Hacker News Reader

I think there is a major qualitative difference between generative AI and search engines.

Search engines index the web and point you at other people's work, along the way showing perhaps too much of that content (thus "stealing" users from the target webpage). But they don't reshuffle existing content into something apparently new and original.

The "malicious" case for generative AI is that it sucks in copyrighted work (vs. indexing it), rehashes and produces something that is supposedly original, but really a sophisticated rehash of copyrighted work.

... as opposed to a human doing the same thing ?

It's hard for me to reconcile that it's somehow OK for a student to write a term paper about something (e.g. "Ulysses"), Wikipedia doing the same thing, but on the other hand, not OK for chatGPT doing it.

Copyright is not a principle or an ideal. It's a pragmatic law designed to achieve specific goals. It can and does make such arbitrary distinctions.

Indexing the copyrighted works is rehashing it. You're rehashing it into a different format that is more easily searchable by a computer. But that work is still based on other people's copyrighted works.

It doesn't produce a song if you ask for one. It points you at an existing one, with attribution and a (perhaps excessive) excerpt.

LLMs do.

I'm not saying search engines will be considered the same as LLMs, but given that LLMs are pushing the tolerances of Fair Use, should that get limited through litigation or legislation, the things search engines get away with like caching or summarizing, AMP pages, etc may cease to be legal and search engines may have to adopt less rich means of communicating relevancy, perhaps by showing the keywords that match or something else indirect but still true about a source, without pulling content straight from it.

As it stands right now, yes, Fair Use. But where do we draw the line? That line's been blurry for a while. Mostly limited to no more than 30 seconds of a performance, and no more than what's needed to quote literary works. Not sure about lyrics.

The issue is on some level, most things we create are derivative. Someone had to have the idea first, but once an idea is unleashed upon the world, it seems very difficult and unwieldy to put the genie back in the bottle.

I'm not really pro-LLM since it enables business to leech off of FOSS even more efficiently. The disruption of LLMs seems to be accelerating our philosophical re-examining of copyright and licensing terms in FOSS. We will inevitably need a GPL in the future that disallows remixing via LLM or other generative text algos, due mostly because ensuring all of a result is freely usable is not easy. Limitations could be built in to only 'fetch' code licensed under permissive terms, like MIT or BSD, but the tendency of these models to 'hallucinate' means you really cannot know the legal standing of LLM-generated code, at present.

Ruling in favor of copyright will call into question search engines and the like as well.

No, they won't. Search engines have already fought and won this battle on fair use grounds because they make use of the copyrighted content differently than LLMs do. It's an absolutely fundamental distinction.

Patents and trademarks haven't really helped as much as they were expected to.

Patents have been a thing for nearly a millenia; Britain's patent system is credited with giving it the technological edge over its Medieval and post-Medieval competitors for world domination. Similarly, the U.S. patent system has been credited with the U.S.' technological prowess for the past 2 centuries.

Only recently did works as far back as 1920 enter the public domain.

Nothing is stopping artists from releasing works into the public domain during their lifetimes. That would of course would mean other people economically exploiting their works however they wished without any input or control from the artist...which is generally why most artists haven't done that.

While we're discussing intellectual property, what about one's DNA? Is it not a performance of biology? How about your fingerprint? Fingerprints are semi-unique, so it's also a performance mark

This is either a bad-faith argument. DNA and fingerprints are tangible things created without any sort of intellectual input. Therefore, by definition not intellectual property.

We've seen celebrities sue for the use of their likeness, so that's recognized to some degree as well.

This is another bad-faith argument. Celebrity likenesses are intangible property but are not intellectual property and are not afforded the same protections.

I really think generative language models are disrupting a lot of things we used to take for granted

LLMs so far have disrupted student papers. And that's pretty much it.

I consider the right of publicity to be IP. I base this primarily on Shaw Family Archives, wherein the grantees of IP rights were denied right of publicity because it did not exist as an intellectual property right at the time of Monroe’s death, not because RoP is not intellectual property.

I’m curious if you can set me straight with a citation, or whether you would contest mine.

Do you have a source on the British and US patent system being major contributors to their technological success? Im very interested in this point as I feel like software is the opposite, in which open source has been the driver of progress.

As previously said, search engines index and provide links. I’ll add that it constitutes fair use because a search engine isn’t itself a replacement for the articles that it indexes.

But ChatGPT is actually providing an alternative that obviates the original articles themselves.

Google started moving away from just providing links along time ago. They routinely scrap data and show it, keeping people from visiting the links. I don't see how this behavior could be allowed while also crushing LLMs.

Personally, I like the flexibility of an LLM being able to describe a process at different skill levels. This is of tremendous educational value to the world.

Search engines provide links, but also titles and snippets of the page -- enough for you to decide if you want to visit, and Google will show you their cached page if you ask for it.

Even the link is a copyrightable item -- artistic effort went into creating it

Search engines will also eventually stop serving the result if the source disappears. A LLM model that has been trained and published don't care at all about the source anymore.

> Search engines provide links, but also titles and snippets of the page -- enough for you to decide if you want to visit

Small snippets are allowed by copyright law. They are not infringing.

> and Google will show you their cached page if you ask for it.

Really? I haven't seen that in several years. How do you get it these days?

I always assumed Google quit giving you that option exactly because of copyright issues.

> Even the link is a copyrightable item -- artistic effort went into creating it

IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that the current state of copyright law disagrees with you. Can you point to some concrete evidence that you're right?

>cached page

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.hac...

etc

There's also a link in the three-dot menu next to the search result, but it doesn't always appear.

The difference is that search engines don't say, "I created this".

Search engines are a device for leading you to a source. This is 99% of the time in the copyright holder's interest.

LLMs output a mashup of source material without attribution. This is 99% of the time against the copyright holder's interest.

So is everyday conversation.

Search engines used to be a device for leading you to a source. Most queries worth any money now have zero organic results above the fold. And it's one of many various schemes to keep you on their sites and not to organic search results. There's a plethora of straight ad strategies, widgets for various verticals (retail, travel, etc), "rich snippets", etc.

Search engines have a big difference which is that they usually direct you to the original website.

Bing's LLM does that too.

But it also tells you everything on the page without needing to click

It’s basically the “does this replace the original content” doctrine of fair use

Doesn't Google knowledge graph do that as well? Google is always giving me the answers I need before I click on a site. This was already normalized behavior prior to the existence of LLMs.

The knowledge graph is Wikipedia, that they use under license, or other sources that they have paid for a license to use.

What you're thinking of is "featured snippets". As far as I know, the justification behind those is that they are exact quotes that are followed by a citation (a link). Google argues those are fair use, since it's a properly referenced quote.