Hacker News Reader

Comment by parliament32 | Hacker News Reader

> a consideration of impact on the potential market for a rightsholder's present and future works

This is one of those mental gymnastics exercises that makes copyright law so obtuse and effectively unenforceable.

As an alternative, imagine a scriptwriter buys a textbook on orbital mechanics, while writing Gravity (2013). A large number of people watch the finished film, and learn something about orbital mechanics, therefore not needing the textbook anymore, causing a loss of revenue for the textbook author. Should the author be entitled to a percentage of Gravity's profit?

We'd be better off abolishing everything related to copyright and IP law alltogether. These laws might've made sense back in the days of the printing press but they're just nonsensical nowadays.

View on HN

Well I mean you're constructing very convoluted and weak examples.

I think, in your example, the obvious answer is no, they're not entitled to any profits of Gravity. How could you possibly prove Gravity has anything to do with someone reading, or not reading, a textbook? You can't.

However, AI participates in the exact same markets it trains from. That's obviously very different. It is INTENDED to DIRECTLY replace the things it trains on.

Meaning, not only does an LLM output directly replace the textbook it was trained on, but that behavior is the sole commercial goal of the company. That's why they're doing it, and that's the only reason they're doing it.

> It is INTENDED to DIRECTLY replace the things it trains on.

Maybe this is where I'm having trouble. You say "exact same markets" -- how is a print book the exact same market as a web/mobile text-generating human-emulating chat companion? If that holds, why can't I say a textbook is the exact same market as a film?

I could see the argument if someone published a product that was fine-tuned on a specific book, and marketed as "use this AI instead of buying this book!", but that's not the case with any of the current services on the market.

I'm not trying to be combative, just trying to understand.. they seem like very different markets to me.

> how is a print book the exact same market as a web/mobile text-generating human-emulating chat companion? If that holds, why can't I say a textbook is the exact same market as a film?

Because the medium is actually the same. The content of a book is not paper, or a cover. It's text, and specifically the information in that text.

LLMs are intended to directly compete with and outright replace that usecase. I don't need a textbook on, say, Anatomy, because ChatGPT can structure and tell me about Anatomy, and in fact with say the exact same content slightly re-arranged.

This doesn't really hold for fictional books, nor does it hold for movies.

Watching a movie and reading a book are inherently different experiences, which cannot replace one another. Reading a textbook and asking ChatGPT about topic X is, for all intents and purposes, the same experience. Especially since, remember, most textbooks are online today.

Is it? If a teacher reads a book, then gives a lecture on that topic, that's decidedly not the same experience. Which step about that process makes it not the same experience? Is it the fact that they read the book using their human brain and then formed words in a specific order? Is it the fact that they're saying it out loud that's transformative? If we use ChatGPT's TTS feature, why is that not the same thing as a human talking about a topic after they read a book since it's been rearranged?

Well there's multiple reasons why it's not the same experience. It's a different medium, but it's also different content. The textbook may be used as a jumping-off point, supplemented by decades of real-life experience the professor has.

And, I think, elephant in the room with these discussions: we cannot just compare ChatGPT to a human. That's not a foregone conclusions and, IMO, no, you can't just do that. You have to justify it.

Humans are special. Why? Because we are Human. Humans have different and additional rights which machines, and programs, do not have. If we want to extend our rights to machines, we can do that... but not for free. Oh no, you must justify that, and it's quiet hard. Especially when said machines appear to work against Humans.

Personally I think a more effective analogy would be if someone used a textbook and created an online course / curriculum effective enough that colleges stop recommending the purchase of said textbook. It's honestly pretty difficult to imagine a movie having a meaningful impact on the sale of textbooks since they're required for high school / college courses.

So here's the thing, I don't think a textbook author going against a purveyor of online courseware has much of a chance, nor do I think it should have much of a chance, because it probably lacks meaningful proof that their works made a contribution to the creation of the courseware. Would I feel differently if the textbook author could prove in court that a substantial amount of their material contributed to the creation of the courseware, and when I say "prove" I mean they had receipts to prove it? I think that's where things get murky. If you can actually prove that your works made a meaningful contribution to the thing that you're competing against, then maybe you have a point. The tricky part is defining meaningful. An individual author doesn't make a meaningful contribution to the training of an LLM, but a large number of popular and/or prolific numbers can.

You bring up a good point, interpretation of fair use is difficult, but at the end of the day I really don't think we should abolish copyright and IP altogether. I think it's a good thing that creative professionals have some security in knowing that they have legal protections against having to "compete against themselves"

> An individual author doesn't make a meaningful contribution to the training of an LLM, but a large number of popular and/or prolific numbers can.

That's a point I normally use to argue against authors being entitled to royalties on LLM outputs. An individual author's marginal contribution to an LLM is essentially nil, and could be removed from the training set with no meaningful impact on the model. It's only the accumulation of a very large amount of works that turns into a capable LLM.

Yeah, this is something I find kind of tricky. I definitely believe that AI companies should get permission from rightsholders to train on their works, but actually compensating them for their works seems pointless. To make the royalties worthwhile you'd have to raise the cost per query to an absolutely absurd level

The amounts are not the only problem; there's no good way to measure which input in the training contributed to what degree to the output. I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out it's fundamentally impossible.

Paying everyone a flat rate per query is probably the only way you could do it; any other approach is either going to be contested as unfair in some way, or will be too costly to implement. But then, a flat rate is only fair if it covers everyone in proportion to the contribution, which will get diluted by the portion of training data that's not obviously attributable, like Internet comments or Wikipedia or public domain stuff or internally generated data, so I doubt authors would see any meaningful royalties from this anyway. The only thing it would do, is to make LLMs much more expensive for the society to use.

> it's a good thing that creative professionals have some security in knowing that they have legal protections

This argument would make sense if it was across the board, but it's impossible (and pretty ridiculous) to enforce in basically anything except very narrow types of media.

Let's say I come up with a groundbreaking workout routine. Some guy in the gym watches me for a while, adopts it, then goes on to become some sort of bodybuilding champion. I wouldn't be entitled to a portion of his winnings, that would be ridiculous.

Let's say I come up with a cool new fashion style. Someone sees my posts on insta and starts dressing similarly, then ends up with a massive following and starts making money in a modelling career. I wouldn't be entitled to a portion of their income, that would be ridiculous.

And yet, for some reason, media is special.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com