[asperous]

The training jurisdiction one is interesting. Are future companies going to exclusively train their models in a copyright lack country?

Seems like jurisdiction would be based on the copyright of the allegedly infringed images, and UK-based users creating copyright infringing copies in the UK.

But that's apparently not the law or case law in the UK yet.

[gumballindie]

As anyone stealing data or other digital goods in countries that dont respect property they will be punished when trying to sell in countries there property is protected.

[whythre]

Still not convinced training AI is theft, and I think copyright law is a cudgel used by powerful corpos to extract rent and smash innovation.

[vohk]

While I somewhat agree with that take on copyright, I think you have to pick a lane to keep that position coherent:

Either you insist that copyright must be respected at every level, and the creators of material used for training deserve appropriate compensation, or

You throw out copyright completely in this context, but that means the resulting models cannot be treated as proprietary either unless they were produced using absolutely no unlicensed training data.

I think there is an argument for both. Want to create a proprietary model for commercial use? Pay up. Creating an open source, copyleft project exclusively for personal use and artistic expression? Exemption.

The current status quo is perfectly described by powerful corpos extracting rent. Billions for themselves and pennies for the average artist.

[tavavex]

> Either you insist that copyright must be respected at every level, and the creators of material used for training deserve appropriate compensation

I don't think that current copyright laws automatically entitles people to royalties from something like AI-generated imagery. The dichotomy you've presented here isn't pro-copyright vs anti-copyright, but "so pro-copyright that they argue for expanding the current laws" vs not.

> Want to create a proprietary model for commercial use? Pay up. Creating an open source, copyleft project exclusively for personal use and artistic expression? Exemption.

That definitely benefits all the "powerful corpos" you've mentioned here. Now, Disney, Adobe, Meta etc. can use a fraction of their money to get all the data they would ever need and be the sole profiteers, while all newcomers will face an impassable barrier to entry that prevents them from ever threatening the existing players.

[vidarh]

Copyright already has a lot of limitations. It has never been, nor been intended to, be absolute, because the point is to promote the arts and a too strict grant of rights would stifle it instead - indeed most places it is accepted that copyright is a significant limitation on the liberty of society at large, justified (or not, depending on ones opinions) by encouraging more works, but accepting it as a restriction means there is some degree of acceptance that it should not be more expansive than it needs to be (and many will disagree about whether the current length of copyright is or is not more expansive than it needs to be)

The only limitation that needs to be there for training on copyrighted works not to be infringing is to accept that extracting information about the work is not infringing if copyrighted elements of the work itself is not significantly reproduced.

[TaylorAlexander]

There is at least one middle ground area where you acknowledge that copyright and intellectual property restrictions should be removed, but that we should also recognize that all of the existing work was created by artists who expected they would have copyright protection. We should in my view not take from artists without their consent, and there is no implied consent when their works were posted at a time they believed they were protected by copyright.

This would mean we have to do a few difficult and worthwhile things: explicitly dismantle the copyright system, encourage artists to donate their existing works to the commons, and then only make datasets based on legally collected information. This would also have the side effect of encouraging the development of new training techniques and model designs which are more sample efficient.

I am afraid that what we will do instead is allow some erosion of copyright for small creators without dismantling the power large intellectual property holders have over the rest of us.

[visarga]

> We should in my view not take from artists without their consent

I think "take" is the wrong word here, nobody is republishing the copyrighted works, instead the model gets a gradient update. The update is shaped exactly like the model itself, and it gets stacked up with other updates from other examples. It doesn't look like the original work at all, the original work was a picture or book, the gradients look like a set of floating point tensors. AI models decompose inputs into basic concepts, they don't copy like bittorrent.

Why should an AI not be allowed to form a full world model that includes all published works? It's not like the authors can use copyright to stop anyone from seeing their works, they never had a right to stop others from seeing.

[TaylorAlexander]

I am more arguing that if it’s considered taking, we should follow the path I recommend.

Whether or not it is taking is more nuanced, but I will say I’m not sympathetic to the idea that it’s broadly similar to a human looking at the work. It’s just very, very different. You can’t spin up a copy of a human on a cloud server and make them work 24/7.

I would expect that as laypeople we aren’t equipped to reason about this effectively. I suspect that decades or more of case law would be relevant to how this would be viewed, and I’m personally not equipped to argue it.

What I do know is that artists don’t feel good about it. They feel like they’re being taken from. And I’m not inclined to quickly dismiss their concerns. I think this needs careful, deliberate consideration. And if a system could be built that is consent based, I’d feel much better about it. A human child could be raised and mature without ever being exposed to copyrighted material beyond a handful of books (harder in the modern world but common 200 years ago). Maybe we just need to build better models. It certainly seems possible.

[throwaway14356]

if you can legally use something its not stealing.

Even the argument that its logical to call it that isn't certain.

If i take your picture I own it?

If you take a picture and i upload it to fb meta gets to use it?

If I publish your book under my name and no one finds out, did I write it?

If no author can be found, may I read it?

[anonymousab]

> I think copyright law is a cudgel

It is interesting to me that we are finally seeing a case where many smaller, independent artists and creators are using these laws to assert their rights against the encroachment of the moneyed tech interests, and of course now all of the powerful corpos are singing another tune. Rules for thee, not for me.

[cqqxo4zV46cp]

Yep. That is the question. Anyone that immediately comes back with “it’s stealing!”, especially those that were confidently saying it when this first became an issue, long before they would’ve had any time to contemplate it deeply, are just proving that techies’ sense of transferable expertise is completely unfounded.

[Retric]

No it isn’t, because ‘steeling’ is allowed.

There’s no question these neural networks and their output are derivative works. However being a derivative work isn’t enough to guarantee copyright infringement.

So, the only question is if we are going to carve out an exception here or not. The idea someone can use a VCR to copy live TV and let people watch it later came out of a court case not copyright law. There’s a lot of such exceptions, but getting one isn’t guaranteed.

[Ukv]

> There’s no question these neural networks and their output are derivative works.

In the two US cases we have any progress on so far, the established requirement for substantial similarity (opposed to "dependant on" or such) has been upheld, with Judge Vince Chhabria specifically setting out that it'd "have to mean that if you put the Llama language model next to Sarah Silverman's book, you would say they're similar". and Judge William H. Orrick agreeing with the defendants that "plaintiffs cannot plausibly allege the Output Images are substantially similar or re-present protected aspects of copyrighted Training Images, especially in light of plaintiffs’ admission that Output Images are unlikely to look like the Training Images".

The UK definition of derivative works is, to my understanding, narrower and specifically enumerated as opposed to the US's more open-ended definition.

The remaining area of doubt, assuming the above remains consistent, is over the transient copying that occurs during training.

[chii]

> the transient copying that occurs during training.

i think this should be dismissed as it is the same level of transience as the workings of the internet; you and your ISP, caching proxies etc, all made a transient copy as part of the existing (legal) consumption of the works that the author has put online.

Unless the works was illegally copied for training - which cannot be true if the works was publicly available for viewing on the internet, this transient copying cannot be a valid infringement.

[Retric]

This case involves a many examples of substantial similarity. Worse it’s precedent that generative AI doesn’t necessarily avoid creating such examples.

Defendants can easily argue that being 1/10 millionth or whatever of the training set means their specific work is unlikely to show up in any specific example but the underlying mechanism means it can be recreated.

[surfacedetail]

The defendants will evidently claim transient copying.

[deeviant]

> There’s no question these neural networks and their output are derivative works.

A derivative work is an expressive creation that includes major copyrightable elements of a first, previously created original work (the underlying work).

There is absolutely no agreement that what neural networks do (as a rule) counts as such, so it is not at all correct to say "there is no question..."

If learning how to draw by watching other people draw makes everything you draw a derivative work, then perhaps you have a point.

[Retric]

The network in question recreated the exact content in question on a specific event. What happens is general isn’t the issue, the problem comes from specific output.

For a neural network to be able to recreate a complex work with minimal prompting it must be encode that information and therefore be a derivative work.

[bobthepanda]

There are some ironclad exceptions but they would have to make it through the dysfunctional Congress.

The big one is recipes. Recipes under the current copyright regime in the US are considered non-copyrightable facts, which is why every cookbook and recipe blog has lots of copyrightable splash photos and personal anecdotes. Congress specifically doesn’t want grandmas getting sued for copying the recipe on the box.

[papercrane]

> Congress specifically doesn’t want grandmas getting sued for copying the recipe on the box.

Recipes don't have a specific exception within the the copyright law that Congress has carved out.

It is also not cut and dry. It basically boils down to facts not being copyrightable. So a list of ingredients and basic instructions (e.g. cooking time and temperature) won't be granted copyright protection.

But, the prose in the instructions can be copyrighted. So copying a whole recipe verbatim can be copyright infringement, but copying the list of ingredients and writing out the basic instructions is not.

[blibble]

not sure what Congress has to do with a case in the UK

fair use is mostly a US concept, there is no such thing in the UK or most other countries

[AmericanChopper]

> There’s no question these neural networks and their output are derivative works.

Most generated content almost certainly isn’t derivative work by the standards of copyright law. It’s plainly obvious to anybody who’s read Frank Herbert’s books that he derived a lot of ideas from Isaac Asimov, but it’s equally obvious that Dune isn’t a derivative work of Foundation.

If I had some commercial interest in generative AI models, I’d be very happy that everybody is debating the copyright implications. Because copyright law is certainly going to favour the models. The biggest regulatory risk to them as far as I can tell is that they clearly don’t have section 230 protections, and I can’t imagine how that isn’t going to come crashing down around them rather soon.

[Retric]

If you run someone over you can’t defend yourself by saying 99.999% of the time you didn’t run someone over. Most output being free of copyright issues isn’t a defense if any output has those issues.

Specific examples of clear copyright infringement mean that output is a derivative work AND by encoding enough information to recreate it the underlying neural network must itself be a derivative work.

[surfacedetail]

Derivative work has a specific meaning in copyright law, there has to be something in the output, and that's not the case here. Otherwise every single owner of 5 billion images could sue you for your "cat at a cafe" midjourney picture.

Judge Orrick in one of the US cases already called this idea 'nonsense", his words.

[Retric]

Not all outputs are at issue here, but if ANY output is copyright infringement they have problems.

Specific and clear examples of derivative works are shown therefore both those exact examples and the underlying neural network must be a derivative work.

[lelanthran]

I think that if you stick to a definition of 'fair use' that allows the slurping of entire corpuses, then copyright doesn't have any teeth anymore.

If the license makes the data public viewing, like with websites, then slurp all you want. If the license forbids automated bulk processing, then stop whining about fair use and pay for a license that allows bulk processing.

"Out system actively uses every single byte of data to produce any output" is so obviously not the intention fair use clauses.

[surfacedetail]

Fair use doesn't exist in the UK.

[Loughla]

What is your justification for AI training not being theft?

[prvc]

If including a copyrighted work in an AI training corpus is theft because of its influence on some artificial neural net, then so is viewing it by a human being, whose memory is now somehow the property of the copyright holder, an absurd conclusion.

[notahacker]

Well if we're concluding that training a neural net and a human mind forming memories is exactly the same thing, I'm looking forward to all their defenders agreeing that the neural nets should be held criminally responsible every time they generate an image deemed unlawful in certain jurisdictions...

Otherwise there's obviously a legally relevant distinction between a human mind which is ascribed agency to decide if and how to use its memories of copyrighted material, and importing into an information retrieval system which can't help but spit out transformations of parts of its inputs on demand, (including lossy representations of the Getty watermark if it's fed enough Getty material, or an exact facsimile of an image if that's all it's trained on...)

[naet]

There's a massive jump in that logic, which is basically equating a large neural net to being exactly the same as a singular human being. If you ask me that is clearly not the case. They operate in entirely different ways and have very different properties.

[prvc]

>There's a massive jump in that logic, which is basically equating a large neural net to being exactly the same as a singular human being.

It does not assume that.

[CamperBob2]

Are you willing to give up this point of view the first time you fail a Turing test? It seems only fair.

[anonymousab]

Humans are not treated the same as machines and business ventures. Many things are illegal for the latter and are not thought crimes for the former.

[poidos]

Your premise that a neural net is equivalent to a human brain seems much more absurd.

[prvc]

You wouldn't look at a car.

[artninja1988]

Copying is not theft in general as you don't take anything away from anybody

[anonymousab]

The major corps and tech companies loved to claim otherwise for years as it suited their interests.

[oblib]

>>Copying is not theft in general as you don't take anything away from anybody

That's a perfect oxymoron.

[surfacedetail]

Theft has specific meaning in law, and it's reserved for physical property (or unique digital assets and financial instruments like bonds).

Copyright uses infringement, which is not theft: it's non-rivalrous, and it contains a number of exceptions.

[gedy]

Fair use. (Even if the creator doesn't like that)

[JambalayaJim]

Training a model on another person’s work shouldn’t be considered theft, but the model also shouldn’t be allowed to generate profits. Without of course compensating the owner of the training data.

Someone needs to come up with a royalty structure for this stuff.

[jterrys]

I think using data that you don't have the copyrights to train AI is theft.

That being said, Getty is hardly the paragon of goodwill considering they regularly steal from public domain databases, issue DMCA takedown requests of the stolen content from said databases, and then turn around to sell it to unwitting people for a subscription. They own none of the copyrights for what they are doing but have been allowed to get away with it.

[visarga]

> I think using data that you don't have the copyrights to train AI is theft.

There are public domain works you can use and copyright doesn't protect ideas. It protects expression of ideas, so getting "just the ideas" without the expression is ok.

[jterrys]

Right. Public domain is stuff that doesn't have exclusive IP rights. You can do with that what you want.

The problem is that "expression of ideas" in the realm of AI is akin to plagiarism by human standards, because its a literal copying of the source material blended together. I couldn't recite you the entire plot of the Odyssey off the top of my head literally, but AI can, because it has the source material. We just tell it to do funny ha-ha things so its okay.

[zmgsabst]

Have you only read books you own the copyright to?

What’s the legal distinction between you learning and AI learning?

[keonix]

If I regurgiate something I read in copyrighted book without proper license that also would be theft, no distinction there.

I'm not distributing my brain, at least same (but probably more restrictive) should apply to models - training is okay, but using and distributing should be limited by copyright

[broken-kebab]

Explaining anything publicly based on my understanding I got reading books would be illegal following this logic. I'm not sure this is how it works.

[lelanthran]

Redistribution, and the scale of it.

Besides which, "learning" isn't a fair use exemption anyway.

[gumballindie]

Using that which belongs to others without their consent is theft. There isn’t much to debate, unless of course, you wish to benefit from that theft. Powerful corpos can train whatever they wish against the data they own. For instance, microsoft can train its bots on microsoft’s source code, instead of people’s code, but that is not going to happen because they are aware of the implications - the procedural generators are exactly that and nothing more. Meanwhile we cant use their products without a license.

So if they decides to play this game then so should we.

[Ukv]

> Using that which belongs to others without their consent is theft

Are text snippets, thumbnnails and site caches shown by search engines (on an opt-out basis) "theft"? If you draw a car, which you can do due to having seen many individually-copyrighted car designs, are you stealing from auto manufacturers? Have I just committed theft by using a portion of your comment above as a quote?

I don't claim here that statistical model fitting inherently needs to be treated the same as the above examples, but rather use examples to show that the bar of "using" is far too broad.

Legally, copyright infringement in the US requires that the works are substantially similar and not covered by Fair Use. Morally, I believe that artificial scarcity, such as evergreening of medical patents, is detrimental and needs to be prevented wherever feasible - and wouldn't call any kind of copying/sharing/piracy "theft". The digital equivalent of theft is, for example, account theft where you're actually removing the object from the owner's possession.

[tavavex]

Theft is the act of taking away someone else's property. "Using" (aka copying) the public data I create isn't theft, be it with my consent or without. It may be copyright infringement under certain conditions, but arguing that this infringement is stealing is like arguing that digital piracy and shoplifting are basically the same thing.

[AmericanChopper]

> Using that which belongs to others without their consent is theft.

Using publicly available information doesn’t require anybody’s consent.

[rasz]

Thats because the word 'training' is doing all the heavy lifting here. Think of it as copying, compressing and storing all the copyrighted material in a database. Humans learn, humans train, computers encode data. You would never say ffmpeg learned a movie.

[chii]

> You would never say ffmpeg learned a movie.

no you wouldn't, but these diffusion models do way more than ffmpeg, and do qualitatively different things.

I am on the fence, but i lean towards the side where training an AI using existing works is not infringement, as long as the AI's output is (or can be) majority new works. For example, a poor training algorithm that merely repeats the training dataset (and cannot output new works) is infringing, while a different algorithm (such as the current stable diffusion one) that can output works that has never been made and is totally new, does not infringe - after all, style and ideas are not infringing and if the algorithm managed to extract those ideas from the training set, all the better.

[TimPC]

Majority new works is not a good enough standard. If any output is a direct reproduction of a copyrighted input that output is copyright infringement whether it was intended or not. If the trainer of the model doesn’t want to be sued for infringement they are responsible for a robust safety mechanism that prevents it. If that safety mechanism isn’t possible than don’t use copyrighted works if you have any possibility of directly reproducing them.

[chii]

> If any output is a direct reproduction of a copyrighted input that output is copyright infringement

so by that standard, why isnt photoshop a copyright infringement? You can use it to create a copy just the same.

[ddol]

What’s the test for “has never been made and is totally new”?

If I look at a photo of Prince and then using that image as reference create a new silkscreen painting is that fair use or infringement?

Because the US Supreme Court has ruled that instance I referenced was infringement as both images were used for magazine covers [0].

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna64624

[chii]

> What’s the test for “has never been made and is totally new”?

the existing copyright rulings are sufficient to determine this, and has nothing to do with ai models.

You've already pointed out a case - if you use an AI to generate an image which has sufficient likeness to an existing one, then the AI portion is irrelevant to the ruling. You could've made that same image in photoshop without AI, and should obtain the same ruling.

But in the above circumstance, the silkscreen used in the creation of the image does not itself infringe. And replace that silkscreen with AI model, nothing has changed.

[davely]

> Think of it as copying, compressing and storing all the copyrighted material in a database.

But it isn’t. It’s just a series of vectors that point to a likely occurrence of the next word or pixel or bit in a sequence.

[rasz]

You are trying to argue encoding semantics, but at the end of a day the "AI" was completely happy to recite Carmack's Fast inverse square root including original comments verbatim word for word.

https://twitter.com/StefanKarpinski/status/14109710611816816...

[davely]

With the way these AI models work, that data isn’t stored in a database though.

It’s hard for people to understand this concept, but the fact that a model repeated some data verbatim is a happy coincidence (!) solely based on patterns of data that it seen before.

I think people have also have a hard time with how these models are trained. They are vacuuming up all sorts of data and learning from them by creating vectors that determine how follow-up data should be generated.

Sure, the original creators of this content aren’t being compensated or even recognized for it. I don’t have a good idea on how that should be handled.

For normal humans though, looking at art or reading a book, and later repeating some passage or drawing something from your own memory is not a crime. (Unless you’re sharing the DeCSS source code I guess…)

Slightly changing the topic here, but I do wonder what were to happen if someone wrote a program called “Monkeys on Typewriters” that just iterated through various combinations of characters (or bits or pixels) and was able to recreate things verbatim.

Is that random happenstance copyright infringement?

[surfacedetail]

Reciting common text or common license elements and commentary isn't necessarily copyright infringement.

[gpm]

You would never say ffmpeg stole a movie either...