Comment by rhelz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rhelz | Hacker News Reader

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> AI training doesn't constitute copyright infringement. It's not the same thing.

Why not? E.g., chagGpt 3.5, if you ask what the first paragraph of "Moby Dick" is, it prints it out verbatim. How is that not reselling somebody else's IP?

If you ask it to print out the entire book of "Green Eggs and Ham" it dutifully says it can't because of copywrite restrictions. HOWEVER, you can ask it to print out the nth page, and it will happily print it out, for all 1 <= n<= #pages in book.

It snorked up Dr. Suisses IP, and is reselling it to us.

> Could I take the text of "Harry Potter" and sell it as my own novel?

Well, I asked chatGtp to print out the first paragraph of Harry Potter, and it did, but said that it might violate copywright.... LLMs are quite "self aware" (for want of a better word) that they have appropriated copywrited IP. It will still sell it back to us.

LLMs are a compressed representation of the training set.

So...in answer to your question, no, you cannot take the text of "Harry Potter" and sell it as your own content. But chatGtp sure can!!!!!

> Inaccurate hyperbole doesn't help your side.

sigh yes, its important not to overstate your case. Let me try again: Intellectual Property Laws are for plebs like us. OpenAI and its cohorts, however, have found a way to rip off, repackage, and resell any IP they want to.

And all this fuss over how dangerous AI, and how it should be regulated, etc, is just a false flag to distract us from the real issues.

ChatGPT can't sell it as its own content, ChatGPT has no brain, no thoughts and no agency. There are a few questions that matter here.

* Is the literal act of copying data to the hard drives used in model training fair use?

* Is the act of training using the data count as a performance of the work? (This one likely not because there's no human being performed to.)

* Are the resultant model weights considered a derivative work of some or all copyrighted works in the training set?

* Does a model reproducing some or all of a copyrighted work count as a performance? Does transmitting it as an API response? Does hosting it in the conversion history?

* If the answer to the above is yes who has done copying? OpenAI or the user? What situations is it one, the other, or both?

Nothing says you can't acquire data with reckless abandon, and use it to train your AI which would be fair use. I would love to see someone get sued for piracy and mount a defense that they were torrenting to gather data for AI training and see how it goes.

> ChatGPT can't sell it as its own content, ChatGPT has no brain, no thoughts and no agency. There are a few questions that matter here.

ChatGPT is a machine built and operated by humans. If ChatGPT infringes copyright, then it is those humans who own and operate it who are infringing.

The fact that they built a complex obfuscated system that stores many copyrighted works in a novel way (model weights) and reproduces them incompletely or unpredictably when asked, doesn’t change the fact that they have built a system whose purpose is to infringe copyright.

It’s a little bit like saying I started the car running and let it drive off on its own accord in front of a huge crowd of people, I’m not responsible for the deaths because it was the car that ran them over and the car doesn’t have agency. The car wasn’t designed to kill and never intended to kill. But it’s still me who operates the car and should have foreseen the obvious consequences.

I don’t buy into any of these arguments that just because ChatGPT is very complex or mysterious that somehow the humans who built or are running it aren’t responsible for its actions.

> It’s a little bit like saying I started the car running and let it drive off on its own accord in front of a huge crowd of people <snip>

Interesting. Why do you feel as though this is the proper analogy, rather than being the car manufacturer who builds the car which could be used in this way?

What about a car manufacturer who knowingly does not put in a widget to ensure the car is never allowed to exceed the speed limit? Or does not install a breathalyser which drivers need to blow into in order to start the car?

It's also worth noting that simply reproducing copyrighted material is not necessarily an infringement of that copyright, and in most jurisdictions, it depends on the purpose the reproduction is intended to serve.

I don't think any analogy is needed: if I can go to chatGPT, and have it start printing out pages of a book, that is in itself, ipso facto, indeed tautologically IP theft.

Unfortunately, copyright law is complex, and simply reproducing a book may not always be IP theft. There are many potential ways it could be perfectly above board.

For example, the copyright on the book may have expired. Or it could be fair use (however that's defined in the user's jurisdiction). Or the user of ChatGPT may have a physical copy of the book and lives in a jurisdiction where this allows them to obtain a digital copy.

Sure there's plenty of ways to copy a book and not break the law...but as long as there is any way to break the law by selling copies of the book, then the law is broken, because that's exactly what opneai is doing.

> who has done copying? OpenAI or the user? What situations is it one, the other, or both?

You are way overthinking it. Take my example of "Sam I Am" by Dr. Suess. I can buy access to chatGPT, and With the right prompts I can get it to print out every page of that book.

How is this different from somebody selling photocopies of the book in front of Barnes and Noble?

It doesn't matter what storage method or media is used. You can use a database, an LLM, translate it to swahili and back to english, whatever. If you can get somebody's IP without paying them, then axiomatically, indeed oxymoronically, their IP has been stolen.

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