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Comment by koliber | Hacker News Reader

The responsibility for ensuring that copyrights were not violated fall on the person publishing the work. Whether they drew something themselves, hired an apprentice artists with no legal training to draw something, took a photograph of something, or used AI to create an image should not matter.

Why does anyone assume that ChatGPT or other tools would NOT produce previously-copyrighted content?

I can see a naive assumption that since it is “generated” it’s original. However that assumption falls apart as soon as you replace “ChatGPT” with “junior artist”. Tell them to draw a droid from a sci-fi movie, don’t mention anything else. Don’t say anything about copyrights. Don’t tell them that they have to be original. What would you expect them to produce?

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OpenAI is selling access to their GPT models, and those models are outputting copyright material for me to consume... isn't that just as much of a violation?

Is AWS violating copyright if you use their servers to transcode pirated content?

bad example. openai did do this. aws did not do the transcoding part.

Possibly. The courts will decide.

So it makes generative AI essentially unusable, because you don't know if the output is plagiarism or not, so you'd just doubt it always and never use it.

It’s usable for internal content, maybe even a small public blog where you sprinkle in some generated pictures instead of stock photos. Nobody will care if your school project contains a Mario holding a Coca Cola.

It’s once you start monetizing and publishing on bigger scale, without appropriating, it gets interesting.

The thing is, this market is way too small.

The same tools and methods used to detect plagiarism or copyright violation can be employed to check the generated content and modify it just enough to fall outside the scope of any law banning its use for profit. Inevitably, a platform will emerge to do this. From a technical standpoint it is game over. This is indisputable. By the end of next year many models and software tools will exist whose entire purpose will be to do just this. And the ones deploying those tools at scale will be businesses like the New York Times having realized that the only way to survive this is to float with the unstopable tide. Nothing short of absolute privacy violation will stop web unauthorized web scraping. Tools exist today that automate a browser and easily fool the web servers into thinking its just a person clicking around. It works quite well. It works with authorized accounts. It works in the same way any person would visit a site, highlight some text and copy it. What are they going to do? Require the end user's web cam to be on so they can verify a human is navigating next?

Its game over folks. And this is going to happen with or without our approval and any government that limits the potential use of this is only giving nations that dont a large economic advantage.

Interesting times ahead.

> What are they going to do?

Litigation. Hiding behind changing geolocation won't do much since law enforcement has access to the same tools but the difference is they can force companies (your ISP, google) to comply.

Obsolete take, next!

No. It”s still very helpful. However you can not blindly take whatever it produces and publish it.

Sometimes it hallucinates.

Sometimes it draws weird looking hands.

Sometimes it generates copyrighted materials.

Check the work it produces.

Check it against what exactly? How do you, the end user, determine an image does not infringe?

Then the generative tools should just give the sources of the inspiration of the AI and make them aware of what they are using, instead of saying "nope, not my problem".

The consumer will be free to choose what they demand from their tooling. If consumers decide that they only want to use generative AI that does what you propose, they’ll vote with their wallet. If they decide to use other ways of checking for IP infringement, they will. If they choose to ignore the issue, IP owners will bring up violations, like the NYT did.

“Buyer beware” has been a motto since ancient times.

Your argument is nonsense.

The junior artist in your hypothetical would have as much liability, if not more.

but would they have liability if they submitted their "output" to a senior artist, who immediately shot it down as obviously infringing? Surely not. It's not illegal to draw Mario - just illegal to make money off your drawing.

I think the real question is whether OpenAI should be allowed to charge for generating infringing content. Even though the unit cost of the Mario drawing is negligible, the sum total of their infringing outputs may be making them a lot of money.

you don't have to make money off it, you just can't publish it, except as a parody or commentary or possibly a tutorial on how to draw mario if the judge is having a good day

but "making money = infringement" is folk wisdom. you could certainly say making money attracts attention and increases likelihood of legal action

Making money off it doesn't just draw more attention, it also makes a fair use defense harder. Non-commercial use isn't necessary or sufficent for fair use, but it does help.

yeah, I appreciate this clarification. "publishing" seems like a nebulous concept to me and the general act of publishing something rarely seems to be what draws the attention of the lawyers (whereas making money seems clearer-cut).

So I suppose the question will hang on whether OpenAI is "publishing" if it returns similarly infringing results for the same prompts, even though those results are individually generated for a given user query.

>I think the real question is whether OpenAI should be allowed to charge for generating infringing content.

Well, are they really doing that?

If I rent a server to host a minecraft instance, is the company "charging for a minecraft server"? It is not clear to me that by charging users for AI usage they are complicit for whatever is generated. We don't require Adobe to prevent people from drawing Mickey either.

there are a lot of interesting legal questions here, but surely in the Adobe/Mickey case, it's the user's input that's infringing. In the examples provided here, the user's input is obviously not infringing, so that leaves... the model's output?

I’m no lawyer but I don’t think an employee has much legal responsibility. At worst, they can get fired if they keep producing work that infringes on someone’s copyright.

Going with this line of reasoning, if a company uses ChatGPT to generate work, and it produces copyrighted work, the company can stop using ChatGPT.

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