>you can train an AI on copyrighted material just like people can learn from copyrighted material.

No amount of whining and hand wringing from engineers will ever make this true. This is for the courts to decide.

A reasonable interpretation, in my eyes, is that the training process is a black box which takes in copyrighted works and produces a training model. The training model is a derivative work of the inputs. It therefore violates the copyrights of a large number of rights holders. The outputs of the model are derivative works which also violate copyright.

And anyone using or training a model trained on works for which they do not have the rights? Completely fucked. Or at least, they must accept this as a real risk.

I think a reasonable interpretation is also that what you are saying is correct, that doing all that does indeed infringe others' copyright, but that a fair use defense is valid.

I won't be particularly thrilled if that turns out to be the case, but I wouldn't be surprised if it does.

But as you say, we won't know until it's tested in court. And even then, often court cases around a complex topic like this will end up with a ruling that only clarifies a narrow aspect of it. So it might take many related court cases before we have a pretty good understanding of where the law stands. And then, of course, the law could change.

Derivative works are typically things like language translations or film adaptions of a novel. A large language model is something like a probability breakdown of the order of word fragments in a body of text. It's a collection of statistics and math. It's different.

Now, can you get it to output a derivative work? Maybe. Is every output a derivative work? Maybe not.

Things like sports statistics and directories of phone numbers are not copyrightable. Maybe models fall into a similar category. Could be. It’ll be interesting to see how this shakes out over the next few years.

> A reasonable interpretation, in my eyes, is that the training process is a black box which takes in copyrighted works and produces a training model. The training model is a derivative work of the inputs. It therefore violates the copyrights of a large number of rights holders. The outputs of the model are derivative works which also violate copyright.

What is the blackbox “limit” here? Is the mean value of all images in imagenet (which contains many copyrighted images) violating copyright? Is the character count of sarah silverman’s books? What about a prime number representing them - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number?wprov=sfti1

Training is much more similar to a character count than an illegal prime in my view, and thus, is almost certainly going to be okay/found to be okay. If not, something like, 90% of all models used today had some component trained on copyrighted data of some form.

It's a good thing we don't let unreasonable people like you decide what's reasonable then. I'd argue further, but you're probably a weird copyright maximalist that won't listen to reason.

Fortunately, copyright as we know it is dead. It will die a death of a thousand cuts from people not giving a shit about stodgy old[0] people like you that are trying to retard the progress of science and the arts. It won't make a difference if you respond with some clever counterargument here. The future is here and it jettisoned the atavistic nonsense.

[0]: Stodgy and old is a state of mind. If you're actually young, then I'm so sorry for you.

You sound like my coworker 5-10 years ago that told me how I wouldn’t be driving today because of the proliferation of self driving vehicles. I told him he’s a 28 year old dum dum who didn’t understand how things operate in the real world when the constraints aren’t based on technology but on government regulations, the economy, and other factors. I’d say I won that argument for now. I live in the Waymo pilot city and still haven’t taken one mostly due to the limited area they drive in. Just this past week we learned that a traffic can disable a self driving vehicle. I’m interested to see the traffic cone era of AI.

I'm basing this on what US courts have decided. You're free to disagree with them all you'd like, but AI-generated art is not copyrightable. We're seeing an explosion in non-copyrightable art, and when we get down to some small fraction of art being copyrightable, nobody will give a shit about copyright anymore. You also talk about the economy, and guess where the economoc incentives are aligned towards? Hint: it's not towards having expensive humans generate art.

I guess we'll just have to feel that the other is wrong as we wait to see what happens, but I'm betting on existing US regulation and basic human behavior. That's a tall order to bet against.

jeez, way to make it personal

I agree that copyright is done for in an age of generative models, and as a pirate I'm kind of rooting for it, but i'm not so sure it's unequivocally a Good Thing. I'm interested to understand history better, how art and science was produced and distributed before the legal fiction of intellectual property. the point of allowing someone a monopoly on their work is to share it with the public, same as patents. without the legal framework, the way to protect your work may be to not publish it at all, which is where I see the internet going from here, private enclaves that go to great lengths to prevent LLMs from drinking their milkshake.

I think you're right that it'll be tried, but seems unlikely to work. All it takes is one person in the enclave to leak it, intentionally or accidentally.

Personal attacks aren't allowed here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

> A reasonable interpretation, in my eyes, is that the training process is a black box which takes in copyrighted works and produces a training model. The training model is a derivative work of the inputs.

Its unmistakably not a derivative work of the inputs individually or collectively, since a derivative work must be itself an distinct work of authorship (the same as the work of authorship requirement for copyright), and the output of a purely mechanical process is not.

The collection of inputs itself might be a derivative work of the individual inputs, before considering Fair Use.

> No amount of whining and hand wringing from engineers will ever make this true

Please omit flamebait and swipes, as the site guidelines ask: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Your comment would have been fine without that bit.

But acquiring the material illegally is the thrust of the issue, and the point of the thread here: the notion that large companies can get away with piracy if they just execute it on a large enough scale. Copyright infringment for thee but not for me.

The power imbalance has always been there. Getty images commits large amounts of copyright theft and mostly gets away with it, but will happily sue the shit out of you for using your own images they stole.

Also, the notion of the downloading itself being an illegal act is not universal as others have pointed out.

Large countries seem to be doing it as well - https://petapixel.com/2023/06/05/japan-declares-ai-training-...

And as long as OpenAI have an office in Japan they can absolutely legally train the models, no?

They could legally train the models in Japan, yes. Whether they could then use that model outside of Japan would be (and, possibly related, whether it would be considered a derivative work in those locales) would be ultimately up to the courts.

There's no "for thee but not for me" issue here: nobody has ever been sued or prosecuted simply for downloading, acquiring, or possessing illegally acquired copyrighted works. People are sued and prosecuted for unlicensed distribution.

Making and having your own copies, and doing what you want with them, has always been fine. At worst it's a grey area, but in many cases it's been protected as fair use.

I am not sure where you're getting your information from, but you're not a lawyer, so you shouldn't be so confident in telling people what things are fine legally.

Whether people have been sued for downloading works they don't have the right to copy onto their machines is irrelevant to whether it is actually illegal. And it certainly has nothing to do with fair use, which is about copyrighted works that you actually do have some right to.

IANAL so I'm not going to tell anyone what does and what does not constitute fair use in what jurisdictions.

BTW people are being sued for distribution because they make great examples because their offenses and thus the damages are much greater.

I've followed the issue in the US since the early 2000s as an activist and policy expert.

I'm not familiar with the state of play outside the US, but the US is one of the stricter jurisdictions in this regard, for reasons that have mostly to do with sophisticated corruption.

I'm responding to the "for me not for thee" and the top comment about there being an inconsistency between the treatment of large companies and the treatment of individuals in this case.

Unless people are typically punished for downloading and using copyrighted content, there is no such inconsistency. They are not, so there is not.

Copyright troll lawsuits have been fairly public and widely covered in the tech press, and most criminal prosecutions come with a formulaic, gloating press release from the law enforcement folks responsible. So it's pretty easy to follow this stuff.

Are you forgetting all the DMCA lawsuits slapping individuals who downloaded MP3s with tens of thousands of dollars? These were not corporations, these were teenagers still living with their parents who pulled music files off the likes of Napster.

The DMCA does allow harassment by copyright holders to individuals suspected of infringement. It's just that most people like authors wouldn't blow their legal budget suing kids.

My understanding is that the issue there was that they were simultaneously sharing those MP3s, as they were downloading them. Which is to say, I think the person you're responding to is correct about the difference between sharing and downloading, but I'm not a lawyer.

> nobody has ever been sued or prosecuted simply for downloading, acquiring, or possessing illegally acquired copyrighted works

Everyone who was sued by the RIAA was done so for possessing the music in a publicly accessible method. Distribution was never actually proven in any of the cases (including the high profile losses). Defendants who argued that accessibility does not qualify as distribution actually won their cases. Most who argued against the validity of the evidence acquisition also won their cases.

>acquiring the material illegally is the thrust of the issue

'Acquiring' is more difficult to pursue legally. It's easier to go after distribution. In this case, Meta or OpenAI did not distribute anything because they are not chumps. They can go after whoever posted the dataset containing books. Not sure if that is eleuther or just some random person on the internet. In either case, the strategy of going after the rich companies won't work.

Can I memorize copyrighted material and recite it on Youtube? What if I do so but imperfectly? Where do you draw the line? If it's infringement for a human to do that why is it not for a LLM?

That would be an unlicensed reproduction of the work. You’d need permission from the rights holder to create what is essentially an audiobook recording.

That's not what LLMs typically do, though. Pull up ChatGPT and ask it to recite Harry Potter for you. It'll fail.

Ask it to write a book similar to Harry Potter, and it'll make an attempt at it. But human writers absolutely do read Harry Potter and write similar books, and that's perfectly legal. There have probably been thousands of published books inspired by Lord of the Rings.

Look at how many people get blocked or demonetized for covers of existing songs which may not even be that close to the original. You can't even play a few seconds of the original in many cases, even for fair use and criticism/discussion. This is already in place.

Talking about what is allowed on youtube as if that's what defines what is copyrightable is a bait and switch. Youtube has an extra-judicial copyright system that explicitly favors large media owners so they won't sue youtube again.