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Comment by pj_mukh | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand, generating (and then monetizing) things that are copyright violations is already illegal.

What we’re taking about is suing the tool that could potentially be used to generate copyright violations. Which seems silly?

Steelmanning your argument a bit more: OpenAI is selling the fact that you could potentially generate copyrightable material as a subscription, because the artwork is somewhere in the compressed data?

Abstracting the underlying tech a bit: If we imagined a printer that could faithfully represent whatever you told it to and you told it to reproduce Da Vinci’s that you later sold as originals while others told it to reproduce original forms of art (successfully), who’s at fault here, you or the printer?

Seems obvious to me it’s the user of the printer, not the printer itself, even if the printermaker is making money.

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In a strict reading, the tool itself is a copyright violation. In that an LLM is the code and its weights, and the weights contain a lossy compressed copy of a copyrighted work.

Now you might say that's an overly rigid reading of copyright law, and I might agree, but that is nevertheless the reading of it applied to other domains - music, film and so on - where incorporating even a fractional, lossy and heavily processed portion of another work is enough to trigger copyright law. There is no blanket de-minimis that says "well, it's only 5%, so it's fair use".

The legality of Copyright material being present in the latent space of a commercialized foundation model would definitely be an interesting case!

Though most of these cases aren't litigating this. They are charging that the ability to recreate copyrightable material is the fault of the tool and not the tool user[1].

[1]: https://www.darrow.ai/resources/ai-copyright-law

If using the work as training data was lawful (which hasn't been always the case as we know today) I tend to agree with you, but it might depend: creating an alteration of the work might be prohibited altogether or you might need to give proper credit to the original authors and that might already be violated when you present certain output to a user. In general, the user is responsible to obey the license of the original work. The problem is that the LLM doed not know on which works its output (mostly) is based on. So in theory, no output for which copyright laws might apply should be used whatsoever.

It's not cut and dried in that way ("certain output"), in many models, any one piece of training data can influence any number of weights and potential outputs, and it's difficult or impossible to say which output was influenced to what extent by which input.

A drop of blood falls in a lake.. which bit of lake now contains blood?

> the user is responsible to obey the license of the original work

The user is in this case the "AI" company.

They already violated law almost certainly by copying stuff from the net in the first place. (Almost certainly as it by now does not look like this was fair use, and there is no other means to make legal what they did.)

If I measure the length of a song? Not copyright infringement. If I take even a very short sequence of PCM samples, copyright infringement.

But the practical thresholds appear to be different, there's a bunch of ways you can extract kbs' worth of information from a song, some are considered copying (ripping the melody to midi with a converter, say), some are not.

And in the case of "AI", depending on the model it could be extracting and encoding almost anything, because it's a catch-all term encompassing dozens of architectures and methods.

That's not true.

Some people (like the NYT¹) are in fact demanding before curt the destruction of the trained models as they obviously contain copyrighted content.

¹ https://pressgazette.co.uk/media_law/new-york-times-open-ai-...

> OpenAI is selling the fact that you could potentially generate copyrightable material as a subscription, because the artwork is somewhere in the compressed data?

Yeah, that's the express and sole purpose of the tool. You use OpenAI image generation because you want something that looks like a stock image for your website. But you don't want to pay for a stock image because you're cheap. So you'll get a close enough approximation for free. Or, uh, less.

"express and sole purpose of the tool"

Categorically untrue. 100% of all my usage of image generation is for artistic purposes that have nothing to do with the reproduction of or even the mimicry of existing art.

This is a gaping hole in the legal case if the lawyers need this to be true.

> 100% of all my usage of image generation is for artistic purposes that have nothing to do with the reproduction of or even the mimicry of existing art.

How? You're creating artwork that is based off of the training data and is meant to replicate a subset of it.

I think, just because you cannot pinpoint the exact art piece(s) that you are recreating doesn't mean that that isn't what you're doing.

Sorry when you said "Sole purpose", I assumed you meant the ChatGPT USERS sole purpose and OpenAI's expectation of their users' Sole purpose. My sole purpose as a ChatGPT user is not to create/recreate stock photos.

"just because you cannot pinpoint the exact art piece(s)"

Precisely, and neither can the owner of the copyright. Unless of course I rub into classical copyright issues ("these two art pieces look too similar") which goes back to my original question, why isn't just enforcing existing copyright law on bad ChatGPT users enough?

If I "use" your artwork, and generate another artwork that looks nothing like yours (either from my brain or by automating it) why do you care?

> If I "use" your artwork, and generate another artwork that looks nothing like yours (either from my brain or by automating it) why do you care?

I wouldn't, but presumably the person who you are immitating would.

The fallacy here is that you think an LLM is taking one or two art pieces and then turning around and creating something brand new, like a human brain might do.

No. It's taking billions of art pieces and then sampling them at various frequencies to create your art work. We can find your art work somewhere in the training data, it's just hard.

In essence, we're smuggling the copyright violation through convolution. Since these models are truly very large, we can pretend that there isn't copyright violation. But there is, we just can't really find it because LLMs cannot work backwards.

" taking one or two art pieces and then turning around and creating something brand new, like a human brain might do."

I don't think the human brain is doing this at all (except maybe if you're writing a satire or homage). Your writing is the sum total of all your experiences which includes everything you've ever read, a number that might (depending on your age) at least approach millions of tokens.

And just like an LLM you'd find it difficult to piece together your influences.

The difference is I'm a person - I get special privileges. A computer program does not, we don't need to cater to them because, well, they don't have feelings. Or rights.

Ultimately these are tools, slaves to humans, meant for one thing only - to serve us. If they're not serving us, they should be eradicated. Because that's what we do.

Stealing from humans, no matter how convoluted, is bad. We shouldn't do that, and luckily that's completely optional and we don't have to stand for it. The computer programs can't fight back, it's okay.

Don't care if a computer program has special privileges or not, that's irrelevant. It's a tool, and it has the potential to make a whole host of processes and people's lives easier, and no one, not you, not an internet mob, not a council of elders has the right to preemptively stop those real-world tests based on vibes.

So getting to the bottom of what is actually stealing or not will be important (we can't just unilaterally declare it so), and AFAICT if a user misuses it to regenerate copyrighted material that particular user is at fault, not the tool itself.

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