[vorticalbox]

It is learning though. It’s not just copying the code.

Code gets turned into tokens and then it learns the next most likely token.

The issue that I see most people talk about it the scale at which is learnt.

A human will learn from other people’s code but not from every persons code.

[cogman10]

The issue is that of copyright law WRT to derivative works. Machine transformations on original works does not create a new copyright for the person that directed the machine transformation. That's why you can't pirate a bunch of media by simply adding a red pixel to the righthand corner or by color shifting the video.

Copyright law is very clear that if a machine does it, the original copyright on the input is kept. This is why your distributed binaries are still copyrighted, because the machine transformed, very significantly, the source code into binary which maintains the copyright throughout.

It would be inconsistent for the courts to suddenly decide that "actually, this specific type of machine transformation is actually innovative."

I know this is generally really bad for the AI industry, so they just ignore it until a court tells them they can't anymore. And they might get away with it as I don't have faith that the courts will be consistent.

[red75prime]

Shredding is a machine transformation. Does it mean that shreds retain original copyright even if the content can't be restored and the provenance can't be traced? Just an example that treating all machine transformations equally with no regard to the specifics doesn't make much sense.

And the specifics of autoregressive pretraining is that it is lossy compression. Good luck finding which copyrighted materials have made it into the final weights.

[cogman10]

> Does it mean that shreds retain original copyright even if the content can't be restored?

Yup, it absolutely does. In fact, that's why you are still violating copyright law by using bittorrent even though each of the users is only giving out a small slice or shred of the original content.

The US has a granted defense in the case of something like shredding called "Fair Use" but that doesn't mean or imply that a copyright is void simply because of a fair use claim.

> And the specifics of autoregressive pretraining is that it is lossy compression.

That doesn't matter. Why would it? If I take a FLAC recording and change it to an MP3. The fact that it was a lossy transform doesn't suddenly give me the legal right to distribute the MP3.

> Good luck finding which copyrighted materials have made it into the final weights.

That's what the NYT v. OpenAI lawsuit is all about. And for earlier models they could, in fact, pull out full NYT articles which proved they made it into the final weights.

Further, the NYT is currently in discovery which means OpenAI must open up to the NYT what goes into their weights. A move that, if OpenAI loses, other litigants can also use because there's a real good shot that OpenAI also included their works in the dataset.

[red75prime]

> Yup, it absolutely does

Well, it's not the first time when the law contradicts laws of nature (for the entertainment of the future generations). Bittorent is not a relevant example, because the system is designed to restore the work in its fullness.

> in fact, pull out full NYT articles

That's when they used their knowledge of the exact text they wanted to "retrieve" to get the text? It wouldn't be so efficient with a random number generator, but it's doable.

[cogman10]

> Bittorent is not a relevant example, because the system is designed to restore the work in its fullness.

You can restore shredded documents with enough time and effort. And if you did that and started making photo copies, even if they are incomplete, you will run afoul of copyright law.

Bittorrent is a relevant example because it shows that shredding doesn't destroy copyright.

Remember, copyright is about the right to copy something. Simply shredding or destroying a thing isn't applicable to copyright. Nor is giving that thing away. What's applicable is when you start to actually copy the thing.

[red75prime]

I've meant idealized shredding: a destructive transformation, which is still a machine transformation (think blender instead of shredder). When you need the exact knowledge of a thing to make its (imperfect) copy using some mechanism, it doesn't mean that the mechanism violates copyright.

EDIT: I don't say that neural networks can't rote learn extensive passages (it's an effect of data duplication). I'm saying that they are not designed to do that and it's possible to prevent that (as demonstrated by the latest models).

[ell1e]

LLMs seem to be so devoid of intelligence, I think it's arguable if that's learning: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-think... Typically, you would imply a level of understanding when you say learning. LLMs apparently can't do that, by design.

[blks]

A human is not a commercial product. Here we have commercial product that was created by using a lot of various copyrighted and protected IP, without licensing agreements, without paying, without even citing it.