In its submission to the Australian governmentâs review of the regulatory framework around AI, Google said that copyright law should be altered to allow for generative AI systems to scrape the internet.
The point is that if the model doesnât contain any recognisable parts of the original material it was trained on, how can it reproduce recognisable parts of the original material it was trained on?
Thatâs sorta the point of it.
I can recreate the phrase âapple pieâ in any number of styles and fonts using my hands and a writing tool. Would you say that I âcontainâ the phrase âapple pieâ? Where is the letter âpâ in my brain?
Specifically, the AI contains the relationship between sets of words, and sets of relationships between lines, contrasts and colors.
From there, it knows how to take a set of words, and make an image that proportionally replicates those line pattern and color relationships.
You can probably replicate the Getty images watermark close enough for it to be recognizable, but you donât contain a copy of it in the sense that people typically mean.
Likewise, because you can recognize the artist who produced a piece, you contain an awareness of that same relationship between color, contrast and line that the AI does. I could show you a Picasso you were unfamiliar with, and youâd likely know it was him based on the style.
Youâve been âtrainedâ on his works, so you have internalized many of the key markers of his style. That doesnât mean you âcontainâ his works.
Just because you canât point to a specific part of your brain that contains the letter âpâ doesnât mean it isnât in there somewhere. If you didnât contain the letter âpâ, or Getty watermark, or Picassoâs work, you wouldnât be able to recognise them when you saw them or tried to replicate them. The act of recognising something that is familiar is basically the brain comparing what the eye sees with what is stored in the memory. The brain stores it differently to an exact copy on a hard drive, but it does, nevertheless, contain everything that it remembers.
I disagree that recognition implies you contain it. Itâs much closer to a description than the actual thing, and a description isnât the same as the thing. This is evidenced by you being able to look at a letter P in a font youâve never seen before and recognize it without issue. If it was just comparison, you couldnât do that.
