Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

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maybe one country or another will outlaw generative ai or ai art or media synthesis or whatever it ends up being called, but presumably they'll be left behind by rapid cultural and technical development in whatever countries don't

the cat is out of the bag, the worms are out of the can, the feathers have blown away in the wind

these developments seem very likely to be central to programming, all other kinds of engineering, conceptual art, scenography, costuming, technical illustration, and pornography, within a couple of years, even if (against all odds) development on the neural nets themselves makes no further progress; they enable you to do things in minutes that previously would have taken days, things which are core parts of the feedback loop driving these disciplines

if every country in the world except thailand bans it then within ten years all your kids will be secretly watching prohibited thai movies with software secretly written in thailand on surreptitiously thai-designed computers, riding thai bicycles

even if deepfakes mean that the most significant effect of ai art is enabling massive fraud, spam, and mitm attacks, banning it locally won't stop you from falling victim to it (fraud is already illegal) but just from developing effective defenses against it

Japan has explicitly amended their copyright code to enable machine learning on copyrighted data.[0] [0]https://storialaw.jp/en/service/bigdata/bigdata-12

> although the laws of foreign countries have provisions with the same effect as Article 47-7 of Japan’s Copyright Act, all of which limit use to development for non-commercial purposes and development by research organizations

It reads like there's a bunch of countries that have similar legislation, interesting though.

Very interesting! This would give Japan a real competitive productivity advantage if ML tools are banned or severely hampered elsewhere. It would also mean that other countries would need to ban not just scraping but also the resulting code or AI-generated media.

I'm sure chatgpt would be of much less interest worldwide if it only spoke japanese.

Doesn't follow. Why would a tool built in Japan limit itself to Japanese? ChatGPT doesn't limit itself to English.

To export you must abide to the laws of the country you're exporting to.

your novel theory of extraterritorial jurisdiction will no doubt be very interesting to trips litigators

afaik asahi v. superior court is still governing precedent in the usa though so it won't be of any interest to domestic litigators in the usa

Perhaps you can't read words?

Extraterritorial jurisdiction?

You sell stuff to country A, you comply with laws of country A. Which is why USA companies have to take GRPR into account.

You make an illegal model for country A? Can't sell it there.

You wouldn't sell the model, you would sell its outputs. I can legally buy products made by factories in Bangladesh that would violate all sorts of laws if they were operating in the U.S. It will be for international trade agreements to determine.

You mean operate in a legal grey area and shut down when the loophole is closed

So has the EU as part of the digital single market changes in 2019 (The so-called Text and Data mining exceptions)

Not really.

Well they allow mining the data but nothing is said about the copyright of the collage output.

your novel theory of how diffusion models work will no doubt be of great interest to deep learning researchers

requires training data: yes

occasionally outputs training data verbatim: yes

verbatim output is somehow not a copyright violation: ???

"The collage output"? What?

100%.

Furthermore, if we adopt current copyright laws to AI rather than understand the entire world is changing, only the largest AI companies will be able to leverage the technology to train their models.

If it requires every film in existence to train a model, only Disney or Disney licensors will be able to operate. That's not good for competition. It might make it even harder to grow up as an independent creative or startup as it presents an impenetrable moat.

As I currently see it, weakening copyright is the only way to assure democratic access to this technology.

I'm still troubled by some of the implications of the technology and think it would be a good idea to have some countries take a hard Luddite stance against AI, but that doesn't mean I think you are wrong. I have trouble with the assumption that what is good for efficiency and reducing human labor is necessarily good for us, but it does imply those that don't go along with the efficiency increases will be destroyed by those that do.

With generative AI I'm mostly concerned with what it will do to the next generation of artists. I don't think I would have ever had the motivation to pursue music if it had been possible to replicate perfectly with AI. I'm immensely thankful I got that opportunity and so I want the next generation to get it as well.

i strongly agree with your first paragraph

i think the second paragraph is a bit myopic, like hunter-gatherers observing agriculture and worrying whether the next generation will be able to track prey through plowed fields, or will allow their hunting skills to decay because it's easier to get meat by trading with the agriculturalists

but that understates the case; ai (if this is really ai this time) is certainly a more significant innovation than agriculture, probably more significant than fire, on par with tools and language

still, that says nothing about its moral valence

It's surprising that so many people on this site side with the Luddites. The back pressure ML is generating is at this point too strong for anything to make any difference. Anyone who attempts to stop it will just be practicing self-sabotage.

It's surprising that so many people on this site side with the Luddites

This is too reductive.

The back pressure ML is generating is at this point too strong for anything to make any difference.

This is wrong, regulation can make a difference.

Anyone who attempts to stop it will just be practicing self-sabotage.

This is a prospect worth evaluating organically. Learning the potential is much different from accepting self-fulfilling prophecies.

> This is wrong, regulation can make a difference.

Regulation is per country or bloc. With ML the value of defecting is so high that any regulation you impose on it which restricts its utility will amount to self-sabotage.

generally luddites are found among those with the deepest understanding of a new invention

but i agree that in this case it's probably futile

If it really turns out to be a problem then copyright holders are simply going to add in a not-licensed-for-training clause in all their licenses[1].

Sure, existing works already licensed can still be used, but at least both parties (copyright holders and AI trainers) won't have anything to argue about.

[1] Anyone from CC reading this? Make it the default.

It is like adding a clause in the license that you are not allowed to read the license.

The moment you share your creation/work to someone/the world, you are training their nn.

You can not share something publicly and then demand "xyz" can not view it. Viewing is training.

You are free to keep your creation under lock & key and only share with nn (of people and/or AI) of your choice.

> You can not share something publicly and then demand "xyz" can not view it.

That's nonsense. Licenses have clauses on how the content may be used. Clauses along the lines of "The content may not be used for ..." are common.

I dunno where you heard that once you release something the license clauses no longer apply, but it's wrong.

many of these clauses are legally unenforceable because you can violate them without infringing on any of the rights that copyright law grants exclusively to the copyright holder (who can license them)

> many of these clauses are legally unenforceable because you can violate them without infringing on any of the rights that copyright law grants exclusively to the copyright holder (who can license them)

That's news to Microsoft[1], who's shared source and various NDA licenses for the source code already has clauses restricting what you can do with it.

[1] I think the problem is that the pro-AI arguments are coming from people who are not aware that clauses in licenses restricting how the content is used is quite common. For example, you were obviously not aware that they were so common that almost every big tech and/or software company of the past and the present already have those clauses in, and those clauses have already been found to be enforceable!

of course people who agree to a contract are bound by its terms under common law; the question in the original article is what copyright law does or doesn't allow people to do without any sort of contract

unfortunately you have descended from simply making vaguely ignorant comments to attacking me, which indicates that further engagement with you is unlikely to be useful to anyone

The license is the contract. Literally.

And every nonFLOSS license and I've seen has restrictions on what the licensee can do with the material.

Can you find one nonFLOSS license that doesn't have restrictions or limitations?

I mean, you lead with obnoxious, then descended into condenscension, all while not realising that the whole point of the license is to restrict the licensee.

Until such a time as a license containing a clause about not being used for "training purposes", whatever the hell that means, actually shows up in court, then adding this to your license has all the legal teeth of saying that you must sacrifice your first born.

How are you planning on proving a particular licensed work was used in a sufficiently large model? One of the commonly mentioned issues with current ML is the inability to reverse the output to figure out 'how it got there'.

> How are you planning on proving a particular licensed work was used in a sufficiently large model? One of the commonly mentioned issues with current ML is the inability to reverse the output to figure out 'how it got there'.

That's a different problem. Let's not get into the argument of "Just because the victim cannot prove something, we should remove the relevant laws."

The current laws are sufficient; all that it takes is for licenses to have a non-AI-training clause.

Lets solve the problem of "how do you prove" when we get to it[1].

[1] Right now, due to the systems already trained being given every single image on the net as training data according to the owner of those systems, in a civil suit the burden will be on them to prove that, on the balance of probabilities, a particular image was not used.

laws that cannot be enforced in practice are bad laws; they work out to be a 007-style license to kill, but for businesses rather than people

granting many such licenses is a recipe for social collapse

> laws that cannot be enforced in practice are bad laws;

Who said they couldn't be enforced? The argument from the pro-AI team is that we shouldn't have those laws in the first place.

I'm saying, let's keep the laws we already have because they already work quite nicely if the content creators don't want their work included in any training data set.

Rushing to make new laws because "Muh AI" is silly.

probably before rushing to categorize people into teams and ridicule those you think are on a different team from you, it would serve you well to understand the basic principles of the field you are commenting on so that you are in a position to assess the factual claims people are advancing

if you are failing to understand the factual claims, you have no hope of making sense of the normative claims for which you have such thirst

I'm not on a team, but the notion from the pro AI people that licensors cannot add restrictions on their material is, frankly, childish in its logic.

Almost all big companies routinely have licenses which heavily restrict how their software may be used, and the licenses have held up time and time again in various jurisdictions around the world.

The only argument you appear to be presenting is "well and don't like it that way".

Tough. It's already that way and has been so for dozens of decades .

that isn't how law works

copyright is not a get-into-jail-free card that allows private parties to invent their own legal system and nonconsensually impose it on other private parties

It's not nonconsensual, if you want to use copyrighted content, or consume it in any way, you have to abide the the clauses in the license.

Forbidding certain uses is a particularly common clause in most copyrighted material.

Other than some FLOSS licenses, can you find one that doesn't have limitations on what you can do with the material?

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