[loumf]

The intellectual property law that governs ACM articles is copyright law, not patents. I don’t know who controls these (the ACM or the authors) or what rights might have been granted to the public.

The entire point of copyright law is so that people can make their writing public and still be able to control the right to make copies (for example, into your dataset for training an LLM).

[bonoboTP]

Copyright protects against reprinting or reproducing the wording and expression, not using the idea expressed in there in novel contexts.

[20k]

AI reproduces copyrighted work exactly in many cases, so it clearly infringes copyright in this sense

The output of it is also a derivative work, and derivative works also infringe copyright. Its only not a problem if you ignore copyright entirely

Humans are the only entities that get to enjoy special idea-learning-exemptions, not AI

[kelnos]

Are you a lawyer that has tested this in court, or is this just what you want the reality to be?

As someone with lots of open source code out there that has likely been used as LLM training data, I'm very sympathetic to this point of view, but that doesn't seem to be the legal reality. Much of this has not been fully tested in court, but it seems likely that LLM training is not copyright infringement, as long as the training material itself was acquired legally.

[20k]

I mean, its theoretically possible that a court might rule that if an LLM outputs an exact or lightly modified piece of copyrighted work, that it won't be copyright encumbered. We'll end up in a situation where copyright doesn't exist anymore, because you can always claim that its been laundered through an AI. This seems terribly unlikely to me, because 1:1 transformations (eg copying an image into memory) are already established to count as making a copy for legal purposes, there's strong precedent around piracy

There's also been court cases where material has been found to be infringingly used, eg song lyrics, so the case where copyright ceases to exist doesn't seem to be coming through yet, thankfully. It'd be the most staggering upheaval of copyright of all time if this doesn't turn out to be true

[bonoboTP]

The verbatim reproduction is clearly a red herring and not the main use case. Nobody reads novels (or science papers) by prompting ChatGPT to give the next paragraph.

Derivative work or transformative? It's not the same.

[20k]

AI code generation often outputs exact copies of code that exists in the wild. I've seen it output chunks from research papers unprompted as well, its a big problem, or blending two papers together in a salad

AI works also clearly aren't transformative in many cases. If you ask it a question about a paper, it'll quote bits of the paper at you. That serves as an exact substitute of the original work. If you ask it for song lyrics, or information about the news, its content is a direct substitute for the original source it was trained on. This clearly does not fall under a transformative use case

You could argue that some uses of it are transformative, but even then - its easy to find some piece of training data in the source code that the output work supersedes. By its very nature it does not have the capacity to genuinely invent under the law (as it is not human), and a prompt isn't a significant enough part of the processing to count here

[visarga]

As long as it is not substantially similar to training set it should be OK to reuse ideas. Ideas should not be protected by copyright or we can't create anything. We should not accept "vibe copyrights".

Everyone treats the human user of the AI as furniture, but they steer the whole process into unique directions.

[20k]

Under the law, machines are not able to create copyright, and basic human involvement is not enough to change this. Eg if you click a button saying "go", that won't create copyrightable content

You can use all the ideas you want, but AI cannot because its not a person, and does not enjoy the same protection under the law. The copyright holders by and large did not agree to you using their content like this

If we enable this, people won't create anything because all their work will immediately be stolen by the AI models. Copyright partially exists to promote the creation of new content, because theft disincentivises novel creation

[seanmcdirmid]

Are you sure you didn’t have RAG enabled and it wasn’t putting the paper in its context for your prompt? I find it hard to believe that anything but the most commonly published papers/code would exist directly in model weights.

[20k]

I've seen:

1. AI models frequently output large chunks of code which are plagiarised. In one specific case it was code for walking the stack, that was a clear mix of two original sources that I was able to find with changed variable names, but the structure was identical and switched from the first to the second halfway through

2. AI models plagiarising stack overflow answers word for word, quite recently about the rotation rate of smoothbore cannons in the age of sail

3. AI misspelling answers because the physics papers its trained on made the same typos, which is how I discovered that it had plagiarised the answer

4. Misconceptions/wrong answers that can be traced back to specific papers due to the oddly specific nature of the language used

There's been a lot of research about getting AI models to output their training data, and it turns out they store huge amounts of it. You can use this to get people's personal information if you really want to, and that's very low occurance information

[hparadiz]

Suddenly it's "copyright infringement" to count the amount of times one word occurs after another word. I find this whole thing so amusing.

[20k]

AI has the capacity to exactly reproduce its training data, just because something is a transformed representation does not mean that it isn't copying it in some fashion. The JPEG format 'just' counts the frequencies in an 8x8 block of pixels, and yes that's 100% copyright infringement

[kelnos]

I have the capacity to exactly reproduce things I've read as well, but it's not automatically copyright infringement if I do so.

> and yes that's 100% copyright infringement

Says what court of law?

I'm kinda getting tired of this stuff. I'm someone who has been, and still to some extent is, uncomfortable with the possibility of copyright/license laundering in LLMs, but they way you are making your argument is incredibly off-putting and not sympathetic. You're throwing out wild assertions about the law that are not supported by... anything, really.

[hparadiz]

The courts don't agree with you and I don't either. Now what?

[visarga]

> The output of it is also a derivative work,

A short session is just retrieval, a long session is always unique. The more the user writes the more it diverges from any content in the dataset.

[brookst]

Can you point me to the statute that makes it ok for humans to learn from copyrighted work, but forbids AI? I’ll wait.