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Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

> It's so obvious to me that machine learning models are derivative works of their training set.

Okay, but narrative creators watch movies and listen to music and read books too. Many do indeed "file the serial numbers off" other people's work and publish something else, that makes them money and not the original creators. Does one instance of "filing the serial numbers off" by one author mean that no authors anywhere are allowed to write any books as soon as they've read "a bunch" of other books? I get what you are saying, but it's not so obvious what the right policy is. It is very hard to make it consistent when "AI" is substituted with "human," and it's not so obvious if "AI" is a distinct class from human, because it is after all, something that only exists because a programmer somewhere wrote and operated it.

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>Does one instance of "filing the serial numbers off" by one author mean that no authors anywhere are allowed to write any books as soon as they've read "a bunch" of other books

So far, pretty much all major actors are doing it. So yes, if everyone is abusing a rule, the ball is taken home.

>I get what you are saying, but it's not so obvious what the right policy is.

The one these companies spent 2 decades prior fighting to strengthen. Yes, I am enjoying the schadenfreude of companies in copyright lingo they used to launch thousands of lawsuits, and now they are on the other end when convenient to them to "steal IP".

> it's not so obvious if "AI" is a distinct class from human

It is. It obviously is. It's the same reason that a person watching a movie and remembering it later is different than recording the movie with a camcorder.

> Ah but I made a robot that walks into theaters, buys a ticket, records the movie, leaves, and then recreates the movie at my home an infinite number of times. I didn't break the law, since a human could surely do the same thing with enough practice and effort.

Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds?

The policy isn’t written that way though. The policy doesn’t say anything about camcorders. So you’re right about camcorders. But the law says “copying” which is pretty abstract, the case law is really detailed, so it’s not so black and white. Nobody cares about your imaginary situations with robots - I basically agree with you that there needs to be a distinct law governing AI training, and that leads to a far more interesting and totally normative conversation about who, if anyone, is the good or the bad guys.

If the policy (via case law) becomes, expressly permissioned content only, there are no image generators. Some people may want that. But is that better than we were, in the current status quo, where we have them? I don’t think so.

There is a difference, and AI companies understand it very well. All of them prohibit you from using their model to train other AI models. Microsoft takes it a step further and even prohibits you from trying to discover how the models work.

No human, however powerful, can prevent you from looking at their actions and learning from them. You can look at Obama's speeches for instance and learn how to craft certain messages for your own speeches. Nothing he can do to stop you from doing that.

And that is the key difference: AI models have been designed to privatize the process of learning, wherein they have unlimited freedom to learn from any human's work without compensating them from it, but humans or even other AI models cannot learn from an AI model.

This distinction IMO removes any right that the AI companies have to pretend that their models are people. They're not, the actions of the AI companies themselves show that.

> All of them prohibit you from using their model to train other AI models.

Have they ever successfully enforced this clause in court? An equally valid resolution would be a conclusion that they don't actually have that power.

The issue here is that the AI model itself is a derivative work.

Further, they will very much recreate things the’ve seen many examples of. Recreating “Mona Lisa” isn’t a problem, but recreating “Iron Man” is. Individual artists may not know how to prompt the system to recreate their work, but looking at the training sets is going to help quite a bit.

No, the issue is that it makes outputs that compete with artists, and that is a problem if you go and make a fair use argument for appropriating copyrighted works.

If I were to secretly use an image generator, just for my own purposes, trained on public data, the plaintiffs would say it is just as illegal.

The rub is, do you know who else makes work that competes with artists? Other artists! It still kind of goes down on some vibesy stuff that I don't know if the law has a straight answer to. And for what it's worth, the Andy Warhol v. Goldsmith decision was about artists competing with other artists - this is the decision that has created an opening to challenge fair use. I just wonder why limit ourselves to the peculiarities of that case, why not open all forms of competition between artists to litigation over their influences and processes?

How the model is used isn’t relevant if creating it was already infringement. Training on works creates something of value and artists want to be able to prevent that training without compensation. There’s a long history of case law around just how much of someone’s work can be copied before it’s a problem. But here it’s literally the entire work being used so ‘how much’ is just everything.

The points you bring up are also relevant but artists don’t want to look through a billion individual images to see if that specific image happens to infringe on their work.

Edit: Wrote the response to a comment that got deleted before I posted presumably because I edited this one: IMO many commentators are getting this wrong.

“the less likely it is that the appropriation will serve as a substitute for the original work or its plausible derivatives, shrinking the market opportunities for the copyrighted work” https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-869_87ad.pdf

The form of these models is very different, but the purpose is to create directly competing works. Each individual output may not directly infringe with a specific work, but the goal of the model very much is.

The comment brought up commentary about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol_Foundation_for_the...

It's only clear that training is a violation of copyright if you have a layman's understanding of how training works. There are no images stored in image models, just vectors that represent pixel relationships. You may call this fancy compression, but the ship runs aground if you try to "compress" a small set of images with a transformer - you just will get random noisy junk on the output.

Artists have a much firmer legal ground to stand on if they go after model output, but the goal is to kill image generators, not simply censor their output.

Think of it like this: If I splatter paint on a canvas, does jackson pollock have a copyright claim? Probably not, despite my creation being a product of training on his work. But it would be fair for my creation to be checked to see if it is too similar to one of his works.

just vectors that represent pixel relationships

Ask DALL-E 2 for Mona Lisa and it will produce something clearly derived from the original work. The ability to recreate items from the training set depends on how these systems are trained, but they are clearly capable of retraining enough to be problematic.

The Harry Potter the movies aren’t the original books, derivative works don’t imply something is the same just that it’s directly derived from something else.

> If I splatter paint on a canvas, does jackson pollock have a copyright claim?

If you’re trying to copy him then actually yes he would. Being inspired by a technique is fine, but the difference is less subtle than you might think.

Copyright cares how something was created, if you end up with ‘random’ patterns that happen to look suspiciously similar to another work it’s extremely unlikely that you came to that point randomly. What’s the odds you would pick the same 12 colors as someone else and apply them in the same order? 12 factorial isn’t a small number and that’s before considering the color selection.

All what you said is why I believe artists have much firmer ground to stand on by going after output. We can have dumb AI that scans outputs for copyright violation the same way youtube scans for it.

Just because I can draw spider man from memory doesn't mean I owe Disney money or that I am 'problematic'. It means I just have to censor my outputs when doing drawings for people.

But again, artists don't want this outcome, so there is a purposeful muddying of the waters going on.

> I just have to censor my outputs when doing drawings for people.

If any output is infringing the model must itself be infringing by definition. The correct solution isn’t to censor the result the correct solution is to delete the model.

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