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Comment by dale_glass | Hacker News Reader

> A model is not derived work of its training data. This seems to me insane, but a lot of the world seems to hold this view

Why insane? Models don't take the content as-is, they take measurements. I don't owe you royalties just because I used your photo to get the proportions and coloring of a duck right. Go watch artist streams, you'll often see people to go Google Images for references. I've never seen that result in credit or payments.

The alternative is that we hand out lots of money to a few large companies specializing in content archives, and there's really no benefit to anyone else anyway. On the long term I would expect a few fat cats to get fatter, the small guy to get nothing, and AI still work but get there slowly. I don't see the point or the benefit.

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> Models don't take the content as-is, they take measurements.

At some point, enough measurements constitute a copy. If I redistribute the average value of all the pixels in your photo, I'm obviously not in violation of your copyright. If I measure and redistribute 90% of its DCT coefficients (i.e. make a slightly compressed JPEG), I am.

The interesting stuff happens between those extremes. We cannot just take as a given that all LLMs always are on the safe side. It is not at all obvious.

> I don't owe you royalties just because I used your photo to get the proportions and coloring of a duck right.

No but a tribute or citation would be nice, especially if the (software) license requires it.

Such things are beyond what copyright protects. This line of reasoning would only work if there were a radical reimagining of copyright itself.

Yeah but here is the thing. Say you train a Lora for a model. You then merge those weights into the open weight model.

Now prompt it for an original image, it will pretty much be able to reproduce that exact image.

You can say it is just measurements but at some point, it can just reproduce with high enough accuracy to just be seen as a copy

Given that corporations buy up any valuable IP, I personally think the answer is to abolish copyright because right now it is really only protecting the rich and corporations . Individuals have the illusion of protection but if Disney steals your shit, good luck with the pain and suffering you experience trying to win a court case against them

Abolishing copyright would make it much harder for smaller players to protect their interests. Their original work would be gobbled up by the big players, and made easily available under the umbrella of a large corporations pre-existing market share. Not a fun situation at all to be in. Especially for the little guys.

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