Where do we draw the line between AI learning from codebases to offer code solutions, and humans learning from codebases to offer code solutions?
The line we draw is "did a human creatively and intentionally produce the output" or "did a computer".
It doesn't matter that we've built a compression algorithm no one actually understands (which is what LLMs effectively are, a lossy compression algorithm, compressing their input into a model), the bar for copyrightable creativity was, and still is, human creativity. Which, by definition, a computer does not have, unless a human infuses it into the computer specifically (by for example using the computer to produce a specific copyrighted work).
If you took a pen and paper and traced over an image that's also a copy, even though you used a human.
Saying that Generative AI is a compression algorithm shows a lack of understanding of the issues and technology at play.
Therefore, by definition and AI cannot create a derivative work. Because it's not human.
I see no reason to grant computer programs human rights. I think a lot of people would have a hard time articulating some reasons to do that. So they don't, and talk about the technology instead. I think that doesn't matter. If you can't tell me, and convince humanity, why a computer program should be granted human rights then I don't think we can even get to a point where the technology itself matters.
LLM's and other generative AI are not designed nor are particularly good at this. What they are good at is returning new results using 'learning' it has developed via training.
If I want to send someone a sample of code, I'll use zip. If I want to generate code from a prompt, I'll use a llm.
Because of what?
How does ZIP compare to a LLM at answering a prompt to write a short story about cats in the style of Romeo and Juliet?
It's actually the other part of the parent comment that's wrong, and a large part of learning something is adding stuff to your dictionary.
Those words don't really go together in that order.
> the bar for copyrightable creativity was, and still is, human creativity
That's not because of anything qualitative about creativity, but is because of who can actually hold legal rights.
It also has nothing to do with whether the output is considered a derivative work of any particular piece of the input.
> The U.S. Copyright Office has taken the position that "in order to be entitled to copyright registration, a work must be the product of human authorship. Works produced by mechanical processes or random selection without any contribution by a human author are not registrable."
If a human draws a fractal, that is art. If a computer produces a fractal, that is math, and math is not copyrightable.
Copyright also allows for independent derivation, so if you produce an image or sentence that is identical to another, but can somehow prove you did not know about the supposed original, you're in the clear for copyright.
It is impossible to know if something is a copyright violation without also knowing all sorts of things, including the intent of the author, and if the author knew about the supposed original work.
Did you read this part at all?
Do you know what copyright registation is?
Hint: whether you get copyright registation has nothing to do with whether what you did was legal.
You seem to know enough of the buzzwords that this distinction should be obvious to you. Which makes me confused as to why you would misinterpret such a clear and important difference unless it was to intentionally mislead to people who aren't aware of the law.
You could even go read the first sentence of that wikipedia article to understand what it was about.
"The threshold of originality is a concept in copyright law that is used to assess whether a particular work can be copyrighted. It is used to distinguish works that are sufficiently original to warrant copyright protection from those that are not"
Notice. This is not the same as if it infringes on someone else's work.
Why did you misunderstand that article so seriously?
That’s not the line we’re drawing at all, where did you pull that out of.
Nope! Thats not true at all.
If a human word for word wrote out the harry potter books, they wouldn't be protected.
Instead, the line is drawn at if the new works is covered under fair use.
And a human is perfectly able to use a computer to do that in all sorts of circumstances. The human or computer being involved is completely irrelevant here.
> human creativity
Nope. Human creativity only matters for protecting works. It has nothing to do with whether you can create them with a computer.
It is perfectly possible for it to be completely legal to use a computer produce a piece of work, without infringing on anything, and yet the newly created work isn't protected in the future from other people copying it.
The method and actor are irrelevant.
The only relevant part is the result.
Is the resulting JPEG transformative?
That may be what you mostly care about, but it is definitely not true in deciding legal questions.
If your originally produced content, without ever having seen the other thing, is substantially similar to something that already exists, you are much more likely to be in trouble (in the sense that someone will take issue, not in the sense that you can be convicted) than if you copied something existing, and transformed it into something unrecognizable.
> They provide information on that site about when the Sun rises and sets and so on... but they also provide it under a disclaimer saying that this information is not suitable for use in court. If you need to know when the Sun rose or set for use in a court case, then you need an expert witness - because you don't actually just need the bits that say when the Sun rose. You need those bits to be Coloured with the Colour that allows them to be admissible in court, and the USNO doesn't provide that....It's a question of where the numbers came from.
That's just saying that your bits have to be authenticated/verified to be accepted as accurate.
Which makes sense and is entirely different than "your bits are illegal and your other identical bits are legal."
That happens all the time though. If I rip a copy of a movie for backup purposes, that rip is legal. If I upload a torrent of it, the exact same bits on my disk are now illegal distribution of a copyrighted work.
If I am the artist who owns the copyright of the work, my bits can legally be redistributed.
The intent and legal status of the bits matters in a ton of cases.
Or maybe it would be the same as photocopying a book, where laws restrict the proportion of the work that can be reproduced without permission.
Or maybe it will be its own thing, where courts and government decide existing laws are insufficient and we need new laws.
1. "Smack my bitch up" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eU5Dn-WaElI
2. "Voodoo people" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZYLp5uX9Yw
Those pieces sound exactly the same as the original, but it does not violate copyright because they've been produced by hand. Mind blowing!
Anyway I'm definitely not a copyright expert but I just found this argument extremely weak.
Similarly, I can't draw a batman cartoon with pencil and paper and avoid copyright claims when I try to sell the episodes.
Please do not go around infringing on copyright and thinking it's OK because you recreated whatever it was by hand.
Jim Pavloff was never sued by Prodigy or the right owners.
On the other hand:
https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/case-study/blurred-lines-...
> Marvin Gaye’s Estate won a lawsuit against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams for the hit song “Blurred Lines,” which had a similar feel to one of his songs
Which refutes your assertion of no potential copyright violation.
B. They don't sound exactly the same as the original.
C. That they were produced by hand or automation is irrelevant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/clean_room
Such as Wine:
I think I'm hoping for a result that anyone can train any model on any content, regardless of that content's copyright status. Mostly because I want AI assistant tools to be as effective as possible, to be able to access the same information I can access. But however it turns out there will probably be some unintended consequences.
Once framed correctly from a legal perspective, you have a person creating a tool using copyrighted material. Is this legal? For images, probably. However, selling or renting the tool or images generated using it is an open question. You can legally photograph a copyrighted image using a camera. But you cannot sell the photograph without permission from the original rights holder, because that would violate their copyright. And things are different for copyrighted text, such as a book (and computer source code?). You can only legally photocopy a portion of a book as fair use. Copying an entire book without permission is a copyright violation.
So your sentence should sound: "where do we draw the line between engineers of VC startups calculating model parameters by processing copyrighted content, and humans learning from codebases". Then the difference becomes obvious.
Where I find myself frustrated with the general argument you put forth is that it alleges that pattern-extraction is the extent and essence of human learning.
I do not think that the current LLMs-are-AI trend has grasped neither the essence of intelligence nor learning. I recognize that one cannot paint an entire field of study with broad strokes, but there is a certain amount of in-industry Kool-Aid consumption that, while perhaps rewarded by more gullible portions of the market, is poisoning the public well of goodwill.
This can only lead to a very harsh backlash, which we already observe undermining the deeply-funded attempts at foisting this stuff upon the world at large as "AI"
Computers are not human being and never will be. The fact stands that CoPilot has no notion of code outside of its training data and is merely a pattern-extraction machine. You can dismiss this claim, but you cannot disprove it.
We demand it.
this is just a powerless underclass realizing that their complete and lifelong segregation from our legal mechanisms is now biting them in the butt