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Comment by tshaddox | Hacker News Reader

> What’s really happening is that AI models have much better memory than humans and are more precise in their output.

And yet, presumably we agree that a simple file server that serves up exact copies of copyrighted work does constitute copyright infringement. What's the difference? You could also say "what's really happening is that the file server has much better memory than humans." Duh!

It sounds like you're saying that, because an AI model is a very convoluted and sometimes inaccurate way to implement a computer system that sometimes serves up exact copies of copyrighted works, it's not copyright infringement when that computer system does serve up an exact copy of a copyrighted work. I'm not quite understanding the argument.

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Two things:

1) I’m generally copyleft and would argue that copyright as we know it is nonsensical in the digital era and needs to be entirely rebuilt to make any sense whatsoever. And that as is it harms the commons more than it protects creators. So yeah a fileserver has always been a game changer just like the printing press was and we’re far behind as a society, legally.

2) When a computer system does reproduce copyrighted content verbatim, it’s infringement the same as if a human did it from memory. That wasn’t my point. My point was that use of copyrighted content to train the model is fair use because it’s no different from a human consuming the content and committing it to memory.

Copyleft licenses are a form of copyright. Unless it is some other meaning I am not aware of with left-right word play.

On one hand, copyleft licenses are a creative form of copyright to enforce the wishes of the author to allow derivative works under the condition they are also distributed freely. Let's call it weak copyleft, the pragmatic variety.

OTOH are copyright abolitionists who are offended by the notion that their freedom to copy and modify code on their own harddisk could be restricted by a mere "license", to them the notion of intellectual property is poppycock. The Strong Copylefties consider GPL a necessary evil, a way to use their enemies' tools against them, to spread their ideals of free culture amidst a corporatist hellscape.

Or it could merely be someone taking the naïve reading of "anti-copyright"

But the human that consumed the content paid for it didn't they?

What if they heard it on the radio? Or read it in a library?

The model didn't hear it on the radio or had to access a library, it was directly fed raw copyrighted media. There are no such nuances here.

The act of getting heaps of copyrighted media for commercial use without paying clearely breaks copyright

So if I hear a song on the radio and it inspires my commercial purposes, then what?

Point being: whether a work is used commercially is not relevant. It's common that we think it is, but it's not. I first read about an LRU cache in my operating systems textbook and later used the concept in a commercial work. I have not committed copyright infringement.

Then nothing - you didn't gather massive amounts of raw copyrighted goods and consumed them in a comercial goal without paying.

This LLMs are not trained on the radio, especially not exclusively.

Edit0: Did you get access to this book that inspired you legally, as in at a library, during a class, or having bought it yourself? Was it fair use?

Because none of those look like getting heaps of copyrighted stuff for free and claiming you didn't.

If instead you stole the book - then yes, this is similar. I don't care what you do with it - can't steal it and assume you are respecting copyright.

I am a product of the impressions left by massive heaps of copyrighted content. One song on the radio is just a rhetorical device.

If OpenAI rented all humanity’s media from a library and used them to train an AI model then that seems 100% ethical to me.

Now if you ask the model to recite the script to Breaking Bad and it does so perfectly and I think that grants me copyright authority over it then we’re going to have problems. It’s just not the model or tool’s problem.

Did OpenAi rent it? Or did they get it without respect for copyright?

How about you?

This is the point

You’re lost in the weeds. I know that’s the point it’s why the whole song on the radio thought experiment got brought up. The question was, if an AI model trains on public radio waves, and hears a copyrighted song, is that infringement? My position is no, it’s not because the radio station had a license to broadcast that song on the radio.

Similar, if all the books used to train a model are available in the library, so long as someone rents the books, then they can be used to train a model.

The question was directed at you. I don’t know why you’re repeating it back to me like I didn't know what I was asking…

Feel free to chat with a lawyer on copyright

The file server is only infringing when it serves those files. Photoshop itself isn't infringing just because someone recreates a famous art piece in it, it's the end user that is infringing. The difference between server driver vs user driven creation shifts responsibility.

What about a file server which hosts only encrypted files, which are unusable garbage on their own, that happen to turn into exact copies of copyrighted work when supplied with the right decryption key? That's user-driven creation, right?

Photoshop doesn’t provide you with copyrighted materials to work with when prompted or require ingesting other copyrighted works to work optimally. Language models do both.

The courts are going to rule in favor of these authors if they have a basic understanding of what’s happening.

> Photoshop doesn’t provide you with copyrighted materials to work with when prompted or require ingesting other copyrighted works to work optimally. Language models do both.

They actually are not that different from Photoshop. Regarding providing you copyrighted materials, if you instruct it to generate something someone else already copyrighted, perhaps by using a feature meant to reproduce existing art style, you will generate an infringing work.

As for "ingesting of other copyrighted works to work optimally", you don't know what goes into designing and building Photoshop - how many third-party datasets or copyrighted assets, which get embedded deep into the application in a form that the end-user cannot discover or consume. You don't know, and it doesn't matter, because Adobe using copyrighted materials in building Photoshop does not propagate copyright claims to you the user/renter of Photoshop. Same can be argued about LLMs - copyrighted inputs from training set get sufficiently blended when turned into weights that you, the end user, should be shielded from any IP claims related to the training data.

(Yes, the last point enables "copyright laundering", but I'm not convinced this is a problem - not compared to regulatory environment trying to prevent it.)

My point is simply these models should not ingest copyrighted materials without paying the authors or publishers. Litigating end-users who are using LLMs that have ingested pirated copyrighted would be so complex as to not be worth it except for large businesses. If I want to ingest/read a book I need to pay money but if an LLM does it they’re free to pirate the book? Why?

And why is it that I pay OpenAI to generate data based off books it stole for free when I had to pay money for the same book.

I know what I am actually paying for is the model obviously but it just feels extra wrong to be paying a company for a service it’s built using pirated content.

>If I want to ingest/read a book I need to pay money

Or you just go to the local library. Or you borrow it from a friend. Or you stand in B&N and read it in the store.

You're arguments are not great.

> Photoshop doesn’t provide you with copyrighted materials to work with when prompted or require ingesting other copyrighted works to work optimally. Language models do both.

Photoshop now has generative AI features that leverage language models as well as training on imagery, so this is literally false when discussing Photoshop as it currently exists.

I would say it’s reproduction of an exact copy that represents copyright infringement, not dissemination of the digital brain that remembered it.

If and when someone tries to profit off an AI work that would be copyright infringement if a human had made it, it should be copyright infringement of an AI does it also.

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