Comment by 20k
11 hours ago
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
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.
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
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.
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
I just want to make sure that you saw those things with pure context isolation and AI wasn’t just doing a search to grab the content directly and throw it into the context of your prompt. You’d be surprised how often I’ve heard these claims and it turns out they were just using an agent with RAG enabled.