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Comment by GaggiX | Hacker News Reader

Having exact copies of the samples inside the model weights would be an extremely inefficient use of space, and also it would not generalize, unless it generated a copy so close to the original that it would violate copyright law if used, I wouldn't find it very reasonable to think that there is a memorized copy inside the model weights somewhere.

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An MP3 file is a lossy copy, but is still copyright infringement.

I didn't say it takes an exact copy for copyright infringement.

A program that can produce copies is the same as a copy. How that copy comes into being (whether out of an algorithm or read from a support) is related, but not relevant.

>A program that can produce copies is the same as a copy.

A program that always produces copies is the same as a copy. A program that merely can produce copies categorically is not.

The Library of Babel[1] can produce copyrighted works, and for that matter so can any random number generator, but in almost every normal circumstance will not. The same is true for LLMs and diffusion models. While there are some circumstance that you can produce copies of a work, in natural use that's only for things that will come up thousands of times in its training set -- by and large, famous works in the public domain, or cultural touch-stones so iconic that they're essentially genericized (one main copyrighted example are the officially released promo materials for movies).

[1] https://libraryofbabel.info/

Yeah that's right, I doubt that a model would generate an image or text so close to a real one to violate copyright law just by pure chance, the image/text space is incredibly large.

A human illustrator can also copy existing works. As a result they are not criminalized for making other non-copies. The output of an AI needs to be considered independently of its input. Further, the folly of copyright ought to be also considered, since no work -- whether solely human in origin (such as speech, unaccompanied song, dance etc.) or built with technological prosthesis/instrumentality -- is ever made in a cultural vacuum. All art is interdependent. Copyright exists to allow art (in the general sense) to be compensated for. But copyright has grown into a voracious entitlement for deeply monied interests, and has long intruded upon the commons and fair use.

human illustrator != machine owned by a Moloch powered mega tech corp

But you're a tech person. I'm trying to think of this from the point of view of e.g. a likely potential jury.

Again: Imagine two AI machines, different in one way: One of them has been fed "Article X" and the other hasn't.

You press buttons on the machine(s) in the same way.

The machine that was fed "Article X" spits out something that looks like Article X, and the one that wasn't, doesn't.

The magic inside, I don't think will much matter.

>But you're a tech person. I'm trying to think of this from the point of view of e.g. a likely potential jury.

Courts can call experts to testify on matters requiring specialized knowledge or expertise.

Absolutely; but again, if I'm the lawyer on the other side, I'm pretty confident that I'm beating any "expert" on this with the simple logic of:

- You put thing into the machine

- You press buttons, it makes obvious derivative work

- You don't put thing into the machine, and it can't do that anymore.

There is "something" in there GENERATING COPIES and we see exactly where it came from, even if we can't identify it in the code or whatever.

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