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points by archontes 1 day ago | 0 comments
How, to you, does training an AI violate copyright?
[–] alerighi 1 day ago
If the material that you train the AI on is copyright protected you are by definition violating it.

Otherwise AI becomes a glorious copyright-laundering machine, use something that you want to copy to train an AI, then ask that AI to replicate the stuff it was trained on. Of course it will make a perfect copy, but who is the creator of that intellectual work? The AI itself not for sure, but the original author of the stuff that the AI copied.

An no, it doesn't matter if the AI doesn't copy exactly but does a bit of shuffling of stuff, if not you are arguing that it's not cheating if you copy the homework of your classmate but you rearrange some words to make it not identical...

[–] archontes 1 day ago
How does that follow from the definition of copyright or the protections it offers? This is law we're talking about. Cite the black and white.

From copyright.gov "Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation, although it may protect the way these things are expressed"

What rights does copyright provide?

Reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords.

Prepare derivative works based upon the work.

Distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership or by rental, lease, or lending.

Perform the work publicly if it is a literary, musical, dramatic, or choreographic work; a pantomime; or a motion picture or other audiovisual work.

Display the work publicly if it is a literary, musical, dramatic, or choreographic work; a pantomime; or a pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work. This right also applies to the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work.

Perform the work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission if the work is a sound recording.

Training an AI isn't on this list. An AI may produce infringing outputs, but training an AI isn't a violation of copyright.

"Copyright laundering" is a nonsense idea. Copyright is not designed to prevent people or machines from producing things in a style or similar things. It protects against exact reproduction or reuse, and that only to the extent that the form is separable from function. If the form is inseparable from function, the expression cannot be copyrighted at all.

Let's assume "shuffling stuff" as you describe it would solidly place a work into the "derivative works" category.

Fine, the AI has produced a derivative work. The original copyright holder has a claim on that work if it were to be distributed, sold, displayed, or performed.

Does the AI hold a copyright? No. Only humans can hold copyrights. Does the prompter hold a copyright? No. A human has to perform the transformative work, not merely arrange for a machine to do it. AI outputs are not copyrightable.

But how you "feel" about it isn't a useful measure. It being like "cheating off someone's homework" isn't useful, either. Hell. Copyright is carefully crafted to allow "cheating off someone's homework" provided that the result doesn't reproduce elements of the original exactly.

[–] Micrococonut 18 hours ago
You make a great argument for expanding the definition of copyright to include protection from use in AI training.
[–] archontes 14 hours ago
Maybe so. Maybe a disruptive technology now exists that renders the modus operandi of many industries moot. It's called disruptive for a reason.

I am also of the opinion that AI weights aren't copyrightable, as they're the result of an automatic process. "Open source" weights are a laughable non-sequitur.

I am not generally of the opinion that we need to expand copyright in order to protect a status quo.

[–] cyanydeez 1 day ago
Ok, so lets say you "train" and "AI" using the binary source code of windows, then ask the AI to recreate Windows.

Does that violate copyright? What if we us the binary source code of MacOS, Linux and Windows, then ask it to recreate Windows?

Does the fact that we added some other ingrediants violate the idea that the LLLM will create a substantially similar product?

I'm not defending windows, but indicting LLMs as anything but "fair use".

[–] withinboredom 1 day ago
I don't think that's how it works. From experience from working on an experimental online learning system... it can't remember verbatim unless it is _really_ in there many many times. It can reconstruct it pretty close though.

source: online learning of codebases in the hundreds of thousands to millions of lines of code