“Suno’s training data includes essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet.”

“Rather than trying to argue that Suno was not trained on copyrighted songs, the company is instead making a Fair Use argument to say that the law should allow for AI training on copyrighted works without permission or compensation.”

Archived (also bypass paywall): https://archive.ph/ivTGs

  • @[email protected]
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    1610 months ago

    Imagine how many years of prison would get an individual if he admitted in court to pirate tens of millions of music files in order to make a profit

    • Hot PotatoOP
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      10 months ago

      I mean Suno is being sued by the record labels right now for this. We will see how much they have to pay if they lose

      • sunzu
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        310 months ago

        I don’t know if corpos will allow such dangerous precedent since all mega corps are guilty of this

  • @[email protected]
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    10 months ago

    Even the one where I moist-farted the riff from “7 Nation Army” and looped it for 24 hours, i.e. 7-nation-army-beans-and-dairy-mix.aiff?

  • @[email protected]
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    3110 months ago

    I just don’t get how we can’t just sue them. You’d think the big copyright holders, record labels in this case, would be all over that.

    • @[email protected]
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      10 months ago

      I can only assume they see it as a double edged sword. Rights-holders (read: publishers, labels & studios) would have the power to sue here, not creators (read: artists, musicians and filmmakers).

      These rights-holders also want to use AI so they don’t have to pay or deal with creators, so while they don’t love that other companies are making money off their content, they’re more just mad that someone else did it first before they could exploit their own content in the same way.

      Sue and set precedent, and they might accidentally make it impossible for them to turn around and do the exact same thing once they have the technical know-how.

      Entirely speculation, but it’s the only thing that makes sense to me.

      EDIT - As another commenter mentioned, I broke my own rule and commented without reading and this was discovery as part of an ongoing lawsuit. I did say it was entirely speculation though, and I still think this is why you don’t see so many AI related lawsuits in all the areas there is just tons of content generation. I also still think this is a “mad they couldn’t get there first” situation.

    • @[email protected]
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      3110 months ago

      Uhm, this came out as part of a law suit against them by the record industry? So they are in the process of being sued.

      While not surprising, the admission, which was made as part of court proceedings responding to a massive recording industry lawsuit against the company, shows yet again that many AI tools are trained on, essentially, anything that companies can get their hands on.

      • @[email protected]
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        10 months ago

        Thank you. I‘m honestly baffled at the amount of comments talking out of their ass in this thread as if the legal system has made 0 progress or effort to deal with anything AI related by now. It‘s reminiscent of how cryptobros talked about NFTs not so long ago and how all the scammers are untouchable because laws don‘t mention NFTs directly or something. AI is the largest case of copyright infringement ever committed and labels do not give a damn about subjective and debatable „but it’s transformative“ arguments. Again, it‘s baffling.

    • @[email protected]
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      310 months ago

      If I make a song inspired by the sound of two artists, the lyrics of two other songs, and the voice of a few more, who gets the money?

  • @[email protected]
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    3910 months ago

    why are comments full of AI shilling? are these bot accounts or are there still real people actually defending “AI” ““art””?

    • @[email protected]
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      1710 months ago

      Why are comments RIAA shilling?

      Are you a bot?

      The fuck is wrong with discourse now. This kind of comment is just embarrassing.

    • Todd Bonzalez
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      1110 months ago

      Because regardless of whatever data Suno trained their model on, the stuff it makes sounds like shit and won’t replace real music, just like Midjourney isn’t replacing real art.

      • @[email protected]
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        210 months ago

        I predict “AI” will get better and start generating things that are indiscernible from real art and music in the future. However, that doesn’t mean it will replace artists. Because while AI generated stuff is kinda neat… there isn’t any spirit behind it. With real music and art, people are creating it because they enjoy doing it and every step of the process they have control over. With AI art its just a computer pumping out garbage, even if it is engineered to sound or look good. I don’t know if I’m doing a good job explaining what I mean lol

        • @[email protected]
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          110 months ago

          I totally agree. However, AI assisted works will probably fare much better, depending on how much a human inserted artistic intent into the AI. It’s as you say, people enjoy the steps they have control over, and I think most will use it to replace the steps they are bad at, or which take very long otherwise. Fully AI generated works will probably never be good enough.

    • ᕙ(⇀‸↼‶)ᕗ
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      610 months ago

      i love suno because it proves 99% of music is not art. not all. not even close. it is entertainment at best. if suno can generate “music” for the masses this will radically reduce pollution of the planet: less bands touring, less music plattforms pushing industry produced music, less shitty texts…the world will be a better place once we acknowledge that we are not so fucking special after all. music is like food. anyone can cook, dont pretend to be ratatouille. birda even do free music their buddies vide to and no riaa in sight.

      • @[email protected]
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        10 months ago

        music is not art. not all. not even close. it is entertainment at best.

        I feel like you and the 4 people who upvoted your comment have commodified music too much. It’s easy to do these days with all the streaming services and such that exist to commodify it. But music isn’t always purely entertainment, It’s something created for a purpose by real people.

      • @[email protected]
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        1110 months ago

        I’d say everything is art, just on different levels to different people. Or nothing is art.

        • ᕙ(⇀‸↼‶)ᕗ
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          110 months ago

          no. i do not think so. taking a dump isnt art, creating the mona lisa is art. what we enjoy and think is “art” as in something an ai or a bird can create is not art.and so isnt taylor swift, nktob or whatever is “popular”. it just means many ppl can vibe with it. like bacon and onions.

          • @[email protected]
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            10 months ago

            I’d say that open for discussion. Even taking a dump can be seen from the perspective of art, although I agree for us humans it’s quite far out there.

            Perhaps to smallen the gap, think of a dung beetle rolling a ball of poo.

            I’m not saying you have to like it or even that it’s noteworthy, but art in my opinion as definition can be anything that is created by something. As long as an observer looks at it as if it were art.

              • @[email protected]
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                10 months ago

                Yes, in the same way a field of corn on a farm can be seen as art. We do not have full control over how it actually looks in the end, but it’s an expression by natural phenomena (sometimes guided or initiated by humans).

                You could argue about the amount of free will required to create art. But in that case one could philosophically raise the question if humans even have free will, and if anything may be called art then at all.

                I think if something is observed as art, it is by definition art. And perhaps everything that exists and is created could fit that description. But personally one of the more interesting types of art to me are where living beings are involved in the creation, while they’re actually thinking of creating art; and I think most discussions are about that concrete level.

                • ᕙ(⇀‸↼‶)ᕗ
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                  110 months ago

                  hm. but an ai could create an infinite amount. and each item might be perceived as art by some individual. and you say it has the same value as the mona lisa? i doubt that. an ai could even replicate billions of near similar mona lisas. yet none of them is art even if there is an individual that perceives the ai image as art. the only that is taking place is narcism.

        • @[email protected]
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          210 months ago

          There’s objectively good and objectively bad art. Anyone who says otherwise is just an edgelord who is not on top of the conversation.

          • @[email protected]
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            410 months ago

            I wish lemmy had the ability to save comments to folders, like email. This could go in the “Wild Takes” folder. Seriously, what metric would you use to objectively measure all art? Even a survey of people is going to be biased based on who you sample and its still a subjective opinion of people

            • @[email protected]
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              110 months ago

              You know art / art history is a subject of study at the majority of universities? Art is simply not a free-for-all concept where everything produced is equal, that is only what bad artists want to believe.

              Good art is relevant, bad art is irrelevant. That’s the base where people who know about it judge it.

              • @[email protected]
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                10 months ago

                You know art / art history is a subject of study at the majority of universities?

                Yep, and I think that’s great! Learning to make and appreciate art should be something everyone has a chance to do. Those programs at universities are great for learning principles of art. They teach you the “rules”. However, once you leave that class, you don’t have to follow any of those rules if you don’t want to. Learning the rules is great because then you know where you can break them.

                I like a lot of music that most people would despise. I am very glad that there are artists that are willing to make such music, even though the masses will not appreciate it.

                example: https://carlstone.bandcamp.com/track/sumiya

                Art is simply not a free-for-all concept where everything produced is equal, that is only what bad artists want to believe.

                I do feel that art is indeed a free-for-all. Anyone can create it, anyone can view it. Art means different things to different people and therefore it’s not productive to put certain art above other pieces of art. Even if 1000 people think a painting is horrible looking, if 1 person enjoys it, it was still worth creating that piece

                Good art is relevant, bad art is irrelevant.

                There is tons of good art that is “irrelevant”. Ever taken a stroll through Bandcamp? There is so much music there that maybe only 100 people have listened to, even if its gorgeous sounding. Relevance doesn’t have anything to do with quality.

      • @[email protected]
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        610 months ago

        Anyone can do anything, but becoming proficient at something is hard and takes time. Why do you hate people who create art so much?

        • ᕙ(⇀‸↼‶)ᕗ
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          110 months ago

          because they dont and we have to accept that. may they enjoy their lives and so may their fans and followers. is a melody made by a bird a lower level of creativity than a melody made by you?

          • @[email protected]
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            310 months ago

            is a melody made by a bird a lower level of creativity than a melody made by you?

            Probably so. Bird melodies serve a biological purpose to the bird, as a form of communication. The bird doesn’t intend to make music, us humans just interpret it that way

            • ᕙ(⇀‸↼‶)ᕗ
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              110 months ago

              thats what i ment. you overvalue the human creations. you think animals are not sentinent,right?

              • @[email protected]
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                10 months ago

                you think animals are not sentinent,right?

                No, absolutely not. Animals are without a doubt sentient. Unless they are a sea sponge or something.

    • @[email protected]
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      710 months ago

      A big % of social media comments are bots, more than you can imagine. You probably have had multiple arguments with Chat-GPT without knowing.

    • @[email protected]
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      1010 months ago

      From a broad technical perspective “human” “art” is also a process of observing, learning, and recombining to make something new out of it. There is also experimentation which can be incorporated into AI models as well, see for example reinforcement learning, where exploration is an important concept. Therefore, I don’t see how that’s different from “AI” “art”.

      However, that should not defend how morally questionable training data is sourced.

      • @[email protected]
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        10 months ago

        i don’t care about the training data as much as the insane lengths people go to humanize AI. it’s not observing, and it’s not learning. it doesn’t even know what it’s copying, what anything means, and what it’s even doing. and most importantly it’s not communicating anything. because there’s nothing to communicate. it’s not art.

        also i don’t get your point of using scare quotes around “human”… are you suggesting we’re not human? wtf is that even supposed to mean?

  • DarkThoughts
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    3910 months ago

    Why would the “AI” know about it and not just make that up though? But also, if companies can use everything on the internet as a “fair use” thing, then so should people. No more bullying of people making stuff you don’t like / agree with.

  • @[email protected]
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    1710 months ago

    Oh, so when a ai company wants to use copyrighted works without permission or compensation it’s “fair use” but when I do it, it’s “piracy” and “I need to leave before the cops are called”.

      • @[email protected]
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        1510 months ago

        One has to pay a very high cost to do this. These AI companies did not pay. Why do AI companies get a pass on copyrighted material that the rest of us are getting sued, imprisoned, and fined for accessing?

        • The Quuuuuill
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          2110 months ago

          Lot of people flying in this thread to down vote people saying that these media companies live by a different set of rules than the rest of us without understanding that this AI model is basically a huge automated record scratching DJ that can only regurgitate things its heard before reassembled and presented as new. If any of us tried to do this same thing they’d sue our pants off for piracy and plagiarism. But when they do it it’s fine.

      • The Quuuuuill
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        910 months ago

        But I’m not allowed to remix them. That’s the point that’s being made

        • @[email protected]
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          4910 months ago

          If you get an idea from a song, you are 1000% free to turn that into new art. This is the fair use argument.

          • @[email protected]
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            1710 months ago

            I agree with the logic, but I don’t think it should apply to LLMs—a humans-only law, if you will.

            • The Quuuuuill
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              1810 months ago

              I think the key is that an LLM can’t have ideas. Its creative endeavors aren’t creative. Art is about the craft and the message and an LLM lacks that context. Like. The best an LLM can do is produce the kinds of music Drake does that is meant to pacify people into continuous consumption

              • @[email protected]
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                110 months ago

                LLMs can’t have truly new unique ideas yes, but neither does most of humanity. AIs are very good at mixing information, acting like an unrestricted pattern mixer. It’s missing the artistic intent to drive that somewhere meaningful and enjoyable to humans to be seen as real art, which is what sets humans apart from AI despite. But humans can include artistic intent into the materials the AI uses, like lyrics and style, which in turns does raise it back to the level of real art.

              • @[email protected]
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                810 months ago

                I had a similar thought after I wrote this. LLMs aren’t creating anything so much as style-copying. They’re unique productions, insomuch as rearranging notes or pixels makes something unique, but I think creativity requires conscious agency, which LLMs definitely do not have.

                Also, I don’t need to copy the entirety of Drake’s discography to produce music like his, which is an aspect of human creativity that LLMs currently lack.

            • @[email protected]
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              10 months ago

              That’s sort of currently the law with copyright in the US. You can’t get a copyright on material made completely by an AI. Only if a human interfered can you get a copyright, and most likely only on the parts that the human interfered with.

              Source: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ai_policy_guidance.pdf (See header II. The Human Authorship Requirement)

              TL;DR

              the Office states that “to qualify as a work of ‘authorship’ a work must be created by a human being” and that it “will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author.”

    • Dr. Moose
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      10 months ago

      You’re free to learn from any piece of music too. Whether AI is actually learning is still debatable but you have the same rights right now.

      I’m still on the edge tbh I feel like it is learning and it is transformative but it’s just too powerful for our current copyright framework.

      Either way, that’ll be such a headache for the transformative work clause of copyright for years to come. Also policing training would be completely unenforcable so any decision here would be rather moot in real world practice either way.

      • just another dev
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        1110 months ago

        Also policing training would be completely unenforcable

        That’s where laws would come in. Obviously it would have civil law, not criminal law, but making sure it would be enforceable would have to be part of such laws. For example, forcing model makers to disclose their training dataset in one way or another.

        • Dr. Moose
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          610 months ago

          But you can already train models at home also you can just extend existing models with new training data. Will that be regulated too? How?

          • @[email protected]
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            10 months ago

            They‘re literally already about to heavily regulate hobby AI to ensure giant corporations that hoard all our information get to make even more mountains of money with it. The idea that anyone gets to use any media for machine learning is already a relict of the past and in fact not remotely comparable to learning things for yourself. Especially not in the legal sense. Did you really naively believe AI will democratize anything for even a second?

      • @[email protected]
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        210 months ago

        Also policing training would be completely unenforcable

        But…it’s already been enforced, several times.

      • @[email protected]
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        1310 months ago

        We are free to learn, but learning is not free.

        Freedom vs cost. One cannot pickup a skill without time, effort and more importantly access to guidance and a vast library of content. Same applies to man or machine. The difference is how corporations have essentially reinvented piracy to facilitate their selfish ends after decades of dictating what’s right with DMCA, DRM and what not.

        • @[email protected]
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          110 months ago

          That’s where open source AI comes in. If we have the same freedoms then all it takes is grassroots efforts to ensure the tools born of humanity’s information remain free to be used by all of humanity. We should also be able to use the same tool without having to pay those companies a dime.

    • @[email protected]
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      2810 months ago

      I’m fine with copyright, provided it’s limited to only a few years and can’t ever be extended. This “lifetime of the author plus 50 years” shit is what makes it terrible.

      • archomrade [he/him]
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        1110 months ago

        Because it manufactures scarcity and causes us to repeatedly expend energy reproducing things that could be otherwise copied and enjoyed at near-zero cost.

        We keep inventing silly rules in order to put off dealing with the existential threat our mode of production represents. “Copyright” is the first and silliest of those rules.

        • @[email protected]
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          10 months ago

          Are you taking about patents? Cause a world without copyright doesn’t sound very fun to me. Or anyone in a remotely creative job.

          Ever for patents: There’s a reason innovations are protected literally anywhere in the world, but the durations being ever longer is a real problem (5 years would probably be fine). The basic concept is still just straight up necessary.

          • archomrade [he/him]
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            210 months ago

            No, i’m talking about all intellectual works (copyrights and patents being some of the categories commonly used)

            Humans need no incentive to create new works, but the way we distribute resources requires us to make these rules so that those creators fit within our ‘work for food’ production model.

            Even a modest UBI would support most creative endeavors, but instead of that we have a “monetize your work or starve” arrangement.

            • @[email protected]
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              210 months ago

              I agree that the current state of laws is overkill by about an order of magnitude, and that’s obviously bad.

              But you do need some amount of protection for works created. Imagine being a photographer, you can’t make money. You make some nice photos, and how do you sell them? If you send a sample to someone, they can just print that and you can do nothing. There’s no copyright after all. It isn’t somthing you can protect legally, so you can’t stop them or sue them for compensation. There’s also a flip side from the corporate perspective: You might find employment as a full time photographer in places that need them, but what about all the companies that just need an occasional picture? You can’t contract it out, because you have no way to negotiate anything if their work isn’t protected, you can’t even look at samples cause nobody would ever dare showing any or they might just be used.

              • archomrade [he/him]
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                110 months ago

                Humans need no incentive to create new works, but the way we distribute resources requires us to make these rules so that those creators fit within our ‘work for food’ production model.

    • The Quuuuuill
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      610 months ago

      I think you have to abolish hierarchical society first. Which I also think should be done. But if you get rid of rules protecting creative endeavors before getting rid of the shitheel corporations it gets rid of creative endeavor more than it gets rid of the corporate bastards. The problem with copyright as it stands is how much the corporate bastards have twisted it over time to benefit them instead of the collective us.

      • archomrade [he/him]
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        210 months ago

        You don’t have to abolish hierarchy, you just have to de-tangle work from sustenance-level resource distribution. A UBI sufficient for living would be enough. Even providing universal housing and reducing the workweek would help.

        Copyright simply makes creative work profitable, but profit isn’t necessarily a prerequisite for creative work.

        • The Quuuuuill
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          210 months ago

          Oh my desire to abolish hierarchical society is… Pretty core to who I am lol. So there was some bias in that. Yeah there’s ways to make get rid of copyright, still have professions, and still have a hierarchy, but at a certain point you’re building a gentler form of capitalism instead of treating people with the true respect and dignity they deserve. I’m willing to accept I’m pretty radical on this particular set of views.

          Also yes. Everyone should get UBI and the billionaires pockets should be where we get the money from

          • archomrade [he/him]
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            210 months ago

            I guess my point is that retaining copyright isn’t necessarily dependent on abolishing hierarchies altogether. People imagine it would take a complete re-imagining of our economy to abolish copyright (and it isn’t a small thing, to be sure), but it’s honestly less intensive than most people think.

            Especially since most of the economic value of copyright is held by large corporations, not private individuals.

  • @[email protected]
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    10 months ago

    It’s pretty obvious if you get specific with the tags. Especially with older styles where there’s less available training data.

    Edit: just go to the album’s page on RYM and copy the tags to try for yourself

  • strawberry
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    1510 months ago

    they’re right, they should absolutely be allowed to use and profit off of other peoples work that they spent decades learning and perfecting

    (this is sarcasm in case you can’t tell they’re dumb as fuck for saying that shut this company down today pls)

  • @[email protected]
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    3610 months ago

    If copyright had a reasonable duration, a huge chunk of that would have been public domain and not an issue.

  • @[email protected]
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    110 months ago

    Well, Microsoft started this line of argument recently æ. Makes sense others also adopt it

  • Hildegarde
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    1210 months ago

    One of the four fair use factors is the portion of the copyrighted work that was taken. For a finding of fair use under this factor, the infringing work must only take the amount of copyrighted material needed for the infringing work’s purpose.

    If they ripped every single file they have access to, there’s no way to be found as fair use under this factor. If they argue they were using a curated list of only the works they needed to develop their model it could be fair use, but admitting to taking every possible work in their entirety is a surefire way to fail a fair use defense.

    • @[email protected]
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      510 months ago

      But that’s not how model training works, it doesn’t simply copy and paste entire songs into its training data. It more or less “listens” to it, analyzes it and when you ask to create a rock song for example it just has an algorithm behind it what a song like that would sound like.

      But you can’t just ask it to generate Bohemian Rhapsody from its data, it would probably get very close depending on the training, but it would never be 100% the same (except the model was only trained on this one song).

      Just like you can listen to rock songs and then make your own, that’s totally valid. The problem here is of course automation and scale, but saying it’s not fair use is dubious.

      • Hildegarde
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        510 months ago

        Fair use is a legal doctrine relating to derivitave works based on copyrighted works. An AI model’s fair use determination would be judged by the same standards and all derivative works.

        It doesn’t matter how they used the copyrighted works. This factor is about scale not intent.

        There are four factors, and no single factor is determinative. But admitting their model uses as much training as possible makes their model less likely to be fair use.

        • @[email protected]
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          210 months ago

          If I as a human listened to every single song of a band from start to finish, then produced a similar song in the same vein (lyrics / music genre), it would be fair use.

          So why would it stop being fair use if an AI does the same thing? Just that the AI can listen to every song of this band and a million other bands, combining them.

          • Hildegarde
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            310 months ago

            Because fair use is an affirmative defense to copyright infringement. To use a fair use defense you have to admit your work is infringing, but argue that the infringement is justifiable.

            Trying to defend the AI with fair use requires you to admit the AI itself is infringing, but justifiable, and by the doctrine of fair use, it is almost certainly not.

            Only humans can hold copyrights. Your example would be a non-infringing work because it lacks direct copying. An AI doing the same would make an uncopyrightable work, with the AI itself being infinging if you tried the fair use defense.

            • @[email protected]
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              110 months ago

              Only humans can hold copyrights.

              Yeah, no. Most copyrighted material is owned by companies, you don’t have to be a natural person to hold copyrights. And if a company can hold copyrights, you can also argue it can have fair use.

              • Hildegarde
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                410 months ago

                Companies are run by people. The human employees create copyrighted works that become the property of their employer by the terms of their contract. That’s how work for hire contracts work…

                You would know this if you have ever worked in any creative field.

                • @[email protected]
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                  210 months ago

                  I work in a creative field. But companies are companies. If I work for a company and create something, it doesn’t belong to a natural person, it immediately goes over to the company.

                  Not the CEO or CTO or whoever is in management, it belongs to the legal entity. Isn’t this a company owning the work I just created? If the CEO dies, the company still owns it.