Those claiming AI training on copyrighted works is “theft” misunderstand key aspects of copyright law and AI technology. Copyright protects specific expressions of ideas, not the ideas themselves. When AI systems ingest copyrighted works, they’re extracting general patterns and concepts - the “Bob Dylan-ness” or “Hemingway-ness” - not copying specific text or images.
This process is akin to how humans learn by reading widely and absorbing styles and techniques, rather than memorizing and reproducing exact passages. The AI discards the original text, keeping only abstract representations in “vector space”. When generating new content, the AI isn’t recreating copyrighted works, but producing new expressions inspired by the concepts it’s learned.
This is fundamentally different from copying a book or song. It’s more like the long-standing artistic tradition of being influenced by others’ work. The law has always recognized that ideas themselves can’t be owned - only particular expressions of them.
Moreover, there’s precedent for this kind of use being considered “transformative” and thus fair use. The Google Books project, which scanned millions of books to create a searchable index, was ruled legal despite protests from authors and publishers. AI training is arguably even more transformative.
While it’s understandable that creators feel uneasy about this new technology, labeling it “theft” is both legally and technically inaccurate. We may need new ways to support and compensate creators in the AI age, but that doesn’t make the current use of copyrighted works for AI training illegal or unethical.
For those interested, this argument is nicely laid out by Damien Riehl in FLOSS Weekly episode 744. https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly/episodes/744
I hate to say this but “let the market decide” if Ai is something the consumer wants/needs they’ll pay for it otherwise let it die.
tweet is good, your body argument is completely wrong
It’s an interesting area. Are they suggesting that a human reading copyright material and learning from it is a breach?
Why wouldn’t they charge their so many corporate customers more? They supposedly are providing their services to US government and military, just charge them extra and pay the publishers.
They intentionally keep their prices lower to out-compete other companies and then complain about it. If they put their actual cost to their customers, you would realize how quickly they will lose the market because open source models would out compete them
{{labeling it “theft” is both legally and technically inaccurate.}} Well, my understanding is that humans have intelligence, humans teach and learn from previous/other people’s work and make progressive or create new work/idea using their own intelligence. AI/machine doesn’t have intelligence from the start, doesn’t have own intelligence to create/make things. It just copies, remixes, and applies the knowledge, and many personalities and all expressions have been teached. So “theft” is technically accurate.
The joke is of course that “paying for copyright” is impossible in this case. ONLY the large social media companies that own all the comments and content that has accumulated by the community have enough data to train AI models. Or sites like stock photo libraries or deviantart who own the distribution rights for the content. That means all copyright arguments practically argue that AI should be owned by big corporations and should be inaccessible to normal people.
Basically the “means of generation” will be owned by the capitalists, since they are the only ones with the economic power to license these things.
That is basically the worst case scenario. Not only will the value of work diminish greatly, the advances in productivity will also be only accessible to big capitalists.
Of course, that is basically inevitable anyway. Why wouldn’t they want this? It’s just sad seeing the stupid morons arguing for this as if they had anything to gain.
This process is akin to how humans learn by reading widely and absorbing styles and techniques, rather than memorizing and reproducing exact passages.
Machine learning algorithms are not people and are not ingesting these works the same way a person does. This argument is brought up all the time and just doesn’t ring true. You’re defending the unethical use of copyrighted works by a giant corporation with a metaphor that doesn’t have any bearing on reality; in an age where artists are already shamefully undervalued. Creating art is a human process with the express intent of it being enjoyed by other humans. Having an algorithm do it is removing the most important part of art; the humanity.
The argument that these models learn in a way that’s similar to how humans do is absolutely false, and the idea that they discard their training data and produce new content is demonstrably incorrect. These models can and do regurgitate their training data, including copyrighted characters.
And these things don’t learn styles, techniques, or concepts. They effectively learn statistical averages and patterns and collage them together. I’ve gotten to the point where I can guess what model of image generator was used based on the same repeated mistakes that they make every time. Take a look at any generated image, and you won’t be able to identify where a light source is because the shadows come from all different directions. These things don’t understand the concept of a shadow or lighting, they just know that statistically lighter pixels are followed by darker pixels of the same hue and that some places have collections of lighter pixels. I recently heard about an ai that scientists had trained to identify pictures of wolves that was working with incredible accuracy. When they went in to figure out how it was identifying wolves from dogs like huskies so well, they found that it wasn’t even looking at the wolves at all. 100% of the images of wolves in its training data had snowy backgrounds, so it was simply searching for concentrations of white pixels (and therefore snow) in the image to determine whether or not a picture was of wolves or not.
Basing your argument around how the model or training system works doesn’t seem like the best way to frame your point to me. It invites a lot of mucking about in the details of how the systems do or don’t work, how humans learn, and what “learning” and “knowledge” actually are.
I’m a human as far as I know, and it’s trivial for me to regurgitate my training data. I regularly say things that are either directly references to things I’ve heard, or accidentally copy them, sometimes with errors.
Would you argue that I’m just a statistical collage of the things I’ve experienced, seen or read? My brain has as many copies of my training data in it as the AI model, namely zero, but “Captain Picard of the USS Enterprise sat down for a rousing game of chess with his friend Sherlock Holmes, and then Shakespeare came in dressed like Mickey mouse and said ‘to be or not to be, that is the question, for tis nobler in the heart’ or something”. Direct copies of someone else’s work, as well as multiple copyright infringements.
I’m also shit at drawing with perspective. It comes across like a drunk toddler trying their hand at cubism.Arguing about how the model works or the deficiencies of it to justify treating it differently just invites fixing those issues and repeating the same conversation later. What if we make one that does work how humans do in your opinion? Or it properly actually extracts the information in a way that isn’t just statistically inferred patterns, whatever the distinction there is? Does that suddenly make it different?
You don’t need to get bogged down in the muck of the technical to say that even if you conceed every technical point, we can still say that a non-sentient machine learning system can be held to different standards with regards to copyright law than a sentient person. A person gets to buy a book, read it, and then carry around that information in their head and use it however they want. Not-A-Person does not get to read a book and hold that information without consent of the author.
Arguing why it’s bad for society for machines to mechanise the production of works inspired by others is more to the point.Computers think the same way boats swim. Arguing about the difference between hands and propellers misses the point that you don’t want a shrimp boat in your swimming pool. I don’t care why they’re different, or that it technically did or didn’t violate the “free swim” policy, I care that it ruins the whole thing for the people it exists for in the first place.
I think all the AI stuff is cool, fun and interesting. I also think that letting it train on everything regardless of the creators wishes has too much opportunity to make everything garbage. Same for letting it produce content that isn’t labeled or cited.
If they can find a way to do and use the cool stuff without making things worse, they should focus on that.I’m not the above poster, but I really appreciate your argument. I think many people overcorrect in their minds about whether or not these models learn the way we do, and they miss the fact that they do behave very similarly to parts of our own systems. I’ve generally found that that overcorrection leads to bad arguments about copyright violation and ethical concerns.
However, your point is very interesting (and it is thankfully independent of that overcorrection). We’ve never had to worry about nonhuman personhood in any amount of seriousness in the past, so it’s strangely not obvious despite how obvious it should be: it’s okay to treat real people as special, even in the face of the arguable personhood of a sufficiently advanced machine. One good reason the machine can be treated differently is because we made it for us, like everything else we make.
I think there still is one related but dangling ethical question. What about machines that are made for us but we decide for whatever reason that they are equivalent in sentience and consciousness to humans?
A human has rights and can take what they’ve learned and make works inspired by it for money, or for someone else to make money through them. They are well within their rights to do so. A machine that we’ve decided is equivalent in sentience to a human, though… can that nonhuman person go take what it’s learned and make works inspired by it so that another person can make money through them?
If they SHOULDN’T be allowed to do that, then it’s notable that this scenario is only separated from what we have now by a gap in technology.
If they SHOULD be allowed to do that (which we could make a good argument for, since we’ve agreed that it is a sentient being) then the technology gap is again notable.
I don’t think the size of the technology gap actually matters here, logically; I think you can hand-wave it away pretty easily and apply it to our current situation rather than a future one. My guess, though, is that the size of the gap is of intuitive importance to anyone thinking about it (I’m no different) and most people would answer one way or the other depending on how big they perceive the technology gap to be.
Another good question is why AIs do not mindlessly regurgitate source material. The reason is that they have access to so much copyrighted material. If they were trained on only one book, they would constantly regurgitate material from that one book. Because it’s trained on many (millions) books, it’s able to get creative. So the argument of OpenAI really boils down to: “we are not breaking copyright law, because we have used sufficient copyrighted material to avoid directly infringing on copyright”.
Eeeh, I still think diving into the weeds of the technical is the wrong way to approach it. Their argument is that training isn’t copyright violation, not that sufficient training dilutes the violation.
Even if trained only on one source, it’s quite unlikely that it would generate copyright infringing output. It would be vastly less intelligible, likely to the point of overtly garbled words and sentences lacking much in the way of grammar.
If what they’re doing is technically an infringement or how it works is entirely aside from a discussion on if it should be infringement or permitted.
Arguing why it’s bad for society for machines to mechanise the production of works inspired by others is more to the point.
I agree, but the fact that shills for this technology are also wrong about it is at least interesting.
Rhetorically speaking, I don’t know if that’s useless.
I don’t care why they’re different, or that it technically did or didn’t violate the “free swim” policy,
I do like this point a lot.
If they can find a way to do and use the cool stuff without making things worse, they should focus on that.
I do miss when the likes of cleverbot was just a fun novelty on the Internet.
I am also not really getting the argument. If I as a human want to learn a subject from a book I buy it ( or I go to a library who paid for it). If it’s similar to how humans learn, it should cost equally much.
The issue is of course that it’s not at all similar to how humans learn. It needs VASTLY more data to produce something even remotely sensible. Develop AI that’s truly transformative, by making it as efficient as humans are in learning, and the cost of paying for copyright will be negligible.
If I as a human want to learn a subject from a book, I buy it
xD
That’s good.Dude never heard of a library. I only bought a handful of books during my degree, I would’ve been homeless if I had to buy a copy of every learning source
That was literally in my post. Obviously, in that case the library pays for copyright
Your taxes pay for the library.
Imagine if you had blinders and earmuffs on for most of the day, and only once in a while were you allowed to interact with certain people and things. Your ability to communicate would be truncated to only what you were allowed to absorb.
If I as a human want to learn a subject from a book I buy it ( or I go to a library who paid for it). If it’s similar to how humans learn, it should cost equally much.
You’re on Lemmy where people casually says “piracy is morally the right thing to do”, so I’m not sure this argument works on this platform.
I know my way around the Jolly Roger myself. At the same time using copyrighted materials in a commercial setting (as OpenAI does) shouldn’t be free.
Only if they are selling the output. I see it as more they are selling access to the service on a server farm, since running ChatGPT is not cheap.
The usual cycle of tech-bro capitalism would put them currently on the early acquire market saturation stage. So it’s unlikely that they are currently charging what they will when they are established and have displaced lots of necessary occupations.
That’s true, but that’s not a problem unique to AI and is something most people would like more regulations for.
That’s their problem, hands off my material (if I had any).
The solution is any AI must always be released on a strong copyleft and possibly abolish copyright outright has it has only served the powerful by allowing them to enclose humanity common intellectual heritage (see Disney’s looting and enclosing if ancestral children stories). If you choose to strengthen the current regime, don’t expect things to improve for you as an irrelevant atomised individual,
Devil’s Advocate:
How do we know that our brains don’t work the same way?
Why would it matter that we learn differently than a program learns?
Suppose someone has a photographic memory, should it be illegal for them to consume copyrighted works?
Because we’re talking pattern recognition levels of learning. At best, they’re the equivalent of parrots mimicking human speech. They take inputs and output data based on the statistical averages from their training sets - collaging pieces of their training into what they think is the right answer. And I use the word think here loosely, as this is the exact same process that the Gaussian blur tool in Photoshop uses.
This matters in the context of the fact that these companies are trying to profit off of the output of these programs. If somebody with an eidetic memory is trying to sell pieces of works that they’ve consumed as their own - or even somebody copy-pasting bits from Clif Notes - then they should get in trouble; the same as these companies.
Given A and B, we can understand C. But an LLM will only be able to give you AB, A(b), and B(a). And they’ve even been just spitting out A and B wholesale, proving that they retain their training data and will regurgitate the entirety of copyrighted material.
Even if they learned exactly like humans do, like so fucking what, right!? Humans have to pay EXORBITANT fees for higher education in this country. Arguing that your bot gets socialized education before the people do is fucking absurd.
That seems more like an argument for free higher education rather than restricting what corpuses a deep learning model can train on
Porque no los dos? Allowing major corps to put even more downward pressure on workers doesn’t help anyone but the rich. LLMs aren’t going to save the world or become sentient.
Tomato, tomato…
If ChatGPT was free I might see their point but it’s not so no. If you’re making money from someone’s work you should pay them.
Then OpenAI should pay for a copy, like we do.
Is their an official statement if OpenAI pays for at least one copy of whatever they throw into the bots?
The argument seem most commonly from people on fediverse (which I happen to agree with) is really not about what current copyright laws and treaties say / how they should be interpreted, but how people view things should be (even if it requires changing laws to make it that way).
And it fundamentally comes down to economics - the study of how resources should be distributed. Apart from oligarchs and the wannabe oligarchs who serve as useful idiots for the real oligarchs, pretty much everyone wants a relatively fair and equal distribution of wealth amongst the people (differing between left and right in opinion on exactly how equal things should be, but there is still some common ground). Hardly anyone really wants serfdom or similar where all the wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of a few (obviously it’s a spectrum of how concentrated, but very few people want the extreme position to the right).
Depending on how things go, AI technologies have the power to serve humanity and lift everyone up equally if they are widely distributed, removing barriers and breaking existing ‘moats’ that let a few oligarchs hoard a lot of resources. Or it could go the other way - oligarchs are the only ones that have access to the state of the art model weights, and use this to undercut whatever they want in the economy until they own everything and everyone else rents everything from them on their terms.
The first scenario is a utopia scenario, and the second is a dystopia, and the way AI is regulated is the fork in the road between the two. So of course people are going to want to cheer for regulation that steers towards the utopia.
That means things like:
- Fighting back when the oligarchs try to talk about ‘AI Safety’ meaning that there should be no Open Source models, and that they should tightly control how and for what the models can be used. The biggest AI Safety issue is that we end up in a dystopian AI-fueled serfdom, and FLOSS models and freedom for the common people to use them actually helps to reduce the chances of this outcome.
- Not allowing ‘AI washing’ where oligarchs can take humanities collective work, put it through an algorithm, and produce a competing thing that they control - unless everyone has equal access to it. One policy that would work for this would be that if you create a model based on other people’s work, and want to use that model for a commercial purpose, then you must publicly release the model and model weights. That would be a fair trade-off for letting them use that information for training purposes.
Fundamentally, all of this is just exacerbating cracks in the copyright system as a policy. I personally think that a better system would look like this:
- Everyone gets a Universal Basic Income paid, and every organisation and individual making profit pays taxes in to fund the UBI (in proportion to their profits).
- All forms of intellectual property rights (except trademarks) are abolished - copyright, patents, and trade secrets are no longer enforced by the law. The UBI replaces it as compensation to creators.
- It is illegal to discriminate against someone for publicly disclosing a work they have access to, as long as they didn’t accept valuable consideration to make that disclosure. So for example, if an OpenAI employee publicly released the model weights for one of OpenAI’s models without permission from anyone, it would be illegal for OpenAI to demote / fire / refuse to promote / pay them differently on that basis, and for any other company to factor that into their hiring decision. There would be exceptions for personally identifiable information (e.g. you can’t release the client list or photos of real people without consequences), and disclosure would have to be public (i.e. not just to a competitor, it has to be to everyone) and uncompensated (i.e. you can’t take money from a competitor to release particular information).
If we had that policy, I’d be okay for AI companies to be slurping up everything and training model weights.
However, with the current policies, it is pushing us towards the dystopic path where AI companies take what they want and never give anything back.
You should look at the energy cost of AI. It’s not a miracle machine.
I agree that this is a major concern, especially if non-renewable energy is used, and until the production process for computer technology and solar panels is much more of a circular economy. More renewable energy and circular economies, and following the sun for AI training and inference (it isn’t going to be low latency anyway, so if you need AI inference in the northern hemisphere night, just do it on the other side of the world) could greatly decrease the impact.
I think Generative AI should just be scrapped. Nobody needs hyperrealistic photos and videos, or chatbots, or any of that shit. The main problems of the world are not technological, but legal. Too many laws are enacted for the benefit of robber-barons, and unless they are scrapped, I have no faith in my legal system.
Counteroffer. We eliminate copyright laws all together. For anyone and everyone.
Let move to a system in which we found the projects before their release. And once released they are available to everyone for free.
Also let’s make a system where everyone can work a basic work like 20-30 hours a week and get a living wage and the rest of the time we can just produce art of any kind of thing for free to anyone as we’ll already had our needs covered and we won’t have the need to monetize every second of out existence.
Disagree. These companies are exploiting an unfair power dynamic they created that people can’t say no to, to make an ungodly amount of money for themselves without compensating people whose data they took without telling them. They are not creating a cool creative project that collaboratively comments on or remixes what other people have made, they are seeking to gobble up and render irrelevant everything that they can, for short term greed. That’s not the scenario these laws were made for. AI hurts people who have already been exploited and industries that have already been decimated. Copyright laws were not written with this kind of thing in mind. There are potentially cool and ethical uses for AI models, but open ai and google are just greed machines.
Edited * THRICE because spelling. oof.
Not even stealing cheese to run a sandwich shop.
Stealing cheese to melt it all together and run a cheese shop that undercuts the original cheese shops they stole from.
Whatever happened to copying isn’t stealing?
I think the crux of the conversation is whether or not the world is better with ChatGPT. I say yes. We can tackle the disinformation in another effort.
When you copy to consume yourself it’s way different than when you copy to sell the copy for a lower price.
They’re not selling the copy, bruh. They’re selling a technology that very few understand. Smart people pretend they get it, but they don’t. That’s how rare the math is.
So because you don’t understand it, everything it does should be legal?
It’s not rare maths. There are trns of thousands of AI experts. And most CS graduates (millions) have a good understanding on how they work, just not the specifics of the maths.
Yeah, they’re not selling a copy, they are just selling a subscription to a copying machine loaded with the information needed to make a copy. Totally different.
I should start a business of printers and attach a USB with the PNG of a dollar bill. And of course my printers won’t have any government mandated firmware that disables printing fake money.
I’m not printing fake money! It’s my clients! Totally legal.
We have hundreds of years of out of copyright books and newspapers. I look forward to interacting with old-timey AI.
“Fiddle sticks! These mechanical horses will never catch on! They’re far too loud and barely more faster than a man can run!”
“A Woman’s place is raising children and tending to the house! If they get the vote, what will they demand next!? To earn a Man’s wage!?”
That last one is still relevant to today’s discourse somehow!?
