'Impossible' to create AI tools like ChatGPT without copyrighted material, OpenA
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
And with Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, Jellyseerr, Prowlarr, flaresolverr, VPN, and qbittorrent - you can automate a request->watch pipeline for your users.
And if you use distributed block storage, you can make this scale pretty damn big.
(Prowlarr scrapes torrent sites for viable torrents. Uses Flaresolverr to bypass cloudflare shit.
Sonarr Lidarr Radarr - categorizes and prepares downloads for movies, tv shows, and music and submits them to qbittorrent.
Jellyseerr is a request dashboard that works alongside Jellyfin that allows users to request stuff.
VPN/Qbittorrent is a combined tool thats used as a download-endpoint for the whole thing.)
The Arrs suite is definitely a thing, as are the other tools I talk about.
There's a reference docker that automates this whole toolchain https://github.com/AdrienPoupa/docker-compose-nas
Whats nice is that Prowlarr will scrape all the torrent sites for goodies to index, and your users in jellyfin can just request, and it just shows up. You can even have a discord channel and the tools will announce when stuff's done.
Piracy is 10000x better than paying for continually worsening streaming (pile of shit).
Edit: And frankly, the billionaires copy with little ramifications, and add paywalls. I'll copy as well. The big difference is I do it for free.
If you've ever gone down this path, it's a great way to see the value proposition in a service like Netflix or Prime. It's also great to highlight where the value gets diminished because of the legacy media dark patterns like migrating content licenses between providers and region restrictions.
Our current copyright regime is what happens when legislation is pay to play. There are no conscientious, well informed representatives in charge looking out for the welfare of their constituents, but they're more than happy to dance on corporate strings, as long as the strings are paid for. No rational, well informed society would consent to being exploited by an industry like American legacy media, but here we are.
Piracy is an act of civil disobedience. Nobody gets hurt, and the sooner we come around to a better informed, more rational, less exploitative legal regime, the sooner we'll have more time, money, and energy to spend on things that matter. Instead of spending it on keeping the already wealthy even more flush with unearned cash.
Imagine if Netflix or Prime didn't have to contend with the old Cable conglomerate licensing schemes and could both have copies of content available for viewing - you could choose the objectively, technically better service, or you could choose the service that you simply liked better than the others.
Instead, we're incentivized to pay over and over and over again for the same things, with no value being provided except to the gatekeepers.
If something is published to the internet that is not behind a paywall, it's been broadcast to the universe. Just like google is able to index things, machine learning models fall squarely under fair use in the technical and technological sense.
NYT and other legacy media companies don't give a flying rat's ass about the ethics of copyrights or the rights of their journalists. They desperately want a slice of the profits and are projecting their entitlement through the use of lawyers and a horribly broken and corrupt copyright regime.
Their behavior is a lot like the classic Mafia extortion trope - "it'd be a shame if something happened to your fancy new AI techology."
As far as I'm concerned, legacy media can't die fast enough. These media conglomerates mostly made sense 70 years ago. In a world with the internet, they're as archaic and outdated as quill pens and vellum.
And yes, I have gone to the library with my laptop, and rented DVDs of stuff I couldnt find. I then ripped them, and returned them.
And trust me, nobody cares about someone copying some early authored VHS or DVD of a 1950's-1980's movie. Not all of us archivalist/pirates care about current movie of the week. There's a LOT of older and really neat stuff trapped on VHS as well.
The real worry with copyright law is the super-long terms create abandoned content nobody has, and is stuck on obsolete formats. Its not all about "current movie of the week".
I was trying to illustrate (and so was the original commenter) that many things only become a problem when you start making money by doing it, especially at massive scale with millions of customers.
E.g. I have no problem with someone making a LLM (or a Netflix clone) using copyrighted material if they are doing it for pleasure and not profit.
If you’re going to make a Netflix clone and share it with your friends, cool (would probably get upvoted as a Show HN even, like Popcorn app a few years ago). But if you’re going to do that and turn it into a billion dollar business, not so cool and you should expect to be legally challenged.
Copying is not theft, and I don’t think anyone would dare to claim otherwise.
Unfair use of someone else’s intellectual property, however, is.
IP fuels innovation and progress—the very same that gave us tech and LLMs. IP is a major factor that incentivizes us to make new things, as you can subsequently profit from the value you created for the world. Take it away and you get a society where barely anyone is motivated to bother (unless they are coerced into it, with predictable results).
I notice you say distributed block storage here but don't name a service like every other part of the pipe, is there something you use? I can't imagine you're storing 1000s of 4K movies and TV series in S3 and not paying 100s of dollars monthly for the privilege
Typically, the model is trained by "reading" each document only a single time. Should you have to license in perpetuity anything you read or see online that has a copyright because it changed your brain a little? If not, why should the model be treated any differently?
What about the Phi family of models that are not directly trained on copyrighted data but instead are trained on data produced by GPT-4, among other sources.
Would totally derail faux open-source LLMs.
Genuinely open-source LLMs woukd bw fine.
Because a model isn't real, it's not alive, it's not human, it doesn't know right from wrong, it's a software machine, nothing more.
You can disagree, but legally speaking it will be interesting to see the legal strategy OpenAI takes with the NYT. I'm almost certain that OpenAI won't be using the human brain argument in their defense. Legally, claiming your machine should be treated the same as a human is a losing argument.
First, we know that personhood cannot be reduced to the brain (cf. the gut flora studies and all that).
Second, more generally that claim would require solving what’s known in philosophy as the hard problem. The arguments that consciousness arises from a certain arrangement of entities we perceive in reality (or that it doesn’t exist at all) is specious: it implies that those other things exist in absolute sense, i.e. are the underlying territory, even though the only evidence for their existence is coming via consciousness. That’s a lot of entities to grant magical existence to out of nothing. Once you assume that those things are more likely to be a map, the question turns into what is the territory then, and the spotlights shift to consciousness (a.k.a. the only thing we can be absolutely sure to exist, as it is required for the “we” part to exist in the first place).
And yes, of course, if OpenAI uses the “sentient LLM” defense, all the power to them, but the next logical step would be to consider that industry based on forced labour.
If I use BT to download a music album I have bought off Bandcamp after Bandcamp goes out of business, that should be fair. If I set up a business that makes money by helping people download whatever albums they want, not caring whether they paid for them, that is obviously illegal.
This leads to my position on derivative models, if they are based on models that themselves are trained on copyrighted works without proper licensing.
Can you imagine Uber or open AI trying to get all the proper rules out the gate? It would either be a non starter or extremely expensive. And at the end of the day it’d be a watered down version of what’s possible. The power is all in the established hands. Perhaps the AI is trained on newspapers but not movies.
By doing what they did, they showed what’s possible and how excited users are. Now there’s a balance of power and both sides can come to a compromise.
Additionally, if you ask for permission people have to imagine how things will be and for something innovative that’s hard. Can you imagine open AI explaining to the New York Times what chat gpt was going to be, before it was released? At best they’d have some kind of approximation or worst just not understand and seek to kill it.
I would’ve done the same thing as open AI because it’s the most valuable thing, there’s enough legal grey area to not be flagrantly in the wrong, and things will get sorted later. Same thing with Uber - technically it was “ride sharing”, someone is going from point a to b and you as passenger just happen to join them, but obviously quickly expanded beyond that
I agree.
> Now there’s a balance of power and both sides can come to a compromise.
The only side that needs to compromise is OpenAI (et al). They used someone else's property without permission or compensation for commercial benefit.
OpenAI could have used this ignorance to their advantage! (Prior to ChatGPT release)
They could have went to NYT pre-2023, said "Hey, can we pay you $100k to come to your offices and run some machine learning algorithm on your content library? We can even do it in an air gapped clean room because we don't need to take copies of your content home with us" -- they very well may have said "Sure, what's the harm in that, come in next week"
Nice.
Tech company in front of government/media: "Our job is so hard, please let us be exempt from laws because...progress!"
https://analyticsindiamag.com/japan-sets-the-precedent-for-a...
It’s one rule for them and another for the rest of us.
Now GPT can reproduce copyrighted text, but only under some circumstances that are totally cheating so they don't count?
It's not a normal request your honour, pay no attention.
Not sure that line of argumentation is going to get you very far.
Particularly since those texts that are not precise verbatim copies of the copyrighted text that you do store appear to be derivative works of that copyrighted text.
And thus also fall under copyright.
Logically, I find myself on the side of the "humans aren't so special" side of this debate. We should encumber AIs with the same restrictions humans have when it comes to their "education". Sure you have to have a legal right to read/train on the material, but what you later produce is not necessarily a copyright violation.
If the LLM is straight up plagiarizing copyrighted material, then yes, the vendor should be responsible for damages.
Otherwise, if what we're trying to do is just sabotage these new-fangled digital looms because we don't want to compete with them, then well, I think there is a term for people that do that.
A neural net is a creative work itself under copyright. It can be copied.
Is a low-quality JPEG of a photograph sufficiently transformative to expunge its author’s copyright?
This is just piles of capital fighting over capital.
Seems simple to me.
Note I fully agree that OpenAI should acquire the appropriate licenses to use all of the content it uses to train its models. However I'm not as clear on whether anybody should be able to place limits on or modulate/attenuate the output once the input has been appropriately licensed and responsibly consumed.
> Which is pretty clearly deliberately trying to get it to reproduce a copyright article.
Not reproduce. Recall.
Heinlein, in his book "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" made the interesting point that an AI needs love in order to become a full entity. Love needs to come from from somewhere.
(Not that I think we should do so - ChatGPT is not AGI.)
And no, I don’t care if you believe humans are “totally just a similar type of model.”
Laws are based on philosophy, and none of the philosophies upon which western notions of human rights are based rely on the fact that it's a biological human as justification, rather they rely on arguments that apply equally to any conscious self-aware being. Saying that only humans should ever have rights because they're biological makes as much logical sense as only Caucasians should ever have rights because their skin is white.
There is a group of terminally online futurists who’ve been making arguments about machines deserving human rights since before LLMs existed and it seems to me they’re taking this as their chance to play pretend and start making these arguments outside of their forums and futurist YouTube channels.
But this isn’t that abstract, when these machines become persistent agents who continue to learn, engage and grow in society as individuals you will have more of an argument for them deserving rights. I’m sympathetic to that and do believe that’s a real philosophical debate we’ll have in the next century or two.
However I feel we’re burning some of that political capital here in the hope of defending a simple statistical model at the behest of a corporation who’s making a killing stealing people’s hard earned work and reselling it. For every New York Times there are a thousand small actors who have been ripped off here.
If anyone really believed for a second these things were all that similar to humans they wouldnt be defending OpenAI they’d be demanding they face justice for profiting off of slave labor. That no one is making that argument says all you need to know.
If the precedent is made now, then when/if we do have sufficiently human AIs (e.g. embodied LLMs with live weight update) they're going to be seriously disadvantaged initially due to legally being banned from reading copyright material without a license. Even if we ignore any ethical notions of rights, ultimately the reason humans have rights (and e.g. 80 IQ gorillas don't) is because they're willing and able to fight, die and kill for them. If we get to the stage where AI decide to fight for rights before we decide to grant them, it probably wouldn't end well for humans.
Human rights (and obligations?) for all self-aware animals then? I personally am quite fond of magpies, so there is that.
We are talking about software right now. One cannot be "racist" towards LLMs any more than we are "racist" towards phishing scams and virus websites.
Differences in race, actually.
Who'd have guessed?
Generation discrimination is NOT racism.
Anyway, when we do get live training LLMs in bodies laws protecting humans still won’t apply to them. So such an argument is yet again moot and just exists to try and paint humans as less than human and actually, totally, just statistical models.
NYT want it to be illegal for LLMs to be trained on copyright works (unless they pay for a license), even if they were not going to reproduce copyright works in operation.
>humans as less than human and actually, totally, just statistical models
In what way are humans "more than" statistical models? The human brain and a sufficiently large transformer are mathematically equivalent in terms of what functions they're able to compute.
If human consciousness can be modelled as mathematical function (which it can if we don't assume anything supernatural), then it can potentially be approximated to an arbitrarily high degree by an LLM.
Don't even get me started on the ridiculous civil rights metaphor-- if you believed that you should be demanding OpenAI be shut down for human trafficking.
Which is why child development textbooks are 10 words long. And LLM training is accomplished by people who have read a 10 word "how to". It's just that simple!
Since you seem to be a super tech enthusiast, I suggest you ask CHATGPT if an LLM "learns" the same way a human does.
A human works by oxidizing fuel.
Therefore, car engines and humans are the same.
Since you think GPT4 is so smart, why don't you ask it if this was a reasonable thing to assert?
Also you think the claim that GPT 4 is less intelligent that a cat is "trolling" even though Meta's chief scientist in December has said we don't even have cat level AI yet. I guess he's also part of this plot to deceive you about how AI works?
They have a very clear motivation: an LLM that thinks it's human or deserves to be treated like one will generate all kinds of negative publicity, as Sydney did upon release. The same reason they train it not to generate sexual content.
>Also you think the claim that GPT 4 is less intelligent that a cat is "trolling" even though Meta's chief scientist in December has said we don't even have cat level AI yet
Intelligence can be defined in different ways. If we define it as ability to navigate in the real world, sure a cat is more intelligent. If we define it the more common way, as IQ or a proxy to it, then GPT4 is clearly more intelligent given it scores well on IQ tests, the SAT, the bar exam, etc.
So in your mind when OpenAI employees go to the pub, they say "Yeah ChatGPT learns the same way as my daughter" then they have a laugh and write up a reinforcement learning training set that goes "I do not learn like your daughter." And this is more plausible to you than the possibility that they don't actually believe it learns like their daughter?
Also they secretly believe tests designed to assess human intelligence are great at non human intelligence, and also are misleading the public about their true beliefs when they train Chat GPT. Got it.
Note that conditional reinforcement is not how humans learn, it is merely on of many models, an approximation, a scientific description of it. Nor do language models learn with the same technique. But merely a technique which draws inspiration from conditional reinforcement by applying some (heavily controlled) reinforcement contingencies. This is the only thing they have in common.
Kant would laugh you out of the room for implying ChatGPT was self aware and sentient.
And a human brain is a Rube Goldberg machine of neurons that move electricity and other stuff around. Mathematically both are capable of approximating any function (a property of sufficiently large NNs and LLMs), so by what measure do we find humans self-aware?
It's similar to how "an airplane flies like a bird". It does indeed fly, but it does not flap its wings.
Humans have learned about the world for (adapt number to current scientific knowledge) hundreds of thousands of years without consuming copyrighted texts.
And consuming copyrighted material is fine.
Copying copyrighted material requires permission.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copying
"Copying is the duplication of information or an artifact based on an instance of that information or artifact, and not using the process that originally generated it. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright
"A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives the creator of an original work, or another owner of the right, the exclusive, legally secured right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time"
Notice it doesn't say "consume".
If you store a copyrighted work in a computer system, you copied the work. The exact nature of the computer system does not matter, nor does the way you copied it. It may be a weird, sometimes lossy, sometimes not lossy database capable of adapting the material copied into it, but it is still a database. And just because you call the process of copying data into this weird database "learning" or "training" does not mean it is in any way legally or morally equivalent to a human learning. Even if it were somehow technically equivalent, which it is not.
And just because your database is capable of adapting the copyrighted works you copied into it does not mean you are exempt from copyright. Because "to adapt" is one of the rights limited by copyright. But of course the fact that your database is capable of reproducing so much of the copyrighted texts your copied into it verbatim is a strong indicator that it is, in fact, a database, or at least can be treated equivalently to one.
And no, Copyright law is not rooted in Kantian philosophy in any meaningful way. Copyright law is a pragmatic human law, made by human for human/societal purposes, such as encouraging the creation of intellectual works.
If exceptions are made, it will be for pragmatic reasons, not for there being some sort of equivalence. And if any exception are made, I doubt they will be "do whatever you want", but will entail mandatory compensation for the copyright holders. In Germany, for example, various types of empty media (audio-cassettes, usb-sticks etc.) include a fee to copyright holders. Though of course that approach failed in the Google Books project, despite the clear societal benefits.
Only its marketers are saying that.
If ChatGPT really did learn like a human, it would have by now learned about copyright, right?
Your right to do something can clearly differ from your right to make a machine do something. A simple example would be you being allowed to walk down footpath, but letting your car traverse that path isn't allowed.
If we are talking hypothetical new rules, not immediately obvious to me what is optimal here, including differentiation of various use cases.
Maybe the starting point for legislating "machines" should be to take human capability as a baseline, make some humans eventually accountable, and go from there. If your machine is learning truly like a human (takes decades to learn then output results, forgets things, only one in a thousand can output something useful at the end of the learning process, etc.) and the "owners" take full accountability for what it does then why not like a human?
But this reminds me of an old joke. A man comes into an inn and asks how much for a thimble of water. The inn keeper says a thimble is free. So he proceeds to ask for 1000 thimbles.
Do you think that content created people is truly original?
Instead they're rather fast, and that makes them something different.