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Comment by brian_cloutier | Hacker News Reader

I think you're saying any work created by a model trained on copyrighted data is a derivative work of that copyrighted data.

But this can't be right, it is inconsistent with how copyright has worked so far. Artists and musicians and engineers all learn from each other and have seen and learned from, "trained on" many other examples of works from their field. Even when works are clearly inspired by other works we tend not to give them the legal status of derivative work.

You're suggesting we treat models with a much stricter copyright regime than has previously existed.

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courts in the US have repeatedly ruled that humans and machines aren't the same in the eyes of copyright. for example under current case law, nothing created exclusively by a machine is copyrightable.

This is not sane, sustainable or justifiable. E.g. what about that future when we have actual AI people?

I hope I shall never be forced to call a Microsoft product a person. I find your entire implied world view to be a cheap parody of the rights living beings inherently should have.

If we get to the point that capitalist maximalist-utilitarianism insists upon hijacking the very concept of what a living organism is, I can only compare it to a teddy bear vs an actual bear.

It’s not enough to merely put fur on it and an internal rom for it to regurgitate prefabricated roars upon contextual prodding.

Respect the life you are only one instance of, for hubris has always brought suffering and pain in its wake.

Yes. The copyright law must change. This is different.

why must it change, why is this different? genuinely curious

Because the scale is different.

You have a mechanism that can regurgitate (digest, remix, emit) without attribution all of the world's code and all of the world's art.

With these systems, you're giving everyone the ability to plagiarize everything, effortlessly and unknowingly. No skill, no effort, no time required. No awareness of the sources of the derivative work.

My work is now your work. Everyone can "write" my code, without ever knowing I wrote it, without ever knowing I existed. Everyone can use my hard work, regurgitated anonymously, stripped of all credit, stripped of all attribution, stripped of all identity and ancestry and citation.

It's a new kind of use not known (or imagined?) when the copyright laws were written.

Training must be opt in, not opt out.

Every artist, every creative individual, must EXPLICITLY OPT IN to having their hard work regurgitated anonymously by Copilot or Dall-E or whatever.

If you want to donate your code or your painting or your music so it can easily be "written" or "painted", in whole or in part, by everyone else, without attribution, then go ahead and opt in.

But if an author or artist does not EXPLICITLY OPT IN, you can't use their creative work to train these systems.

All these code/art washing systems, that absorb and mix and regurgitate the hard work of creative people must be strictly opt in.

That's how the law needs to be.

What would you think if models were bundled with a second model, the "copyright filter". Just as humans know to keep their creations sufficiently far away from copyrighted material, you could distribute models which are trained on copyrighted materials but know well enough not to produce anything so close so something copyrighted that it infringes.

This would prevent anybody from accidentally infringing when using these tools. Does that seem like a reasonable solution, or is your concern greater than accidental infringement?

Explicit opt in, period.

Your arguments actually suggests that AI is making copyright less relevant and we should make it less strict, not the other way around.

But why? It really seems to me that things like Copilot will save millions of man hours and make the world a better place. The only harms people have come up with are highly speculative and far smaller in magnitude.

That is the underlying theory of copyright law. We make the speculation that if we don't have copyright law then people won't have the incentive to create future works.

A world without copyright would however save more than just a few millions of man hours that copilot might do. Allowing people and companies to freely use the best software available, view the best art, enjoy the most relaxing music, have the best recreational time with the best films. The only harm is the highly speculative claim that people won't be creating the best software, the best art, the best music or the best films.

That analogy doesn't work because unlike an art work, you can't sell a 20 line snippet.

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