cross-posted from: https://nom.mom/post/121481
OpenAI could be fined up to $150,000 for each piece of infringing content.https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/08/report-potential-nyt-lawsuit-could-force-openai-to-wipe-chatgpt-and-start-over/#comments
No.
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We 100% need to ensure that automation and AI benefits everyone, not a few select companies. But copyright is totally the wrong mechanism for that.
A pen is not a creative work. A creative work is much different than something that’s mass produced.
Nobody is limiting how people can use their pc. This would be regulations targeted at commercial use and monetization.
Writers can already do that. Commercial licensing is a thing.
… Google’s proposed Web Integrity API seems like a move in that direction to me.
But that’s besides the point, I was trying to establish the principle that people who make things shouldn’t be able to impose limitations on how these things are used later on.
Why should that difference matter, in particular when it comes to the principle I mentioned?
It’s not like AI is using works to create something new. Chatgpt is similar to if someone were to buy 10 copies of different books, put them into 1 book as a collection of stories, then mass produce and sell the “new” book. It’s the same thing but much more convoluted.
Edit: to reply to your main point, people who make things should absolutely be able to impose limitations on how they are used. That’s what copyright is. Someone else made a song, can you freely use that song in your movie since you listened to it once? Not without their permission. You wrote a book, can I buy a copy and then use it to make more copies and sell? Not without your permission.
Except it’s not a collection of stories, it’s an amalgamation - and at a very granular level at that. For instance, take the beginning of a sentence from the middle of first book, then switch to a sentence in the 3-rd, then finish with another part of the original sentence. Change some words here and there, add one for good measure (based on some sentence in the 7-th book). Then fix the grammar. All the while, keeping track that there’s some continuity between the sentences you’re stringing together.
That counts as “new” for me. And a lot of stuff humans do isn’t more original.
The maybe bigger argument against free-reign training is that you’re attributing personal rights to a language model. Also even people aren’t completely free to derive things from memory (legally) which is why clean-room-design is a thing.
I can see your argument it’s just your metaphor wasn’t very strong and I think it just made things a bit confusing
Google web integrity is very much different than what I’m proposing. “Nobody” was more in relation to regulating this.
I hold the opposite opinion in that creatives (I’d almost say individuals only, no companies) own all rights to their work and can impose any limitations they’d like on (edit: commercial) use. Current copyright law doesn’t extend quite that far though.
A creative work is not a reproduceable quantifiable product. No two are exactly alike until they’re mass produced.
Your analogy works more with a person rather than a pen, in that why is it ok when a person reads something and uses it as inspiration and not a computer? This comes back around to my argument about transformative works. An AI cannot add anything new, only guess based on historical knowledge. One of the best traits of the human race is our ability to be creative and bring completely new ideas.
Edit: added in a commercial use specifier after it was pointed out that the rules over individuals would be too restrictive.
I think that point’s worth discussing by itself - leaving aside the AI - as you wrote it quite general.
I came up with some examples:
Taking your statement at face value - the answers should be: no (I can’t decorate), yes (it’s a valid restriction), and no (I can’t use it to illustrate my argument). But maybe you didn’t mean it quite that strict? What do you think on each example and why?
Fair points. I think the restrictions in most part would have to be in place for commercial use primarily.
So under your examples
Yes, you should. As there’s no commercial usage you’re not profiting off of their work, you’re simply using your copy of it to decorate a personal space
If we restrict the copyright protections to only apply to commercial use then this becomes a non-issue. The copyright extends to reproduction (or performance in the case of music) of the work in any kind, but does not extend to complete control over personal usage.
Personal interpretation is fine. If you start using that argument in some kind of publication or “performance”, then you end up with fair use being called into question. Quoting, with appropriate attribution is fine, but say you print a chapter of the book, then a chapter of critique. Where is that line drawn? Right now it’s ambiguous at best, downright invisible at most times.
I appreciate the well thought out response. I hold sting views on copyright of an individuals creative work as a musician and developer, and believe that they should have control over how their products are used to make money. These views probably are a little too restrictive for the general public, and probably won’t ever garner a huge amount of support.
I dropped the ball on making sure to specify use as in commercial use, I’ll put an edit at the bottom of the op to clarify it too
All of the examples you listed have nothing to do with how OpenAI was created and set up. It was trained on copyrighted work, how is that remotely comparable to purchasing a pen?
Would a more apt comparison be a band posting royalties to all of their influences?
You made two arguments for why they shouldn’t be able to train on the work for free and then said that they can with the third?
Did openai pay for the material? If not, then it’s illegal.
Additionally, copywrite and trademarks and patents are about reproduction, not use.
If you bought a pen that was patented, then made a copy of the pen and sold it as yours, that’s illegal. This is the analogy of what openai is going with books.
Plagiarism and reproduction of text is the part that is illegal. If you take the “ai” part out, what openai is doing is blatantly illegal.
Just now, I tried to get Llama-2 (I’m not using OpenAI’s stuff cause they’re not open) to reproduce the first few paragraphs of Harry Potter and the philosophers’ stone, and it didn’t work at all. It created something vaguely resembling it, but with lots of made-up stuff that doesn’t make much sense. I certainly can’t use it to read the book or pirate it.
Maybe it’s trained not to repeat JK Rowling’s horseshit verbatim. I’d probably put that in my algorithm. “No matter how many times a celebrity is quoted in these articles, do not take them seriously. Especially JK Rowling. But especially especially Kanye West.”
Openai:
That doesn’t mean the copyrighted material isn’t in there. It also doesn’t mean that the unrestricted model can’t.
Edit: I didn’t get it to tell me that it does have the verbatim text in its data.
Here we go, I can get chat gpt to give me sentence by sentence:
Most publically available/hosted (self hosted models are an exception to this) have an absolute laundry list of extra parameters and checks that are done on every query to limit the model as much as possible to tailor the outputs.
This wasn’t even hard… I got it spitting out random verbatim bits of Harry Potter. It won’t do the whole thing, and some of it is garbage, but this is pretty clear copyright violations.
Computer manufacturers aren’t making AI software. If someone uses an HP copier to make illegal copies of a book and then distributes those pages to other people for free, the person that used the copier is breaking the law, not the company that made the copier.
They didn’t pay the writers though, that’s the whole point
True - but I don’t think the goal here is to establish that AI companies must purchase 1 copy of each book they use. Rather, the point seems to be that they should need separate, special permission for AI training.
I believe this is where it’ll inevitably go. However I’m not sure it’ll be just AI, rather hopefully more protections around individual creative work and how that can be used by corporations for internal or external data collection.
This really does depend on privacy laws as well and probably data collection, retention and usage too.