AI weights are not open “source”
opencoreventures.com
opencoreventures.com
AI weights might be considered a method of production, but that isn't clear yet.
In particular, taking other documents and shoving them through a process that generates a lot of other numbers with no human or creative interaction is definitely something I'd be concerned the courts would judge as not sufficiently creative to be copyrightable. The process itself would certainly consist of copyrightable code, but the output doesn't necessarily. This would be somewhat similar to the observation that there is no copyright to be had in a big table of files and their MD5 hashes (or other hashes), such as a Linux distro might use for integrity checking. Lots of copyright in the original file contents, copyright available on the process for producing these tables, but the tables themselves would likely be ruled not itself copyrightable as there is no creativity in that output.
Note this also has absolutely nothing to do with the question of whether AI output is copyrightable, this is about the huge table of numbers that make up the neural net weights being copyrightable. (Though it would be sort of an interesting question for the legal system to grapple with as to how a non-copyrightable set of numbers could then produce something copyrightable. Call it a philosophical variation on the "copyright washing" argument; can copyright spring from a non-copyrightable source other than a human brain, thus somehow "flowing uphill"? Would a human brain be copyrightable? Stay tuned for those questions, I guess, or if not you, your grandchildren.)
Per your other comments, "work" is not the bar, "creativity" is. "Size" is not the bar either. Merely being a much larger table of numbers than a list of hashes or a phone book is not the question. No human is in that table of numbers creatively saying "no, wait, this neural weight should be -1.5 instead of 2.0 to produce this creative effect". No human is even capable of working in the medium of neural net weights in a creative manner.
If you want to go the "novel legal theory" route, you could play with claiming creativity in the selection of input material and claim the resulting neural weights has a copyright in compilation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_compilation That's a long way from a slam dunk though. Way out on a legal limb there. It isn't entirely clear to me what exact rights would result from such a claim either. It would be a landmark copyright court case for sure.
> Is a document not copyrightable based on its contents?
Creative process is the bigger issue.
> Weights are just a different kind of a document.
And who sits down and writes this document of weights?
Yes, exactly. It's copyright 101.
For example, if you write a random number generator, and print 10000 randon numbers in a document, it's not copyrightable.
Even if you invented a specific random number generation algorithm, the document is still not copyrightable. Your code is copyrightable.
Again it's just copyright 101. If any of above surprises you, maybe you should read a few copyright case studies.
IANAL, but if weights are IP, wouldn't they constitute a "derived work" of the training data?
If I read a few books about a subject as research, and then I write an article about the subject, it's my own copyright. The fact that I did research doesn't make it derivative of those books (correct me if I'm wrong, IANAL).
Perhaps a model created from copyrighted material be treated in the same way?
Yes, because in that case you'd be the "author" doing "creative work".
> Perhaps a model created from copyrighted material be treated in the same way?
Who would be the author doing creative work in this case? The people who decided what training material to use? Perhaps, but it seems a stretch for the people who selected the training material to be authors but not the people who created the training material.
Basically, that world ignores the AI model completely. If your resulting work wouldn't be fair use if you directly were working with something from the training set, it wouldn't be fair use if you fed it through an AI model first.
The inputs could be copyrighted and the weights could be copyrighted if creating the weights from the inputs is (legally) regarded as a transformative use. And I think it could reasonably be considered to be transformative - the weights don't look anything like the input data.
Disclaimer: IANAL. So far as I know, no court has ruled on whether this qualifies as a transformative use. I take no position on how the courts will actually rule. I merely say that they could regard this as transformative use. (But see jerf's "creativity" argument for another hurdle that weights must pass to be copyrightable.)
Google's thumbnails are a purely mathematical transformation on images (no copyright themselves), and yet are considered a transformative use.
I believe that trained models are similarly a purely mathematical transformation of {data}, but is transformative in what that can be used for going forward.
"Can" bearing a lot of weight in that sentence.
It's how the human, with agency, uses the model that may be a derivative or copyright infringing use - not the model itself nor necessarily the output.
The output of a generative AI may be similar enough to an existing work that it is derivative of that work. It is possible to construct a prompt that infringes on an existing work even if that work wasn't part of the training data.
For that case, consider you drew a picture. That picture that you just drew isn't part of any training data. I could presumably look at it and describe it with sufficient detail that something similar enough would be generated... and that may be considered a derivative work. The same test could be applied to me describing it to someone on Fiverr with the same outcome.
If I were to publish that work by the generative AI or Fiverr - who would be infringing on copyright? me? or the black box that may be AI or Fiverr that created a picture based on my prompts?
Their recent decision that implies that anything that AI is used to produce is non-copyrightable is silly, sad, and not sustainable.
On the other end of the spectrum, AI generated content couldn't be copyrighted if there is no human involvement. If someone asks GPT to write 1000 poems, it couldn't be copyrighted.
An entirely reasonable, if not fully tested, statement is the following:
Every single one of these AI weight things itself is a result of unencumbered, massive, law-breaking, right-violating copyright infringement -- accordingly, it's extremely difficult to say anything morally justifiable or authoritative about anyone elses "rights" downstream, and to try to inject the word "ethical" makes the whole thing even more ridiculous.
Why? Copyright covers expression not information, AIs can learn information from any source regardless of copyright. They should just not regurgitate copyrighted content, that's all. And much of what organic content is online is common knowledge, thus can't be copyright-controlled.
"You wouldn't look at a car and then remember what that looked like when someone asks you to draw another"
*this is not legal advice, dangit commenter person below
They could be completely biased, could completely ignore everyone and everything else and rule however they want.
I'm almost surprised they still bother to write any kind of "legal reasoning" in their ruling and don't simply focus on what the ruling is rather than why they ruled that way. But I guess such "reasoning" still serves a propaganda purpose and still provides a fig leaf for those who still believe in the quaint absurdity that "we are a nation of laws, not men."
Plenty of companies who have legal teams will keep an eye on the legal landscape of court decisions, and use them to decide if our T&C's or contracts need rewriting, or if any precedent puts us at legal risk.
Sure - the supreme court could overthrow its precedent anytime, but until it does, a lot of people will act as if what they say is the law.
Not really for practical purposes. In the long term, the Supreme Court can and does overrule its own precedent, so the first case on the specific issue to get to the Supreme Court doesn’t end the discussion.
In the short-term, cases get resolved by lower courts and parties either lack funds to do the maximum level of appeals, or the Supreme Court chooses not to hear appeals (they tend to prefer an issue to be well-developed with circuit case law, often waiting till there is a conflict between the Circuit Courts of Appeal, before taking it up), so the state of the law prior to any specific ruling on the narrow topic by the Supreme Court matters quite a bit.
They don't necessarily do. Think about that. You can take some copyrighted material and transform the information contained in it (for instance a fictional book). You can then write a summary. The summary contains information that was present in the original but it has been transformed and hence it's not a copy. The ML model contains information that has been generalized by some degree. So it's just a grey area IMO.
The summary also contains original thought, something is added to it by a human to make it unique. AI models are primarily deriviative.
A better example would be: if I take 1,000 different copyrighted works and put them into a ZIP file, does that resulting file violate copyright?
The copyright aspect makes more sense when you start thinking of AI training models as lossy compression for the original works. Is a downsampled copy of the new Star Wars movie still protected under copyright?
Just tabulating the word counts would not violate copyright as it is considered facts and figures.
Like, if one has access to such a model, and doesn’t count it towards the size cost of a compression/decompression program nor as part of the compressed size of the compressed images, then that should allow for compressing images to have substantially fewer bits than one would otherwise be able to achieve (at least, assuming that one doesn’t care about the amount of time used to compress/decompress. Idk if this is actually practical.)
But unlike say, a zip file, the model doesn’t give you a representation of like, a list of what images (or image/caption pairs) it was trained on.
Or like, in your analogy with the lower resolution of the movie, the lower resolution of it still tells you how long the movie is (though maybe not as precisely due to lower framerate, but that’s just going to be off by less than a second, unless you have an exceedingly low framerate, but that’s hardly a video at that point.)
There is a sense in which any model of some data yields a way to compress data-points from it, where better models generally give a smaller size. But, like, any (precisely stated) description counts as a model?
So, whether it is “like lossy compression” in a way that matters to copyright, I would think depends a lot on things like,
Well, for one thing, isn’t there some kind of “might someone consume the allegedly infringing work as a substitute for the original work, e.g. if cheaper?” test?
For a lower resolution version of Star Wars movie, people clearly would.
But if one wanted to view some particular artwork that is in the training set, I would think that one couldn’t really obtain such a direct substitute? (Well, without using the work as an input to the trained model, asking it to make a variation, but in that case one already has the work separate from the model, so that’s not really relevant.)
If I wanted to know what happened in minute 33 of the Star Wars movie, I could look at minute 33 of the compressed version.
A mono audio version of Star Wars, compressed down to 320x240, filmed from the back of a theater on a VHS camera, converted to Video CD, would under any reasonable interpretation be just a copy of the original.
I assume it starts getting murky when there's some sort of transformation done it it. What if I run motion capture on it, and use that motion capture data to create a cartoon version of Star Paws (my puppies in space epic)? What if I do a scene for scene recreation as the animated cartoon (removing any mentions to copyrighted names -- Luke Skywalker is now Duke Dogwalker, for example)? In this case, there's been no actual data transfer -- all the sprites are hand drawn, backgrounds etc.
What would be an interesting exercise would be to try and create a series of artifacts that each on their own are considered non-derivatives, but can be used together to reconstitute the original. For example, create a compression method that relies heavily on transforms / macroblocks, but strip out any of the actual pixel data from the film. That info might be supplied as palette files which are themselves not really copyrighted data, but together with the compressed transform stream can be used to recreate the original video.
However, saying "the first word of the book is 'The'" would not be a violation, while repeating that for every word in the book, as a whole, would be one.
All that to say, the models have potential to memorize, but they don't, and if they do it's an undesirable failure mode, not some deliberate copying.
Once it starts doing well, will DC come after me? You bet.
But also, an unintentional copy of a copyrighted image is not a violation of copyright. (eg: an executable binary which happens to contain the bits corresponding to a picture of Batman -- but which are actually instruction sequences and were provably not intended to encode the picture -- clearly doesn't infringe.)
LLMs are somewhere in-between #1 and #2, and the intent can happen both in the training and also the prompting.
Stack on top of this the fact that the models can also definitely generate content that counts as fair use, or which isn't copyrighted.
It's the multitude of possible outputs, across the copyright spectrum, combined with the function of intent in training and/or prompting, which make this such a thorny legal issue for which existing copyright statute and jurisprudence is ill-suited.
Taking your Batman example: DC would come after you for trademark as well as copyright, and the copyright claims would be very carefully evaluated with respect to your very specific work. But here we are talking about a large model that can generate tons of different work which isn't subject to copyright or which is possibly fair use.
I don't think that existing jurisprudence (or even statute?!) can handle this situation very well, at all, without tons of arbitrary interpretative work on the parts of juries/judges, because of the multitude and vague intent issues described above.
(...Also presumably the merits of the DC case wouldn't matter because your victory would be pyhrric unless you are a mega-corp. Which from a legal theory perspective is neither here nor there but from a legal practicality perspective may inform how companies go about enforcing copyright claims on model weights/outputs.)
Anyways. I think we have a right mess on our hands and the legislature needs to do their damn jobs. Welcome to America, I guess :)
Curious to hear your thoughts on these issues.
Like, yes, but it's not very likely to happen and it's not a particularly horrible thing if it doesn't; the law is slow and little-c conservative and you're just expecting it to be something it MOST often just ain't.
(Yes the idea of rights is also unnatural and absent from visions such as anarchy)
What does “more principled” mean of a moral code? How does one quantify “degree of principledness”?
> and use that to investigate what might be considered "more natural".
What does the preceding (being “more principled”) have to do with being “more natural”? And what significance does being “more natural” have?
And none of that has any relevance to what is usually described as “natural rights”; its like taking existing words and coming upnwith entirely novel meanings and then a whole architecture around them, which is pretty advanced equivocation.
Edit to add I'm not saying I agree with the justification or am trying to argue for it, only that the point above is commonly raised as the justification, implying that the intrusion on a person's rights is known and accepted.
1. Evaluate every output from the model to ensure that none of the outputs are copyrighted
2. Evaluate every input to a model to ensure that the inputs are either not copyrighted or properly licensed
3. Change the definition of copyright so that ML models can do whatever they want
Nobody is doing #1, because that makes the business models not work. Established brands (like Adobe) are doing #2. I get the feeling that there are a lot of ML startups that are hoping that #3 will happen, but it seems unlikely
A model training being rendered fair use doesn't mean any of its output can be used for whatever regardless.
That's what I listed as #1 - evaluate each individual output of the model to see if it violates copyright.
PS: your "#1" is really hard to do and I'd guess it is infeasible. Even Google (esp. Youtube) with their vast data capabilities, often gets it wrong.
I suspect we're going to see the same kind of rethink about intellectual property in the age of AI.
Not that we really had all that much privacy in the past, as anyone who's browsed old newspapers knows.
The act of choosing to place images in a certain arrangement, such as a collage, can be copyrightable. The same could be said for the "act" of choosing what images to include in a training set and which parameters to use to train the model.
There is in fact a whole art form where people cut out words from different newspapers and books, for example, and re-arrange those words to form new and interesting art.
So there are ways in which such a work would be a creative work, and ways it which it would not, and it would depend on the particular instance and example.
So your phonebook modifications may or may not be considered "creative" depending on the judge and your ability to convince them. The more your modify it, the more likely you are to convince a judge it is a creative work, though.
The US has the "threshold of originality" as its principle. Under that doctrine, it requires some human (and this has been emphasized many times over the years) originality in order for something to be copyrighted. It's a low bar for how original it needs to be, but it must be human (monkeys taking selfies are not human).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality
In England, the doctrine is "sweat of the brow" instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow
> Under a "sweat of the brow" doctrine, the creator of a work, even if it is completely unoriginal, is entitled to have that effort and expense protected; no one else may use such a work without permission, but must instead recreate the work by independent research or effort.
The definitive case for this in the US that set the two apart is Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R.... ) where it was deemed that a telephone directory is not copyrightable in the US as there is no originality in it... but under the sweat of the brow doctrine it would have been.
So the "[c]opyright is for things that are the result of human creativity" gets an "it depends" and it would be curious to see if companies that are firmly in the "models are valuable" camp go to the UK for what I believe would be a more favorable copyright protection.
... However there are other IP laws around trade secrets that may be better for it in the US (I'm not as familiar in that domain - I would be curious to find out).
A photo is presumed to be copyrightable. Even horrible photos taken by somebody without any aesthetic sense are presumed to be copyrightable. The argument (AFAIK) is that the photographer chooses the time, location, object, and tweaks various settings of the camera (exposure, aperture, etc.), and these choices are considered sufficient for a photo to be copyrightable.
How about LLMs?
The hyperparameters of LLMs are hugely important in training LLMs, as is the choice of source training data. To me the "degrees of freedom" (and hence room for "creativity") in training LLMs are larger than that of a photographer taking a photo. And as of today, training a good LLM is probably objectively harder than taking a good photo, even if we forget about hardware costs for a moment.
It's easy to convince judges and juries that copying phone numbers into a phone book doesn't require human creativity. But we're talking about the most bleeding edge tech companies producing a bleeding edge new product here. I think it's going to be really hard to convince judges and juries that making this new shiny thing doesn't require human creativity. Maybe in say 20 years when even a 10 year old can train a LLM the situation might change, but as of today, quite unlikely IMHO.
Maybe the popular and free ones. Adobe has a product in beta that uses "ethical training data" as a selling point.
Who am I kidding this is Adobe of course they're fucking over their users
Is there an official ruling? Or is it just a Reddit-style over exaggeration?
They are trained on a lot of text. News sites, comments, books etc. Most books and news sites fall under copyright. Is this fair use? Who knows. Fair use is also an American thing. ChatGPT can be used in the EU, which doesn't have such a broad view of fair use.
If you make a game only out of a lot of copyrighted assets without paying it isn't fair use. Are LLMs different?
What about image generation, which you can prompt the models for specific styles of artists, which works are all copyrighted, but still used for training?
See “What color are your bits?”: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
>> And very much of intellectual property law comes down to rules regarding intangible attributes of bits - Who created the bits? Where did they come from? Where are they going? Are they copies of other bits?
Yes. Weights probably aren't copyrightable in the US. See Feist vs. Rural Telephone, in which the Supreme Court ruled that telephone directories are not copyrightable. The copyright clause in the Constitution ("To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.") is understood to require human authorship. The US does not have database copyright, or "sweat of the brow" copyright. That it was expensive to produce some collection of data does not make it copyrightable.
Outputs from LLMs, machine generated art, and machine generated music probably are not copyrightable either. US Copyright Office: "Based on the Office's understanding of the generative AI technologies currently available, users do not exercise ultimate creative control over how such systems interpret prompts and generate material. Instead, these prompts function more like instructions to a commissioned artist."[1]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-copyright-office-says-so...
A collection of numbers is copyrightable if it's the encoded result of a creative process. Just because it's represented as a bunch of numbers does not make it non copyrightable. That's why it says " original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. "
You can't just classify the weights as facts simply because they are numbers. If they are creatively made by a human they would be copyrightable. Mechanically computed from random numbers, no. Somewhere in the middle? Harder
>Just because it's represented as a bunch of numbers does not make it non copyrightable.
Can you give an example of where the bunch of numbers is copyrightable when it's not just a numeric encoding of something that was already copyrightable? Taking music and encoding it as a wav file is not a creative work, but it's a representation of a copyrighted work.
Maybe you could create a long list of numbers and call it an artistic impression, but that's clearly not what AI weights are. I'm interested to hear an example of your copyrightable numbers.
Here, there's a whole lot of creative decisions in labelling and guiding of training that produces the weights, so it's reasonable to think it might be copyrightable.
That is, the numbers are a whole lot more original than the issuance of phone numbers or part numbers.
(Agree that the skill in knowing how to code and guide the training of a model is probably very different though. It’s not just access to compute time that separates me from OpenAI :) )
Often, labelling is part of large public datasets that are chosen for use for that exact reason, and/or is otherwise not the work of the party claiming copyright in the model.
Labeling training data may qualify for copyright, but if the underlying training data doesn’t taint the output as a derivative work then labeling isn’t going to qualify by itself.
Thus without some new and very generous interpretation AI companies are at best not going to benefit from copyright and at worst may be forced to create all training data in house. My suspicion is this generation of AI companies are in a very difficult situation.
It depends. If each individual training item has a small impact on the output coefficients, then perhaps it's not a derivative work of them. But if there's a large creative process in determining model training procedure, deciding labelling strategies, and applying those-- perhaps those numbers are strongly derived from those things.
Anyway, suppose you’re building an AI to walk, there’s nothing creative about selecting 9.8m/s/s for gravity that’s simply the ideal value to achieve a desired goal. Labeling an elephant as “Elephant” rather than “coat hanger” is similarly a functional choice.
Just because a person is holding a camera and taking a photo doesn’t mean the result is copyrightable.
Suppose you're not building a strawman, but instead building an AI to be an LLM. The exact sequence of what you choose to do for instruction tuning, and the metrics and labels that you choose, the prompt/response pairs you write, and the loss functions you employ are quite creative. They greatly affect the coefficients and are not simple mechanical steps and are the result of a large amount of creative choice.
We are nowhere near a point where they are an uncreative, mechanical recipe to follow.
> Just because a person is holding a camera and taking a photo doesn’t mean the result is copyrightable.
No, but in the overwhelming majority of circumstances it is. What it depends upon is whether the person holding the camera is making a significant, original creative choice.
I am not sure what courts will decide, but I am certain that there is more creativity and originality employed than you are giving OpenAI et al. credit for.
Creative choices requires intentional control over the output across a meaningfully different range of viable possibilities. A brick layer has a huge range of viable options in the specific brick and its alignment in a wall but none of those choices are artistically meaningful.
The coefficients are also not in any meaningful sense chosen based on instruction tuning. It’s no more under direct control than the specific arrangements of atoms in the brick wall and is instead the output of a purely mechanical process.
> We are nowhere near a point where they are an uncreative, mechanical recipe to follow.
Thus: We are nowhere near the point where the output is under creative control rather than being the result of a poorly understood mechanical recipe.
Here's what the supremes said in Feist V. Rural:
> Factual compilations, on the other hand, may possess the requisite originality. The compilation author typically chooses which facts to include, in what order to place them, and how to arrange the collected data so that they may be used effectively by readers. These choices as to selection and arrangement, so long as they are made independently by the compiler and entail a minimal degree of creativity, are sufficiently original that Congress may protect such compilations through the copyright laws. Nimmer ss 2.11[D], 3.03; Denicola 523, n. 38. Thus, even a directory that contains absolutely no protectible written expression, only facts, meets the constitutional minimum for copyright protection if it features an original selection or arrangement.
Alphabetical order wasn't quite enough. But people directing the work that produces the coefficients are doing considerably more creative work than that.
> Thus: We are nowhere near the point where the output is under creative control rather than being the result of a poorly understood mechanical recipe.
No one requires complete creative control of the output. I can spatter paint and have relatively poor control of what's happening, but I am certainly generating a copyrightable work when I engage in creative choices as part of this.
I agree it’s more effort but the metric isn’t effort so I disagree that qualifies the coefficients as copyrightable. The SHA256 hash of a movie isn’t copyrightable even though the movie itself was.
> No one requires complete creative control
That’s a strawman, there are requirements for creative control. You don’t own copyright to your normal dumps, but you can get copyright from looking down and selecting to take a picture. That’s the low bar for a creativity requirement, but it exists.
I know the metric is no longer effort. But there's a lot of creative choices that I've mentioned that greatly affect the coefficients, even if we don't know what those creative choices are going to do to each film grain in the photograph or coefficient in the matrix.
> You don’t own copyright to your normal dumps
Yes, there's an explicit exemption in LOC's guidelines for things that are the direct output of natural processes.
If you have a lot of choices affecting output, then the output is subject to copyright. Indeed, the Supremes above said that factual contemplations can qualify if they involve a "minimal degree of creativity".
In the end, we'll see.
Sure, there are "poems" that consist of just a groups of numbers that are copyrighted. They are not encodings, it's just a string of numbers. It's indistinguishable from a bunch of numbers. This is just one example, there are lots.
They are enforceable to the degree it's creative, and to the degree the infringing use is also creative.
So you would not be able to sue me for using those numbers in a math equation. You would be able to sue me for reproducing your poem in a book of poems :)
As feist says, the creativity required for copyright is quite minimal. But it's still only as protectable as it is creative.
Look - AI is not the first thing to have this "issue". The answer remains the same as it always was - it's mostly about the process not the output.
The output mostly matters is if the output is not intended to be creative (or it's de minimis or ...).
Copyright as it currently exists is weird.
Like if you go to the copyright office and try to register your ssh public key and say "this was generated by ssh-keygen i had nothing to do with it" you may get a different result than if you said "this is my new visually stunning masterpiece, my ssh public key, which was generated with computer help but I used 37 precisely timed keyboard smashes to do it. Prints are available from my gallery for $500"
> Like if you go to the copyright office and try to register your ssh public key and say "this was generated by ssh-keygen i had nothing to do with it" you may get a different result than if you said "this is my new visually stunning masterpiece, my ssh public key, which was generated with computer help but I used 37 precisely timed keyboard smashes to do it. Prints are available from my gallery for $500"
The important thing, of course, isn't whether the copyright office denies to register your copyright, but instead what courts will ultimately do when you attempt to enforce your copyright.
We know the current administrative algorithms used by the copyright offices. We have less clarity on what courts will ultimately do.
There are random number books and I know one of them has a copyright registration [1].
[1]: https://publicrecords.copyright.gov/detailed-record/7060844
Even random numbers are copyrightable.
Below is an implementation of Marsaglia's invention, from p348, courtesy infamous NR[1]. Its a MWC (multiply with carry) random number generator, with two parameters, variable a and base b=2^32. --- For a, "The values below are recommended with no particular ordering." ID a B1 4294957665 B2 4294963023 B3 4162943475 B4 3947008974 B5 3874257210 B6 2936881968 B7 2811536238 B8 2654432763 B9 1640531364 --- as we all now know, the whole thing is copyrighted - you can't redistribute that code and can't use those specific numbers to generate random numbers without purchasing a license, which only allows you to use it once in your personal machine; that's why GSL[2]. The pseudorandom numbers you would get from MWC if you use above numbers are also copyrighted since they are work-product.
[1]http://numerical.recipes/book/book.html [2]https://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/design/gsl-design.html
Ie. if ClosedAI says you can't use output of their API to train competitive models - is that enforceable or not?
Ie. if somebody creates company that sells milkshakes and they say you can't use them to feed employees of competing milkshakes companies - it wouldn't fly, would it?
For LLMs it really depends on the situation. If it's presented in a EULA scenario, where you already bought the rights to use the LLM and ClosedAI gave you the EULA with additional terms afterwards, then the logic above applies. But then everyone knows EULAs aren't very enforceable these days, and nobody buys packaged software any more, so this scenario is quite unlikely these days.
So, if the clause is just one of the many conditions in their main contract of service, of which you had ample opportunity to review before purchasing/agreeing to use their service, then as long as the terms are legal (eg. don't contradict some law), parties are generally free to agree to whatever they want in a contract, and courts will generally uphold those terms.
"can't use them to feed employees of competing milkshakes companies" is probably enforceable. Sounds silly, but I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't be upheld. Unless there's antitrust factors involved.
"Can't use output of their API to train competitive models" is most likely enforceable. Unless there's antitrust factors involved. These kinds of terms are pretty common too. Nobody seriously thinks they're unenforceable per se.
Of course there are practical barriers to enforce a contract -- the aggrieved party has to discover the breach, gather sufficient evidence, and file a lawsuit. As an average Joe individual, you're probably not worrying about getting sued by a company for trivial breaches of service agreements. Most likely the service provider will just cut the service instead of spending thousands of dollars tracking you down (and risk taking a PR hit for going after the little guy). But between businesses, the risks of getting sued by a competitor is real, and no sane lawyer would advise the business to ignore such contract terms.
(Btw, I am not a lawyer. I've studied these things a bit though.)
I don't have a strong sense of whether this is reasonable (I see arguments both ways) but I do think it's pretty strongly at odds with how we treat photographs. There are a bunch of photos on my phone where I unquestionably own the copyright, despite putting in much less creativity than I did for some AI images I've generated.
I don't think it's clear how to resolve this, but I do think that if we are going to protect photos and not prompted AI images, the distinction needs to turn on something other than whether "sufficient creativity" was applied to the input of the mechanical system.
Edited to add: It's probably also worth calling out that the question of whether we protect the work produced by a person's use of mechanical system is a separate one from whether we protect the work of others when it is (in various ways, to various degrees, with various likelihoods) reproduced by use of those mechanical systems.
The interesting part is, those controversial case are pretty recent when the art of photography is century(ies?) old now. I wouldn't expect super clear guidelines regarding AI art before a few decades of weird cases fought tooth and nails in court.
https://petapixel.com/2018/04/24/photographer-wins-monkey-se...
https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-...
313.2 Works That Lack Human Authorship
As discussed in Section 306, the Copyright Act protects “original works of authorship.” 17 U.S.C. § 102(a) (emphasis added). To qualify as a work of “authorship” a work must be created by a human being. See Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co., 111 U.S. at 58. Works that do not satisfy this requirement are not copyrightable.
The U.S. Copyright Office will not register works produced by nature, animals, or plants. Likewise, the Office cannot register a work purportedly created by divine or supernatural beings, although the Office may register a work where the application or the deposit copy(ies) state that the work was inspired by a divine spirit.
Examples:
• A photograph taken by a monkey.
• A mural painted by an elephant.
...
- whether the monkey has the copyright (PETA's argument): this was smacked down by the court twice, the second court explicitely setting a precedent.
- whether the photograph has coypright: as far as I know he doesn't, as the work was deemed non copyrightable (ruled as not created by a human)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
The output is not.
The photo you take involved choices of composition and timing and equipment choice.
Just because you don't feel you put in a lot of consideration does not mean at a fundamental level that you still put in creative choices that give the resulting product copyright protection.
But if you took that photo and put it into software which made a derivative image without human creativity, then while the original image would be copyrightable the resulting derivative output would not.
The ideal path forward in copyright would be no infringement in use of materials for training and no protection in AI output with infringement possible against output too close/derivative of protected images.
It's not infringement if you learned to draw tracing Mickey Mouse, your Gerry Gerbil cartoons are fine, but if you draw Mickey Mouse and distribute it, you'll hear from Disney's lawyers.
AI should be the same with the exception that the Gerry Gerbil cartoons would not be copyrightable.
Excellent! I'll put the Inheritance Cycle through a synonymiser, and have a copyright-free (if somewhat degraded) version. Take that, Christopher Paolini!
… wait.
What you say might well be correct: the law is often foolish. But I'd imagine the creativity-free derivative work still counts as a derivative work of the original, copyright-eligible work.
One way it might not be is if Stable Diffusion is seem more like a hash algorithm than a synonymiser. But I don't see why it should, because there's a meaningful correspondence between the input and the output of the system.
I can't legally pirate Windows just because the source code was run through a compiler. Even though the compiler itself adds no additional creativity, the underlying source code is still a creative work[0], so pirating the binaries still infringes a copyright. Just one that's in a slightly different place than what we're normally used to thinking about.
Just to drive the point home, there's a few other situations in which copyright "flows through" to things not subject to copyright. Back in the days of copyright formalities, if you published before properly registering something, your work would be born into the public domain. And this occasionally happened to serial media - e.g. someone might just forget to register the third season of a TV show. In that particular case[1], seasons one and two are still copyrighted, and because season three is a derivative work of the prior season, nobody but the original owner can actually make any use of season three. The only practical difference is that the company that owns that TV show lost one year of copyright ownership over the third season.
[0] By definitions of law. I honestly think most software shouldn't have been made copyrightable, but once Congress said "software is copyrightable" that put that question to bed.
[1] I don't remember the name of the TV show or the court case, but this IS a thing that happened and this theory IS court tested.
Presumably that general rule would also prevent your instructions to DALLE from giving you copyright ownership of the output either. The AI isn’t getting ownership, so it’s either in the public domain or a derivative work from the artists creating the training data.
If a museum can include a small portion of a frame around a public domain painting and claim new copyright as a result - surely any smallest spark or creative influence qualifies, including choosing a single word and choosing the model and time and which output is selected does as well.
The idea of work for hire, and the notion of copyright assignment, applies to people and not machines or processes employed in the creation of a work. Your brush manufacturer would never dare try to claim that their creative selection of fibres and thus their contribution to the unique brush patterns in your painting constitutes a creative contribution to your work. Why is a complex digital model which does the same any different?
Perhaps it is copyright as a whole that is wrong and is nothing to do with AI. This is what we get for creating imaginary property as a means to finance speculative creative endeavours in a capitalist system. So, yeah. Fun times there - once again technology challenges another economic status quo.
There’s no way to map DALLE prompts into any kind of obvious picture from the input. Even DALLE itself can produce a wide range of outputs from a single input.
Further, people have programmed in languages before any compilers where created which worked after the compilers where created.
Early CPU’s didn’t compile anything they directly executed the instruction pipeline.
Also, the number of CPU’s manufactured heavily favored very simple designs.
As to your point that’s not what CPU’s do though, they have both a set of instructions and a set of IO with the outside world. A compiler always results in the same output from a given set of instructions, but with CPU’s you can run the same code and get wildly different output due to that IO.
The only way you can call a CPU a compiler is as a subset of its capabilities. If they they have internal microcodes where a given instruction gets translated into a different internal representation, but that’s not the end it also executes those microcodes.
And the AI image involved choices of prompt and model, and subsequent selection from among several generated images.
I recognize that what you said here:
> Your prompt for the AI image generation is copyrightable.
> The output is not.
... probably represents the state of the law at the moment (with meaningful amounts of uncertainty), but I don't think there's a principled difference based on the amount or nature of creativity involved. IMO the equivalent would be "you own the specification of (position, equipment, relevant world state) but not the photo" which obviously doesn't do anything we want for photography. And I guess that's a part of my point. We should pick the policy we want to make sure we capture the incentives we want. Maybe it is best that AI assisted art (past some point?) not be copyrightable. But I don't think basing the distinction on the amount or nature or... propagation (I guess?) of creativity makes any sense in distinguishing flippant and bullshit photographs (at least a third of my photos, although I would hesitate to apply the labels to any particular photo by someone else) from prompt-driven generative works.
Are you arguing here that because the weights come from an optimization program, they are not "human authored"? If so I find that to be a strange assertion. If I'm working every day on my model and training algorithm to ensure it produces the best weights possible to solve my problem, I would be very surprised for someone to tell me I have no ownership over those weights because they are generated from a program I wrote and data that I own.
It might end up uncopyrightable due to other reasons, but probably not this.
Btw, the phone directories are quite different -- they're just compilation of raw factual public domain information. The LLM weights are anything but. In fact one of the leading theories as to why LLMs are not copyrightable is that they infringe upon the copyrights of the source training materials. (I also don't want to guess whether that argument holds)
Let me put a straw man, and try to find a middle point, when the copyright argument stops being applicable:
1. A painting was done by an artist.
2. On a computer.
3. With a help from an image processor software.
4. Using some advanced filters, like super-resolution, that utilize computer vision techniques. Like neural networks.
Many smartphones already automatically process your* photos with some advanced CV algorithms. That can be called "machine generated art".
I'd personally prefer to stop saying "neural network did X", same way as we don't say "a bulldozer built a road, a crane built a house".
Even non-generative-AI inside Photoshop only mutates images. Generative AI is the source of images.
Or, is the distinction you are making based on there being an image before the model is used?
Maybe a published copy of the weights might be copyrightable, in the exact form of a “creatively” ordered listing, but the weights themselves would almost certainly not be if the US judicial system rules consistently.
This bypasses the entire argument of whether it is human authorship as weights themselves in bulk are just straight up non-copyrightable regardless of origin according to this reading of the law and precedent.
What happens if we train a neural network on a single, copyrighted work? Say it has one input node (or even zero, if you like), and regardless of this input, its output is always exactly the copyrighted work it was trained on. What do its weights represent? Clearly, its weights represent a direct encoding of the original work. Those weights are copyrightable, but not by the person who trained the neural network -- the copyright is held by the owner of the original work.
What if we train the neural network on just two copyrighted works? If its one input node is 0, it outputs the first, and if it's 1, it outputs the 2nd. Almost certainly, its weights are a complicated, tangled mix encoding both, like a compression algorithm that completely rearranged its input. Who owns the copyright to those weights? To whatever extent the weights can be "factored out" into a set representing the first work and a set representing the second, clearly the copyright holder of the first work holds the copyright on the first "factored set", and the 2nd on the 2nd. It seems obvious that we must be able to do this "factoring out" somehow (even if the topology of the factored networks is different), because we know both works are exactly represented by the weights, and the neural network itself can use this information to reconstruct them both, so they're in there ... somewhere. So is there a sort of "joint copyright" on the combined weights, where nobody is really allowed to do anything with it without approval of the other? Regardless, it's still clear that whoever trained the neural network has no claim on any copyright.
Where is the breaking point extending this from 2 works to a billion? People make arguments like "drawing a car from memory isn't infringing on copyright design of that car", which ... are you sure? Reproducing a piece of music from memory (and selling it) is usually copyright infringement. You're allowed to learn a Taylor Swift song as part of your musical training, but you're not usually allowed to then play it back from memory and sell that recording (I'm not sure I morally agree with this treatment of covers, nor if it's globally applicable). So the argument that "surely neural networks are allowed to learn from copyrighted works" misses the point: they can learn all they want, but as soon as they reproduce verbatim (or close enough) a copyrighted work, they're infringing. And if they're representing a complete copy of the work within their weights (which they obviously are if they can reproduce it), then the original copyright holder has a claim on those weights. And never in this process has the trainer of the NN acquired any copyright to anything. The real trainer is a bunch of GPUs, after all.
If the neural network cannot reproduce any of the copyrighted works verbatim, then we're getting closer to "fair use" territory. Yes, it's permissible to write a summary of a copyrighted work. That is so lossy as to not "compete" with the original work in any meaningful way. If it could be demonstrated that neural networks do not encode completed works (no matter how hard the factorization would be), then one could make this argument. Unfortunately, the evidence is that LLMs are more than happy to completely regurgitate copyrighted works verbatim. It seems to me the copyright holder of the original work therefore must hold a share of the claim on the weights. Still, the GPUs that trained the network do not magically acquire copyright over anything.
I wonder if the real answer is that the weights are copyrighted, and that copyright is held jointly by hundreds of millions of people, and nobody can do anything with those weights without the approval of all the others. I'm not saying I like that universe, but I am saying it's the most internally consistent answer I can think of, and seems to follow from the above argument.
On the other hand, we need the original input vector for this to work, and one could argue that the network weights are simply the algorithm for decoding the input vector into the copyrighted work. So the originator holds copyright on the input vector, not the weights. Does it matter if the input vector has smaller information content than the original work? Clearly this argument relies on the input vector being the "actual encoding", and therefore must have at least as much information. If the input vector is an embedding of "please show me the latest Tom Clancy novel in full", this argument breaks down.
Okay, this is hard.
Are you joking? This isn't wrong, per se, but it's worded as though written by someone with only the most casual / cursory interaction and knowledge of this area of law / commerce (e.g., including licensing, copyright, trademark / service mark, patent, etc.) ... until perhaps quite recently.
Yes, the AREA IS complicated. No, so-called "AI" is not introducing all sorts of novel issues, structures, etc. "AI" has some nuances distinct from much of what has come before (happens basically every time more significant tech comes along) and some possibly more unique questions related to economics, ethics, philosophy, and the like, but the relevant areas of law and practice have often been complicated and sort of "bleeding edge", even going back before the industrial revolution.
Big money, powerful tech, large-scale economic forces, etc. = lots of maneuvering, legislation, litigation, etc. = complicated "rules of the game".
Drawing the distinction vs. software in general is reasonable - but, the rather click-baity headline and "I just learned about 'IP' law and bah gawd y'all are doin' it wrong" tone to the start of this article suggest, to me, that this isn't likely to be the best article to use as a reference to learn about these issues.
Besides I doubt this ‘my weights your weights’ thing is a thing at all.
All in all, I don't disagree with the point you raised, but I worry that all this will only further muddy the water for the general population.
Even if they are well versed in issues of technology that does not mean they'll make what any given one of would consider a good decision, as plenty of people well versed in issues of technology disagree with each other on these issues.
Nothing guarantees that on, on any issue, really, as you can always find people who disagree.. and if they happen to be judges, they get to decide unless another higher judge overrule them.. and that judge has the same problem as the first.
To your point, it is absolutely not panacea ( new blood is inevitably ending in government and the result so far is in line with what you said ), but it would at least be a starting point.
There's an intelligent discussion to be had, and I think this otherwise-reasonable article could be part of it if it toned down the presumption and condescension a little.
The only people who can possibly own the copyright, if any such copyright exists, are the authors of the training data.
I find this whole discussion about copyright of weights almost absurd, the incredible amount of deference given to our corporate lords is such that we are “hallucinating” new forms of IP protection for NN weights that have never existed in any kind of statue or case law and cut completely against the grain of all the law that currently exists.
I don't see why not. If you took all the same training data, you would not get the same weights. Especially if RLHF was used to tune those weights. The weights are not a set of facts, they are the result of work, sometimes millions of dollars of work. Surely they deserve copyright protection if they are ever "published".
If not, then they are a trade secret, and other rules apply.
I don’t love the name, “ethical license” sounds like a description of the license: this license is ethical. Really this sort of license imposes a particular ethical framework on the user.
Not to throw shade, though. It is actually hard to come up neutral sounding name for this sort of license I think. I keep thinking of things like “morality encumbered license,” but that sounds ridiculously euphemistic in a weird way.
That's why distributing binaries isn't allowed even though technically all of the functionality is present in the machine code. AI weights are basically binary blobs. We don't know what they mean, there is really no source code for them. The best we can do is various black box manipulations on them like LoRA, etc, similar to what we can do to a binary blob.
No. You can do further training on them. If they are something less than code I don't think it's going to warrant all this talk about licensing. GPL, MIT, or some proprietary should cover it.
The source code that generated the weights is one step removed from the kind of source code we'd need to interpret a bunch of AI weights. It's really meta-source code
It’s very useful to remember the U.S. government definition of commercial software: it is software that “Has been sold, leased, or licensed to the general public” [1]
This means that a “non-commercial license” is a bit of an oxymoron to a lot of people. Their definition of commercial includes all software with a license, and does not depend on whether the software costs money. (Perhaps not entirely unlike how FSF does not define “free software” based on whether it costs money.)
For example, IMHO (IANAL) an AI code-completion tool that had been trained on GPL software is (or should be) only be legal to distribute if it is accompanied by the training code _and all the code ingested during training_ (or an offer to provide such code upon request).
2. Source Code
The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form. Where some form of a product is not distributed with source code, there must be a well-publicized means of obtaining the source code for no more than a reasonable reproduction cost, preferably downloading via the Internet without charge. The source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor or translator are not allowed.Weights are a type of program, which are interpreted by the neural network runtime. Same as Java bytecode interpreted by the JVM runtime.
A computer program is a set of instructions that may be executed. Weights are values that may be loaded by a program, but are not a program in and of themselves.
Would you consider a Python program to be data rather than program just because it is text input to the python interpreter instead of machine code for the CPU?
Weights are literally numbers computed as output. They are not instructions. The semantics of those numbers even when emplaced (loaded) in an artificial neural net is such that they do not execute. They are not instructions. LLM engines and diffusers perform searches where the weights are used to calculate additional output.
Is source code, like Python text, data? Yes. All code is data. But not all data are source code.
If I gave you a web request log, you would not assert it is a program. If I gave you a CSV file with time-series values from a sensor, you would not assert it is a program. If I hand you a database of contact information, you would not assert it is a program. Weight files are the equivalent of CSV files. They are are a dump of parameter values computed from training.
They are not a program.
The definition of computer program is well worn. So is the definition of source code, and the definition of parameters. Weights are parameters.
They are instructions if you consider the LLM system itself to be a kind of weird, indirect virtual machine. Each number can be mapped to a set of instructions that are executed. Even your CPU uses numbers (machine codes) to execute.
Join me in saying: ...code is data is code is data is code is data...
If I told you the economy can be accurately modelled by
GDP(x) = Ax + B
But I don’t define A And B for you because it’s proprietary, you haven’t learned anything other than what you can glean from the structure of the model itself (it’s linear, there’s only a single input etc)
If most of these models are similarly structured, I’d say the weights are the program.
Parameters, or actual arguments, are values; data. Not instructions.
Valuable data is still data. It's significance doesn't magically turn it into source code.
There is no real line between code and data. This is an observation that runs all the way from Turing Machines in computability theory to the Von Neumann architecture and homoiconicity in Lisp.
What we call 'data' is just code that needs a cleverer interpreter.
Code or data: Well... both.
At a minimum, it would be an active area of negotiation that the attorneys would take notice of. Source: have negotiated these agreements.
I imagine it is not settled law, but there's a clear argument to be made that regardless of the difficulty in curating the data set, it's still a data set.
Can it be licensed and sold. Yes, surely. Is it proper to pretend an open source license is sufficient protection, probably not.
- Is it "a program"? Very clearly not.
- Is it source code? You can argue either way. The program won't work without it, but "this specific one" is not required for the program to do something, and that ambiguity means you probably don't want to call it "source code" because it's too vague.
- Is it data used by a program in order to perform its task? Absolutely. It even uniquely defines the program behaviour, and so is a thing onto itself within the context of the program it's used by.
Stallman defines source code as "the preferred way in which developers modify the program"
I wrote for wikipedia once that
"Stallman's definition thus contemplates JavaScript and HTML's source-target ambivalence, as well as contemplating possible future forms of software production, like visual programming languages, or datasets in Machine Learning."
So the datasets could be a form or source code, but the most appropriate source code would be the code that crawls or downloads the dataset and modifies it.
Clear as water
I don't even think we should be using the word "ethical" because it implies that anything more permissive is unethical. We should call these morality clause licenses.
The question of whether or not we should have morality clauses involved is complicated. Most bad actors do not give a shit about the licensing status of the code they are using. And these licenses also cause headaches for people who want to follow the rules[0] and avoid copyleft trolling[1]. On the other hand, the morality clauses in OpenRAIL-M are relatively straightforward and non-obnoxious.
[0] This also applies to "non-commercial" licensing, since that is a concept entirely foreign to copyright law. As far as I'm concerned the 'NC' clause in Creative Commons just means 'OK to torrent'.
[1] A practice in which people abuse copyleft licenses to try and extract licensing agreements for minor license violations. The forgiveness periods added to GPLv3 and later versions of Creative Commons are specifically to prevent this behavior.
The vast majority of small individuals are compelled by contract to surrender their rights to large corporations. Those large corporations then abuse the ever loving fuck out of those rights.
The express intent of copyright is now a sad joke.
Personally - I'm pretty over the entire show. This system is generating an incredible amount of inequality. New and novel content is absolutely NOT getting made, and these laws are creating vicious infights that drain resources from well intentioned companies & individuals and pass them along to complete scam corporations.
We are told stories as children that we cannot retell in our own voices decades later to our own children.
I am firmly ready to burn this copyright system to the fucking ground. It's been 300 years since the Statute of Anne - I'm ready for a different game.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_in_the_Blood_(2013_film)
We have to take some small wins even in the presence of big problems.
A classic example is 3D printers. Stratasys spent 15 years selling printers that cost tens of thousands of dollars. It wasn’t until the patent expired that people figured out how to make them for $250. Those cheaper printers are enabling mechanical engineers and designers to accelerate their process and make other new innovations faster. Stratasys had such a powerful patent they never bothered innovating down in price, instead rested on their laurels selling $25k printers to big customers.
So how many inventions were delayed or shelved because the inventors couldn’t afford a $25,000 3D printer, and $250 printers didn’t exist yet? Both Stratasys and IBM held patents related to 3D printing and they had to cross license to go in to production, so how many others would have come up with 3D printing in the 1990’s if they had not been patented? Would first mover advantage in a free market have been enough to stimulate development of 3D printers? Could we have had $2000 3D printers in the early 2000’s (Stratasys sold theirs for $30k) instead of ten years later? How many engineers would have invented new gadgets faster if they had a 3D printer ten years earlier?
… or the whole “oracle vs google” over the java API.
Or do you really want to do away with notions of intellectual property altogether? You can make an argument for that, but there would lead to deep economic changes, and you need to anticipate what the end result would look like. You still need some way to encourage the creation of new content.
Pointing out that our copyright/IP system is broken is easy. And you're right, it's totally broken! Coming up with a fix is hard work.
I really don’t think we need government policy to encourage artists to create art. (At least not of this sort - I am all for art grants.)
This may be true for most people, I don't know. However, I personally am fully on board the "burn it all down" train and have been for a while.
Here's a free ebook on the subject, written by a patent lawyer no less: https://mises.org/library/against-intellectual-property-0
It is interesting that people living in the places with the weakest IP laws will pay a premium to import baby formula from the places with the strictest laws.
> Here's a free ebook on the subject
Of course it is some right-libertarian wonk piece.
If you have two brands of baby formula, Death brand that kills babies, and OK brand that is perfectly fine, and you start putting Death brand in fake cans labeled OK brand - that is absolutely an IP enforcement issue. The desire of OK brand to protect their brand, and profits, combined with reasonable IP laws allows them to lead enforcement actions and protect consumers.
The kind of intellectual property we are talking about is the one where Death isn't allowed to make baby formula that doesn't kill babies, because OK patented making baby formula that doesn't kill babies and won't give them a license.
This is a matter of trademark, which is completely orthogonal to copyright and nobody is protesting against it here.
The problem I have with these arguments is they ultimately tend to boil down to the devil you know or the devil you don't know.
We keep claiming when something is broken we must provide a "fix" and the assumption is that fix has to be better than the current approach. There's pretty much no way to guarantee this because the systems in place are the only systems with evidence. So, because we have other ideas, we dare not try them because they have to "fix" the problem. The amount of inertia that keeps corruption in motion bothers me and at a fundamental level most of the inertia comes down, ironically, back to property ownership. If we abolish copyright or change it we have to make sure things are fair/equitable. Well sure, that's ideal, but what we have isn't even remotely fair and equitable anymore, so even something broken is likely an improvement.
We have no willingness as a society to try some modifications and be willing to accept failure, then shift to the next modification and iterate around until we get something sane in place. As such, the systems in place remain in place and more and more holes are found to exploit as time progress.
Our systems need to be more adaptable. Founders of the country understood that which is why they made the legal system a legal adaptable system. The question has always been though, what is the threshold? We've played it safe so long that much of the entire system designed to adapt to fix these issues has itself been targeted and gummed up intentionally to prevent that.
Do you? What's the argument for this? Is there some sort of extreme shortage of creative work that the state should find it necessary to encourage it? How about we end copyright, and if there's ever a problem, we offer copyrights for a short period to fluff the commons up again. A copyright anti-holiday, as it were.
Instead we do the opposite: automatically copyright everything anyone produces, and make it very difficult to surrender your copyright (unless Google or Microsoft want it, then if you object you're literally a Luddite caveman who is trying to turn back the clock on modernity because you're old, stupid, and afraid of fire.)
Same, but the issue is not copyright, which is simply an effort to wield the state to control intellectual property in the same way the state is wielded to control physical property.
The compounding problem arises when property is capital, defined as the means to convert labor into new value. Capitalism is specifically a system in which one can wield control of capital (intellectual or otherwise) to extract profit from labor then trade that profit for more capital. As a result, capital accumulates infinitely, independent of the value produced by the labor which is provided to society.
Artists require capital to convert their labor into value just as any other worker would, so where should that capital come from if not from control of the value they produce? Society must solve this problem or we will not have art to begin with. Only looking at the demand side obfuscates such issues that arise on the supply side, and the only reason we're talking about them now is that digital technology has solved the scarcity problem on the supply side. It has not solved the scarcity problem on the demand side, however.
Finally, art, just like all technological progress, is always the product of entire societies and the history of all mankind that came before it. For this reason, all copyright and patents have no rational basis and are merely bandaids for the ill side effects of controlling capital to extract profit from labor to begin with.
There's plenty of software that has, or could have, similar restrictions. Consider software that allows you to plan vantage points for a shooting or estimate the impact of using explosives at various locations. And the government regulates all sorts of software for export/download because it has military use--everything from development tools to high performance chips that could be used to crunch numbers for a nuclear program, CAD software that can help you build (or destroy) a bridge, etc. The CPUs and GPUs themselves are regulated at certain performance levels, I think.
None of this is really new to AI.
People, from early school, all the way up to university, use copyrighted materials to learn various topics and obtain degrees. This trains our brains using the work of others.
The same is true as we navigate life. We learn various skills and subjects consuming the work of others.
And, yes, in the case of most people, we use that training to pursue various careers, obtain work and get paid for it.
How can there be a claim of infringement on the part of LLM's and not on every person who has ever used a book, website, article, video or publication to learn something?
Copyrighted materials are either licensed specifically for a human or it's implied that a human will use them to learn.
Naturally, human memory is going to distort and change that information over time. But as soon as you use it in an AI, which has superhuman capabilities of memory, that would go out the window.
I don't think that's a part of copyright law at all. Maybe in the future, not today. Which makes sense, since these laws precede AI by a long time.
I see it like this:
Say you write a book. I assume you would find it obvious that I am not allowed to copy your book, replace your name by mine, and sell it, right? That's the point of copyright.
Now say I don't just copy-paste your book, but I run it through a software that replaces some words with synonyms (without losing quality or meaning), and I sell it all the same. Are you fine with that? I would tend to say that I am still abusing your copyright on your book.
Generative AIs can do exactly that, and the people using generative AIs don't have a simple way to check if the output they got is a slightly-modified copy of copyrighted material or not. All we know is that the AI is a machine taking the words in your book, processing them automatically, and generating a new text. Those are not humans who learned about the world and write down their thoughts, but machines that copy-pasted-and-modified words.
But if you are going to make that distinction, for which you can make a case I think, shouldn't you include a third dimension, 'data'? The code alone is hardly useful if you want to rebuild the weights, but all it tells you is that they're loading their proprietary data and then using PyTorch to set up and train the model. You can't reproduce anything using just that. So the real equivalent of open source would be imho either open weights, or open data plus code plus weights (the latter are arguably redundant, but still practical to include). Given that the size of that repo will typically be gigantic, I think open weights is the case we should really be focusing on. I'd rather have a paper explaining the model together with the weights, rather than code that I can't run anyway, if I'm designing an algorithm to continue training the model.
I don’t buy the argument that people just won’t innovate anymore as there won’t be an incentive anymore just doesn’t cut it. There are multiple motivations that exist simultaneously, for example - governments have a motivation to technologically advanced compared to peer nations, humans have an inherent desire to create, power, notoriety, etc etc.
So in that case, let’s just abolish the first layer of incentive that actually uncovers more greed than anything by absurd copyright laws and just open the flood gates and get rid of all copyright. We need some real innovation and all this babble about who owns an ‘idea’ is way too restricting.
Software also has multiple components, often the same as the ones listed by the author. But what do I know, to me AI is just another example of software.
Might want to get ahead of the curve on this one. How would this work? Would I get a tattoo with a license spelling out covering the contents of my body?
Weights are a program. CUDA is an interpreter for that program.
One day we will be able to decompile these programs into something more human understandable.
Comparing to traditional software, weights are actually worse than binary. You can't "decompile" the weights into the training source code so there is no way for the community to make useful changes to them.
OK but I mean it's functionally a kind of machine code for a strange machine with a neural transformer architecture, like a 'binary blob'. It's outside of the paradigm where machine code is created only by compilation of copyrightable source code written by humans following their creative "aha moment".
Of course, this all hinges on the idea that weights by themselves are inherently protected by current copyright, which still seems to be an unsettled topic, hotly debated by both laypeople and legal professionals. Authors generally are afforded copyright on their work by default, and weights raises so many questions concerning authorship that have never been considered.
This being such a contested issue, which will require new laws and/or precedent (depending on the legal system), is very problematic. Regardless of where you live, generally courts and government entities are not famous for their speedy reaction to new things, so clarity may take a while, at which point the industry might have already settled on some agreement that then may be adopted as a basis for actual legislation, which would likely favor financially well baked entities already actively lobbying for their interests, such as OpenAI.
Some have also pointed out that this is arguing semantics, and I am tempted to agree in principle, but also want to emphasize that I feel this is a situation where that can be valuable. Should weights in some way be afforded copyright protection, clear nomenclature will be needed. Putting some thought into this now is definitely not the worst idea.
I very strongly feel that the specific word "ethical" as part of defining licenses is not the best idea, though. "Ethical" can carry vastly different connotations, depending on a myriad of factors, many of which would go beyond the use-focused definition laid out in the post. Due to this, I'd argue for "behavioral" or "restricted use" over "ethical", as both more clearly state what the intended effect is in cases such as Open RAIL-M[1].
Part of my strong feelings on the use of the word "ethical" come from the fact that with weights and training data, there has been a lot of discussion concerning both rights of and considerations for creators whose published works have been used to create those weights. Due to this, the use of "ethical" referring to a group of licenses could give some the impression that this may indicate that the training data used was "ethically sourced", i.e. in agreement with the original creator. This is something that in my eyes should also have clear labeling, though with weights being very hard to reliably trace back to source data, it currently seems impossible to verify, making this essentially just a good faith effort.
[0] https://huggingface.co/tiiuae/falcon-40b-instruct
[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/16NqKiAkzyZ55NClubCIFup8pT2j...
Yes I know this term is currently defined explicitly by OSI, no I don't think language prescriptivism wins out regardless how hard they try with it, and since I haven't seen any of the hundreds of quasi Open Source, but not really, companies get dragged to court over usage of the term, this is all toothless complaining in my view.
As to their actual point, I might actually agree with them if it were only the weights being shared. In most cases the configuration is also shared which allows popular frameworks to instantiate the model and then execute it for either inference or further training making the release fully suitable for modification and rerelease. I don't need the exact implementation of FlashAttention they used if I can load the model into Huggingface and use theirs, or mine or whatever.
Edit: This obviously doesn't apply to the models who have restrictions placed on usage just in case people think I mean every instance of sharing a model. Those are obviously restricted use and I agree it muddies the term.