Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

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Let's imagine an hypothetical LLM, which has been trained on books, published by publishers (companies). Thousands, thousands of book which are not out of their copyright terms, without telling to their authors.

All of the things emitted by this LLM will be a remix of these books.

Will the outputs of this LLM be a violation of copyright? I bet it will be.

Let's train the same AI, on self-published, but again copyrighted material.

Will the outputs of this LLM be a violation of copyright? I bet it should be.

but, in reality, in discourse, we see that if it's company IP, then ordinary people are doing it wrong because it's copyright violation, and if it's people's IP, then ordinary people are doing it wrong, because it's fair use.

Copyrighting things are not a privilege given to corporations. If it's fair use, I can train a voice model with Freddie Mercury's voice, and make him a vocal of my garage band, but RIAA will end my life, but if a company samples my sound and reproduces for a video without my consent, it'll be fair use because I don't have 1000 lawyers.

This is what bothers me.

Once you read the dictionary everything else is just a remix by your own definition.

> If it's fair use, I can train a voice model with Freddie Mercury's voice

This is where it falls down. If it's fair use you can train your AI using clips of his voice. It does not give you the right to then produce a sample similar enough to one of his songs and use it in your own (without royalties). But you absolutely can use your FM voice to sing your own song because voices can't be copywriitten.

“fair use because I don't have 1000 lawyers”

That the legal system operates differently for those with greater wealth is a more general, certainly important problem, but not specific to LLMs or copyright.

One hopeful thought to consider, if big corporations like Disney use generative ai that have been trained on Joe Nobody’s artwork, and they will most likely, now Joe Nobody can sue Disney, and he may be able to find attorney’s because Disney has enough money to make themselves a lucrative target for lawsuits. Maybe this isn’t how the legal system works, I have very little knowledge of copyright law.

Yeah good luck going up against Disney. They are described as a law company with an entertainment side business. I am not even going to write everything I want to say because even as a random nobody on an anon account it is still far too dangerous.

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