Comment by ticulatedspline
7 months ago
Definitely seems reasonable to say "you can train on this data but you have to have a legal copy"
Personally I like to frame most AI problems by substituting a human (or humans) for the AI. Works pretty well most of the time.
In this case if you hired a bunch of artists/writers that somehow had never seen a Disney movie and to train them to make crappy Disney clones you made them watch all the movies it certainly would be legal to do so but only if they had legit copies in the training room. Pirating the movies would be illegal.
Though the downside is it does create a training moat. If you want to create the super-brain AI that's conversant on the corpus of copyrighted human literature you're going to need a training library worth millions
> Personally I like to frame most AI problems by substituting a human (or humans) for the AI. Works pretty well most of the time.
Human time is inherently valuable, computer time is not.
The issue with LLMs is that they allow doing things at a massive scale which would previously be prohibitively time consuming. (You could argue but them how much electricity is worth one human life?)
If I "write" a book by taking another and replacing every word with a synonym, that's obviously plagiarism and obviously copyright infringement. How about also changing the word order? How about rewording individual paragraphs while keeping the general structure? It's all still derivative work but as you make it less detectable, the time and effort required is growing to become uneconomical. An LLM can do it cheaply. It can mix and match parts of many works but it's all still a derivative of those works combined. After all, if it wasn't, it would produce equally good output with a tiny fraction of the training data.
The outcome is that a small group of people (those making LLMs and selling access to their output) get to make huge amounts of money off of the work of a group that is several orders of magnitude larger (essentially everyone who has written something on the internet) without compensating the larger group.
That is fundamentally exploitative, whether the current laws accounted for that situation or not.
That's a part of the issue. I'm not sure if this has happened in visual arts, but there is in fact precedent against trying to hire a sound a like over the one you want to sound like. You can't be in talks with Scarlet Johannsen, reject her, and then hire a sound a like and say "talk like Scarlet". It's pretty clear at that point what you want but you didn't want to pay talent for it.
I see elements of that here. Buying copyrighted works not to be exposed and be inspired, nor to utilize the aithor's talents, but to fuel a commercialization of sound-a-likes.
> You can't be in talks with Scarlet Johannsen, reject her, and then hire a sound a like and say "talk like Scarlet"
Keep in mind, the Authors in the lawsuit are not claiming the _output_ is copyright infringement so Alsup isn't deciding that.
> but there is in fact precedent against trying to hire a sound a like over the one you want to sound like. You can't be in talks with Scarlet Johannsen, reject her, and then hire a sound a like and say "talk like Scarlet". It's pretty clear at that point what you want but you didn't want to pay talent for it.
You're referencing Midler v Ford Motor Co in the 9th circuit. This case largely applies to California, not the whole nation. Even then, it would take one Supreme Court case to overturn it.
> Definitely seems reasonable to say "you can train on this data but you have to have a legal copy"
How many copies? They're not serving a single client.
Libraries need to have multiple e-book licenses, after all.
In the human training case probably a Store DVD would still run afoul of that licensing issue. That's a broader topic of audience and I didn't want to muddy the analogy with that detail.
It changes the definition of what a "legal copy" is but the general idea that the copy must be legal still stands.
Fair enough.
What you are describing happened and they got sued:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_Mouse#Walt_Disney_Produ...
I'm on the Air Pirates side for the case linked, by the way.
However, AI is not a parody. It's not adding to the cultural expression like a parody would.
Let's forget all the law stuff and these silly hypotheticals. Let's think of humanity instead:
Is AI contributing to education and/or culture _right now_, or is it trying to make money? I think they're trying to make money.
> It's not adding to the cultural expression like a parody would.
Says who?
> Is AI contributing to education and/or culture _right now_, or is it trying to make money?
How on earth are those things mutually exclusive? Also, whether or not it's being used to make money is completely irrelevant to whether or not it is copyright infringement.
> Says who?
Artists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAG-AFTRA
> How on earth are those things mutually exclusive?
Put those on a spectrum and rethink what I said.
> completely irrelevant to whether or not it is copyright infringement
_Again_, leave aside law minutiae and hypotheticals.
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