The unfortunate answer is that the courts have yet to decide what exactly "training an AI" means in the context of copyright.

I personally do believe that training using copyrighted data is _not_ a violation of any existing copyright, but using the trained AI to reproduce and distribute something that an expert in the field would regard as a copy is a violation.

You're applying 20th century law and logic to 21st century technology.

FWIW I do believe training a model is fundamentally different from training a human.

The obvious analog is facial recognition, deemed privacy violating by laws and courts in multiple jurisdictions, vs a human doing the same thing manually.

> You're applying 20th century law and logic to 21st century technology.

Until we pass 21st century laws, thats what applies.

Or a court ruling.

>The obvious analog is facial recognition, deemed privacy violating by laws and courts in multiple jurisdictions, vs a human doing the same thing manually.

It was deemed "privacy violating" under specific privacy laws within those jurisdictions.

i.e. go pass a law amending copyright law if you think so. there's no substantial reproduction here, in the context of stable diffusion, until there is, and then yeah in that instance it's probably a copyright violation, like a substantial reproduction made by a human would be. but training itself, probably not. but yes, there have been no rulings on it in this context.

I'm aware privacy law applied to facial recognition, not copyright law. Nowhere did I imply that it was copyright law. I brought it up to illustrate that "activity + human" vs "activity + computer" can differ in legality for the same activity.

> go pass a law amending copyright law if you think so

I don't need to do anything. Let's see until one of these cases come to the courts. You're talking as though it's a foregone conclusion that they'll rule the way you think. I wouldn't be so sure myself.

Training an AI on an image would not be covered by fair use doctrine.

> Training an AI on an image would not be covered by fair use doctrine.

Do you have a link to a court decision to that effect?

How, specifically, is "training an AI" different from "training a person" here?

It boggles my mind when people seriously claim that if there’s a word “learning” in ML then it justifies OpenAI et al. ignoring basic copyright.

Training(2) software is to training(1) a human what firewall is to an actual wall made of fire, or what killing a process is to killing a human. The word is a synonym—more precisely, industry slang that happens to resemble a word used outside of the industry due to superficial similarity.

So if you wonder how training(2) software is different from training(1) a person, first understand that it’s a different word that never signified the same concept.

Subsequently, if you want to argue that training(1) should apply to software now, the onus would be on you to explain why and how so. You should be prepared to argue that software is sufficiently like a human—you know, that it understands ideas, has agency and free will, thinks like a human and has human-like consciousness, is capable not only of performing instructions given to it by its operator and act as a tool but to actually consider its actions and make own moral judgements, things like that.

And if you come up with satisfactory evidence in favor of all that, and have grounds to believe some software is enough like a human that training(1) applies to it, then why are you fighting to allow its operator to ignore copyright—and not for more important things, such as to free this human-like being from abuse by its operator and grant it basic human rights? If we imagine that software is like a person enough that “training” it means the same thing as training a human, we should be prepared to acknowledge all the implications that come with that.

The reality is that there are companies who would like us to both believe their software is human-like (so that we don’t sue them for rampant copyright abuse) but also not at all human (so that we don’t demand them to stop profiting from what would be slave labor). Naturally, if they pick one or the other they stand to lose from “a lot of money” to “entire business model”—but we should help them make that choice.

That's great and all, "training", "learning", etc. are terms of art.

How does that change the fact that there is no substantial reproduction of the works in the resulting weights, or in the "output" of these models with the weights?

Can you point to me where it's illegal to take copyrighted works and "train" neural networks on them, as long as there's no substantial reproduction of the works in the output of that process, or in the output of a particular configuration of "trained" and "frozen weights"?

Doesn’t make it any less of an automatically created derivative work.

So, in brief, you don't have any legal citations to support your claim that training an AI is not fair use.

No, in brief I don’t need one and you don’t have one.

Eh, an AI/ML model is an AI/ML model. "Training" one is its own thing.

However you define it, training typically doesn't involve making permanent copies of the data.

This means that Under EU law -as far as I can tell- it is probably legal. Under US law the different circuits have a slightly different interpretations of the law, but probably would agree that this is fair use.

Then the law can/should be fixed.

It may need a bit of clarification nod.

<Training> by any definition you care to give it does not rise to the level of copyright violation (In the case of training eg stable diffusion, on average only a couple of bits worth of "notes" are stored per image. If that's a copyright violation then pretty much anything would be). The main issue -believe it or not- is actually the part where images get temporarily downloaded.

As stated: explicitly legal in the EU. May need some work in the US.

> <Training> by any definition you care to give it does not rise to the level of copyright violation (In the case of training eg stable diffusion, on average only a couple of bits worth of "notes" are stored per image. If that's a copyright violation then pretty much anything would be).

You are talking about two different words, again. Human learning is not a copyright violation. Machine learning is. Machine is not human.

> The main issue -believe it or not- is actually the part where images get temporarily downloaded.

No, the main issue is using a tool to sell derivative works automatically generated from copyrighted original works. If images/text is not stored it wouldn’t change a thing.

If it is not about the transient copies, then what other step in the machine learning process could possibly rise to the level of a copyright violation? What is your reasoning? Do you have a source?

If images/text being stored or not is not part of the argument, then what IS the argument that AI works are derivative? Is it only certain works? All works? Is it automatic? Does it require human intent? How do you get from A to B here?

A work created this way is derivative. If it was through human mind then could be called plagiarism or tribute, but through an automatic tool ran for profit it’s a clear violation if the work was not licensed to allow derivative works.

And of course there is human intent, what are you even talking about? This is law. Law is sort of centered around human actions and intent plays a big role. In this case, operators fully intended to scrape copyrighted works, feed it to this tool and operate it for profit (because money smells good).

You did not answer my question. Define "derivative". Then explain why an arbitrary generated image would be a derivative according to your definition. This is not an adversarial question in and of itself. I'm just asking you to define your terms first.