It's simple. If you put the works into the LLM, it can later make immediately identifiable, if imperfect, copies of the work. If you didn't put the work in, it wouldn't be able to do that.
The fact that you can't "see the copy" inside is wildly irrelevant.
Size of training data: fuck knows, but The Pile alone is 880Gb. Public github's gonna be measured in Tb. A Common Crawl is about 250Tb.
There's physically not enough space in there to store everything it was trained on. The vast majority of the text the chatbot was exposed to cannot be pulled out of it, as this paper makes clear.
I'm guessing that the cases where great lumps of copyright text can be extracted verbatim are down to repetition in the training data? There's probably a simple fix for that.
(I'm only talking about training here. The initial acquisition of the data clearly involved massive copyright infringement).
I don't find this to be true in USA. Because Google already covered this ground and the doctrine of transformative Fair Use was born.
17 U.S. Code § 106 covers reproduction, not just redistribution (IANAL).
As I said, I'm separating the acquisition on the data and the training of the data, because I believe the first is an infringing act, while the other is (in the general case) not.
Fair Use, and the way whether a work is transformative is a factor in it, is much older than Google; I'm not sure what specific Google precedent you think is relevant here.
To get out the original data from an LLM, you need to supply... the original data. Or at least, a big chunk of it.
The actually copyrightable chunk of it, arguably, since what a LLM can generate on its own is only its most predictable, unoriginal, generic chunks. Things it's seen a thousand times.
Which may turn out to be an uncomfortably high % of most creative works.
The comparatively few that are should be fixed.
If you want to argue that the act of training is in itself infringing, even if it doesn't result in a copy... well, I'd enjoy seeing you make that argument.
"I'd be happy to take "reasonable level of fidelity" + yes, the act of training itself as infringing to a jury"
They're not the same thing. At all. The comparatively few that are [extractable] should be fixed. I already said that.
The vast majority of texts CANNOT BE EXTRACTED. Are they still infringing?
At this stage, you can't just declare "infringing or not," thats the point of trials.
What I'm saying is -- you make good points -- but I like my chances in front of a jury with my explanation against yours.
Could be reversed by a higher court of course, but it seems like it establishes that pirating and training are two different "crimes". (Or three - see the bit about "infringing knock-offs").
Good thing they were public (?) works, wouldn't wanna get sued [0] for possibly being a two legged copyright infringement. Or should I say having been, since naturally I immediately erased all of these works from my mind just days after these tests, even without any legal impetus.
Edit: thinking about it a bit more, you also remind me to our midterm tests from the same class. We had to produce multiple page long essays on the spot, analyzing a select work... from memory. Bonus points for being able to quote from it, of course. Needless to say, not many original thoughts were featured in those essays, not in mine, not in others' - the explicit expectation was that you'd peruse the current and older textbooks to "learn (memorize) the analysis" from, and then you'd "write about it in your own words", but still using technical terms. They were pretty much just tests in jargon use, composition, and memorization, which is definitely a choice of all time for a class on literature. But I think it draws an interesting perspective. At no point did we ever have to actually demonstrate a capability in literary analysis of our own, or was that capability ever graded, for example. But if you only read our essays, you'd think we were great at it. It was mimicry. Doesn't mean we didn't end up developing such a capability though.
"Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies"
Edit: I guess the proper term is public domain works, not just public works. Maybe that's our issue here.
WinForms is still around. There have been further technologies, but as far as I can tell the current state of things is basically just a big tire fire and about the best you can do is to ignore all of them and develop in WinForms.
Is there a successor now?
> Our results complicate current disputes over copyright infringement, both by rejecting easy claims made by both sides about how models work and by demonstrating that there is no single answer to the question of how much a model memorizes
I wonder if this is the sort of article that people will claim supports their side, even that it ends the debate without a knockout blow to the other side, when the actual article itself isn't making any such claim.
I'm sure you read the entire article before commenting, but I would strongly recommend everyone else does as well.
LLMs are OBVIOUSLY not a replacement for the books and works that they're trained on, just like Google books isn't.
1. For example earlier this month: https://www.reddit.com/r/fantasyromance/comments/1ktrwxj/fan...
That is, if you want to read Harry Potter, you'd rather buy it (or get it from Anne) than try to wrangle it out of an LLM. Therefore, it doesn't compete with the original work. IANAL, though.
1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
"Transformative" is also part of 1 and is often cited as letting LLMs get away with everything, but everybody argues that and doesn't always win. Also, it's quite linked with 4.
2 mostly isn't a problem but gets into nasty details.
For 3 (emphasis on "used"), this link once again proves that the point does fail.
For 4 we are indisputably seeing mass disruption in several fields, so that point fails.
To be clear - there are ways to use LLMs that balance much closer to the side of fair use, but that isn't how LLMs are advertised.
We have not seen mass disruption in books or news for example, which seem to be two big areas that are most aggressively pursuing copyright claims.
I think the best case on this front is probably from Getty where image generation models ARE directly competing with them.
LLMs are advertised for, and attempt to, replace the works that they're trained on. For HN users, this is most often for code-generation, but people in other fields use it for similar replacement in their own field.
If you ask OpenAI to generate an image of your dog as Superman, it will often start to do so, and then it will realize it is copyrighted, and stop. This seems sensible to me.
Isn’t it the ultimate creative result that is copyright infringement, and not merely that a model was trained to understand something very well?
Remember, we can only target humans. So we're not likely to target your guy; but we ARE likely to target "the guy that definitely fed a complete unauthorized copy of the thing into the LLM."
If I download harry_potter_goblet_fire.txt off some dodgy site, then let's assume that owner of that site has infringed copyright by distributing it. If I upload it again to some other dodgy site, I would also infringe copyright in a similar same way. But that would be naughty so I'm not going to do that.
Let's say instead that I feed it into a bunch of janky pytorch scripts with a bunch of other text files, and out pops a bunch of weights. Twice.
The first model I build is a classifier. Its output is binary: is this text about wizards, yes/no.
The second model I build is an LLM. Its output is text, and (as in the article) you can get imperfect reproductions of parts of the training file out of it with the right prompts.
Now, I upload both those sets of weights to HuggingFace.
How many times am I supposed to have infringed copyright?
Is it:
A) Twice (at least), because the act of doing anything whatsoever with harry_potter_goblet_fire.txt without permission is verboten;
B) Once, because only one of the models is capable of reproducing the original (even if only approximately);
C) Zero, because neither model is capable of a reproduction that would compete with the original;
or
D) Zero, because I'm not the distributor of the file, and merely processing it - "format shifted" from the book, if you like - is not problematic in itself.
Logically I can see justifications for any of B) (tenuously), C), or D). Obviously publishers would want us to think that A) is right, but based on what? I see a lot of moral outrage, but very little actual argument. That makes me think there's nothing there.
If I download an MP3 to my computer, the act of copying it to my hard disk is making a copy. The act of playing it copies it from my hard disk to RAM, then from RAM to the audio output; these are also copies.
That means you either need: A license (e.g. terms and conditions when you buy a legal MP3) or an "implied license" (this is what makes it legal to play CDs) or a right explicitly conferred by law (e.g. 17 U.S. Code § 117(a) lets you copy computer programs into RAM to run them) or a right of "fair use" (which allows e.g. Google copy web pages into their index)
So I'm afraid you've infringed copyright countless times - if you run several thousand epochs of training, you've infringed copyright several thousand times.
You may note that this is completely at odds with reality, and says almost nothing can happen without a copyright lawyer's permission. A cynic would say this suits the interests of copyright lawyers, if not reality, and nobody else gets to create legal theories about copyright infringement.
You have, I assume, a licensed copy of Harry Potter. That license restricts you from doing certain activities, like making (distributing? Lets go with distributing) derived works. Your models are derived works. Thus when you distribute your models, you’re violating the licence terms you “agreed” to when you acquired your copy of Harry Potter.
This is no judgement by me about whether that’s reasonable or not, just my understanding of the mechanics.
Or at least that's how I read it. I'm sure GP will clarify shortly.
But me drawing Superman would absolutely be violating DC's copyright. They probably wouldn't care since my drawing would suck, but that's not the legal issue.
Rockets? Pretty cool. Wernher von Braun? Not cool.
I don't have an alternative argument against AI art either, but I don't think you are going to like this outcome.
The only real question is whether it's possible to prevent the system from generating the copyrighted content.
A strange analogy would be some sort of magical BluRay that plays novel movies unless you enter the decryption key. And somehow you would have to prevent entering those keys.
Not so fast! That hasn't been tested in court or given any sort of recommendation by any of the relevant IP bodies.
And to play devil's advocate here: your brain also contains an enormous amount of copyrighted content. I'm glad the lawyers aren't lobotomizing us and demanding licensing fees on our memories.
I'm pretty sure if you asked me to sit under an MRI and recall scenes from movies like "Jurassic Park", my visual cortex would reconstruct scenes with some amount of fidelity to the original. I shouldn't owe that to Universal. (In a perfect world, they would owe me for imprinting and storing their memetic information in my mind. Ad companies and brands should for sure.)
If I say, "One small step for man", I'm pretty confident that the lot of you would remember Armstrong's exact voice, the exact noise profile of the recording, with the precise equipment beeps. With almost exacting recall.
I'm also pretty sure your brains can remember a ginormous amount of music. I know I can. And when I'm given a prediction task (eg. listening to a song I already know), I absolutely know what's coming before it hits.
Movies are maybe less intuitive because most people won't reproduce a movie. There supposedly are people with "photographic memories" for example. And infringement is possibly not so much the capacity as what is actually done. Someone with a photographic memory could duplicate a movie but unless they actually do their capacity is not infringement. But you also have to consider that if it was viewed "lawfully" in the first place then the copyright holder has decided to let people view them. So the act of a brain seeing Jurassic Park is what the copyright holder authorized. Generally I don't think copyright holders have agreed to have LLM ingest their works.
Plays and opera are maybe more similar, because people to copy productions etc. But those don't feature encryption so the blob of unknown data doesn't feature in the analogy.
But then you're no longer talking about "contains copyrighted material" you're talking about "actively reproduces copyrighted material in an immediately recognizable form".
> Generally I don't think copyright holders have agreed to have LLM ingest their works.
Aren't you essentially speculating about whether or not the training data was obtained in compliance with IP law?
You can train on Disney, but you can't produce Disney outputs.
Likewise, if you create some new IP using AI, the US will confer copyright so long as there was sufficient user input (eg. inpainting, editing, turning it into a long-form movie, etc.) Those new, sufficiently novel works should also be copyrightable.
Copyright should compel people to make good stuff and reward them when they do so. But it shouldn't hinder technological progress. There's a balance that can be struck.
Don't give Disney any ideas!
On a more serious and maybe paranoid note, I'm pretty confident that once we have the technology to apply DRM to people's brains, they will. After all, every time we remember something copyrighted we are stealing their valuable IP.
AI companies are adding the copyrighted material themselves, so they should have even more liability for what their users do (even ignoring the advertising they do).
Last I remember, whether it is ‘transformative’ is what’s important.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use
Eg. Google got away with ‘transforming’ books with Google books.
https://www.sgrlaw.com/google-books-fair-transformative-use/
I think the exact examples used in the past were Indiana Jones, but the point is the same.