I wonder, if MS and OpenAI win, does that mean it will be legal for anyone to take the leaked source code for a proprietary product, train an LLM on it, and then ask the LLM to emit a version of it that is different enough to avoid copyright infringement?
That would be quite the double-edged sword for proprietary software companies.
Someone is likely to design an LLM that is specifically trained to do exactly that.
Lots of money to be made...
That should be fun...
To put another way, the motivations to produce art in another artist's style can still land the artist/buyer in legal trouble regardless of fair use.
I have to imagine that it's likely quite popular to sell AI generated art that mimics or copies existing works.
Not that it’d look anything like the artist you are copying, but it’s a fun idea.
Scale matters, and the scale that computers/these AIs operate under are absurd compared to a person doing it manually.
The work of a person can be mitigated and a person can be held accountable for their actions.
Much of our society operates on the idea that we don’t need to codify and enforce every single good or bad thing due to these reasons; and having such an underpinning affords us greater personal freedom.
I believe that this kind of generative AI is bad because it approximates human behavior at an inhuman scale and cannot be held accountable in any way. This upends the entire social structure upon which humans have relied to keep each other in-check since the advent of the modern concept of "justice" beginning with the Code of Hammurabi.
In essence: Because you cannot punish, rehabilitate or extract recompense from a machine, it should not be allowed in any way to approximate a member of society.
This logic does not apply to machines that "automate" labor, because those machines do not approximate human communication - they do not pretend to be us.
Should those machines then be subject to your same philosophies? I'd suspect you'd say "that's different" somehow but it is only because you are alive at this moment and these machines have been normalized to you that you do not care about them. Were you to be born in a few centuries, you would likely feel the same way most do about the prior machines, and indeed, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who think that future generation's AI (probably simply called technology then) is problematic as you do today. Recency bias is one hell of a drug.
Even then, their work as output can matter but that doesn't necessarily mean they (should) have a per se right to their work without other people also using it, especially in cases where their work is not used as outputs directly, which is what plagiarism is. If that were the case, no one could learn from a other's work, regardless of whether that one is a person or a computer.
I don't think there is a way to continue this particular branch of this argument without devolving into a debate on the value of human life like a couple of Macedonian philosophers - suffice to say, my point of view is that the work of others has intrinsic value tied to intent, and machines do not have intent.
If no output of humans has intrinsic value, then once machines can approximate humans sufficiently there is no reason for humans to exist - and that is an outcome that I, as a human, reject with all of my being.
The reason for humans existing is not because of the output they produce (indeed, that is dystopic), humans have worth inherently, regardless of what they output. This is also what nihilists have figured out, so maybe that is something you should look into if you seriously have such an opinion as expressed in your last paragraph.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40919253&p=2#40920318
You aren't allowed to use photos featuring a non-consenting person to, for instance promote a product.
You are allowed to use photos including a non-consenting person.
There's a lot of complicated law, differing between different jurisdictions to cover this question, and to balance the needs of the public with commercial desires. It's not as simple as you make it sound, and there's no reason we should just default to bending over backwards for commercial interests.
Laws exist to serve society, not the other way around.
This is my whole point. There isn't a single, one-size-fits-all rule that a five year old can comprehend that describes any particular country's legal framework around the many, many different dimensions of tension between public and private interests on this incredibly broad question.
And none of the existing frameworks fit the new use cases well, and we should probably have an open political debate about what we want to do going forward.
Being an ass is generally not illegal. Particular behaviours might be, but no legal or social system intends to censure you for every possible one, and most people who are experts in law or ethics don't believe that they should.
If you identify particular problems with the particular paparazzi laws in your country, that's an interesting conversation, and maybe, if framed well, an interesting data point for this discussion, but is not in itself the 'last word' on it. Just because you can torture an analogy, doesn't mean the analogy has a lot of power.
Perplexity AI.
How does this describe Perplexity AI more than any other LLM?
Perplexity is in the business of using an LLM to paraphrase existing content, then serving that up as their own "work" in a way that directly harms the original content they took.
It's not even a question of "Is AI training copyright infringement", they're just doing copyright infringement with AI. And it's horribly common already.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/27/24187405/perplexity-ai-tw...
Somehow I feel if it was "Adobe vs dev that claims his code was spit by copilot" it would not end the same.
> Specifically, the judge cited the study's observation that Copilot reportedly "rarely emits memorized code in benign situations, and most memorization occurs only when the model has been prompted with long code excerpts that are very similar to the training data."
That almost sounds like it'd be fine to train an "art transformation model" which takes an image and transforms it, which for all the frames of a specific Disney movie just so happen to output the very next frame...
There is a reason a famous AI model architecture is called transformer, it is pretty much optimised to be good at transforming artistic and intellectual works.
It would probably be legal to do this, as long as no one could reasonably show that you intentionally trained the LLM on said leaked source code with the intent to reproduce the product.
Of course, civil suits could be another matter entirely. If you pick a product to rip off that's owned by a multi-billion dollar company, all that can save you is the ethical limits of their legal team's consciences.
But if it was made public and then if an unrelated third party were to re-write the code in such a way that it was non-infringing, then it would be non-infringing. That’s just a tautology.
The LLM has nothing to do with it, and isn't required here.
Far less people care about Bing or Cortana.
Hilarity will ensue :)
They cloned the bios by observing how it behaved and writing code that behaved the same way. Nobody even looked at the bios code.
To do something similar with AI, you really need to train one AI on the source code and then have it explain that code to a second AI that never saw the original code.