In its submission to the Australian government’s 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.
I agree with google, only I go a step further and say any AI model trained on public data should likewise be public for all and have its data sources public as well. Can’t have it both ways Google.
To be fair, Google releases a lot of models as open source: https://huggingface.co/google
Using public content to create public models is also fine in my book.
But since it’s Google I’m also sure they are doing a lot of shady stuff behind closed doors.
Copyright law already allows generative AI systems to scrape the internet. You need to change the law to forbid something, it isn’t forbidden by default. Currently, if something is published publicly then it can be read and learned from by anyone (or anything) that can see it. Copyright law only prevents making copies of it, which a large language model does not do when trained on it.
A lot of licensing prevents or constrains creating derivative works and monetizing them. The question is for example if you train an AI on GPL code, does the output of the model constitute a derivative work?
If yes, Github Copilot is illegal as it produces code that should comply to multiple conflicting license requirements. If no, I can write some simple AI that is “trained” to regurgitate its output on a prompt, and run a leaked copy of Windows through it, then go around selling Binbows and MSFT can’t do anything about it.
The truth is mostly between the two, this is just piracy, which always has been a gray area because of the difficulty of prosecuting it, previously because the perpetrators were many and hard to find, now it’s because the perpetrators are billion dollar companies with expensive lawyer teams.
The question is for example if you train an AI on GPL code, does the output of the model constitute a derivative work?
This question is completely independent of whether the code was generated by an AI or a human. You compare code A with code B, and if the judge and jury agree that code A is a derivative work of code B then you win the case. If the two bodies of work don’t have sufficient similarities then they aren’t derivative.
If no, I can write some simple AI that is “trained” to regurgitate its output on a prompt
You’ve reinvented copy-and-paste, not an “AI.” AIs are deliberately designed to not copy-and-paste. What would be the point of one that did? Nobody wants that.
Filtering the code through something you call an AI isn’t going to have any impact on whether you get sued. If the resulting code looks like copyrighted code, then you’re in trouble. If it doesn’t look like copyrighted code then you’re fine.
AIs are deliberately designed to not copy-and-paste.
AI is a marketing term, not a technical one. You can call anything “AI”, but it’s usually predictive models that get called that.
AIs are deliberately designed to not copy-and-paste. What would be the point of one that did? Nobody wants that.
For example if the powers that be decided to say licenses don’t apply once you feed material through an “AI”, and failed to define AI, you could say you wrote this awesome OS using an AI that you trained exclusively using Microsoft proprietary code. Their licenses and copyright and stuff doesn’t apply to AI training data so you could sell that new code your AI just created.
It doesn’t even have to be 100% identical to Windows source code. What if it’s just 80%? 50%? 20%? 5%? Where is the bar where the author can claim “that’s my code!”?
Just to compare, the guys who set out to reimplement Win32 APIs for use in Linux (the thing that made it into MacOS as well now) deliberately would not accept help from anyone who ever saw any Microsoft source code for fear of being sued. The bar was that high when it was a small FOSS organization doing it. It was 0%, proven beyond a doubt.
Now that Microsoft is the author, it’s not a problem when Github Copilot spits out GPL code word for word, ironically together with its license.
If the resulting code looks like copyrighted code, then you’re in trouble. If it doesn’t look like copyrighted code then you’re fine.
^^ Very much this.
Loads of people are treating the process of AI creating works as either violating copyright or not. But that is not how copyright works. It applies to the output of a process not the process itself. If someone ends up writing something that happens to be a copy of something they read before - that is a violation of copy write laws. If someone uses various works and creates something new and unique then that is not a violation. It does not - at this point in time at least - matter if that someone is a real person or an AI.
AI can both violate copy write on one work and not on another. Each case is independent and would need to be legislated differently. But AI can produce so much content so quickly that it creates a real problem for a case by case analysis of copy write infringement. So it is quite likely the laws will need to change to account for this and will likely need to treat AI works differently from human created works. Which is a very hard thing to actually deal with.
Now, one could also argue the model itself is a violation of copyright. But that IMO is a stretch - a model is nothing like the original work and the copyright law also does not cover this case. It would need to be taken to court to really decide on if this is allowed or not.
Personally I don’t think the conversation should be on what the laws currently allow - they were not designed for this. But instead what the laws should allow. So we can steer the conversation towards a better future. Lots of artists are expressing their distaste for AI models to be trained on their works - if enough people do this laws can be crafted to backup this view.
then go around selling Binbows and MSFT can’t do anything about it
I think this already happen. A very practical example, windows GUI has been copied by many Linus distros. And with windows 11 there’s clearly a reference to Apple MacOS GUI with a sparkling of Google material design.
Should apple and Google be able to sue Microsoft because it “copied” their work? Should Google be able to sue apple because they “copied” the notification drop-down in iOS?
As you say it’s really a grey area because the only reason we consider AI code to be “regurgitated” while human code to be “inspired” is only because we give humans more recognition of their intellectual abilities.
An AI model is a derivative work of its training data and thus a copyright violation if the training data is copyrighted.
A human is a derivative work of its training data, thus a copyright violation if the training data is copyrighted.
The difference between a human and ai is getting much smaller all the time. The training process is essentially the same at this point, show them a bunch of examples and then have them practice and provide feedback.
If that human is trained to draw on Disney art, then goes on to create similar style art for sale that isn’t a copyright infringement. Nor should it be.
This is stupid and I’ll tell you why.
As humans, we have a perception filter. This filter is unique to every individual because it’s fed by our experiences and emotions. Artists make great use of this by producing art which leverages their view of the world, it’s why Van Gogh or Picasso is interesting because they had a unique view of the world that is shown through their work.
These bots do not have perception filters. They’re designed to break down whatever they’re trained on into numbers and decipher how the style is constructed so it can replicate it. It has no intention or purpose behind any of its decisions beyond straight replication.
You would be correct if a human’s only goal was to replicate Van Gogh’s style but that’s not every artist. With these art bots, that’s the only goal that they will ever have.
I have to repeat this every time there’s a discussion on LLM or art bots:
The imitation of intelligence does not equate to actual intelligence.
a human does not copy previous work exactly like these algorithms, whats this shit take?
Derivative works are only copyright violations when they replicate substantial portions of the original without changes.
The entirety of human civilization is derivative works. Derivative works aren’t infringement.
It is not a derivative work, the model does not contain any recognizable part of the original material that it was trained on.
Except when it produces exact copies of existing works, or when it includes a recognisable signature or watermark?
It’s not turning copyright law on its head, in fact asserting that copyright needs to be expanded to cover training a data set IS turning it on its head. This is not a reproduction of the original work, its learning about that work and and making a transformative use from it. An generative work using a trained dataset isn’t copying the original, its learning about the relationships that original has to the other pieces in the data set.
This is artificial pseudointelligence, not a person. It doesn’t learn about or transform anything.
To take those statements seriously, you will need to:
- define and describe in detail the processes by which “a person” learns
- define and describe in detail how “a person” transforms anything
- define and describe in detail what is “intelligence”
- define and describe in detail what these “artificial paeudointelligences” are doing
- define and describe in detail the differences between the latter and the previous points
Otherwise, I’ll claim that “a person” is running exactly the same processes (neural networks, LLMs, hallucinations), and that calling these AIs “artificial paeudointelligences” is nothing else than dehumanizing a minority just because you feel threatened by them.
The lines between learning and copying are being blurred with AI. Imagine if you could replay a movie any time you like in your head just from watching it once. Current copyright law wasn’t written with that in mind. It’s going to be interesting how this goes.
Imagine being able to recall the important parts of a movie, it’s overall feel, and significant themes and attributes after only watching it one time.
That’s significantly closer to what current AI models do. It’s not copyright infringement that there are significant chunks of some movies that I can play back in my head precisely. First because memory being owned by someone else is a horrifying thought, and second because it’s not a distributable copy.
the thought of human memory being owned is horrifying. We’re talking about AI. This is a paradigm shift. New laws are inevitable. Do we want AI to be able to replicate small creators work and ruin their chances at profitability? If we aren’t careful, we are looking at yet another extinction wave where only the richest who can afford the AI can make anything. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to be concerned.
Let me ask you this: do you think our brains and LLM’s are, overall, pretty distinct? This is not a trick or bait or something, I’m just going through this methodically in hopes my position - which is shared by some others in this thread it seems - is better understood.
my head […] not a distributable copy.
There has been an interesting counter-proposal to that: make all copies “non-distributable” by replacing the 1:1 copying, by AI:AI learning, so the new AI would never have a 1:1 copy of the original.
It’s in part embodied in the concept of “perishable software”, where instead of having a 1:1 copy of an OS installed on your smartphone/PC, a neural network hardware would “learn how to be a smartphone/PC”.
Reinstalling, would mean “killing” the previous software, and training the device again.
Imagine if you could replay a movie any time you like in your head just from watching it once.
Two points:
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These AIs can’t do that; they need thousands or millions of repetitions to “learn” the movie, and every time they “replay” the movie it is different from the original.
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“learning by rote” is something fleshbags can do, and are actually required to by most education systems.
So either humans have been breaking the copyright all this time, or the machines aren’t breaking it either.
You have one brain. You could have as many instances of AI as you can afford. In a general sense, it’s different, and acting like it’s not is going to hit you like a freight train if you don’t prepare for it.
Well fleshbags have to pay several years worth of salary to get their education, so by your comparison, Google’s AI should too.
So works derived from other works should not be copyrightable? Oh wait, that’s specifically allowed. As long as it’s not being reproduced 1:1 then it falls under fair use. The argument that one should get paid for that is absurd. You can’t copyright the idea of something. If that were the case then you could never write another poem or novel or short story because someone already did that and to do so would be “stealing.” It would be ridiculous.
You have really meandered off the path of what I was talking about. But please, meander. It’s interesting.
Bizarre amount of assumptions in your ignorant wall of text post. I’m an attorney that’s worked in copyright for small artists and creators. In my current job i fight back against the tech giants and try to reign in specifically Google Amazon and Meta with consumer protection regulations. The fuck are you?
I’m a person that has the same clout around here as you. You’re an anonymous rando unless you wish to advertise your legal services, put your name and pic up here for people to see and seek your services, which you are more than welcome to do. Until then, guess who I and you are? Nobody with an opinion. Welcome, Nobody, Attorney at Law. You just got irritated and you can’t do shit about it.
To be honest I’m fine with it in isolation, copyright is bullshit and the internet is a quasi-socialist utopia where information (an infinitely-copyable resource which thus has infinite supply and 0 value under capitalist economics) is free and humanity can collaborate as a species. The problem becomes that companies like Google are parasites that take and don’t give back, or even make life actively worse for everyone else. The demand for compensation isn’t so much because people deserve compensation for IP per se, it’s an implicit understanding of the inherent unfairness of Google claiming ownership of other people’s information while hoarding it and the wealth it generates with no compensation for the people who actually made that wealth. “If you’re going to steal from us, at least pay us a fraction of the wealth like a normal capitalist”.
If they made the models open source then it’d at least be debatable, though still suss since there’s a huge push for companies to replace all cognitive labor with AI whether or not it’s even ready for that (which itself is only a problem insofar as people need to work to live, professionally created media is art insofar as humans make it for a purpose but corporations only care about it as media/content so AI fits the bill perfectly). Corporations are artificial metaintelligences with misaligned terminal goals so this is a match made in superhell. There’s a nonzero chance corporations might actually replace all human employees and even shareholders and just become their own version of skynet.
Really what I’m saying is we should eat the rich, burn down the googleplex, and take back the means of production.
That’s fair, also congratulations. Idk if I would count that towards contributing to the internet though, since it’s all within their walled garden on their own terms. It’s helpful for people, but only insofar as it helps Google. 10 years ago I might be less critical since they were still in their “don’t be evil” phase and creating open source projects like Android left and right, something they’re evidently regretting now and trying to lock down using propriety core apps. It’s also worth noting Google’s AI employees authored “Attention is all you need”, the paper which laid the groundwork for modern Transformer-based LLMs, though that’s an architecture and not a full model or code.
Okay so I took back the means of production but it says it’s a subscription basis now
That’s late-stage capitalism for you – even revolution comes with a subscription fee
Or, if it was some non-profit doing the work for the good of everyone :')
If only there were some kind of open AI research lab lmao. In all seriousness Anthropic is pretty close to that, though it appears to be a public benefit corporation rather than a nonprofit. Luckily the open source community in general is really picking up the slack even without a centralized organization, I wouldn’t be surprised if we get something like the Linux Foundation eventually.
Copyright law is gaslighting at this point. Piracy being extremely illegal but then this kind of shit being allowed by default is insane.
We really are living under the boot of the ruling classes.
If you want “this kind of stuff” (by which I assume you mean the training of AI) to not be allowed by default, then you are basically asking for a world in which the only legal generative AIs belong to giant well-established copyright holders like Adobe and Getty. That path leads deeper underneath the boots of those ruling classes, not out from under them.
I don’t think it should be allowed to be trained off any of this stuff for entertainment/art/etc. at all. Like the dream future of AI was all the shitty boring stuff handled for us so we could sit back, chill and focus on arts, real scientific research, general individual betterment etc.
Instead we have these companies trying to get them doing all the art and interesting things whilst we all either have no job, money, or good standard of living, or the dangerous / shitty jobs.
So to avoid being “under the boot of the ruling classes” you want the government to be in charge of deciding what is and is not the correct way to produce our entertainment and art?
I use Stable Diffusiuon to generate illustrations for tabletop roleplaying game adventures that I run for my friends. I use ChatGPT to brainstorm ideas for those adventures and come up with dialogue or descriptive text. How big a fine would I be facing under these laws?
