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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

So what's the solution? Another rent-seeking system where any future information an AI learns about the world has to be carefully attributed for the possibility that someone might take a piece. A whole patent-troll/music industry style mass buy up of AI information rights with a team of lawyers sending out DMCA warnings hooked into every harness.

Does it get paid out on training or is it like music where if the model output is vaguely similar to something someone else created they get a royalty.

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Uhh yes. If you can't properly cite the sources you ripped off in training, you shouldn't be publishing the model.

Imagine actually asking permission to use other people's work to train AI. Imagine respecting the answer of "no".

But it would be unprofitable to ask permission!

I mean.. it feels kinda weird to say that you get to determine how other people use your work? Once you've sold your product, it's out in the open and available for use however the customer wants to use it.

If I bought a cake from your bakery, and then said "I'm going to serve it at my friends' gay wedding!", you couldn't be "hey, no, I don't approve of that". You've already sold me the cake; no take-backsies.

And if I buy a hammer, the hardware store doesn't get to tell me what I'm allowed to build.

If you're arguing for abolishing copyright, I'm all for it.

But as long as copyright exists, AI training should not get any exception to it. That creates an asymmetry, where AI gets to rip off our work and use it to compete with us, while we don't get to do the same with proprietary works (e.g. software).

I don't want a world in which AI can rip off all of my Open Source code and not respect its license, but I can't take macOS and virtualize it and not care what Apple thinks of that.

> If you're arguing for abolishing copyright, I'm all for it. But as long as copyright exists, AI training should not get any exception to it.

AFAICT, the courts currently lean towards allowing AI to be trained even without author permission, and this doesn't violate copyright law.

Copyright law says you can't sell unauthorized copies of copywritten works. Doesn't say you need to get author permission before using their works to train AI.

Yes, the courts are leaning towards creating the exception that I said should not exist, giving an advantage to AI companies over the humans that created the work they've trained on. That is not surprising, but it's still harmful.

So long as the AI company owns a copy of the copywritten work.. does training on it represent an "exception"?

They're not reproducing the work for sale, no? So how does training violate CR law?

Preparing a derivative work, and distributing that.

What is made public and available is treated as such. We do not ask permission to enable neural changes consequent to expressions of people in the open.

Even if the solution is difficult, I don't think that justifies theft.

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