Comment by teddyh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by teddyh | Hacker News Reader

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The problem is people at large companies creating these AI models, wanting the freedom to copy artists’ works when using it, but these large companies also want to keep copyright protection intact, for their regular business activities. They want to eat the cake and have it too. And they are arguing for essentially eliminating copyright for their specific purpose and convenience, when copyright has virtually never been loosened for the public’s convenience, even when the exceptions the public asks for are often minor and laudable. If these companies were to argue that copyright should be eliminated because of this new technology, I might not object. But now that they come and ask… no, they pretend to already have, a copyright exception for their specific use, I will happily turn around and use their own copyright maximalist arguments against them.

(Copied from a comment of mine written more than three years ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33582047>)

I don't care for this line of argument. It's like saying you can't hold a position that trespassing should be illegal while also holding that commercial businesses should be legally required to have public restrooms. Yes, both of these positions are related to land rights and the former is pro- while the latter is anti-, but it's a perfectly coherent set of positions. OpenAI can absolutely be anti-copyright in the sense of whether you can train an an NN on copyrighted data and pro-copyright in the sense of whether you can make an exact replica of some data and sell it as your own without making it into hypocrisy territory. It does suggest they're self-interested, but you have to climb a mountain in Tibet to find anybody who isn't.

Arguments that make a case that NN training is copyright violation are much more compelling to me than this.

No, the exception they are asking for (we can train on copyrighted material and the image produced is non-copyright infringing) is copyright infringing in the most basic sense.

I'll prove it by induction: Imagine that I have a service where I "train" a model on a single image of Indiana Jones. Now you prompt it, and my model "generates" the same image. I sell you this service, and no money goes to the copyright holder of the original image. This is obviously infringment.

There's no reason why training on a billion images is any different, besides the fact that the lines are blurred by the model weights not being parseable

>There's no reason why training on a billion images is any different

You gloss over this as if it's a given. I don't agree. I think you're doing a different thing when you're sampling billions of things equallly.

The root problem is that the model reproduces Indiana Jones instead of creating a new character. This contradicts the statement that the model "learns" and "creates" like a human artist and not merely copies; obviously a human artist would not plagiarize when asked to draw a character.

That does not seem obvious at all. Fan art and referencing is a thing, and there are plenty of examples of AI creating characters that do not exist anywhere in the training dataset.

> the model reproduces Indiana Jones

the model isn't the one infringing. It's the end user inputting the prompt.

The model itself is not a derivative work, in the same way that an artist and photoshop aren't a derivative work when they reproduce indiana jones's likeness.

The end user didn't ask for Indiana Jones though.

That's why I said it's an argument by induction. Where's the limit for it to be different? 10 images? 100? 10000? Where does it stop being copyright infringement and why? Many people have paid heavy fines for much less. I don't think that "a billion images is so unfathomable compared to just one million that it truly is a difference in kind" is a valid response

The example you gave with public restroom do not work because of two main concept: They are usually getting paid for it by the government, and operating a company usually holds benefits given by the government. Industry regulations as a concept is generally justified in that industry are getting "something" from society, and thus society can put in requirements in return.

A regulation that require restaurants to have a public bathroom is more akin to regulation that also require restaurants to check id when selling alcohol to young customers. Neither requirement has any relation with land rights, but is related to the right of operating a company that sell food to the public.

But what if businesses got benefits from society and tax money and were free to ignore the needs/desires of those who pay taxes and who society consists of? That seems just about right.

> The example you gave with public restroom do not work because of two main concept: They are usually getting paid for it by the government, and operating a company usually holds benefits given by the government.

This is not the case in the US yet many places still have public restrooms, due to it benefiting the users themselves regardless of government.

I guess the best explanation for what we're witnessing is the notion that 'Money Talks', and sadly nothing more. To think thats all that fair use activists lacked in years passed..

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