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Comment by DanHulton | Hacker News Reader

Any time I see the phrase "democratize access," my spidey-sense starts tingling. It's almost never used to describe an action that's an unadulterated good for society. It's USUALLY used to describe something sketchy at best, or even outright evil, with the justification that only "the bad guys" have access currently, and everything would be better if EVERYONE had access.

Look, I get that unethical corporations using this pirated training data for their artist-usurpation machines is bad, right? But EVERYONE being able to dismiss the rights and wishes of current artists while they work to create artist-usurpation machines of their own? That's not any better! You don't need to "democratize access" to that!

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Funny, my reaction is the total opposite.

Generally speaking, democratizing access is about removing monopoly power that extracts illegitimate rents -- and that tingles in a good way.

Libraries have always been at the forefront of democratizing access, and hasn't that been an unadulterated good? Or whether it's community colleges that democratized access to higher ed, or the deregulation of air travel that democratized air travel through cheaper prices that made it more available to the masses, instead of artificially restricting routes.

I can't think of a single example of "democratizing access" that is "sketchy at best" or "outright evil". They all seem pretty great to me!

But I guess I'm also firmly on the side of AI training here -- I see no reason for additional compensation to authors/artists for training on their data, when anyone can go to a library or museum and then go and create their own works influenced by what they've seen. Who cares if I hire an expensive consultant who's read a lot of books at the library, or a cheap AI who's read a lot of books from Books3? Why would authors/artists deserve extra compensation for the latter but not the former? There's just no clear legal principle behind that.

I mean that's part of the conversation that needs to be had. I would argue libraries are an unadulterated good, but it is generally considered at best unethical and at worst illegal to re-use content that isn't your own, at least without a proper citation.

Then there's also the issue with things like art, music, and code. Where does the line fall with scraping Github, Soundcloud, DeviantArt, or Instagram and using things like that without permission? Most of the code on Github is open source, but there's a lot of difference between the GPL and BSD licenses.

> but it is generally considered at best unethical and at worst illegal to re-use content that isn't your own, at least without a proper citation.

No it's not at all, except in extremely limited circumstances.

When George Lucas made Star Wars, did he cite all the Westerns and space opera serials and movies that influenced him? When you give a presentation at work on why you should move to a sharded database, do you cite the history of academic work on sharded databases? When you use Times New Roman in a document, do you cite the British newspaper The Times, or Robert Granjon's prior serif designs from the 1500's?

Of course not.

Legally, you can do whatever you want with ideas and styles and whatnot, which is what AI is about. Legally, you only run into problems when you reproduce sections of copyrighted works verbatim, without a license, in a manner that's not considered fair use. Your answer to "where does the line fall" is quite clear legally -- it's the line demarcated by fair use, which has nothing to do with licenses. AI doesn't change that.

But there is no bright line test for what is and isn't fair use.

I am not a lawyer, but it seems right to me to say that the weights are a derivative work of the training set.

> A “derivative work” is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications, which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a “derivative work”.

As I understand it, derivative works must be created with the legal use of the original work, or be fair use, otherwise they are infringing.

No, as you can see from your very definition. But here's a good example:

If you take a book and turn it into a movie, that's a derivative work. Anyone can see the direct resemblance -- the transformation or adaptation.

But if you take a book, convert each letter to a number, add up the numbers that make each sentence, and then sell that as a list of "random" numbers, that's not a derivative work. The end result is sufficiently transformed that copyright no longer applies. Ownership of the original work has no relevance.

And AI weights are like that. They're a complete transformation. They're not a derivate work. The only thing you have to make sure of is that they haven't been overtrained to the extent that they can regurgitate whole chapters of the texts they were trained on, for example. But that's not something they're currently able to do, and obviously copyright law will force companies to ensure it stays that way. (Not to mention that companies would do it anyways, due to the economic motivation of reducing model sizes to cut costs.)

Weights are simply a lossy compression of the training data set.

Now, I understand the argument that perhaps the specific work has been homeopathically diluted down to nothingness in the weights and so therefore has only been used to contextualise the compression process of other works, but if the weights can be reasonably used to generate copyright infringing text (and condensations and abridgements and transformations are explicitly listed in the law, verbatim copying is not necessary), or even answer substantial questions about it, then that shows that the weights included that data.

If I take a sound file and compress it down so it's poor quality but I can still make out the tune, that doesn't mean that I've avoided copyright law.

> Weights are simply a lossy compression of the training data set.

No they're not -- they're more like the dictionary generated to produce a lossless compressed data set. But then we throw out the compressed data itself, and keep only the dictionary.

> but if the weights can be reasonably used to generate copyright infringing text (and condensations and abridgements and transformations are explicitly listed in the law, verbatim copying is not necessary)

First of all, they haven't been shown to substantially generate infringing text that aren't the kinds of short snippets covered by fair use. And my previous comment already explained that longer texts are not going to happen, for both legal and economic reasons.

But secondly, you're wrong about "condensations and abridgements and transformations". You can absolutely sell a page-long summary of a book without getting permission, for instance. What do you think things like CliffsNotes are all about? Or all those two-page "executive summaries" of popular busines books?

You can't abridge a 1,000 page book to 500 pages and sell that, but you can summarize its ideas in a page and sell that. Which is basically the approximate level of understanding that LLM's seem to absorb.

>convert each letter to a number, add up the numbers that make each sentence...The end result is sufficiently transformed that copyright no longer applies

the problem with this as an example is that copyright would not apply to this transformative work, not the original author's copyright nor your new authorship because this transformative work contains no creative human expression (unless the original book was designed to add up to some fortune cookie, of course, in which case you have not transformed it)

A nuttier, chewier example would be retelling a litigious story like Moana ("consider the copyright, across all these leaves... make way!"), from the pig's perspective or something, and seeing what would fly and what wouldn't.

That's how I see it as well. To democratize art, music etc. now means to remove the skill component with the usage of all the work done so far. No one is actually prevented from pursuing those things and if you don't want your art to become training data you're ruining democratization and are somehow against the will of the people.

The level of disrespect for artists I've seen here and on other forums with regards to this technology has been staggering. The entitlement for work you didn't do is so gross.

As a fanfiction writer, I find the entitlement of authors and corporations over work that I created gross. I transformed their work into something else, advertising the original work and making a bigger market for it, and in exchange we get C&Ds and copyright claims. Someone writes a reskin of The Odyssey and then a corporation claims every derivative for 75 years.

I have a lot more sympathy for you than the corporate interests that are currently trying to profit off of your work without your knowledge.

I think this is an oversimplification. The concern about entrenching the positions of big tech companies is, I think, genuine, and I do believe it's important to find ways to foster competition and opportunity for smaller players. Possibly the law needs to evolve and/or there need to be licensing solutions for this content that work both for creators, and for those looking to train models (and, in some sense, licensing payments that are "means-tested").

I always took democratize access to X to mean “I would like to give many people the opportunity to give me lots of money by buying my product.”

I saw a funny tweet recently from a guy who was spending $187 a month to not learn art. He was subscribed to like 9 different ai subscription services

If we are thinking of the same tweet, it was from an influencer who shows off these different tools on his YouTube channel. So of course he's subscribed to all of them. Quite the disingenuous framing

Unless he is in a third world country, the value of your time spent trying to 'learn art' would be much, much higher than that.

Replace democratize with lower the barriers to entry. Yes it removes initial skill but typically doesn't remove the skill cap.

I've developed a similar mistrust of the term. Blogged about it a while back https://writing.kemitchell.com/2023/01/05/Type-Error-Democra...

>Equity and Concourse type by Matthew Butterick >The lawyer suing all the ai companies Yeah I see you are against giving everyone access to technology now

Any time I see the phrase "democratize access," my spidey-sense starts tingling.

Funny, I get the same tingling feeling when I see the phrase "restrict access." I guess it's an unreliable signal, huh.

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