*Although it used to be more common for AVI files in the olden days.
It only highlights how the world really works. If you have money you get to do whatever the fuck you want. If you're just a normal person you get to spend years in jail or worse.
Reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GptobqPsvg
If you owe the bank $100,000,000 the bank has a problem.
We live in an era where the president of the United States uses his position to pump crypto scams purely for personal profit.
And the US is not the only jurisdiction
"Has been argued" -- sure, but never successfully; in fact, in HiQ v. LinkedIn, the 9th Circuit ruled (twice, both before and on remand again after and applying the Supreme Court ruling in Van Buren v. US) against a cease and desist on top of robots.txt to stop accessing data on a public website constituting "without authorization" under the CFAA.
[1] https://www.thefederalcriminalattorneys.com/unauthorized-rec...
Would it be a "fair use" to download pirated papers for research instead of buying?
Also I was gradually migrating from obtaining software from questionable sources to open source software, thinking that this is going out of trend and nobody torrents apps anymore, but it seems I was wrong?
Or another example: if someone wants to make contributions to Wine but needs a Windows for developing the patch, what would be the right choice, buy it or download a free copy from questionable source?
It's more that the law about "one guy decides to pirate twelve movies to watch them at home and share with his buddies" is already well-settled, but the law about "a company pirates 10,000,000 pieces to use as training data for an AI model (a practice that the law already says is legal in an academic setting, i.e. universities do this all the time and nobody bats an eye)" is more complicated and requires additional trials to resolve. And no, even though the right answer may be self-evident to you or me, it's not settled law, and if the force of law is applied poorly suddenly what the universities are doing runs afoul of it and basically nobody wants that outcome.
Training on copyright is a separate claim than skirting payment for copyright.
Which pretty much boils down to: "If they put it out there for everyone to see, it's probably OK to train on it, if they put it behind a paywall and you don't pay, the training part doesn't matter, it's a violation."
Because it's important to grasp the scale of these copyright violations:
* They downloaded, and admitted to using, Anna's Archive: Millions of books and papers, most of which are paywalled but they pirated it instead
* They acquired Movies and TV shows and used unofficial subtitles distributed by websites such as OpenSubtitles, which are typically used for pirated media. Official releases such as DVDs tend to have official subtitles that don't sign off with "For study/research purpose only. Please delete after 48 hours" or "Subtitles by %some_username%"
If you skirt payment, its a violation. If it's free, but still copyright, it's likely not a violation.
By comparison, someone here brought up that it might be transformative fair use to write a play heavily based on Blood Meridian, but you still need to buy a copy of the book. It would still be infringement to pirate the e-book for your writing process, even if the end result was legal.
The only thing I've been able to find is the note that since copyright is federal law, state contract law actually can't supersede it, to wit: if you try to put a clause in the contract that says the contract is void if I use your work to make transformative fair-use works (or I owe you a fee), that clause is functionally unenforceable (for the same reason that I don't owe you a fee if I make transformative fair-use works of your creations in general).
Or they can negotiate a deal at scale with whatever price / restrictions make sense to both parties.
I don’t see a way they could be “trapped”. Worst case they pay retail price.
Clearly Bonnie and Clyde shouldn’t have been prosecuted. Imagine they were just robbing banks for literary research purposes. They could have then used the learnings to write a book and sell it commercially…
Or imagine one cracks 10000 copyrighted DVDs and then sells 30 second clips… (a derived work).
To me, for profit companies and universities have a huge difference — the latter is not seeking to directly commercially profit from copyrighted data.
Seems fair.
We wish we lived in a world where change was reliably positive for our lives. Often changes are sold that way, but they rarely are.
But when new things introduce dramatic capabilities that former things couldn't match (every chatbot before LLMs), it is as clear of an objective technological advance as has ever happened.
--
Not every technical advance reliably or immediately makes society better.
But whether or when technology improves the human condition is far more likely to be a function of human choices than the bare technology. Outcomes are strongly dependent on the trajectories of who has a technology, when they do, and how they use it. And what would be the realistic (not wished for) outcome of not having or using it.
For instance, even something as corrosive as social media, as it is today, could have existed in strongly constructive forms instead. If society viewed private surveillance, unpermissioned collation across third parties, and weaponizing of dossiers via personalized manipulation of media, increased ad impact and addictive-type responses, as ALL being violations of human rights to privacy and freedom from coercion or manipulation. And worth legally banning.
Ergo, if we want tech to more reliably improve lives, we need to ban obviously perverse human/corporate behaviors and conflicts of interest.
(Not just shade tech. Which despite being a pervasive response, doesn't seem to improve anything.)
Either both AI teams cheated, in which case there's nothing to worry about, or they didn't, in which case you've set a pretty high bar. Where is that bar, exactly? What exactly does it take to justify blowing off copyright law in the larger interest of progress? (I have my own answers to that question, including equitable access to the resulting models regardless of how impressive their performance might be, but am curious to hear yours.)
Social networks as they exist today represent technology that didn't exist decades ago. I wouldn't call it an "advancement" though. I think social media is terrible for humans in aggregate.
I'm pretty bullish on ML progress in general, but I'm finding it harder every day to disagree with recursive's take on social media.
Everyone I know has stories about their ISP sending nastygrams threatening legal action over torrenting, but now that corporations (whose US legal personhood appears to matter only when it benefits them) are doing it as part of the development of a commercial product that they expect to charge people for, that's fine?
And in any case, my argument had nothing to do with copyright (though I do hate the hypocrisy of the situation), and whether or not it's "nothing to worry about" in the long run, it seems like it'll cause a lot of harm before the benefits are felt in society at large. Whatever purported benefits actually come of this, we'll have to deal with:
- Even more mass layoffs that use LLMs as justification (not just in software, either). These are people's livelihoods; we're coming off of several nearly-consecutive "once-in-a-generation" financial crises, a growing affordability crisis in much of the developed world, and stagnating wages. Many people will be hit very hard by layoffs.
- A seniority crisis as companies increasingly try to replace entry-level jobs with LLMs, meaning that people in a crucial learning stage of their jobs will have to either replace much of the learning curve for their domain with the learning curve of using LLMs (which is dubiously a good thing), or face unemployment, and leaving industries to deal with the aging-out of their talent pools
- We've already been heading towards something of an information apocalypse, but now it seems more real than ever, and the industry's response seems to broadly be "let's make the lying machines lie even more convincingly"
- The financial viability of these products seems... questionable right now, at best, and given that the people running the show are opening up data centres in some of the most expensive energy markets around (and in the US's case, one that uniquely disincentivizes the development of affordable clean energy), I'm not sure that anyone's really interested in a path to financial sustainability for this tech
- The environmental impact of these projects is getting to be significant. It's not as bad as Bitcoin mining yet, AFAIK, but if we keep on, it'll get there.
- Recent reports show that the LLM industry is starting to take up a significant slice of the US economy, and that's never a good sign for an industry that seems to be backed by so much speculation rather than real-world profitability. This is how market crashes happen.
>If you're just a normal person you get to spend years in jail or worse.
Not that I'm a big fan of the criminalization of copyright infringement in the United States, but who has ever spent years in jail for this?
Besides, if it really bothered you, then we might not see this weird tone-switch from one sentence to the next, where you seem to think that piracy is shocking and "something should be done" and then "it's not good tht someone should spend time in jail for it". What gives?
What a weirdly condescending way to interpret my post. My point boils down to: Either prosecute copyright infringement or don't. The current status quo of individuals getting their lives ruined while companies get to make billions is disgusting.
This is the absolute core of the issue. Technical people see law as code, where context can be disregarded and all that matters is specifying the outputs for a given set of inputs.
But law doesn’t work that way, and it should not work that way. Context matters, and it needs to.
If you go down the road of “the law is the law and billion dollar companies working on product should be treated the same as individual consumers”, it follows that individuals should do SEC filings (“either require 10q’s or don’t!”), and surgeons should be jailed (“either prosecute cutting people with knives or don’t!”).
There is a lot to dislike about AI companies, and while I believe that training models is transformative, I don’t believe that maintaining libraries of pirated content is OK just because it’s an ingredient to training.
But insisting that individual piracy to enjoy entertainment without paying must be treated exactly the same as datasets for model training is the absolute weakest possible argument here. The law is not that reductive.
Copyright laws target everyone. SEC laws don't.
As Anatole France famously quipped:
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
Aaron Swartz?
EDIT: apparently he wasn't in jail, he was on bail while the case was ongoing - but the shortest plea deal would still have had him in jail for 6 months, and the penalty was 35 to 50 years.
As for actually gathering the copyrighted material: I believe the jury hasn't even been empaneled for that yet (in the OpenAI case), but the latest ruling from the court is that copyright may have been violated in the creation of their training corpus.
They can. I don't think anyone got prosecuted for using an illegal streaming site or downloading from sci-hub, for instance. What people do get sued for is seeding, which counts as distribution. If anything AI companies are getting prosecuted more aggressively than "ordinary people", presumably because of their scale. In a recent lawsuit Anthropic won on the part about AI training on books, but lost on the part where they used pirated books.
Same goes for recording: I'm just training my skills of recording. Or maybe I'm just recording it so I can rewatch it later, for training purposes, of course.
None of this is relevant because Anthropic was only left off the hook for training, and not for pirating the books itself. So far as the court cases are playing out, there doesn't appear to be a special piracy exemption for AI companies.
>Same goes for recording: I'm just training my skills of recording. Or maybe I'm just recording it so I can rewatch it later, for training purposes, of course.
You can certainly use that as a defense. That's why we have judges, otherwise there's going to be some smartass caught with 1KG of coke and claiming it's for "personal consumption" rather than distribution.
None of this matters in reality, though. If you're caught with AV gear in a movie theater once, you'd likely be ejected and banned from the establishment/chain, not have the FBI/MPAA go after you for piracy. If you come again, you'd likely be prosecuted for trespassing. In the cases where they're going after someone in particular for making these rips, they usually have a dossier of evidence, like surveillance/transaction history showing that the same individual has been repeatedly recording movies, and watermarks correlating the screenings that the person has been in to files showing up on torrent sites.
Good example, because this is exactly what websites are doing with LLM companies, who are doing their damnest to evade the blocks. Which brings us back around to "trespassing" or the CFAA or whatever.
That argument is pretty much dead after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Buren_v._United_States and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn
I'll leave all other jurisdictions up to you.
It's even more important in audio DSP: processing near-zeroes can end up being extremely CPU intensive, look up denormal/subnormal floats.
Quite a lot of algorithms use some form of division and zero is the only number in our typical structures (Z, Q, R, C), that cannot be used to divide with.
Error: division by please upvote, share and like!What good is a speech recognition tool that literally hears imaginary voices?
I'd really appreciate it.
Well, if it is supposed to work after silence detection, then it is good for speech recognition I guess. It's like blaming a wheel why is it circular, you can't sit on it. It's a part of a larger machine.
Show us a technology with better results that does not use VAD. If you can’t, then I’m not sure what you’re arguing against except superficialities so inconsequential that I can’t comprehend the condescension. The results speak for itself
Do you also moan that before applying glue to a surface or it won't stick? Or if you need to drill a guiding hole before making a larger one in wood? Or that you need to use truly prime numbers for a security key to actually be safe?
On the other hand, I can imagine that when things get quiet and the signal-to-noise ratio gets close to zero, random background audio (or randomness introduced in the transcription model) will be enough to tickle a critical number of neurons and elicit hallucinations.
The related thought exercise is this: Try scanning across the band with an AM or sideband radio, and after a while your brain will start to wonder "was that a voice I just heard, or music perhaps?" when in reality it was just environmental static.
I agree their products could be better "end to end" integrated. Meanwhile there is a continuously-improving field of work for detecting speech (which Whisper is incapable of). They offer official "cookbooks" with guidance on an approach they recommend: https://cookbook.openai.com/examples/whisper_processing_guid...
> At times, files with long silences at the beginning can cause Whisper to transcribe the audio incorrectly. We'll use Pydub to detect and trim the silence.
(Official OpenAI quote)
Say if I wanted to use it for Voice Nav, or Voice Input, but not piss off random people speaking the wrong language.
You put in 2+2 - the right figures. The machine says 4 - the right answer. If you put in the wrong figures, like 3+3, will the machine still say 4? It's easy to make a machine that always says 4.
The people who asked him that question, however, probably got a different scam demonstrated to them every every. Remember the Mechanical Turk? Babbage's reply paints him very honestly. It shows that he couldn't even conceive that someone might try to trick the royal court (or whoever it was) into accepting a fake device.
If it couldn't understand it, it was "foreign" for the longest time.
I also noticed a couple of months ago that YouTube seems to have quietly rolled out a new auto-transcription model that can make reasonable guesses at where capitalization, punctuation, and sentence boundaries should go. It seems to have degraded even more rapidly than the old one, falling victim to the same kinds of transcription errors. Although the new one has a different hallucination in silence and noise that it wasn't able to classify (which, incidentally, its ability to recognize things like music and applause seems worse than the old one's): where the old model would have hallucinated the word "foreign", the new one thinks it's hearing the word "heat", often repeated ("Heat. Heat.").
To be fair, there is a difference between when subtitles match the source language and when they don't. Former are often verbatim.
Netflix sometimes takes the cake with what I consider the most outrageous option: writing "[in English]" when they mean "in whatever language the protagonist considers native", which is mind-bogglingly wrong and hilarious at the same time.
They do this with the English subtitles of the German production "Die Kaiserin" ("The Empress"): whenever Sisi is speaking in another language, say French, the subtitles will say "[in French] I love you...", and when she switches back to German they will say "[in English] I love you...". WTF, Netflix? Note this is unrelated to understanding German; it's mostly Netflix looking down on its customers and assuming they cannot comprehend there are people in the world for whom their native tongue is different to the viewer's native tongue.
This has happened in more shows, enough to know it's not a fluke, though Netflix is inconsistent about it.
The videos I tried to transcribe were also Mandarin Chinese, using whisper-large-v3. Besides the usual complaints that it would phonetically "mishear" things and generate nonsense, it was still surprisingly good, compared to other software I played around with.
That said, it would often invent names for the speakers and prefix their lines, or randomly switch between simplified and traditional Chinese. For the videos I tested, intermittent silence would often result in repeating the last line several times, or occasionally, it would insert direction cues (in English for some reason). I've never seen credits or anything like that.
In one video I transcribed, somebody had a cold and was sniffling. Whisper decided the person was crying (transcribed as "* crying *", a cough was turned into "* door closing *"). It then transcribed the next line as something quite unfriendly. It didn't do that anymore after I cut the sniffling out (but then the output switched back to traditional Chinese again).
They trained the model on every YouTube video they could, and hoped the aggregate was useful data.
My revelation was that machine translation needs a corpus of bilingual documents to learn from, and if the language is sufficiently obscure, there may not be any bilingual documents except for the Bible, which missionaries have translated into just about every language on Earth.