Comment by preppy_wind@kbin.social on OpenAI says it could ‘cease operating’ in the EU if it can’t comply with future regulation

In addition to the possible business threat, forcing OpenAI to identify its use of copyrighted data would expose the company to potential lawsuits. Generative AI systems like ChatGPT and DALL-E are trained using large amounts of data scraped from the web, much of it copyright protected. When companies disclose these data sources it leaves them open to legal challenges. OpenAI rival Stability AI, for example, is currently being sued by stock image maker Getty Images for using its copyrighted data to train its AI image generator.

Aaaaaand there it is. They don’t want to admit how much copyrighted materials they’ve been using.

You wouldn’t be saying that if it was your content that was being ripped off

“Ripped off”? That isn’t how LLMs work.

That’s, uh, exactly how they work? They need large amounts of training data, and that data isn’t being generated in house.

It’s being stolen, scraped from the internet.

If it was publicly available on the internet, then it wasn’t stolen. OpenAI hasn’t been hacking into restricted content that isn’t meant for public consumption. You’re allowed to download anything you see online (technically, if you’re seeing it, you’ve already downloaded it). And you’re allowed to study anything you see online. Even for personal use. Even for profit. Taking inspiration from something isn’t a crime. That’s allowed. If it wasn’t, the internet wouldn’t function at a fundamental level.

I don’t think you understand how copyright works. Something appearing on the internet doesn’t give you automatic full commercial rights to it.

An AI has just as much right to web scrape as you do. It’s not a violation of copyright to do so.

But Google and Bing do that too. They scrape all the internet that they can get to so that they can sell ads (with a few steps in between)

if you read a copyrighted material without paying and then forgot most of it a month later with vague recollection of what you’ve read the fact is you still accessed and used the copyrighted material without paying.

Now let’s go a step further, you write something that is inspired by that copyrighted material and what you wrote become successful to some degree with eyes on it, but you refuse to admit that’s where you got the idea from because you only have a vague recollection. The fact is you got the idea from the copyrighted material.

FWIW that’s pretty much exactly how all creative works are created. Especially music.

Except that nobody has a superhuman ability to create endless amounts of content almost instantly based on said work.

People throw this “artists/writers use inspiration to create X” argument all the time and it just totally ignores the fact that we’re not talking about some person spending 10s/100s/1000s of hours of their time to copy someone’s working style.

It’s a piece of software churning it out in seconds.

Do generative AI models typically focus on ONE person’s style? Don’t they mix together influences from thousands of artists?

FWIW this is not an area I read up on, and so I don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other.

If I would create a very slow AI that takes 10 or 100 hours for each response, would that make it any better in your opinion? I do not think calculation speed of a software is a good basis for legislation.

If analyzing a piece of art and replicating parts of it without permission is illegal, then it should be illegal regardless of the tools used. However, that would make every single piece of art illegal, so it’s not an option. If we make only the digital tools illegal then the question still remains where to draw the line. How much inefficiency is required for a tool to still be considered legal?

Is Adobe Photoshop generative auto-fill legal?
Is translating with deepl.com or the modern Google Translate equivalent legal?
Are voice activated commands on your mobile phone legal (Cortana, Siri, Google)?

All of these tools were trained in similar ways. All of these take away jobs (read: make work/life more efficient).

It’s hard to draw a line and I don’t have any solution to offer.

Except the illegally obtaining the copyrighted material part, which is the main point. And definitely not on this scale.

Web scraping isn’t illegal, though.

I think there can be said to be a meaningful difference due to the sheer scale and speed at which AIs can do this though.

Ultimately, I think it’s less of a direct legal question and more a societal question of whether or not we think this is fair or not. I’d expect it to ultimately be resolved by legislative bodies, not the courts.

That’s still not how LLMs work. I can’t believe everybody who is upset with them doesn’t understand this.

The LLM has no idea what it’s reading. None. It’s just doing a word association game, but at a scale we can’t comprehend. It knows what arrangement of words go together, but it’s not reproducing anything with any actual intent. To get it to actually output anything that actually resembles a single piece of material it was trained against would require incredibly specific prompts to get there, and at that point it’s not really the LLM’s making anymore.

There’s plenty of reasons to be against AI. Such as the massive amounts of data scraping that happens to train models, the possible privacy invasions that come with that, academic cheating, etc. But to be mad at AI for copyright infringement only shows a lack of understanding of what these systems actually do.

The training process of LLMs is to copy the source material word for word. It’s instructed to plagiarize during the training process. The copyrighted material are possibly in one way or another embedded into the model itself.

In machine learning, there’s always this concern whether the model is actually learning patterns, or if it’s just memorizing the training data. Same applies to LLMs.

Can LLMs recite entire pieces of work? Who knows?

Does it count as copyright infringement if it does so? Possibly.

The training process of LLMs is to copy the source material word for word. It’s instructed to plagiarize during the training process. The copyrighted material are possibly in one way or another embedded into the model itself.

No it isn’t. That;s not how neural networks work, like at all

In machine learning, there’s always this concern whether the model is actually learning patterns, or if it’s just memorizing the training data. Same applies to LLMs.

It’s learning patterns. It’s not memorising training data. Again, not how the system works at all

Can LLMs recite entire pieces of work? Who knows?

No. No they can’t.

Does it count as copyright infringement if it does so? Possibly.

That’d be one for the lawyers were it to ever come up, but it won’t

No, that is simply a completely misunderstanding of… well the entire concept

That’s not how copyright works either.

In that case feel free to train your LLM without using copyrighted materials. OK?

As if OpenAI was run by people not caring about copyright.

Exactly this. I hate copyright as much as the next person and find it funny when corporate meddling leads to them fighting each other, but both sides of this leads to shitty precedent. While copyright enforcement already is a shitty precedent, its something we can fight. AI companies laundering massive amounts of data without having to hold up copyright could possibly lead to them also not having to abide to privacy laws in the future with similar arguments. Correct me if im wrong.

Erm… what? No, that’s a massive nonsequiter

Not entirely. I do think that if copyright holders have an argument against AI data scraping, privacy watchdogs will have one as well. But if copyright holders don’t have one, the position of privacy watchdogs will be weaker as well. Mind you, I’m not arguing about legality, I’m fully aware that those are two very different things from a legal perspective. Im arguing from a perspective of policy narratives.

What is a privacy law?

yeah I’ll just wait here patiently until they share their source code and all the contents of their black box of data

Note that what the EU is requesting is for OpenAI to disclose information, nobody says (yet?) that they can’t use copyrighted material, what they are asking is for OpenAI to be transparent with sharing the training method, and what material is being used.

The problem seems to be that OpenAI doesn’t want to be “Open” anymore.

In March, Open AI co-founder Ilya Sutskever told The Verge that the company had been wrong to disclose so much in the past, and that keeping information like training methods and data sources secret was necessary to stop its work being copied by rivals.

Of couse, disclosing openly what materials are being used for training might leave them open for lawsuits, but whether or not it’s legal to use copyrighted material for training is something that is still in the air, so it’s a risk either way, whether they disclose it or not.

and that keeping information like training methods and data sources secret was necessary to stop its work being copied by rivals.

Cant have others copying stuff that you have painstakingly copied yourself.

They seem really intent on having their cake and eating it too.

a) we’re not violating the letter or spirit of copyright laws

b) disclosing our data could open us up to a ton of IP lawsuits

hmm

Your first comment and it is to support OpenAI.

edit:

Haaaa, OpenAI, this famous hippies led, non-profit firm.

2015–2018: Non-profit beginnings

2019: Transition from non-profit

Funded by Musk and Amazon. The friends of humanity.

Also:

In March, Open AI co-founder Ilya Sutskever told The Verge that the company had been wrong to disclose so much in the past, and that keeping information like training methods and data sources secret was necessary to stop its work being copied by rivals.

Yeah, he closed the source code because he was afraid he would get copied by other people.

With replies like this, it’s no wonder he was hesitant to post in the first place.

There’s no need for the hostility and finger pointing.

he was hesitant to post in the first place.

Was he hesitant? how do you know that?

He created his account 2 weeks ago and didn’t post until tonight.

keeping information like training methods and data sources secret was necessary to stop its work being copied by rivals.

I feel like the AI model is going to become self aware before people like Sutskever do

Someone should just create an actual open source LLM, that can learn and replicate the innovations of all the others, and then just use these companies’ arguments about copyright against them.

But OpenAI’s models are proprietary. I’m a bit with Stable Diffusion since the models are open, but fuck OpenAI. OpenAI is not in favor of reduced copyrights. They are in favor of not being negatively affected by copyright, but still benefit from it.

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OpenAI says it could ‘cease operating’ in the EU if it can’t comply with future regulation(www.theverge.com)

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