this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2024
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It's all made from our data, anyway, so it should be ours to use as we want

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 19 hours ago

I used whisper to create subs of a video and in a section with instrumental relaxing music it filled on repeat with

La scuola del Dr. Paret è una tecnologia di ipnosi non verbale che si utilizza per risultati di un'ipnosi non verbale

Clearly stolen from this Dr paret YouTube channels where he's selling hypnosis lessons in Italian. Probably in one or multiple videos he had subs stating this over the same relaxing instrumental music that I used and the model assumed the sound corresponded to that text

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Although I'm a firm believer that most AI models should be public domain or open source by default, the premise of "illegally trained LLMs" is flawed. Because there really is no assurance that LLMs currently in use are illegally trained to begin with. These things are still being argued in court, but the AI companies have a pretty good defense in the fact analyzing publicly viewable information is a pretty deep rooted freedom that provides a lot of positives to the world.

The idea of... well, ideas, being copyrightable, should shake the boots of anyone in this discussion. Especially since when the laws on the book around these kinds of things become active topic of change, they rarely shift in the direction of more freedom for the exact people we want to give it to. See: Copyright and Disney.

The underlying technology simply has more than enough good uses that banning it would simply cause it to flourish elsewhere that does not ban it, which means as usual that everyone but the multinational companies lose out. The same would happen with more strict copyright, as only the big companies have the means to build their own models with their own data. The general public is set up for a lose-lose to these companies as it currently stands. By requiring the models to be made available to the public do we ensure that the playing field doesn't tip further into their favor to the point AI technology only exists to benefit them.

If the model is built on the corpus of humanity, then humanity should benefit.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 16 hours ago (3 children)

the AI companies have a pretty good defense in the fact analyzing publicly viewable information is a pretty deep rooted freedom that provides a lot of positives to the world

They are not "analyzing" the data. They are feeding it into a regurgitating mechanism. There's a big difference. Their defense is only "good" because AI is being misrepresented and misunderstood.

I agree that we shouldn't strive for more strict copyright. We should fight for a much more liberal system. But as long as everyone else has to live by the current copyright laws, we should not let AI companies get away with what they're doing.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 15 hours ago (9 children)

I've never really delved into the AI copyright debate before, so forgive my ignorance on the matter.

I don't understand how an AI reading a bunch of books and rearranging some of those words into a new story, is different to a human author reading a bunch of books and rearranging those words into a new story.

Most AI art I've seen has been... Unique, to say the least. To me, they tend to be different enough to the art they were trained in to not be a direct ripoff, so personally I don't see the issue.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 hours ago

I don’t understand how an AI reading a bunch of books and rearranging some of those words into a new story, is different to a human author reading a bunch of books and rearranging those words into a new story.

Ok, let's say for now that these things are actually similar. Is a human legally allowed to "rearrange those words" in any way they want? Not really, because they can't copy stuff like characters or plot structure. Even if the copy is not verbatim, it has to avoid being "too similar". It's not always clear where the threshold is; that will be judged in court. But imagine if your were being sued for copyright infringement because of perceived similarities between your work and another creator's. You go to court and say "Well I torrented the plaintiff's work and studied it with the express intent to copy discernible patterns in it, then sell my work based on those patterns". As long as the similarities are found to be valid, you're most likely to lose. The fact that you've spent years campaigning how companies can save a lot of money by firing artists and hiring your pattern-replicating service instead probably wouldn't help your case either. Well, that's basically what an honest defense of AI against copyright infringement would be. So the question is, does AI actually produce output too similar to its training data? Well, this is an example of articles you can find on the topic...

So based on the above thoughts, do you feel like we hold AI generation to the same standard as we do human creators? It doesn't seem so to me.

But there's a lot of reasons why we should hold AIs to higher standards instead. Off the top of my head:

  • AIs have been created exclusively to replicate patterns in existing works. This is not the only function people have. So we don't have to wonder whether similarities between AI inputs and outputs are coincidental. We don't have to worry about whether overbearing restrictions might inadvertently affect some other function.
  • AIs have no feelings or needs. We don't have to worry about causing direct harm to them and about protecting their rights. Forbidding a person from reading a book just in case they copy elements from it is obviously problematic, but restricting AI's access to copyrighted work is not directly harmful in the same way.
[–] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

The for-profit large-scale media blender is the problem. When it's a human writing Harry Potter fan fiction, it's fine. When a company sells a tool for you to write thousands of trash "books" for profit, it's a problem.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago

Which is why the technology itself isn't the issue, but those willing to use it in unethical ways. AI is an invaluable tool to those with limited means, unlike big corporations.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

They are not “analyzing” the data. They are feeding it into a regurgitating mechanism. There’s a big difference. Their defense is only “good” because AI is being misrepresented and misunderstood.

I really kind of hope you're kidding here. Because this has got to be the most roundabout way of saying they're analyzing the information. Just because you think it does so to regurgitate (which I have yet to see any good evidence for, at least for the larger models), does not change the definition of analyzing. And by doing so you are misrepresenting it and showing you might just have misunderstood it, which is ironic. And doing so does not help the cause of anyone who wishes to reduce the harm from AI, as you are literally giving ammo to people to point to and say you are being irrational about it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Yes if you completely ignore how data is processed and how the product is derived from the data, then everything can be labeled "data analysis". Great point. So copyright infringement can never exist because the original work can always be considered data that you analyze. Incredible.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (5 children)

No, not what I said at all. If you're trying to say I'm making this argument I'd urge you (ironically) to actually analyze what I said rather than putting words in my mouth ;) (Or just, you know, ask me to clarify)

Copyright infringement (or plagiarism) in it's simplest form, as in just taking the material as is, is devoid of any analysis. The point is to avoid having to do that analysis and just get right to the end result that has value.

But that's not what AI technology does. None of the material used to train it ends up in the model. It looks at the training data and extracts patterns. For text, that is the sentence structure, the likelihood of words being followed by another, the paragraph/line length, the relationship between words when used together, and more. It can do all of this without even 'knowing' what these things are, because they are simply patterns that show up in large amounts of data, and machine learning as a technology is made to be able to detect and extract those patterns. That detection is synonymous with how humans do analysis. What it detects are empirical, factual observations about the material it is shown, which cannot be copyrighted.

The resulting data when fed back to the AI can be used to have it extrapolate on incomplete data, which it could not do without such analysis. You can see this quite easily by asking an AI to refer to you by a specific name, or talk in a specific manner, such as a pirate. It 'understands' that certain words are placeholders for names, and that text can be 'pirateitfied' by adding filler words or pre/suffixing other words. It could not do so without analysis, unless that exact text was already in the data to begin with, which is doubtful.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (2 children)

Not to mention patent laws are bullshit.

There are law offices that exist specifically to fuck with people over patent and copyright law.

There's also cases where people use copyright and patent law to hold us back. I can't find the article but some religious jerk patented connecting a sex toy to a computer via USB. Thankfully someone got around this law with bluetooth and cell phones. Otherwise I imagine the camgirl and LDR market for toys would've been hit with products 10 years sooner.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

Banning AI is out of the question. Even the EU accepts that and they tend to be pretty ban heavy, unlike the US.

But it's important that we have these discussions about how copyright applies to AI so that we can actually get an answer and move on, right now it's this legal quagmire that no one really wants to get involved in except the big companies. If a small group of university students want to build an AI right now they can't because of the legal nightmare that would be the Twilight zone of law that is acquiring training data.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

AI is right-out unregulated in the EU unless and until you actually use it for something where it becomes relevant, then you've got at the lower end labelling requirements (If your customer service is an AI chat, say that it's an AI chat), up to heavy, heavy requirements when you use it for stuff like sifting through job applications. The burden of proof that the AI isn't e.g. racist is on you. Or, for that matter, using to reject health insurance claims, I think we saw some news lately out of the US what can happen when you do that.

OpenAI's copyright case isn't really good to make the legal situation any clearer: We already know that using pirated content to train stuff isn't legal because you're not looking at it legitimately. The case isn't about the "are computers allowed to learn from public sources just as humans are" question.

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's not punishment, LLM do not belong to them, they belong to all of humanity. Tear down the enclosing fences.

This is our common heritage, not OpenAI's private property

[–] [email protected] 2 points 18 hours ago

It doesn't matter anyway, we still need the big companies to bankroll AI. So it effectively does belong to them whatever we do.

Hopefully at some point people can get the processor requirements to something sane and AI development opens up to us all.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago (5 children)

Wouldnt that give people who is it for bad things easier access? It should be made illegal to create if they dont legally have access to that data

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[–] [email protected] 86 points 1 day ago (8 children)

So banks will be public domain when they're bailed out with taxpayer funds, too, right?

[–] [email protected] 59 points 1 day ago (3 children)

They should be, but currently it depends on the type of bailout, I suppose.

For instance, if a bank completely fails and goes under, the FDIC usually is named Receiver of the bank's assets, and now effectively owns the bank.

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[–] [email protected] 61 points 1 day ago (5 children)

A similar argument can be made about nationalizing corporations which break various laws, betray public trust, etc etc.

I'm not commenting on the virtues of such an approach, but I think it is fair to say that it is unrealistic, especially for countries like the US which fetishize profit at any cost.

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[–] [email protected] 129 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (23 children)

It won't really do anything though. The model itself is whatever. The training tools, data and resulting generations of weights are where the meat is. Unless you can prove they are using unlicensed data from those three pieces, open sourcing it is kind of moot.

What we need is legislation to stop it from happening in perpetuity. Maybe just ONE civil case win to make them think twice about training on unlicensed data, but they'll drag that out for years until people go broke fighting, or stop giving a shit.

They pulled a very public and out in the open data heist and got away with it. Stopping it from continuously happening is the only way to win here.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 day ago (1 children)

They pulled a very pubic and out in the open data heist

Oh no, not the pubes! Get those curlies outta here!

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago

Best correction ever. Fixed. ♥️

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 day ago (16 children)

Legislation that prohibits publicly-viewable information from being analyzed without permission from the copyright holder would have some pretty dramatic and dire unintended consequences.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 day ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

"Given they were trained on our data, it makes sense that it should be public commons – that way we all benefit from the processing of our data"

I wonder how many people besides the author of this article are upset solely about the profit-from-copyright-infringement aspect of automated plagiarism and bullshit generation, and thus would be satisfied by the models being made more widely available.

The inherent plagiarism aspect of LLMs seems far more offensive to me than the copyright infringement, but both of those problems pale in comparison to the effects on humanity of masses of people relying on bullshit generators with outputs that are convincingly-plausible-yet-totally-wrong (and/or subtly wrong) far more often than anyone notices.

I liked the author's earlier very-unlikely-to-be-met-demand activism last year better:

I just sent @OpenAI a cease and desist demanding they delete their GPT 3.5 and GPT 4 models in their entirety and remove all of my personal data from their training data sets before re-training in order to prevent #ChatGPT telling people I am dead.

...which at least yielded the amusingly misleading headline OpenAI ordered to delete ChatGPT over false death claims (it's technically true - a court didn't order it, but a guy who goes by the name "That One Privacy Guy" while blogging on linkedin did).

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago

Another clown dick article by someone who knows fuck all about ai

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 day ago (26 children)

It could also contain non-public domain data, and you can't declare someone else's intellectual property as public domain just like that, otherwise a malicious actor could just train a model with a bunch of misappropriated data, get caught (intentionally or not) and then force all that data into public domain.

Laws are never simple.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Imaginary property has always been a tricky concept, but the law always ends up just protecting the large corporations at the expense of the people who actually create things. I assume the end result here will be large corporations getting royalties from AI model usage or measures put in place to prevent generating content infringing on their imaginary properties and everyone else can get fucked.

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[–] [email protected] -3 points 12 hours ago

I really don't care about AI used on designs for generic products.

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