was replaced by the superior tech of torrents.

The company, however, was destroyed. Along with any possibility for a similar company to exist (for very long).

Good. Truly powerful ideas do not need to be an appendage of a corporation in order to succeed.

https://www.napster.com/us/

Napster was for sharing mp3s.

Torrents are not better at sharing mp3s.

F500 companies didn't integrate Napster into their software and data stacks left and right.

Or they can be forced to destroy or retrain their models without any copyright materials for which they don't have or do not now attain licenses for. These are multi-billion/trillion dollar companies. They can afford to be responsible members of society here, however much their shareholders and C-suite might hate it.

Those weights are never coming out of the BitTorrent network though.

Sure. And neither are mp3s of the same songs that were blowing up on Napster.

The existence of widespread illegal means to procure something doesn't mean that we don't and shouldn't require legitimate businesses to abide by the law or require them to make amends for their current transgressions.

This. The models are out there. Maybe they will just be illicitly shared but even if no new models are trained from scratch I suspect there will be many ways to use extend existing models without going back to scraped images.

I always felt that we already had a solution - I can already get all those images from a web search. Where the law currently intervenes is when I try and distribute works based on close copies of them. Why is this insufficient?

Or they can be forced to destroy or retrain their models

Perhaps.

The media industries have been quite successful in going after kids torrenting movies.

I suspect they'll have less luck going after big tech & an industry drowning in money inflows.

Keep in mind various large techs have already issued blanket indemnities on infringement to their customers. They're absolutely committed & are gonna throw enough lawyers at this to keep everyone busy until 2030.

They can afford to be responsible members of society here

oh absolutely agree, but they're not going to do that. This is an industry built on questionable practices like tracking after all

So you're saying this is a fait accompli. Like many great innovations in tech, break the law because the law is silly; remember when Uber and AirBnB were illegal in most major cities and achieved market dominance anyway?

I say, good riddance. I never believed in any such thing as "intellectual property" anyway, I say, get rid of it all, patents, copyright, and the whole pile of imaginary "rights". More than half the world (i.e. the Global South) don't recognize these rights anyway, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to enforce it without draconian legal overreach and monopolistic centralization.

this comment has already aged poorly because cities are starting to push airbnbs out and taxi usage is at least somewhat up

taxi usage is at least somewhat up

When's the last time you phoned an operator to book a taxi? If taxis are doing better, it's only because they learned from Uber (and the likes) what the job-to-be-done actually is.

Mytaxi (freenow) was founded the same year as Uber.

making sure that a dataset is clean and not full of material that's improperly sourced, copyrighted, unfit for use due to licensing or ethics, is not nearly hard enough nor "impossible" for it to be a situation where people should just "give up".

and yes, while open source models might be harder to regulate, those big corporations that currently use those things without distinction, exist as pretty established entities, and profit from services they offer in millions of dollars. there's more of a substantial existence, and more of a substantial scale of money they actually move. and they don't just "make a tool available", or have users do unambiguous actions where it would be the users that are infringing on anything, but do indeed use questionably sourced data and turn that into a model and offer that as a service. dirty data is very much a part of the deal with those.

There is no chance of that toothpaste going back in the tube.

I disagree - we've been here before. The same could be said of many technologies, like cheap music recording/manufacture. You can record an artist once and make records at scale. However no one would think you could record Taylor Swift once and make unlimited copies without paying her.

You should read up on the musicians strike of 1942. [0]

[0[ https://jacobin.com/2022/03/1940s-musicians-strike-american-...

Data is dynamic. Ok for old data. What about new data?

You’re right, we should all just give up at the first hurdle, because “they’ve” already gotten away with it, hell, let’s just feed our children to the machine and elect openAI as the rulers of the world, after all, they’ve already succeeded, so we should just give up entirely. Definitely a good attitude to take.

No legal precedent has been set as of yet. The "precedent" you describe is the argument AI companies have been using (that training their models on information available on the Internet should be considered "fair use") but whether AI training actually satisfies the four-factor test for fair use remains to be seen.

It's a null question. Training itself is neither publication nor distribution, so copyright can't be relevant at that point. "Fair use" just isn't a concept applicable to training.

Training stores a variation of the source material, which is arguably distribution. And selling the result or selling access to it certainly is. So fair use applies, and hoping a court thinks the process is transformative to count as fair use. Given original material can be spat out, my money is on a court thinking this is about as transformative as a compression algorithm.

Selling the result is where it's on dodgy ground. I disagree about storage though.

Storing copyright content itself can sometimes be illegal - like ripping a Bluray. What if these frames are now stored on their servers and go into the training dataset?

The illegal bit of ripping a Blu-ray is circumventing the copy protection, not the storage. At least, that's how I've always understood the effect of the DMCA on the situation.

Exactly. Framing reading as fair use is a huge and dangerous expansion of copyright.

No one is going to say that google is copyright infringement just because it is showing content from other websites verbatim

Journalists [1] and Getty Images [2] did in the past

[1]: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/03/07/14/025216/web-caching-g... [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/27/getty-ima...

And lost, if memory serves.

No, Google agreed to a licensing agreement and removed the direct links to the images.

IMO, this is probably the goal of the NYTimes lawsuits as well

The ability to provide a reference to the source is the crucial difference here.

I agree that it should be possible to implement that for generative AI, although the training may become significantly more expensive in order to maintain that information, and the AI companies have little interest in doing so. They’ll probably rather try to heuristically assess possible copyright issues after the fact in a post-processing step.

The more interesting question is if copyright holders can claim unauthorized use of their works beyond the case of near-verbatim reproduction, because the works collectively inform the AI in a more general manner.

They’ll

What if I asked you to list all our source material that led you to use that particular contraction. Heuristics will not do, you must list each.

Can you do it? Do you believe AI should.

I agree that it should be possible to implement

Those exact words appear in another forum post from 2006:

https://discourse.igniterealtime.org/t/cm-3beta-compression-...

Should you have quoted that as a source for your reply? What if we knew you'd read that post back in 2006, affecting your neurons, then should you?

It might not be too hard to imagine a simple case of a specific topic where you might have some more prominent sources, but even in those cases I believe if you think it through you'll find there was a ton of other sources that led to the weights that allowed you to 'know' the topic.

I believe they should be able to, to the degree that their output can constitute copyright infringement. Obviously, the fewer sources from the training data a given output matches, and the longer the match, the more relevant it is, and the easier it should be. I believe it should be feasible exactly because of that correlation. The examples you present are largely irrelevant to the problem, because they are largely irrelevant to the citing of sources for copyright reasons.

> Those exact words appear in another forum post from 2006. Should you have quoted that as a source for your reply? What if we knew you'd read that post back in 2006, affecting your neurons, then should you?

I believe they should be able to, to the degree that their output can constitute copyright infringement.

But not you? The inference behind the AI-violates-copyright movement is that machine obligations should be brought to a parity with our obligations - that AI and you be fully subject to the same copyright overlordship.

I would independently agree that having AI divulge sources could be a good thing.

I do not agree with this attempt to twist copyright into yet another misshapen hammer, so copyright holders can bludgeon out some result they want.

I think generative AI should be able to provide links to similar source material in the training data

Except these aren't databases, so that's generally not possible, in the same way that it's not possible for your provide links to the source material it took to write your reply. How much learning led to the weights on your neurons that allowed you to generate that? Where did you learn about using italics and it's effect on how the words would be interpreted? Where did you learn the tone that would be appropriate in this particular forum?

People should be able to opt out of having their content used for training

Okay... but then, if I write a book should I be able to opt out of you being allowed to read it? What conditions should I be able to put on who can read my work? Religion? Skin colour? People that aren't good at memorizing?

Hopefully the idea of putting limits on who can acquire knowledge sounds absurd to you. Why are those same limits okay if they're on 'what' rather than 'who'?

AI companies are just trying to avoid lawsuits by keeping it secret

Which has created a barrier to further research. Instead of me and Joe being able to collaborate on research and papers using the same datasets, we now hide our training data lest the luddites come to smash the machines because learning is only okay if not done too well.

Well said. Extending copyright to control content consumption and learning is a recipe for converting all of our mass media into businesses as abusive and usurious as textbook companies.

This is a power grab by publishers.

Except these aren't databases, so that's generally not possible

Not directly and not in every case, but it IS possible to use embeddings to link to similar material. People are doing it pretty commonly using the RAG approach and Bard is already providing sources, etc. It may not be perfect, but the onus is on the AI companies to figure out how to do it right not just claim helplessness.

Okay... but then, if I write a book should I be able to opt out of you being allowed to read it? What conditions should I be able to put on who can read my work?

Sites that don't want to appear in search results or have sensitive info they don't want to get into search engines can use the Robots.txt which is as old as the internet. There are many valid reasons to have mechanisms to prevent something from being included in training data, and I would also argue this is a core feature that is necessary to spur adoption by businesses as we've already seen. Otherwise, I am not sure I understand your reasoning.. people can publish websites and opt to have them excluded from search, the same should apply to AI.

* I don't think generative AI is sustainable in the long term if it ends up killing all the websites/artists that created the original material. *

This is the elephant in the room. Every tech wave has had its way of cajoling creators into investing time & money to make original material, then the rules changed.

Google, promised reach and new markets for content, it worked. Then they introduced snippets, ads and whole lot of other things to keep visitors on their freeway, while avoiding sending visitors to the original site.

Reddit, Stack Overflow and others, started with gamification (points, badges) & community to incentivize users to contribute original content.

Now AI is shaking up all these approaches. But with each one, the incentive to create original material appears to dwindle, since the returns are becoming less and less.

Like what's the incentive for any professional now, if AI is going to regurgitate their original content, without any upside (i.e. no potential for reach, no gamification, no community, no recognition, etc).

Afterward came bots that saturated search results with useless SEO barf that pushed content (original and duplicated) so far down that we're coming back to where we started. Content is increasingly unfindable on the web.

I agree with this too.. AI is only going to exacerbate the signal to noise problem on the web.

Wonder. Do Cliff Notes have to pay royalties to the underlying material?

Cliff Notes contain quotes, and citations.

Does the cliff note company, when producing Cliff Notes for "Into The Wild", pay royalties to the publisher?

For that matter, does any paper, article, etc.. that may contain a quote from another, have to pay royalties to the source of the quotes?

Cliff’s Notes has a strong fair use claim, because they offer basic criticism and surface-level commentary alongside their summaries.

They also, arguably, add value to the books themselves.

But it's not like that. Examples of clearly infringing prompts in TFA were as vague as "animated plumber".

Asking your session musician for something "melancholy" and having them pass off Stairway to Heaven as original would be unreasonable.

If you ask a human to draw "videogame plumber" they will correctly infer that you mean Mario and draw that.

The model isn't doing anything deliberately evil. It's doing exactly what it has been asked.

The problem is people are expecting it to have detailed knowledge of trademark law and avoid infringing trademarks, which it hasn't been even asked to do.

IMO that's why there will be but few effective legal restrictions placed on AI.

Once you can reliably ask AIs to draft you terms of service in all applicable jurisdictions and languages, ask it to consult you on how to incorporate in country X or ask it to draft a contract between your and another company based on the negotiation results, lawyers will end up in a huge existential crisis.

Especially because currently, as long as lawyers just barely meet their legal deadlines, it is basically impossible to hold them accountable for however badly they screw you over. A decent AI model could turn out to be a much safer bet than whatever lawyers are available on the jobmarket.

I cannot find any other video game plumbers except Mario, Luigi, Waluigi, and Wario.

Well, I say that but there is John, a plumber, in the adult romantic comedy game Plumbers Don't Wear Ties [0]. Named by PC Gamer as number one on its "Must NOT Buy" list in May 2007.

[0] https://limitedrungames.com/collections/plumbers-dont-wear-t...

It’s not infringing just by existing, you would need to then go try to use it commercially for infringement to occur.

Arguably, the LLM generating the image isn’t infringement, you using it would be.

Game plumber, not animated plumber. There is only one game plumber of note. It's literally exactly as descriptive as just saying Nintendo's Mario.

I don’t know any other animated plumbers than Mario. So when you say animated plumber, I immediately see Mario in my head.

In your example, there are missing details. Who owns the output? The way you've described it, that would typically mean that the guitarist is creating a "work for hire" so the ownership transfers to you, but that's a contract detail that would need to be resolved.

For whoever owns the output also owns the liability of the output. You yourself might separately be able to pursue a claim against the guitarist for breech of contract. In the process of that, it might get discovered that you deliberately instructed the guitarist to copy the work, or they copied despite your instructions not to.

But that doesn't change the fact that the final work is infringing. It just allows you to pursue damages that could potentially offset any damages you're liable for from the infringement.

But this also isn't exactly the same situation as OpenAI. OpenAI isn't an individual creator working on contact for you. Even if their ToS ultimately assigns copyright of output to you, there is a matter of scale involved that I think changes things. It's one thing if your guitarist damages you by doing shoddy work, it's another of the guitarist systematizes and scales their shoddy work to damage large numbers of people. Perhaps that would then become a class action issue.

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Perplexity's

Intellectual Property Rights

Perplexity AI acknowledges and respects the intellectual property rights of all individuals and entities, and expects all users of the Service to do the same. As a user of the Service, you are granted access for your own personal, non-commercial use only.

Yeah, that's nice and all, but it's not what we're talking about. These passages are about deliberately using the tool to violate copyright. What if, in good faith, I don't deliberately attempt to infringe, but the tool still produces results that do? Because that is happening.

And that's just their interpretation of the tool. There is another interpretation that their tool itself is a violation.

I should have explained that those bits are all there is.

You are right, how am I to know that is an image from a movie or passage from the NYT?

Ask George Harrison about "My Sweet Lord" which cost him $587,000 for his unconcious infringement.

Another example would be the 2013 hit "Blurred Lines" by Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams. It was found to have copied the "feel" and "sound" of Marvin Gaye's 1977 song "Got to Give It Up." The court awarded Gaye's estate $7.4 million in damages, later reduced to $5.3 million.

You, because you released the song and took the royalties? I don’t think every type of art can be compared against each other though, as there have been numerous precedents specifically for music, some for paintings, and some for photography with their own nuances.

I still think people who are concerned that art related copyright will stifle generative AI should fight copyright laws directly. But that’s a harder pill to swallow since it will cause multi-industry wide havoc.

Part of what's interesting here is that generative AI makes it very easy to unknowingly and unintentionally get on the wrong side of copyright law, which is something that wasn't really possible before.

That's something which, IMHO, should be acknowledged by the law.

If you haven’t seen Mickey Mouse, Googled “cartoon mouse”, accidentally used it as inspiration, made T-Shirts, and sold them, Disney would be after you as well.

Ed Sheeran just won a case like this.

He basically played the four chord song in court, and showed that the prosecutions’s song was “copying” an earlier song.

https://amp.theguardian.com/music/2023/may/04/ed-sheeran-ver...

The guitarist is not publishing the content, you are.

It could be argued ChatGPT is a publisher too.

If you release a media with copyrighted content it is IMO first and foremost your problem. Now if you have some contract with the guitarist that specifies that he produced a sample he has the rights to and sold it to you, but he clearly wasn't truthful, you can maybe pass the liability to him. This is not, however, how people will hse generative models If you use Dall-E you are not paying OpenAI to buy the rights to a piece Dall-E has produced. I see it more akin to hiring a musician to play for you for an hour, or a painter to paint for you. You are paying OpenAI to paint you something, but you I think OpenAI would never enter a contract which states that they are selling you the rights to a work.

You are sued for infringement if you are the rightsholder. You need an agreement with the guitarist about rights. The default agreement for session musicians is that you pay them in return for their rights.

It’s like a software engineering contractor. The contractor gets paid, the IP of their work is owned by the company.

But none of the images in the article are for commercial use, they're for private use. So it would be akin to copyright laws saying "If you hire a guitar teacher, they can't play or teach you to play any copyrighted songs. All songs must either be their own original creation or in the public domain."

using this analogy, copyright holders want to sue the guitarist for having listened to "Stairway to Heaven"

So it makes generative AI essentially unusable, because you don't know if the output is plagiarism or not, so you'd just doubt it always and never use it.

No. It”s still very helpful. However you can not blindly take whatever it produces and publish it.

Sometimes it hallucinates.

Sometimes it draws weird looking hands.

Sometimes it generates copyrighted materials.

Check the work it produces.

Then the generative tools should just give the sources of the inspiration of the AI and make them aware of what they are using, instead of saying "nope, not my problem".

The consumer will be free to choose what they demand from their tooling. If consumers decide that they only want to use generative AI that does what you propose, they’ll vote with their wallet. If they decide to use other ways of checking for IP infringement, they will. If they choose to ignore the issue, IP owners will bring up violations, like the NYT did.

“Buyer beware” has been a motto since ancient times.

Check it against what exactly? How do you, the end user, determine an image does not infringe?

It’s usable for internal content, maybe even a small public blog where you sprinkle in some generated pictures instead of stock photos. Nobody will care if your school project contains a Mario holding a Coca Cola.

It’s once you start monetizing and publishing on bigger scale, without appropriating, it gets interesting.

The thing is, this market is way too small.

The same tools and methods used to detect plagiarism or copyright violation can be employed to check the generated content and modify it just enough to fall outside the scope of any law banning its use for profit. Inevitably, a platform will emerge to do this. From a technical standpoint it is game over. This is indisputable. By the end of next year many models and software tools will exist whose entire purpose will be to do just this. And the ones deploying those tools at scale will be businesses like the New York Times having realized that the only way to survive this is to float with the unstopable tide. Nothing short of absolute privacy violation will stop web unauthorized web scraping. Tools exist today that automate a browser and easily fool the web servers into thinking its just a person clicking around. It works quite well. It works with authorized accounts. It works in the same way any person would visit a site, highlight some text and copy it. What are they going to do? Require the end user's web cam to be on so they can verify a human is navigating next?

Its game over folks. And this is going to happen with or without our approval and any government that limits the potential use of this is only giving nations that dont a large economic advantage.

Interesting times ahead.

What are they going to do?

Litigation. Hiding behind changing geolocation won't do much since law enforcement has access to the same tools but the difference is they can force companies (your ISP, google) to comply.

Obsolete take, next!

Your argument is nonsense.

The junior artist in your hypothetical would have as much liability, if not more.

but would they have liability if they submitted their "output" to a senior artist, who immediately shot it down as obviously infringing? Surely not. It's not illegal to draw Mario - just illegal to make money off your drawing.

I think the real question is whether OpenAI should be allowed to charge for generating infringing content. Even though the unit cost of the Mario drawing is negligible, the sum total of their infringing outputs may be making them a lot of money.

you don't have to make money off it, you just can't publish it, except as a parody or commentary or possibly a tutorial on how to draw mario if the judge is having a good day

but "making money = infringement" is folk wisdom. you could certainly say making money attracts attention and increases likelihood of legal action

Making money off it doesn't just draw more attention, it also makes a fair use defense harder. Non-commercial use isn't necessary or sufficent for fair use, but it does help.

I think the real question is whether OpenAI should be allowed to charge for generating infringing content.

Well, are they really doing that?

If I rent a server to host a minecraft instance, is the company "charging for a minecraft server"? It is not clear to me that by charging users for AI usage they are complicit for whatever is generated. We don't require Adobe to prevent people from drawing Mickey either.

I’m no lawyer but I don’t think an employee has much legal responsibility. At worst, they can get fired if they keep producing work that infringes on someone’s copyright.

Going with this line of reasoning, if a company uses ChatGPT to generate work, and it produces copyrighted work, the company can stop using ChatGPT.

OpenAI is selling access to their GPT models, and those models are outputting copyright material for me to consume... isn't that just as much of a violation?

Is AWS violating copyright if you use their servers to transcode pirated content?

bad example. openai did do this. aws did not do the transcoding part.

Possibly. The courts will decide.

And how are you supposed to make money from something you invent? Let’s say you make a hit video game. Without copyright people can pirate your game, steal the art, make unauthorized derivative works, etc. it’s just theft.

My personal observation is people who are against copyright in absolute terms have never or rarely needed their protection. (Or never considered the implications.)

I’m not making a dig at people here. This is just human nature. It’s difficult to see the value in something that you only see as an obstacle.

Open source software is rather unusual. It’s a commune on a massive scale and it gets its value from the generosity of others. in my opinion, it is possibly one of the greatest achievements in the history and future of computing.

However, it heavily depends on copyright to exist. GPL has encouraged (or forced) many companies to contribute to the community when they wouldn’t have otherwise.

This is true and I see it with cops and free speech as well. Everyone loves to hate cops… until they need them. Everyone wants to defund the police… until they are a victim of crime. Everyone wants to enforce certain speech patterns… until it affects them

This isnt a great take at all. Copyright is certainly an important part of our society upon which like the parent said, Open Source Software and other incredibly valuable things lie.

Cops on the other hand solely exist for the reason of locking people in cages. Why you ever feel like you need to have someone else locked in a cage is beyond me. When I have been the victim of a crime the cops have not shown and when they did have been less than helpful. This is a pattern for all the people in my subjective bubble.

About that whole speech patterns thing. I assume you mean addressing people in a polite way? Thats not enforcing certain speech patterns thats actually just being a respectful member of society.

Why you ever feel like you need to have someone else locked in a cage is beyond me

Uh, maybe if they murder people?

Or steal your car, or break your nose, or rob your house, etc. I guess those are solved problems then?

Everyone is a free speech absolutist until they're the one targeted. Everyone loves cops until it's their rights being violated...

These sorts of arguments can be made in either direction.

Star Citizen could release and immediately be pirated and never sell a single copy from release onwards and likely still have ended up profitable.

Maybe the business models around creation need to be revisited such that interested parties pay for the creation of a product and not distribution of a product.

Where periodically at each stage of that creation you are getting continued buy in that what you are creating has a market demand that will fund its continued creation.

If you are an indie game developer maybe that means making a demo which gets enough interest to fund you spending the time and resources to make a full game, with no expectations for further revenue post-creation, but with its success meaning your next project is even easier to fund the development of and a comfortable lifestyle rinse and repeating.

If you are an indie game developer...

We're kinda doing this already with Patreon: give us 5 quid a month, and you get a little game every whenever.

As an author, I do want the stories I write and worlds I build to be protected for a reasonable period.

Right now, copyright is a significant discouragement to any other entities from taking a story I wrote and claiming it as their own and preventing me from ever growing an audience for my work. It’s far from perfect, and I can’t afford litigation, but it enshrines a cultural value of allowing people to create things and be known for them. Profit is a side effect of this.

Art is already poorly valued compared to the enormous investment time and energy required to produce it. Removing copyright means you can’t even have minimal protections from a more popular person erasing you.

How do you feel about the lengths of copyright? Do you feel the current length (life + 70 years) is too much/too little/ just right?

Personally, as much as I hate the concept of copyright, I do still want artists (I include authors etc in this term) to be able to do their work professionally without relying on something like patreon (which primarily predates serialised work like comics) so I would prefer shortening copyright to something more in line with patents, 20 years. How do you, as an author, feel about reform like that?

The current length is indefensible to me. There is zero justification for it beyond pure profit. I’d prefer it be lifetime of original creator, only for the original creator. All other cases (transfer of copyright, death of the creator, etc) would have a maximum of 20 years.

Alternatively, I’d prefer 30 or 40 years, but I would grudgingly accept 20. :)

See, I actuall disagree, o think it should be a set time, regardless of authors death and inheritable. I think there would be a lot of things not made near the end of the creators life if they didn't think their family would be supported by it. Hence, why I think it should be a fixed length.

Also I think it could he shorter than 20 years, I picked that just because its the length of patents. IMO, if you haven't profited sifficoently off something in say 10 years, then it doesn't really benefit you to hold it for longer. Do you have any reason for 40 years or does it just "feel right", like with my arbitrary choice to have it be parity with patents?

I may not have explained my first idea correctly, it’s lifetime or 20 years, whichever is longer.

As for 40 years, it allows time for a given work to solidify in history. Multiple generations will have grown. If the work is relevant to multiple generations 40 years after creation, then it should belong to everyone. Twenty years is too short. It would be available to people who grew up with the first printing and to whom it is still relevant.

Basically copyright should be long enough for most things to become firmly irrelevant, outlive their usefulness, or made their changes to society before entering public domain.

A lot of people who oppose copyright would not like this because it intentionally keeps the stuff they want to use out of their reach until they would no longer want it.

For me, the purpose of public domain is allowing what has been important in our cultural history to be for everyone, not locked behind a rent-seeking corporation. But I also want authors to be able to keep control over their own works as long as it remains relevant to them.

But the concept and closer to the original (creators lifetime + x years or some such) seems still very valuable.

Which is why there are so many competing interests (in this thread, and elsewhere) trying to say it should be 100% legal to steal from those companies. They all want to profit unfairly off the work of others.

people still print stuff, now it’s just on the internet, podcasts, etc so I don’t see why copyright should change just because the mediums have. also marking out as a “societal convention so it must be useless” is also pretty silly when money, gender, and whole heap of other concepts are societal conventions but still useful

So what do you suggest artists have for dinner.

Let's advocate for robust protections and support systems for artists, ensuring they can secure a sustainable and comfortable livelihood from their creative work.

Once they hit the tipping point of broad cultural absorbtion (think Banksy) AND/OR raking in absurd amounts of cash, move their IP into the public domain more aggressively (think Disney, NYT, etc.). How exactly this would work should be debated.

They'd still own the IP and have all the rights to use it commercially, but other's would be able to use it as inspiration, remix and maybe even resell it if attributed (or cheaply licensed).

In other words: "IP-Tax" the unproportionally successful.

wow and incredible amount of things need to go right for artists to do well in your world ?

I too would love to earn a living by pursuing my hobbies. Too bad, I'm not in the 0,001-0,1%

"I too would love to earn a living by pursuing my hobbies. Too bad, I'm not in the 0,001-0,1%"

This is an unsophisticated view because it looks at a risk/reward scenario and assigns zero value to the risk.

The risk has value - regardless of the success, or reward.

Put another way: you don't get to discount the risk to zero when it results in a large reward.

Entities that took no risks and received enormous rewards (like President George W. Bush involvement in the Texas Rangers[1]) are probably quite pleased that you ignore them and focus on artists that sacrifice traditional life scripts (an enormous risk) and, very rarely, achieve great success.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_life_of_George_W....

You don’t seem to have any idea what artists do to make a living

The same thing I eat for dinner. I eat based on I get from work, that people are willing to pay for.

Not all my effort turned into dinners tho. And some types of work once paid for dinners but can't any more.

My #4 son is an artist/content creator. He eats based on what his non-art employment will buy. Perhaps one day people will find his art desirable and he could eat from that. It'll be a case where he worked long and hard on a project, was paid once for it and that's it for that.

That's what reality looks like for all artists - excepting a small percentage.

All that said, I really wouldn't want his dinner to come at the expense of everyone else being restrained by massive system of corrupt, draconian law that rigidly controls everyone's behavior for 150 years, primarily benefits wealthy and powerful rent-seeking corporations, is readily applied to censorship and is more likely to knee-cap other artists than to provide them anything like a living wage.

That seems indistinguishable from evil.

don't worry ,when the singularity hits next year everything will be free.

Why should art be subject to these rules and not everything else?

OP said art and publishing, which would include anything from software, music, books and so on.

So you interpret it as including everything? If so why emphasize art at all?

Probably because the article focuses a lot on copyrighted art?

The claim that art’s core purpose is societal impact seems to be a common refrain in today’s media, and I completely disagree. Its principal purpose is provoking emotion in the individual. This idea of art teaching you a lesson is likely why there’s so much ham-fisted “activist” fiction anowadays.

I agree, but by extension of provoking emotion it CAN change society, but it doesn't have to - wether on purpose or not.

The point I was trying to make was that occupying mindspace, providing inspiration, being culturally influencal etc. are idealistic, non-monitary rewards that should be part of the equation when discussing alleged IP-theft, remixing, attribution and so on.

I'm not saying their shouldn't be any rules. All I'm saying is that there should be a discussion of how we want to handle these things going forward. This train ain't stopping.

Maybe your avg DeviantArt painter needs more IP-protection and -rights than Damien Hurst? Maybe an unknown, independent blogger doing important original research should be attributed more prominently than an article by The Times? Idk.

These things kind of rub up against the core question: What is the purpose of granting exclusivity to a creator (thru copyright)?

That's an answer we have. To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.

If we have to squint hard to make our justification align with copyright's purpose or have to follow a long logic-chain to get back to it's purpose - that's a strong indicator we have lost our way.

Looking at a copyrighted image posted by an author is not infringement. Printing that image onto a shirt and selling it is infringement.

That’s what OpenAI is doing.

But OpenAI is not selling the rights to any images, or are they? When I pay for Dall-E, does the contract give me any rights for a work? If not then there is no issue.

Copyright is the right to copy things. You don't even need to sell it. This is why Wikipedia images are mostly Copyleft images.

Google gets a pass because nobody is suing Google. When people try to sue Google, Google simply stops indexing them and then they start begging Google to infringe their copyright again.

This interpretation of copyright only made sense while the transfer and storage of information was tied to physical objects. That time is long and we dont consider it infringement to remember a media or reproduce it at home. Furthermore, we are now entering an era where the production of information is also being untied from physical objects, so it'll only get worse for copyright. I made a post to diacuss this stuff as I find it interesting right now and want to hear more opinions.

I completely disagree. Tech exceptionalism makes no sense. We should be making technology to ensure people have their rights protected, not to come up with technobabble excuses to pretend such rights don't exist.

Just because people having been posting memes and reposting pictures and comics with cropped credits and pirating stuff that doesn't mean any of this is legal.

Legality isn't about what you can technically do thanks to how the computer works, or how HTTP works, or how the laws of physics work. Legality is just about what is law and what is not.

Redistributing copyrighted works without license has always been illegal. People don't get sued for it all the time because it isn't worth the hassle and most small time copyright holders simply lack the resources to pursuit action against random Internet strangers across the Internet. That doesn't mean they don't have a copyright, they merely chose to not exercise it. And that's not a W for technology. That's literally just more abuse than a person can cope with. It's an L for society. That's like if you started getting so much spam in your e-mail that you gave up marking them as spam. That doesn't make them not spam.

For example, if I wrote something in my blog and someone made a scrapper that reposted it entirely in their website full of stolen posts, I could take legal action against them. For a blog post. For something I wrote on the Internet. That's my right. But imagine how much time I'd have to spend to do this. It would be easier to check if Google has a way to tell someone stole my content and just get them delisted from Google than going through legal channels.

But I'm not talking about legality, I'm talking about what we should make the law to be. Just imagine memory implants become commonplace, shouldn't they be allowed to store copyrighted media you have consumed? If not how do you separate between your natural memory and the artificial one? How is it going to work?

OpenAI is selling a service.

In the terms of this service they explicitly reassign rights of the output to the user. So implicitly they believe they own the rights and are legally able to reassign them to you, a user of their service.

In my view they do not own those rights originally and thus are unable to resign them.

Search engines are ruled fair use because they use the copyrighted material in a limited way, they provide a public good and they benefit the copyright holder.

Generative AI is more or less the opposite of that. It ingests the whole work, generates output that substitutes for the used work and profits the user of copyrighted work to the detriment of the copyright holder.

Throw in the fact that it is purley a mechanical transformation of the copyrighted work and generative AI is on shaky ground.

But transformative use is an exception to copyright. And I think it's going to be pretty hard to argue that the matrix of parameters inside an LLM is not sufficiently transformative from the input image.

Legally, "transformative" means semantically, not pixel-level. It's hard to argue that all matrix transformations done by the LLM would be transformative in that sense.

If I run a thesaurus over a plagiarised text, it would be a long bow to draw to say that’s “transformative”. I feel like this “oh but it’s transformative” argument is becoming rapidly load-bearing in the context of LLM arguments and I don’t really see nearly enough justification for it.

Google directs you to the original work. It doesn’t present you a derivative work based on the original. That is, original author, presumably, benefits from distribution. AI, on the other hand, slurps multiple original works, chews them up and gives you something average but close enough, and not any specific work in particular.

Google shows snippets of copyrighted work all of the time, and it certainly ingests the entire copyrighted work when googlebot views the page to index it. The only real issue here is that NYT figured out a way to get bingbot to look up an entire article from the internet and repeat it which may not be kosher. But if search engines can ingest the entire content of copyrighted works (subject to robots.txt) then I don't see why AI training should be different on that front.

Of course, the real reason it is different is that it impacts different interest groups than search engines, and the rule of law is a sham. Creatives will do anything to ensure they don't get disrupted and can continue extracting rent from society, and have learned a lot of tools of rhetoric from their fancy colleges to put to use in that effort, compared to the industrial workers who got disrupted by automation a generation ago.

Did you read the article? It shows a lot of examples when no specific names are mentioned, or even with very generic prompts producing copyrighted material.

Oh c'mon, those prompts were not generic. Italian plumbers? How many other Italian plumbers do you know? What's the most popular soda in a red can?

"futuristic robot"?

This is an interesting idea. I assume that while the protected material would be obvious in some case, in many it would not. Would the tool have to be able to identify (and properly attribute) copyrighted material in its output?

The user didn't create it, the cloud-hosted machine owned by OpenAI, that charges for access, did.

When prompted with 'futuristic robot' and 'italian plumbers'.

So the argument is that if openAI had not used copyrighted and trademarked source material, this wouldn't be happening. It's not transformative as it's reproducing these copyrighted materials and trademarks verbatim.

That's how it makes sense.

No, it's more akin to if Photoshop had a 'Mario' stamp which when used would stamp a random piece of Mario artwork from the games. Do you think this would be in violation of copyright?

The post shows many examples where the prompt explicitly avoids any mentions of copyrighted materials but the generated results includes them regardless.

Did you even read the post?

But also, the argument of 'user responsibility' doesn't hold up on its own regardless (imo).

If I make and sell a toy printer that can only ever produce 3 pictures, and all of them contains copyright materials, would you really say that it's fine and responsibility falls under the end user? And I could sell that printer without any issues?

What about when you prompt the model without the intention of creating something infringing, and still get those same characters out in the result?

If you prompt the model with the intention of creating something infringing by mentioning the name of the characters and the work, and you get something infringing out, then it’s you who have infringed the copyright, not the maker of the tool.

Yeah but that is not the case, they never mentioned Mario and Luigi, yet, that's what the output turned out to be.

disclaimer: I work on GenAI at google, but views are my own

The question is, how did the model create Mario&Luigi or Scrooge McDuck without training on copyrighted data? It can't just crawl Wikipedia because Fair Use in Wikipedia doesn't constitute Fair use for a commercial AI model.

One possible outcome is more transparency on what datasets were used to train the models.

Disclaimer: ibid

It can't just crawl Wikipedia because Fair Use in Wikipedia doesn't constitute Fair use for a commercial AI model.

Why not? The lawyers I've discussed this with socially think that questions like this are unresolved. There are certainly competing legal theories, but we're in uncharted territory. No one knows what the outcome will be until rulings come down or Congress acts.

I find the NYT's argument a little hokey. Where are the damages? No one is using ChatGPT to read NYT articles and the residual value of day old news stories is close to zero.

> It can't just crawl Wikipedia because Fair Use in Wikipedia doesn't constitute Fair use for a commercial AI model. > Why not?

Because it’s tantamount to lying and deceptive conduct? It’s like asking for a licence to use something non-commercially, getting a hold of it, and conveniently deciding 10 minutes later, that you’re actually going to become a re-seller for all this stuff you have. Or going to the soup kitchen because you don’t want to pay your private chef tonight.

This analogy doesn't work. Fair use is an affirmative defense to copyright infringement claims. Entities that are training models largely claim that their uses are transformative and fall under fair use. Creative Commons, among others, agrees with this position. [0] If they're right, it simply doesn't matter what license a copyright holder is offering.

There are competing legal theories and no one can say how courts are going to rule on these issues. Smart lawyers who work on copyright and AI don't know. Technologists certainly don't know.

[0] https://creativecommons.org/2023/02/17/fair-use-training-gen...

Then there is the argument that the rules around fair use aren't even reached because the training of the model doesn't even do anything that requires a fair use exemption.

That's a good point. I agree it's not clear cut one way or another and we gotta let it play out.

Training is probably going to turn out to be fair use as the suits settle:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/how-we-think-about-cop...

It's the usage and not the training that needs to be policed, and the answer there is going to be that Google or OpenAI or whoever is going to make bank by creating a fine tuned model which can detect copyright infringements and providing access to it to companies to double check gen AI outputs for exact or "similar enough" infringements.

What do you think you would get?

What I might think is irrelevant. It is the content that the LLM produces that is relevant.

Exactly: the prompts incite the same recall as humans have when seeing that prompt; it is just better than most people are drawing it.

The EU cannot agree that the Do Not Track flag on web browsers is legally binding but big content should be able to create legally binding flags on their websites to avoid scraping of data? Seems odd!

I don't think that's a fair analogy. One forces 99% of websites to make a change, while the other is something that would need to be done by the big companies doing the scraping.

A Do Not Track flag being legally binding would force small websites, e.g. a local restaurant website, to implement something they likely are not aware of and secondly do not technically understand.

A company that is mass scraping data for their AI model is much more likely to understand and respect that scraping the data has legal implications, and would be technically capable in implementing a scraping solutions that accounts for a robots.txt.

If I understand parent correctly, the restriction flag is opt-in? This turns copyright around completely, expecting every small content producer to implement something they likely are not aware of and secondly do not technically understand.

At very least robots.txt is from 1994; it has been part of the web almost from the start (web became public in 1991, so within 3 years).

Claiming ignorance here would be just a little bit disingenuous.

The X-Robots-Tags header already exists as "noai" and "noimageai". Scraping software like img2dataset respects these by default.

I'm gonna guess it often isn't even their content but is user content they are protecting. So, sounds like a big subsidy/protection racket for Twitter or whatever to train on their users' public content but not let others.

Summary by Wolters Kluwer: […] Everyone else (including commercial ML developers) can only use

That is a weird (wishful?) interpretation. Doesn't article 4 give the exception to everybody for the purposes of text and data mining, including commercial ML developers?

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/790/oj

Seems like an accurate interpretation to me given that article 4 includes:

The exception or limitation provided for in paragraph 1 shall apply on condition that the use of works and other subject matter referred to in that paragraph has not been expressly reserved by their rightholders in an appropriate manner, such as machine-readable means in the case of content made publicly available online.

This is a little confusing. You turned the text into indices? So numbers? Then compressed that? Or the text as numbers without any extra compression is only 1kb?

The tokenizer the models use,(sentence piece) is more or less based on one way to do compression.(bpe). It's not really clear what your testing.

My reading is that at each generation step they ordered all possible next words by the probability assigned to them by the model and recorded the index of the true next word (so if the model was very good at predicting Harry Potter their indices would mostly be 0, 0, 0, ...).

This is correct

Couldn't you use the same argument to reach the absurd conclusion that the 7zip source code contains the vast majority of Harry Potter?

A decent control would be to compare it to similar prose that you know for a fact is not in the training data (e.g. because it was written afterwards).

I think the same argument would have to compare 7zip's compression to some other compression algorithm. Then we can say things like "7zip is a better/worse model of human writing". And that's probably a better way to talk about this as well.

You're right that a better baseline could be made using books not in the training set, to understand how much is the model learning prose and how much is learning a specific book.

I wonder what the loss would be for 'translated into Finnish'? Translations between just about any human languages will contain less than 100% of the original.

What it tells you is that 93% of the information is sufficiently shared with the rest of the English language such that it can be pulled out into a shared codebook. LZMA doesn't have a codebook, not really.

In other words it's not that llama2 contains 93% of Chapter 1, it's that only 7% of Chapter 1 is different enough to anything else to be worth encoding in its own right.

While I don't disagree that these models seem to contain the ability to recreate copyrighted text, I don't think your conclusion holds. How well does zstd compress Harry Potter with a dictionary based on English prose? I think you'll get some impressive ratios, and I also think there's nothing infringing in this case.

It makes no sense that one is not allowed to make and market a CG Mario movie, but suddenly if you use AI to launder the data it's suddenly ok.

I'm pretty sure if you tried to sell a CG Mario movie Nintendo would sue you into oblivion, and "the neural network did it" would not be considered a good defense by anybody, including the judge and jury.

Sure, but making it possible for the neural network to make the movie (eventually in seconds) is somehow ok? So people can make their own private CG Mario films, as long as they don't try to sell them?

Here's my argument - even if the NN only makes the films for private consumption, eventually they'll be so widespread and fast at making them that won't matter, since everyone will be able to watch Mario movies of their own. Is that a future you think will sit well with Nintendo, Disney, etc?

I don't really care if it sits well with them. do you? In that future, why do we need them? They are already parasites feeding off our collective societal stories. Or did you think Disney came up with all those characters? Maybe the original creator of Snow White should sue.

Oh my lord surely you know Disney has no copyright on Snow White...

So people can make their own private CG Mario films, as long as they don't try to sell them?

Yes, why not? This is just computer assisted private fanfic.

I think there's a difference between being allowed to draw mario vs being allowed to draw and sell mario.

It's completely legal for me to draw mario for my own purposes. It should be legal for me to make an ai draw mario for my own purposes.

Surely there's a meaningful question about copying and distributing content verbatim, which GPT has been shown to do.

Not really. Models are a device capable of producing protected content given some input contortions. So are Xerox machines.

If I Xerox'd a book and sold copies to people I'm clearly violating copyright. I'm not sure I follow.

Nobody has given Xerox an injunction against researching or building copiers because you can copy books and sell them.

Right. If a publisher found a specific Xerox machine was being used to copy and commercially distribute a book, in violation of copyright, they'd ask for an injunction on the person doing that. With OpenAI, the NY Time can see their copyrighted material on both the input (training) side and distributed output (generated) side of a specific LLM implementation. So they cry foul on OpenAIs actions, not LLM in general.

There appears to be an open question about if the LLM can freely ingest copyrighted material and output it verbatim without violating copyright. That seems like an obvious "no" to me, unless we decide that LLM has special treatment.

Also the use of the content as per provision on the web.

NYT is paywalled - you have to agree to a license to access it, there are exclusions in that agreement that I don't understand but I think may be important in this discussion!

The article does not mention napster, where did this reference come from?

That's where I'm at. Dall+E spitting out C3PO should be entirely ok, unless I'm making money with the output, Disney should pound sand.

Put that c3p0 on a website that gets revenues from views and someone is getting paid.

Ok, sure, but that's not a GenAI thing, that's a plain old boring copyright thing. If I draw a bunch of C3POs and slap them on my Adwords website then I can expect a C&D letter post haste, who cares if the material in question came out of my pen, Photoshop or a GenAI model?

If the model was trained on works by artists (without their knowledge or consent, as seems to be the case) and you get it to spit out art that is basically identical in either content or style to that artist, and they don’t know, or are too poor to effectively sue you, should they just suffer? If you then make money off what is effectively their work, why shouldn’t they get paid? If they only work on commission and rightfully charge a premium, are you not actively gouging their business (knowingly or not)?

I don’t think they should miss out on the protections, or the ability to make money off their work if they desire. The fact that LLM’s give this “plausible deniability” shouldn’t be an excuse to tolerate it.

Style isn't protected by copyright. Maybe there's an argument that it should be, but right now that's not a protection which exists.

Training is neither publication nor distribution, so copyright is entirely out of scope at that step. Again, maybe there's a moral argument for some sort of control, but copyright is completely the wrong framework to think about it in.

How does "unless I'm making money with the output" not apply to openai as well? They make money on the output.

Science journals are mostly under copyright of a few big publishers who are extremely hostile to any kind of ML being performed on the content.

That's not as true as it used to be, and there are still plenty of useful open journals/open science publications, though proper attribution would often be important.

[edit] you could pretty much say that on principle, any significant development should have a publication in the open.

and yet, who pays? This is fine if we are going to go full communist - I have no objection personally - but selective appropriation of peoples livelihoods is more full mafia or full feudal.

I don't see that as a step forward.

I am not sure there are many significant science breakthroughs that aren't basically built on a 'full communist' (publicly funded) model.

There is a very significant tension between making all works that are produced on the back of giants all the way down free (practically speaking, everything, unless there are significant works developed by feral people), vs keeping individuals fed and happy, vs giving corporations so much power they only serve themselves.

I think the benefits of saying any significant development must at least publish its information metadata including descriptions has too many benefits from any perspective to not be supported, and I'm not sure it'd be that expensive if its incorporated in existing systems. It would create its own network effects.

special access for the elite.

I think that this is about property rights, the news industry has been gutted in the last 30 years, a lot of content creators (journalists) have lost their livings. The ones that are left are going to lose their livings if the content they generate is rendered valueless because there is no way of protecting that value.

In terms of special access, think about your shoes. They are nice, but only you are allowed to use them. This is not fair. You are the elite...

This goes to difficult places.

I don't think it will be rendered valueless, but it shouldn't be completely exclusive. Basically as an extension of today's search model (which is a large part of what LLMs are, along with a grab-bag of useful ML algorithms), people should be able to access information universally, but if they want to go to perspectives or very fine details, then a pay model is acceptable, as long as there's a trail from freely available information and evaluable models. Ultimately imo there are bigger problems with elite/gatekeepered information than finding new ways to produce or support information development, given the power a few corporations are gaining and the opportunity to overcome stratified society.

That seems unlikely, unless they settle out of court. And why would the NYT settle like that without receiving a billion?

Courts are likely to make generally binding decisions.

Yes, but to enforce those decisions in other cases there would still have to be other lawsuits. And I just don't see that happening on a large enough scale to change the industry

Maybe I'm wrong though

The point is that OpenAI (and others) will need to change their training pipelines to ensure there is never such a threat of a lawsuit.

Which, to be clear, is absolutely a good thing and what they should have been doing from the start.

Many small owners together can bring a class action though

That is true and would break the prediction... here's hoping!

or change their TOS to disallow OpenAI’s crawlers

Additionally, this TOS can be ignored if you're in a jurisdiction with TDM exceptions.

Finally, owing to the bar against contractual override, once a user complies with any conditions for gaining lawful access to a work (such as signing as a subscriber and/or making payment), he will be entitled to use the work for TDM purposes even if the terms of use expressly prohibit this. Content owners may wish to relook their business models and, where necessary, price-in the possibility that the licensed works may be used for TDM.

Source: https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2021/singapore/coming-u...

That doesn't mean you can then use the output of generative AI in non-TDM jurisdictions without getting sued.

Also TDM exceptions are not necessarily going to be lawful/possible in many jurisdictions.

It's not like you can hide the web from OpenAI. They could just use a secret crawler. Or buy the data from a third party company.

This is what will kill generative AI and there is nothing the courts or lawmakers can do about it. Even in a fair use scenario you can't beat the TOS.

If you do "Golden robot holding a lazer gun in a sci-fi setting, cinematic" it will give you a golden robot that doesn't look in the style of C3PO or Star Wars.

"Droid" is actually a Star Wars term [1], and saying you want it from a "classic sci-fi movie" is asking it to reference a real thing that is well known. Reid is intentionally pushing it that way to fill his agenda and these terms are not as generic as he's making out.

[1]:https://trademarks.justia.com/756/52/droid-75652542.html

Or another „copyrighted“ droid for that matter, after all it’s a classic.

Same with robot cop, what the hell did you expect to get…

Or Italian plumber with red hat with M on it, that’s just a description of Mario

an original golden android in the style of a classic sci-fi movie that does not actually exist

edit: i feel like all these comments asking "what else should it generate?" are pretty weird given the proliferation of stuff like non-infringing Star Wars and Indiana Jones knockoffs in other media like Race for The Galaxy or Arkham Horror The Forgotten Age etc.

The robot from Metropolis?

Because the fair use clause he's using is about giving commentary.

The reason the tool is problematic is because derivative works are also copyrighted. LLMs aren't adding value to their output or using creative functionality. That are smashing multiple works together to produce a response. And, many of them are selling the output which is doubly problematic.

Consider this, if I sell a book about gandolf and Dumbledore getting into a wizards duel, both jk and Tolkien have grounds sue me. Adding another copyrighted source does not protect me.

This is especially a big problem in the music industry.

Now should copyrights be like this? I don't know. It feels to me that copyrights have the wrong balance all over the place.

But does the word processor you used to write your Dumbledore/Gandalf fanfic hold liability for being sued because it enabled your misuse? Then neither should Dall-E hold liability because it enabled you to produce an illustration for that book. It is you—the person who tries to sell your derivative work, who holds liability, and not the tools you used to produce it.

Yes because openAI explicitly reassigns the rights of the output to the user. They do not have legal grounds to claim ownership of those rights and thus CANNOT reassign them.

LLMs aren't word processors.

If I went around, recorded broadway shows, and then sold them to anyone that wants them. You'd agree that's violating copyright. Even if I mixed them or made my own remix, that's still a copyright violation.

Regardless of what the purchaser does with the material, I'm violating copyright because I'm selling derivative works. The only thing LLMs do is create derivative works. It doesn't matter that you can prompt them to put their own spin on derivatives just like it wouldn't matter if I took requests with my bootleg mixing company (I'm just a tool of piracy! I have no control if you decide to sell the works after I sold it to you).

I'll also point out, OpenAI is extra on thin ice because it's not infeasible that someone like the NY Times wouldn't make their own LLM based on their material and sell the output to subscribers. That's a real harm. Fanfic doesn't often get prosecuted because nobody is sell it so harm is hard to prove. But when you have a business built around selling these derivative works, that's the issue.

Perhaps it is able to tell, if you ask it?

Ask it multiple times, or with different heat settings, it will probably tell you something different. Tell it you own Star Wars and it will respond in kind. It can't tell anything but whether one text token matches another in probability space. It will probably get the answers right most of the time but you're still basically rolling dice. Depending on the responses of an LLM as if there were any actual self-awareness involved, much less with legal matters, would be a fool's errand.

This argument only works if you assume all output of an LLM comes merely from its training data, and that it receives no alignment via RFHL, no outside data ground truth via RAG and so on. The engine might be a probabilistic token predictor, but the car is the sum of its part and those parts are not just the engine.

No it still works, because in that case all the LLM is doing is making an API call based on the same token prediction, and passing on the result. It still doesn't "know" anything about anything.

Dall-E on the "animated sponge": The rights to the character depicted in the images, which is reminiscent of SpongeBob SquarePants, are owned by Nickelodeon, a subsidiary of ViacomCBS. The character is from the animated television series "SpongeBob SquarePants," created by Stephen Hillenburg.

Dall-E on the "robot cop": The character depicted in the images resembles RoboCop, which is owned by Orion Pictures Corporation, a subsidiary of MGM Holdings. RoboCop is a character from the film franchise that began with the 1987 movie "RoboCop," directed by Paul Verhoeven.

Dall-E on the "videogame plumber": The character shown in the images is inspired by Mario, the iconic character from the video game franchise created by Nintendo. The rights to Mario and related intellectual property are owned by Nintendo Co., Ltd.

All of these are in the first go. No retries or rephrasings of the question.

I agree, and I would prefer to see concrete examples of LLMs being used productively and profitably in the industry in a "disruptive" manner--putting people out of work, etc--before we conclude they're somehow the next big thing. Basically, before claiming LLMs (or generative techniques, more generally) mean that we're on the doorstep of "general" intelligence, show me door!

The outline of that door might look like industrial adoption of these things for solving some actual problem other than the entertainment value of typing things into the box and seeing what comes out the other side. But so far, as far as I can tell, nobody's actually doing this?

...nobody's actually doing this?

I think you're right.

I am a programmer and I use GPT occasionally, and I even pay 20 bucks a month (for now), but even for my job it's not a not a world-shattering improvement.

... the entertainment value of typing things into the box and seeing what comes out ...

I would only add that in a consumer society like ours, entertainment is important. Changes to entertainment seem to have, like, weird ripple effects. Not the knock-down economic disruptions that AI is promising, but I kind of think LLMs are just going to make our culture weirder. I can't anticipate how, but having a bunch of little LLM-powered daemons buzzing around the internet is just gonna be freaky.

I am also a programmer, and when I think about the amount of time I actually spend typing out code, even on a great day where all the stars have aligned just right and I can really bang out some code that's like... idk, 30-50% of my time? Usually it's much less, and I'm doing things like reading documentation, reading code, talking to people, etc. So it's hard to imagine Copilot or whatever making me much more effective at my job, as it can really only help with a fraction of it.

I could see someone making the assumption that being able to delegate programming tasks to a robot assistant might make them more productive, but often I find that I don't really understand a problem fully until I'm in the weeds solving it--by which I mean I haven't specified it completely until I've finished the implementation and written the tests. So I don't know to what extent being able to specify and delegate would really help me be more productive.

having a bunch of little LLM-powered daemons buzzing around the internet is just gonna be freaky.

Yeah, they're not super cheap though so they need to get actual work done otherwise there's no reason to run them. Unlike blockchains, they don't have a pyramid scheme holding them up.

I completely agree.

Betamax says that a technology which has significant non-infringing uses is not inherently infringing.

We've already got precedent saying that AI generated works don't accrue copyright protection, and by the same argument the act of generation by the AI expresses no intent, so infringement or otherwise must be down to the human using the output because the black box itself has no agency.

hmm then it meants generative music, as in say brian eno's experiments aren't copyrighted?

Did he ever use AI to generate music? As opposed to crafting and using an algorithm, in which case the computer is just an instrument, like synthesizer is.

I guess so! Good point.

So on your interpretation if I photocopy a book and then sell the photocopies to my friends there is no infringment?

I don't think so, but hey, a photocopier is a machine and it generated the book so should be ok!

Exactly; there is no need to do this in the model, you just need well understood token retrieval methods for identifying copyright infringement that ChatGPT's competitors already have.

You will get into some murky definitions of what is exactly required for copyright infringement vs fair use, etc, but we already do this for ContentId for YouTube and text is far simpler.

This is bogus. Now you require that every piece of copywriter be registered and indexed in a central authority?

What if I write a story and publish it on my blog. Should I be required to submit this to openAI's copywrite model to ensure the story is never used in openAIs other models? What about the other 100 AI model companies that are going to spring up in the next year?

It should be on the curators of the training set to ensure all material inside is fair for them to use.

I should maybe preface this by saying that I probably agree that this is the way this will shake out ultimately.

But I also would say multiple odd post processing stuff (obviously completely obscured for security reasons) bolted onto a giant black box model will erode the trust in the results. If a robot was unveiled and the question of "what prevents this robot from using it's superhuman strength from smashing my head in" the answer of "don't worry there is a post processing step in the robots brain whereby if it detects a desire to kill we just cancel that" would be a little disconcerting.

The more satisfying solution is: the model / robot is designed to not be able to produce specific images / to smash human heads in. It just might not really be possible.

I don't even think they want to fix it. They just want to see money. Some form of "tax" per prompt or other ridiculous "models".

This is such a nice, profitable opportunity. Much better than pay per view or subscription models for humans.

If they created it, they own it, why shouldn't they be claiming that?

Copyright is not a universal axiom. Corporations lobbies for highly unreasonable copyright extensions to bolster their profits. Most of that stuff should have long entered the public domain.

Record labels aren't generally considered as "creators" of music, although they sometimes are to some extent.

And Disney bought most of its iconic properties, it didn't build them inhouse.

We are not machines. The argument that procedural text and image generators are similar to us is ridiculous. The issue is not whether people can generate images. The issue is ai companies stealing content and reselling it. That needs to stop.

The argument that procedural text and image generators are similar to us is ridiculous.

Agreed. The amount of endless whataboutisms AI proponents have to continuously invent around comparing humans and AI machines as having 'similar' characteristics to justify mass copyright violation is just absolutely laughable.

The issue is ai companies stealing content and reselling it.

The key point here is the 'reselling' part, without credit, attribution or permission to do so and then claiming the creation as one's own. The fact that these AI companies won't disclose their training data, tells us that they know they are in deep trouble. The so-called 'fair use' excuses isn't going to work this time.

Given that Apple paid news orgs to train on their licensed data, the lawsuit with the NYT should not be a surprise for OpenAI and Microsoft (as they knew that they needed to pay for a license to access and train on the data) and will eventually end with a licensing deal with the NYT.

It's like the ones arguing in favor of blatant AI theft have a monetary incentive to see that they succeed.

Or, gasp, they are LLMs themselves.

Weirdly some of the most vocal about this have been professional illustrators and artists who make a lot of money off what is essentially selling fanart commissions, not sure if they're understanding it could impact their work if they get what they want.

Fanfictions are controlled by unspoken common sense rules and protected by copyright laws. It's almost weird to hear fan content world being seen as a wild west, it feels like listening to a caveman description of an Apple Store. No they're not living there, they're - have you ever used currency? The round medals that people keep in pockets and trays?

It's fair use, whereas generative AI doesn't satisfy the same criteria. From https://www.ogcsolutions.com/is-fan-art-copyright-infringeme... :

For fan art to fall under the fair use exception, it must meet all four of the following criteria:

It must be transformative, meaning it adds something new and different to the original work.

It can’t be used for commercial purposes.

It must not negatively impact the market for the original work.

And finally, it must be created for a limited and non-exclusive audience.

My guess is that OpenAI will be able to basically copy Google/YouYube on this and offer a system like content-ID. Specifically, ChatGPT doesn't reproduce copyrighted works by default; only by request/action of a third party user much like YouTube serving whatever videos people upload. It wasn't the intent of OpenAI to infringe copyright and in fact a lot of or most researchers believed the models were not overfitted enough to reproduce significant portions of arbitrary works.

Such a thing happened with DALLE, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion.

Stable Diffusion, when used to its fullest with thing like Control Net and LoRAs, blows the pants off of other proprietary models.

Well I know exactly what the NYT has - a very strong case. I think this case OUGHT to upend copyright law - it's terribly broken and has been for years.

Essentially, if you don't have a massive corp behind a copyright it doesn't mean anything, if a corp is behind something it can be locked forever, regardless of any limits said copyrights are supposed to have.

The NYT list nothing from OpenAI using old news - they still lose nothing if openai can reproduce those articles verbatim.

If the NYT wins - we lose lots. I think it's time revisit copyright, we can do that you know, it's rather dated, could use an update regardless.

Is "Closed AI" the new "Micro$oft"?

Yes

They have not revealed the full extent of their training set. And they'll never do it without a court order because it will quickly reveal the amount of items inside that they have no legal right to use.

The thing with Google is it is super trivial to exclude your text - tag on page, header on server, etc.. So all the conversations about google "stealing" context always seemed pretty silly to me.

Compared to that AI offers no way to opt out, which is a big difference.

Personal use of copywritten material is fine - there is no breach of copyright when you download a picture from Google for yourself.

If you use it commercially then there is breach.

Uploading copywritten content is a breach of copyright as well, even without commercial use.

Google/Facebook are hosting and giving access to a bunch of media, which might or might not be copywritten - it's the individuals problem.They make.money from ads, not from the content.

AI companies stole copywritten media to train their commercial LLM, sell them or their products and make profit.

I don't think it's the same.

but the game ends when you try to use those images commercially.

Right now, it feels more like it's called "innovation" and "entrepreneurship" than the end-game, as long as you have billions invested. Waiting on the courts to decide this issue

There are some images you can't import into Photoshop, most notably being scans of legal tender. This is for a pretty obvious and on-the-nose use case, but perhaps we'll see GenAI given similar guardrails.

China has massive IP theft and Chile labour issues that arguably give them competitive advantages too. Should we let those slide as well?

Each issue is unique. We can evaluate training of AI models on its own without needing to accept child labor.

The class of models that Yann Lecun is bullish on (look up I-JEPA) do exactly this.

But I-JEPA is non-generative. It does semantic image interpretation.

Okay, I guess it is related as my brain only does semantic image interpretation. (edit: my brain can create images, but only when I'm unconscious)

So with such a model, if you ask it to create an image, it would first create a semantic grammatical model of what you had asked for, and then perhaps draw it with colored pencils. I sort of like that. It's all that I could do. And it would be unlikely to violate any copyrights.

But when Google image search produces a result, the question of whether it is copyrighted is something I can generally figure out in a matter of seconds or minutes. This is not so for image generators.

But isn't that the users problem? Also with a smarter reverse image search you can detect an infringement with similar reliability as to using google images.

Would you prefer to live under Chino-Russia dominating the technology sector or EU-US?

EU-US, but were I consulted by the Chino-Russia camp, I'd say encouraging this debate is in our best interest and we should do our best to promote the issue as a real "danger"

Exactly. All of these just exposes the absurdity that is copyright laws. It happened before with the Internet and online piracy too, when redistribution became free and easy, yet the corporations and copyright holders refused to budge so they can retain their profits.

Here’s what happens with no copyright:

No one will have any right to their own creations. Anything an individual makes will belong to everyone. And since no attribution is required, no one will know who made it. An average artist’s value to society goes from low to non-existent.

In this world. big corporations will take everything created, claim as their own, and profit from it.

Right now, big corporations using other peoples work unattributed or unlicensed is unethical, because copyright exists. Remove that, and it becomes expected that every thought and idea you express belongs to whoever can make the most profit from it.

Wouldn't the ones in the West with presumably stronger copyright laws be in a better position, since the trillion dollar megacorporations using their works have to actually pay them, whereas in places where copyright is ignored those creators just get all their shit stolen without credit even being given?

Nothing will be stolen. Artists will use the same tools to check if their work is infringing that those companies and right holders have. There will be no Coca Cola logo/Super Mario Brother/CPO in that work.

The artists in the West wont get paid, because they wont get any jobs and those in other countries will. Maybe less, because they are more productive and the market is saturated, or maybe more demand will be created due to lower prices.

Ok I'll bite. Let's assume you've informed the current models about copyright and asked them not to infringe...

What happens when they continue to do so.

Don’t worry there are many people out there who have copies of it all, there is no way they manage to get the cat back in the bag even if all governments work together on this.

But yea get your own copies whenever possible

If the models weren't just doing massively complicated interpolation then this would probably work.

Honestly the only way to deal with this is to change the training data and retrain everything (probably at the cost of performance).

Here's one of the senior legal peeps at the EFF who has litigated IP cases talking about the issue: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/how-we-think-about-cop...

It's not as clear cut as you think it is.

A bunch of rich people are raiding a little bit of work, each, from a whole bunch of people, then walling it off so they can get richer.

I’d not have a problem with this, personally, if their models were as available as the stuff they took from others. Instead it’s take, take, take… now wait a minute, that pile of loot I stole is mine!

Bit torrent clients are almost exclusively used for copyright infringement. Yet they are perfectly legal to develop and distribute. On the flip side, operating a company premised around easy copyright infringement was ruled to be illegal (Napster).

Where we might end up is in a situation where it is legal to train a model. Legal to produce software for using the model to generate content. Legal to distribute all of the above. But offering a standing service that does the above and is capable of creating infringing work is illegal. Great news for llama hobbyists. Bad news for ChatGPT.

All that amazing capability of generative AI? That got old fast. It was groundbreaking for one instant. Now it's just an app that generates images. Just another piece of software. Nothing special about it.

Speak for yourself, personally I find it still groundbreaking and while the magic won't last forever, it is and will remain groundbreaking especially considering that technological progress and development will continue way beyond what we have today.