Comment by treebeard901
1 hour ago
Early copyright based legal arguments about the training of pirated information for AI didnt have much success. Im sure it will continue not being an issue for the frontier labs while copyright laws are enforced for everyone else.
It’s not about what the model was trained on (though it might be), it’s that fair use in reverse engineering relies on transformative, creative work. There are multiple court cases where RE is protected.
What’s not protected fair use is mechanical transformation (automated format conversion, etc.). I’d argue using AI for RE and publishing the result is not creative, and is mechanical transformation. That makes it not protected fair use and puts projects at risk. This also has court precedent (not necessarily the AI case, but mechanical vs creative transformation).
Misunderstanding this is going to ultimately bring harm to the RE communities where legitimate projects get wrapped up with AI projects in litigation and will chill the whole practice even though it’s legitimate fair use.
(US jurisdiction, I’m not a lawyer, I’m not your lawyer, but I’ve spent a reasonable time reading the landmark cases, EFF’s opinions, USPTO opinions, etc.)