Why copyrighted material? Could we stop celebrating how tech is going to steal everyone's copyrighted works in a massive effort to replace the artists who made it? Why does everyone here hate artists so much? Do they not deserve any rights over their IP, eg, the right to say no when someone wants to make derivative works that replace them from it?
Copyright has a fair-use exception for transformative works. It is difficult to look at the LLM's of the day and think "No, they have not taken the copywritten works and transformed them into something completely new."
There is no hate of artists. I don't know how you get from "It's not copyright violation" to "I hate artists". This is a matter of existing law. It is of course unsettled, the fair-use interpretation not yet tested in courts. But the same goes for affirming it's a violation of copyright.
These questions will have their day in court, and until then there is no need to make arguments in an inflammatory tone that that borders on personal attack. In the meantime, maybe engage in a conversation about how copyright law would need to be changed to account for this new technology, not condemn people who see a reasonable interpretation of existing law the differs from your own.
I think an argument could be made that it's fine for an LLM to learn from copyrighted works, but maybe it should have to go to the library to do it. Having your own human-accessible copy of those works (at home, or at Meta), doesn't sound as acceptable to me.
LLM is a tool much like the internet is a tool. Yes, someone can use it to steal, but stealing is against the law.
Instead of encoding a criminal justice system into an LLM by omitting the possibility of stealing an artists work or omitting the knowledge of physics so someone can't learn how to build a bomb, we should instead just prosecute people for using it in that way intentionally.
How often do people get prosecuted for ripping off an artists style? The criminal justice system "hated artists" long before LLMs and it's not the responsibility of the tech. companies to rectify that in my opinion.
Even Open Source advocates don't really have the right to stop companies from using Open code. The license discourages it, but everyone from Tesla to Nintendo has been caught violating it's terms. Publishing stuff on the open web has always had consequences, unfortunately.
Ah yes, the famous massive tech corporation behind stable diffusion.
Key words being "from each other". AI only takes, it doesn't give anything back, it doesn't inspire. Their ultimate goal is to absorb the entire human history of art and then displace millions of people who received nothing from this transaction they were forced into, just so that some billionaire can afford another yacht.
I have no problems with AI models, but if you want to use art, writing, code, etc. for training, you should restrict your use to public domain works, ask for consent, or commission it. Obviously that would cost a lot of money so big tech companies are once again looking for a free ride.
Totally wrong. There is even a well known counter example: dream-like videos generated by ai wasn't something we had before. This statement tells me you never used it.
> just so that some billionaire can afford another yacht
You are heavily mistaken, that the scenario where ai learning isn't considered as fair use of material. In this case, only megacorps will be able to trains their own AI by spending billions in content.
> Obviously that would cost a lot of money so big tech companies are once again looking for a free ride.
You are constructing your own story while ignoring what is happening.
Adobe and Dall-e models were trained with datasets they mostly had rights over. OpenAI partnered with Shutterstock, and Adobe have their own photo stock. Big tech companies didn't had problem looking for image content. Stable Diffusion on the other hand is open source & open research, but didn't had any rights on most of the image they trained.
You blame "how tech is going to steal everyone copyrighted works", yet, they were already in the tech world: the internet.
It's generally consider ok to sell your fanart on comic festivals. But do you think it's okay that Disney starts selling fanart of One Piece without the publisher's permission?
A car and a pair of legs both move you from A point to B point. So why do laws treat automobiles and pedestrians so differently?
That's why I have put it in quotes.
> But do you think it's okay that Disney starts selling fanart of One Piece without the publisher's permission?
It's why it's called "fair use". Fanart isn't the only case of fair use. Parody for example allows it.
And AFAIK, no court yet have decided that AI "learning" is not fair use or what the limite are.
Why did you put one of those in quotes and not the other?
We phrase it like somehow the material is being copied into the LLM, but that’s not what it’s doing. It’s building a neural graph from the experience of consuming that content.
What would the world be like if humans couldn’t learn, train the weights of the interconnects of their neural tissue, from any material with a copyright?
At the very least I think LLMs trained on data that the trainer does not own or have rights to use in that manner should not be copyrightable.
My thinking “the enemy gate is down” when considering the tokens “Ender’s Game” is my recalling a learned association of those tokens to the given token string.
My knowing that doesn’t strip the copyright. My telling someone the meaning and context of the phrase generally doesn’t strip the copyright away from Orson Scott Card. I’m not reproducing his work but my knowledge of it. And it’s dependent on what I do with that knowledge and how if I’ve violated his copyright.
We are prosecuting the LLMs for possessing fragments of knowledge. And we’re assuming that the recall of some of those fragments means a copy of that work is in fact contained within the weights.
While I love we can all immediately benefit from previous works, I feel for the countless artists and creators who's work has been integrated into models with zero compensation. There are already outstanding lawsuits seeking reparations, but this is new legal territory and there will be a lot to learn and decide in the future.
Copyright like many regulatory devices can be used for good, evil and everything in between.
A society without copyright would be a much poorer one, and humans figured that out a long time ago.
That was before "Attention Is All You Need" and the subsequent work on LLMs that grew out of it. Things are different now.
Copyright may need to be updated to cater for the new world of AI but that doesn't mean as a concept it is evil.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/05/authors-file-a...
Whether demon or genie, any notion of putting this tech back in the bottle is a non-starter. As is turning it into a giant money grab for the copyright industry.
> Data being public is also notably not a license to use it for whatever purpose you want.
Under the Fair Use doctrine, it very well could be. It was when Google indexed every book they could buy, to the disdain of the Author's Guild and the titleholders they represented.
> Have some respect.
I will not respect an authority that forces me to rent digital content.
They are very obviously asking you to respect the individual artists.
In all seriousness, they're afraid because they aren't very pleasant. AI will write things people will like and enjoy hearing. Preachy artists these days just make works they think people ought to want, and ought to like. Getting moralism out of art will be a great technological accomplishment.
More seriously: if you have this attitude for-reals and aren't Poe's Lawing me, perhaps you need a little more preaching aimed your way because your conception of art and the civic society is the closest thing I can think of to a humanities position being objectively wrong.
The ideological soma of agree-with-you AI being desirable is scary enough stuff. Removing communication from art being a "great technological accomplishment" is fucking dystopic.