Hacker News Reader

Comment by xnorswap | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to understand the position of AI companies, when their AIs can be prompted to reproduce copyrighted works verbatim, e.g.

https://imgur.com/a/XBO2B7V

You can argue that a game that old ought not to be still in copyright, and I'd support that position.

But it is in copyright, and I'd rather a world where we curtail copyright terms but enforce them fairly rather than a world in which we stifle culture by automated means of suppressing "DMCA" violations on some platforms while large platform owners invest in AI which trample over the notion of copyright.

View on HN

It's a complicated mess.

Reason being: I, too, am physically capable of reproducing copyrighted works verbatim when correctly prompted. Or at least, can do so as well as current GenAI can in certain specific cases, and know how to use a photocopier in others.

Is the copyright violation the user asking for this, or is it the model having the capability?

If it's the mere capability, the inventors of copy-paste and the camera and voice recorder apps have a problem, along with all search engines that ever index pirated material.

If it's the users, given that copyright databases are much too large for any human to actually know exhaustively what is and isn't in them, there's a real danger that normal people will accidentally do exactly this.

Ridiculous. The copyright violation is in its use for training data. And then its doubled down by the user asking for copyrighted material and getting it verbatim.

It's not complicated. It's only complicated because it might be in the way of some people making billions or trillions.

Let's stop with the analogies. Analogies won't get you anywhere.

- if you recorded a concert with a tape recorder, then distributed it online for money, that was a copyright violation.

- if you recorded a CD with a tape recorder, then sold copies, that was a copyright violation.

- If you used a camera to film a movie being shown in a theatre, then distributed it online, that is a copyright violation.

Stop the BS.

Well, copyright law has literally everything to do with reproducing content and has nothing to do with consumption of content.

So I have to disagree. Copyright doesn’t stipulate the terms of your consumption of media. Sure, people can write licenses and whatnot, but that’s not copyright, that’s a license (for example, the TOS of NYT website may dictate your rights to scrape it)

Copyright law is woefully under-prepared to deal with the challenges of llms. If someone has a photographic memory, it’s not illegal for them to read the book, it’s illegal for them to reproduce it. That’s essentially what we’re seeing with LLMs.

In all of your examples, the illegal part is really the distribution so far as copyright is concerned.

So how do you suggest LLMs could prevent reproduction of copyrighted material, if they're doing so now.

I think that’s a more interesting question. I’m not sure how to do it, but I think that finding a way to stop the reproduction of copyrighted content is probably the missing piece.

If there was a monetary penalty for reproduction of copyright works (apply human laws to machine), then I bet these companies would quickly figure out how to fingerprint output and match it to source data before sending it to the user.

So I go into a cinema with my recording equipment, record the movie, step outside and start selling downloads, and when the cops come, I say:

"I’m not sure how to do it, but I think that finding a way to stop the reproduction of copyrighted content is probably the missing piece."

Really?

That's not a close reading of the other comment.

If LLMs were specially advertised as a way to get all the stuff you already love for free, it would be.

They're not.

What they are advertised as is a way to solve problems and create novel things.

In this regard, LLMs are less of a copyright infringement issue than, e.g. Google News and Google Images both of which had to change because they were in law copyright infringements.

This does not mean that LLMs or diffusion models must get a free pass or anything like that: these are a novel things that didn't previously exist, so while I was initially surprised by the legal cases against Stability and OpenAI due to the existence of Google search and that nobody seemed to care about GPT-3 or the original DALL•E, the arguments made against them are nevertheless interesting and worth caring about.

I suspect LLMs are so useful the powers that be will just carve out a space for them; conversely I don't see that applying to image generation models, so I kinda expect them to be strictly limited to cases where the source data can be proven correctly licensed.

> The copyright violation is in its use for training data.

Every textbook, every educational TV show or YouTube video, every artist whose works have been shown to me in my school lessons in art, music, graphic design, usw. have all been copyrighted.

With one exception: Shakespeare.

Even the bible, being a translation*, had copyright notices on it.

But worse than that: if it were so even for scraping the whole web and training an AI on it… what do you think Google is? Page Rank is a big ol' matrix multiplication, and it spits out quotes verbatim.

> It's not complicated. It's only complicated as it might be in the way of some people making billions.

You know some of these LLMs can be downloaded and run locally, right? For free, even.

"Not making money" is absolutely not sufficient to remove a claim of copyright infringement; and conversely these models are too useful to be simply ignored — they're now in the realm of national strategic thinking.

> Let's stop with the analogies. Analogies won't get you anywhere.

They are the only thing we have, as this didn't exist before, and we need to create a new legal framework for them.

Even copyright itself as a legal idea comes from analogies starting at least as far back as a 6th century Irish dispute where King Diarmait Mac Cerbhaill gave the judgement "To every cow belongs her calf, therefore to every book belongs its copy."**

> Also, if you recorded a concert with a tape recorder, then distributed it online for money, pretty sure that was a copyright violation.

Yes, that's the point.

And yet I am not forbidden from being online due to the fact that I have the capability to do so.

Only the actual performance of this is an offence, not the mere capability.

* All translation is necessarily also interpretation, specifically this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_News_Bible

** Or at least that's the modern English translation of what he said, presumably either in in pre-medieval Latin or Old Irish.

I agree that copyright law is woefully unprepared, and that LLMs have become useful enough it will be difficult if not impossible to stop their development.

> Page Rank is a big ol' matrix multiplication, and it spits out quotes verbatim.

That makes no sense. Google Books was blocked exactly because it was reproducing enough material to be infringing. Google search usually does not copy enough material that it might be considered infringing (even though I think news sites have sued over this in some jurisdictions, right?)

> And yet I am not forbidden from being online due to the fact that I have the capability to do so.

It's fairly obvious that the people running LLMs don't want to prevent them from infringing copyright, particularly in image gen.

> That makes no sense. Google Books was blocked exactly because it was reproducing enough material to be infringing. Google search usually does not copy enough material that it might be considered infringing (even though I think news sites have sued over this in some jurisdictions, right?)

Google Books? That's a non-sequitur. When I said "Page Rank" I mean the algorithm used by Google Search to rank web pages in their search engine results.

The search results give you direct quotations from the pages they linked to, and for a long time also had links to cached copies of those pages.

> It's fairly obvious that the people running LLMs don't want to prevent them from infringing copyright, particularly in image gen.

Apart from all the times they pop up messages refusing to reproduce copyrighted material? The only reason I was even willing to create the following query is because I knew it would refuse me on that grounds: https://chatgpt.com/share/67138f5b-a110-8011-adf8-a82f3fc473...

Image gen… well, for at least the third-party fine-tuners, I agree with your impression. The main players? Unclear to me, especially as we see some models from big players which are created from scratch using only correctly licensed materials — I believe Adobe's models would be an example of correctly licensed training content.

I disagree: I think copyright law is wholly prepared.

If some thing produces a copy of copyrighted material, without explicit approval of the copyright owner, then it is infringing on the copyright.

Where is the unprepared?

Looking at copyright law through the lens of "land grabbing output token sequences" diminishes its perception of long term viability to me.

Generative computation is becoming reproducible at scale.

It's unprepared for the fact that you can now build thinking machines using these new techniques, and that governments will be reluctant to regulate them if they think it will give them issues in an AI race against strategic opponents.

Of course it's doubtful that image and video gen AI are strategically important, but I trust the AI lobby to make sure that governments won't make that distinction.

> Of course it's doubtful that image and video gen AI are strategically important, but I trust the AI lobby to make sure that governments won't make that distinction.

I suspect otherwise. The use cases for image generators are much less obvious than for a personal assistant that's just as fluent in Chinese, international relations, hacking, military strategy, and speech writing… even when the current fluency of LLMs relative to government workers is somewhere between "mediocre" to "it'll do".

I think big copyright owners, however, will probably make their own models. Disney etc. could very easily use their own content to (help) make as many more films as they want. Real human artists will be disempowered regardless of how the copyright stuff happens. Probably.

I hope so, but big AI is banking on being able to use those models for everything.* Our "luck" is that Disney and other giant corporate copyright holders will indeed sue them to oblivion, or at least try.

* Afaik image gen AI is one the few profitable use cases, with Midjourney apparently being profitable already.

Re image gen cost, by my estimate inference was $0.0001/image 2 years ago: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2022/10/09-19.33.04.html

I suspect that there are significantly better options than the thing which just happened to be accessible to me at the time, so I would say that quality, not cost, is the thing currently preventing feature length movies from being generated for less than the cost a movie theatre ticket.

You wrote "thinking machines"? seriously? You do know that attention is all you need, right? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Is_All_You_Need) Having a Generative Pretrained Transformer regurgitate pattern-matched input into mostly logical-appearing output does not make a thinking machine! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_pre-trained_transfo...)

case in point, look at this, and think:

""" It's true that relying solely on attention mechanisms, while groundbreaking, doesn't equate to genuine thinking. These models, impressive as they are, essentially excel at sophisticated mimicry. They learn to identify patterns in vast amounts of data and reproduce them in a way that often seems intelligent. However, they lack true understanding, consciousness, or the ability to form original thoughts and intentions.

The danger lies in anthropomorphizing these systems. We marvel at their ability to generate human-like text, translate languages, and even write different kinds of creative content, and we may be tempted to ascribe human-like qualities to them. But it's crucial to remember that beneath the surface lies a complex algorithm, not a conscious mind.

While the "Attention is All You Need" paper revolutionized the field of natural language processing, it's important to maintain a critical perspective and acknowledge the limitations of current AI technology. The quest for true artificial intelligence, a machine capable of independent thought and understanding, remains an ongoing challenge. """

Maybe you were able to spot a pattern, no?

I can spot a pattern that people who think AI should be able to violate copyright often anthropomorphize it as a silly defense.

If you mean what I wrote, it's irrelevant what you call them. If governments think there is an AI race that they will lose if they enforce copyright, they won't enforce copyright.

ok, good point!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com