Make the AI folks use public domain training data or nothing and maybe we’ll see the “life of the author + 75 years” bullshit get scaled back to something reasonable.
Exactly this. I can’t believe how many comments I’ve read accusing the AI critics of holding back progress with regressive copyright ideas. No, the regressive ideas are already there, codified as law, holding the rest of us back. Holding AI companies accountable for their copyright violations will force them to either push to reform the copyright system completely, or to change their practices for the better (free software, free datasets, non-commercial uses, real non-profit orgs for the advancement of the technology). Either way we have a lot to gain by forcing them to improve the situation. Giving AI companies a free pass on the copyright system will waste what is probably the best opportunity we have ever had to improve the copyright system.
They let the Mouse die finally, maybe there is hope for change.
The Mouse isn’t dead, he is risen anew. Freed from the shackles of his creators, he is now more powerful than he could ever have hoped to be before. The mighty tremble beneath the footsteps of old Steamboat Willie. He is a living sign of a new era, one in which it is possible to strike back against his old captors.
What a great take!
I guess any way you look at it, the Mouse isn’t dead dead.
Tbf that number was originally like 20+ years and then Disney lobbied several times to expand it
19 years. It wasn’t life of the author either. It was 19 years after creation date plus an option to renew for another 19 at the end of that period. It was sensible. That’s why we don’t do it anymore.
Wow, I really really like this take. These corporate bitches want to eat there cake and have it, too.
man this cyberpunk present fucking sucks
Cyberpunk 2077 had a whole giant plot point that the old net was overtaken by rough AIs and the AI wars were a thing.
I’m not sure they’re that far off base
Cyberpunk would always suck, it’s dystopia. Always has been.
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Yeah but we got all the dys without any of the topia. I was promised high quality prosthetics, neon blinkenlights, and the right to bear arms. We’ve got like 15% of the appropriate level of any of those.
no, you get the dys, rich people gets the topia. you don’t think you’re the protagonist do you?
And people wonder why there’s so much push back against everything corps/gov does these days. They do not act in a manner which encourages trust.
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They steal data from everything including paywalled sources and proprietary data.
If this ends with LLMs getting shutdown to some degree, I wonder if it’s going to result in something like a Pirate Bai.
Not to be confused with, “Pirate Bae”, the pirate dating site for those endowed with abundant doubloons.
It’ll result in the industry moving to nations with more permissive scraping laws (like Japan) or less respect for Western copyright (Russia, China).
Yeah, realistically what will happen is china will get far ahead in natural language computing which will benefit it’s economy, everyone who demanded chat GPT be stopped because they’re scared of change will demand the government do something to catch up and they’ll write exemptions into the law.
More likely they’ll realise this is the obvious way things will go and the only legislation will make it harder for open source and community run ai, but hopefully not significantly.
The next round of ai gen will start reaching consumer space soon. CAD, especially for electronics and structural design (E.g. creating the right amount of supports to hold a given load). They’ll scare a few corporations into pushing for legislation but I think the utility will be far clearer.
Doubt it. GenAI requires a shitton of resources, both in storage and for processing. Training a GenAI requires clusters upon clusters of NPUs and/or GPUs, even more than crypto miners and 3D renderers. The full storage requirements are proportional to the amount of training data you give, so expect them at least to be dozens of gigabytes long.
I doubt AI companies do it “for science” (yeah, right) so if they’re shit down by a court of law they’ll just shut the thing down. They can upload the code somewhere, but without training data their engine is useless.
Are there any historical examples of a technology as valuable as LLMs being effectively shut down?
Nuclear energy.
Sort of joking.
Great question, but unfortunately it’s out of both my knowledge and will-to-research base.
Stem cell research
Nice example. I think embryotic is the asterisk to it though.
Kind of a strawman, I’d like everything to be FOSS, and if we keep Capitalism (which we shouldn’t), it should be HEAVILY regulated not the laissez-faire corporatocracy / oligarchy we have now.
I don’t want any for-profit capitalists to have any control of AI. It should all be owned by the public and all productive gains from it taxed at 100%. But open source AI models, right on.
And team SciHub–FUCK YEAH!
Oh OpenAI is just as illegal as SciHub. More so because they’re making money off of stolen IP. It’s just that the Oligarchs get to pick and choose. So of course they choose the arrangement that gives them more control over knowledge.
They’re not serving you the exact content they scraped, and that makes all the difference.
It’s great how for most of us we’re taught that just changing the order of words is still plagerism. For them they frequently end up using the exact same words as other things and people still argue it somehow is intelligent and somehow not plagerism.
“Changing the order of words” is what it does? That’s news to me. And do you have examples of it “using the exact same words as other things” without prompt manipulation?
Why does the prompting matter? If I “prompt” a band to play copyrighted music does that mean they get a free pass?
If you passed them a sheet of music I’d say that’s on you, it would be your responsibility to not sell recordings of them playing it.
Just like if I typed the first chapter of Harry Potter into word it is not Microsoft’s intent to breach copyright, it would have been my intent to make it do it. It would be my responsibility not to sell that first chapter, and they should come after me if I did, even though MS is a corporation who supplied the tools.
That’s not a very good analogy because the band would be reproducing an entire work of art which an LLM does not and cannot. And by prompt manipulation I mean purposely making it seem like the LLM is doing something it wouldn’t do on its own. The operating word is seem, which is what I meant by manipulation. The prompting here is irrelevant, but how it’s done is. So unless The Times releases the steps they used to get ChatGPT to output what it did, you can’t really claim that that’s what it does.
In a blog post, OpenAI said the Times “is not telling the full story.” It took particular issue with claims that its ChatGPT AI tool reproduced Times stories verbatim, arguing that the Times had manipulated prompts to include regurgitated excerpts of articles. “Even when using such prompts, our models don’t typically behave the way The New York Times insinuates, which suggests they either instructed the model to regurgitate or cherry-picked their examples from many attempts,” OpenAI said.
So it’s content laundering
What a colorful mischaracterization. It sounds clever at face value but it’s really naive. If anything about this is deceptive, it’s the lengths that people go to to slander what they dislike.
Actually content laundering is the best term I’ve heard to describe the process. Just like money laundering, you no longer know the source and know it’s technically legal to use and distribute.
I mean, if the copyrighted content wasn’t so critical, they would train models without it. Their essentially derivative works, but no one wants to acknowledge it because it would either require changing our copyright laws or make this potentially lucrative and important work illegal.
Content laundering is not a good way to describe it because it’s misleading as it oversimplifies and mischaracterizes what a language model actually does. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how it works. Training language models is typically a transparent and well-documented process as described by the mountains of research over the past decades. The real value comes from the weights of the nodes in the neural network and not the source that it spits out in its entirety when it was trained. The source material is evaluated and wholly transformed into new data in the form of nodes and weights. The original content does not exist as it was within the network because there’s no way to encode it that way. It’s a statistical system that compounds information.
And while LLMs do have the capacity to create derivative works in other ways, it’s not all that they do, or what they always do. It’s only one of the many functions that it has. What you say would probably be true if it was only trained on a single source, but that’s not even feasible. But when you train it on millions of sources, what remains are the overall patterns of language within those works. It’s much more sophisticated and flexible than what you describe.
So no, if it was cut and dry there would be grounds for a legitimate lawsuit. The problem is that people are arguing points that do not apply but sound reasonable when they haven’t seen a neural network work under the hood. If anything, new laws need to be created to address what LLMs do if you’re so concerned about proper compensation.
I am familiar with how LLMs work and are trained. I’ve been using transformers for years.
The core question I’d ask is, if the copyrighted material isn’t essential to the model, why don’t they just train the models without that data? If it is core to the model, then can you really say they aren’t derivative of that content?
I’m not saying that the models don’t do something more, just that the more is built upon copyrighted material. In any other commercial situation, you’d have to license/get approval for the underlying content if you were packaging it up. When sampling music, for example, the output will differ greatly from the original song, but because you are building off someone else’s work you must compensate them.
Its why content laundering is a great term. The models intermix so much data that it’s hard to know if the content originated from copyrighted materials. Just like how money laundering is trying to make it difficult to determine if the money comes from illicit sources.
I feel most people critical of AI don’t know how a neural network works…
That is exactly what’s going on here. Or they hate it enough that they don’t mind making stuff up or mischaracterizing what it does. Seems to be a common thread on the Fediverse. It’s not the first time this week I’ve seen it.
Well if you believe that you should look at the times lawsuit.
Word for word on hundreds/thousands of pages of stolen content, its damming
Why do you assume that I haven’t? The case hasn’t been resolved and it’s not clear how The NY Times did what they claim, which is may as well be manipulation. It’s a fair rebuttal by OpenAI. The Times haven’t provided the steps they used to achieve that.
So unless that’s cleared up, it’s not damming in the slightest. Not yet, anyway. And that still doesn’t invalidate my statement above, because it’s still under very specific circumstances when that happens.
Also intention is pretty important when determining the guilt of many crimes. OpenAI doesnt intentionally spit back an author’s exact words, their intention is to summarize and create unique content.
Ah, yes. The defense of “I didn’t mean to do it.” Always a classic.
No, the real defense is “that’s not how LLMs work” but you are all hinging on the wrong idea. If you so think that an LLM is capable of doing what you claim, I’d love to hear the mechanism in detail and the steps to replicate it.
I mean, I’m not sure why this conversation even needs to get this far. If I write an article about the history of Disney movies, and make it very clear the way I got all of those movies was to pirate them, this conversation is over pretty quick. OpenAI and most of the LLMs aren’t doing anything different. The Times isn’t Wikipedia, most of their stuff is behind a paywall with pretty clear terms of service and nothing entitles OpenAI to that content. OpenAI’s argument is “well, we’re pirating everything so it’s okay.” The output honestly seems irrelevant to me, they never should have had the content to begin with.
That’s not the claim that they’re making. They’re arguing that OpenAI retains their work they made publicly available, which OpenAI claims is fair use because it’s wholly transformative in the form of nodes, weights and biases, and that they don’t store those articles in a database for reuse. But their other argument is that they created a system that threatens their business which is just ludicrous.
What’s scihub?
A website where you can download paywalled scientific literature. Most scientific literature is paywalled by publishers, and costs a real significant amount to read (like 30-50$ per article if you don’t have a subscription).
Scihub basically just pirates it. And has been shut down several times. But as most scientific studies are already laid with public money, scihub isn’t that unethical at all.
Lots of scientists will just send you their article if you email them. They don’t get the money when you pay to read it - often they pay to submit. Reviewing journal articles is a privilege and doesn’t get you paid. The prestige of a scientific article is from the number of times people have cited it. The only “harm” done is that the publisher doesn’t get to make 100% profit for doing nothing.
Journal publishing is mostly a way to extract money from universities. Elsevier and its ilk name whatever price they think a research university can afford.
OpenAI isn’t really proven as legal. They claim it is, and it’s very difficult to mount a challenge, but there definitely is an argument that they have no fair use protection - their “research” is in fact development of a commercial product.
Using it to train is a grey area, if you paid for the works. If you didn’t, it’s still illegal
What it does is output copyrighted works which is copyright infringement. That is the legal issue. It’s very easy to prompt it into giving full copyright text they never even paid to look at, let alone give to other people.
“AI” can’t even handle switching synonyms to make it technically different like a college kid cheating on an essay
Their argument is that the copying to their training database is “research”. This would be a legal fair use of unauthorised copying. However, normally with research you make a prototype, and that prototype is distinctly different from the final commercial product. With LLM’s the prototype is the finished commercial product, they keep adding to it, thus it isn’t normal fair use.
When a court considers fair use, the first step is the type of use. The exemptions are education, research, news, comment, or criticism. Next, they consider the nature of the use, in particular whether it is commercial. Calling their copying “research” is a bit of a stretch - it’s not like they’re writing academic papers and making their data publicly available for review from other scientists - and their use is absolutely commercial. However, it needs to go before a judge to make the decision and it’s very difficult for someone to show a cause of action, if only because all their copying is done secretly behind closed doors.
The output of the AI itself is a bit more difficult. The database ChatGPT runs off of does not include the whole works it learned from - it’s in the training database where all the copying occurs. However, ChatGPT and other LLM’s can sometimes still manage to reproduce the original works, and arguably this should be an offense. If a human being reads a book and then later writes a story that replicates significant parts of the book, then they would be guilty of plagiarism and copyright infringement, regardless of whether they genuinely believe they were coming up with original ideas.
The IP system, which goes to great lengths to block things like open-access scientific publications, is borked borked borked borked borked.
If OpenAI and other generative AI projects are the means by which we finally break it so we can have culture and a public domain again, well, we had to nail Capone with tax evasion.
Yes, industrialists want to use AI [exactly they way they want to use every other idea – plausible or not] to automate more of their industries so they can pay fewer people less money for more productivity. And this is a problem of which generative AI figures centrally, but it’s not really all that new, and eventually we’re going to have to force our society to recognize that it works for the public and not money. I don’t think AI is going to break the system and lead us to communist revolution ( The owning class will tremble…! ) But eventually it will be 1789 all over again. Or we’ll crush the fash and realize the only way we can get the fash to not come back is by restoring and extending FDR’s new deal.
I am skeptical the latter can happen without piles of elite heads and rivers of politician blood.
We need to ban the publishing business from academic stuff. Have the Universities host a site that’s free access. They can also better run the peer review system and the journals would also also no longer control what research sees the light of day even behind a paywall.
How would you publish if you’re not a part of a major research institution? Los Alamos National Lab could host its own papers just fine, but what about small-time labs? I know of at least one person who doesn’t even officially work in science but publishes original research they do in their free time.
The journal system still provides a service, even if they over-charge for access. The peer review system has value. Imagine if there was zero barrier to publish. As a reader, you’d have to wade through piles of trash to find decent science.
Where would you find it all? Currently we use journal aggregators, whose service also has value and costs money. Are you really going to go to every university’s website looking for research relevant to your area? We could do that again, but with everyone responsibile for publishing their own work, well, who gets indexed with the aggregators?
You get published with a university instead of a for profit publishing system. And universities would get a good or bad reputation for their peer review, just like journals. The aggregator could easily be run by a coalition of universities with government grants to make the maintenance and upkeep free to the users and universities.
We do not have to lock research behind paywalls.
Like https://doaj.org/
The problem isn’t just publishing though, it’s academia as well. Scientists are incentivized to publish in “prestigious” closed access journals such as Nature. They are led to believe it’s better for their career than publishing in open access journals such as PLOS One. As such, groundbreaking papers often get paywalled. Universities then feel obligated to pay outrageous subscription fees to access them.
Yup. And this would change that, giving universities more influence.
Thats actually not a bad idea, train a model with all the data in scihub a then release the model to the public
It would still be useless, the thing would just produce bullshit papers.
Actually a good point.
That would likely be explicitly illegal if the NYT case succeeds (and it isn’t fraud as OpenAI alleges)
This is just the most inefficient zip file ever created
Yeah, but did SciHub pay Nigerians a pittance to look at and read about child rape? Because- wait, I have no idea what I’m even arguing. Fuck OpenAI though.
OpenAI did those subhuman training of ChatGPT in Kenya, not Nigeria. And since the Kenyan govt is a western lapdog these days, nothing would ever come out of that.
Oh, well that makes it okay then. My mistake.
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Yes, because 1:1 duplication of copy written works violates copyright, but summaries of those works and relaying facts stated in those works is perfectly legal (by an ai or not).
If you mean by “perfectly legal” a fair use claim, then could you please explain how a commercial for-profit company using the works, sometimes echoing verbatim results, is infringing on the copyrights in a fair use manner?
I do not mean a fair use claim. To quote the copyright office “Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation, although it may protect the way these things are expressed” source
Facts and ideas cannot be copy written, so what I was specifically referring to is that if I or an AI read a paper about jellyfish being ocean creatures, then later talk about jellyfish being ocean creatures, there’s no restrictions on that whatsoever as long as we don’t reproduce the paper word by word.
Now, most of the time AI summarizes things or collects facts, and since those themselves cannot be protected by copyright it’s perfectly legal. On the occasion when AI spits out copy written work then that’s a gray area and liability if any will probably decided in the courts.
What do you expect when people support 90 year copyrights after death?
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They are also right.
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It seems I did waste my time engaging with you after all. Continue trolling.
To quote you, Mr. Lawyer, that’s a strong accusation.
Btw, make sure not to delete this comment of yours, and if you do, don’t act like you’re above insulting someone and then deleting the comment.
It’s self evident. You’re trolling. And you’re digging in to your trolling.
“the… ridiculous accusation you lobbed at me before cowardly deleting it” - Gutless, living up to his name
You’re right, your behavior is self-evident!
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That’s a pretty strong accusation. You seem to like to wade through people’s post history but to my cursory glance nothing would indicate this poster is a troll.
You understand AI posts frequently surface on this platform and people will engage with those posts even if they disagree with you?
Glance better
Yeah you keep spamming that screen shot. Idk I’m not seeing it. I read the thread you’re posting and it seems like you’re just digging in and insisting that someone that disagrees with you must be a troll.
For what it’s worth, you made the same accusation against me yesterday and after I think I pretty effectively (and unnecessarily I might add) defended myself you deleted those posts. Making spurious accusations like that (and, as I read it, this) are also trollish behavior that doesn’t further any discussion. I’ve looked in your thread you’re posting. You come out flying with accusations based on extremely flimsy evidence. I think OPs responses seemed entirely warranted.
The troll behavior speaks for itself, but if you want to throw your reputation into the garbage along with that troll, be my guest.
Anybody who demands evidence, then refuses to look at it when it is given to them, and then demands money, is a troll.
No, see, it actually isn’t self evident. After being accused of being disingenuous because he only talked about open source in the context of AI — again almost the verbatim ridiculous accusation you lobbed at me before cowardly deleting it - he asked for a citation relevant to the issue and someone sent a CNN article about Duolingo laying off staff. That isn’t the gotcha you think it is. It doesn’t “destroy my reputation” lmao to point out that you are, in fact, acting like a troll. This is a pattern of yours. Be better.
Take a closer look at the screenshot. Can you explain using your own words what your client said?
Then we can move on to people who make and then delete insults… Like you just did.
Time to make OpenASci?
/rimshot
More people need to think like you. Why isn’t “Total War: Warhammer” just called “Total Warhammer”? These are the questions that keep me up at night
I agree with you, but also Total War is the trademark brand and they’re also gonna use it.
Total War: Hammer!
Stop, Hammer time!
“Go with the flow”, it is said
