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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32488 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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I'd argue that a neural net is a derivative work of its training data, so its mere creation is a copyright violation.

Once again it is unclear to me how this is very different than a human who reads a bunch of scripts/novels/poems and then produces something similar to what he studied.

Because the law doesn't consider your memory or the arrangement or functioning of your neurons to be a tangible medium of expression, but a computer memory (including RAM, flash, spinning rust, paper tape, whatever) is. If you see a work and produce something similar, what you produce might indeed by a copyright violation (and there are a lot of lawsuits about that), but your mind can't itself be a copyright violation. A neural network in a computer can be.

A neural network in a computer can be.

This doesn't seem to follow either. Maybe what the computer produces could be a violation, but the actual information contained within it doesn't resemble the copyrighted material in any way we can determine. At least that's based on my understanding of how the trained AI works.

“Copies” are material objects, other than phonorecords, in which a work is fixed by any method now known or later developed, and from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.

The fact that the information contained within the LLM doesn't, in some sense, resemble the copyrighted material isn't relevant, nor should it be; the fact that we can get it out demonstrates that it is in there.

Which is why I'm confused as to why this does not apply to a human memory, other than that just being the Court's distinction between human hardware and electronic systems that they apply.

And then, even accepting your point:

the fact that we can get it out demonstrates that it is in there.

Then presumably putting sufficient controls on the system so that it WILL NOT produce copyrighted works on demand solves the objection.

We also run into the 'library of Babel" issue. If you have a pile of sufficiently large randomized information, then it probably contains 'copies' of various copyrighted works that can be extracted.

So an AI that is trained on and 'contained' the entire corpus of all human-created text might be said to contain copies of various works, but the incredible, vast majority of what it it contains is completely 'novel,' unrelated information which users can generate at will, too.

Which is why I'm confused as to why this does not apply to a human memory, other than that just being the Court's distinction between human hardware and electronic systems that they apply.

There may be no other distinction.

Then presumably putting sufficient controls on the system so that it WILL NOT produce copyrighted works on demand solves the objection.

Only if the controls are inseparable from the system. If I can take your weights and use them in an uncensored system to produce the copyrighted works, they were still in there. Just as if you rigged a DVD player not to play a DVD of "Return of the Jedi" wouldn't mean "Return of the Jedi" wasn't on the DVD.

We also run into the 'library of Babel" issue. If you have a pile of sufficiently large randomized information, then it probably contains 'copies' of various copyrighted works that can be extracted.

If the randomized information was generated without reference to the copyrighted works, this doesn't matter. That's not the case with the AIs; they had the copyrighted works as training data.

That's not the case with the AIs; they had the copyrighted works as training data.

Yes yes, but so did the humans.

This is what gets real fraught here.

The terminal end result of harshly applying IP restrictions is preventing someone who has a sufficiently accurate memory of a copyrighted work from conveying any portion of the work to anyone else outside of a 'fair use' context.

If the technology allowed it, I have little doubt that they'd implement a system to collect royalties every time some college student plays Wonderwall on his guitar at a party.

But on the assumption that the laws haven't gotten THAT ridiculous yet, I'm inclined to suggest that the situation as it stands is that the AI is basically the equivalent of a human being with eidetic memory and thus can recall any copyrighted work it wishes, on demand, when given the correct prompting, but is also fully capable of "original" thought.

Does IP law REALLY grant the owner the absolute right of ownership over every single instance of the information that composes their work... regardless of the format, medium, or usage it is put to?

The terminal end result of harshly applying IP restrictions is preventing someone who has a sufficiently accurate memory of a copyrighted work from conveying any portion of the work to anyone else outside of a 'fair use' context.

Well, we've already had lawsuits asserting that people can be found guilty of subconsciously plagarizing someone else's music: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Sweet_Lord#Copyright_infringement_suit

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