The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates
Those claiming AI training on copyrighted works is "theft" misunderstand key aspects of copyright law and AI technology. Copyright protects specific expressions of ideas, not the ideas themselves. When AI systems ingest copyrighted works, they're extracting general patterns and concepts - the "Bob Dylan-ness" or "Hemingway-ness" - not copying specific text or images.
This process is akin to how humans learn by reading widely and absorbing styles and techniques, rather than memorizing and reproducing exact passages. The AI discards the original text, keeping only abstract representations in "vector space". When generating new content, the AI isn't recreating copyrighted works, but producing new expressions inspired by the concepts it's learned.
This is fundamentally different from copying a book or song. It's more like the long-standing artistic tradition of being influenced by others' work. The law has always recognized that ideas themselves can't be owned - only particular expressions of them.
Moreover, there's precedent for this kind of use being considered "transformative" and thus fair use. The Google Books project, which scanned millions of books to create a searchable index, was ruled legal despite protests from authors and publishers. AI training is arguably even more transformative.
While it's understandable that creators feel uneasy about this new technology, labeling it "theft" is both legally and technically inaccurate. We may need new ways to support and compensate creators in the AI age, but that doesn't make the current use of copyrighted works for AI training illegal or unethical.
The joke is of course that "paying for copyright" is impossible in this case. ONLY the large social media companies that own all the comments and content that has accumulated by the community have enough data to train AI models. Or sites like stock photo libraries or deviantart who own the distribution rights for the content. That means all copyright arguments practically argue that AI should be owned by big corporations and should be inaccessible to normal people.
Basically the "means of generation" will be owned by the capitalists, since they are the only ones with the economic power to license these things.
That is basically the worst case scenario. Not only will the value of work diminish greatly, the advances in productivity will also be only accessible to big capitalists.
Of course, that is basically inevitable anyway. Why wouldn't they want this? It's just sad seeing the stupid morons arguing for this as if they had anything to gain.
Those claiming AI training on copyrighted works is "theft" misunderstand key aspects of copyright law and AI technology. Copyright protects specific expressions of ideas, not the ideas themselves.
Sure.
When AI systems ingest copyrighted works, they're extracting general patterns and concepts - the "Bob Dylan-ness" or "Hemingway-ness" - not copying specific text or images.
Not really. Sure, they take input and garble it up and it is "transformative" - but so is a human watching a TV series on a pirate site, for example. Hell, it's eduactional is treated as a copyright violation.
This process is akin to how humans learn by reading widely and absorbing styles and techniques, rather than memorizing and reproducing exact passages.
Perhaps. (Not an AI expert). But, as the law currently stands, only living and breathing persons can be educated, so the "educational" fair use protection doesn't stand.
The AI discards the original text, keeping only abstract representations in "vector space". When generating new content, the AI isn't recreating copyrighted works, but producing new expressions inspired by the concepts it's learned.
It does and it doesn't discard the original. It isn't impossible to recreate the original (since all the data it gobbled up gets stored somewhere in some shape or form and can be truthfully recreated, at least judging by a few comments bellow and news reports). So AI can and does recreate (duplicate or distribute, perhaps) copyrighted works.
Besides, for a copyright violation, "substantial similarity" is needed, not one-for-one reproduction.
This is fundamentally different from copying a book or song.
Again, not really.
It's more like the long-standing artistic tradition of being influenced by others' work.
Sure. Except when it isn't and the AI pumps out the original or something close enoigh to it.
The law has always recognized that ideas themselves can't be owned - only particular expressions of them.
I'd be careful with the "always" part. There was a famous case involving Katy Perry where a single chord was sued over as copyright infringement. The case was thrown out on appeal, but I do not doubt that some pretty wild cases have been upheld as copyright violations (see "patent troll").
Moreover, there's precedent for this kind of use being considered "transformative" and thus fair use. The Google Books project, which scanned millions of books to create a searchable index, was ruled legal despite protests from authors and publishers. AI training is arguably even more transformative.
The problem is that Google books only lets you search some phrase and have it pop up as beibg from source xy. It doesn't have the capability of reproducing it (other than maybe the page it was on perhaps) - well, it does have the capability since it's in the index somewhere, but there are checks in place to make sure it doesn't happen, which seem to be yet unachieved in AI.
While it's understandable that creators feel uneasy about this new technology, labeling it "theft" is both legally and technically inaccurate.
Yes. Just as labeling piracy as theft is.
We may need new ways to support and compensate creators in the AI age, but that doesn't make the current use of copyrighted works for AI training illegal or
Yes, new legislation will made to either let "Big AI" do as it pleases, or prevent it from doing so. Or, as usual, it'll be somewhere inbetween and vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
However,
that doesn't make the current use of copyrighted works for AI training illegal or unethical.
this doesn't really stand. Sure, morals are debatable and while I'd say it is more unethical as private piracy (so no distribution) since distribution and disemination is involved, you do not seem to feel the same.
However, the law is clear. Private piracy (as in recording a song off of radio, a TV broadcast, screen recording a Netflix movie, etc. are all legal. As is digitizing books and lending the digital (as long as you have a physical copy that isn't lended out as the same time representing the legal "original"). I think breaking DRM also isn't illegal (but someone please correct me if I'm wrong).
The problems arises when the pirated content is copied and distributed in an uncontrolled manner, which AI seems to be capable of, making the AI owner as liable of piracy if the AI reproduced not even the same, but "substantially similar" output, just as much as hosts of "classic" pirated content distributed on the Web.
Obligatory IANAL and as far as the law goes, I focused on US law since the default country on here is the US. Similar or different laws are on the books in other places, although most are in fact substantially similar. Also, what the legislators cone up with will definately vary from place to place, even more so than copyright law since copyright law is partially harmonised (see Berne convention).
Though I am not a lawyer by training, I have been involved in such debates personally and professionally for many years. This post is unfortunately misguided. Copyright law makes concessions for education and creativity, including criticism and satire, because we recognize the value of such activities for human development. Debates over the excesses of copyright in the digital age were specifically about humans finding the application of copyright to the internet and all things digital too restrictive for their educational, creative, and yes, also their entertainment needs. So any anti-copyright arguments back then were in the spirit specifically of protecting the average person and public-interest non-profit institutions, such as digital archives and libraries, from big copyright owners who would sue and lobby for total control over every file in their catalogue, sometimes in the process severely limiting human potential.
AI’s ingesting of text and other formats is “learning” in name only, a term borrowed by computer scientists to describe a purely computational process. It does not hold the same value socially or morally as the learning that humans require to function and progress individually and collectively.
AI is not a person (unless we get definitive proof of a conscious AI, or are willing to grant every implementation of a statistical model personhood). Also AI it is not vital to human development and as such one could argue does not need special protections or special treatment to flourish. AI is a product, even more clearly so when it is proprietary and sold as a service.
Unlike past debates over copyright, this is not about protecting the little guy or organizations with a social mission from big corporate interests. It is the opposite. It is about big corporate interests turning human knowledge and creativity into a product they can then use to sell services to - and often to replace in their jobs - the very humans whose content they have ingested.
See, the tables are now turned and it is time to realize that copyright law, for all its faults, has never been only or primarily about protecting large copyright holders. It is also about protecting your average Joe from unauthorized uses of their work. More specifically uses that may cause damage, to the copyright owner or society at large. While a very imperfect mechanism, it is there for a reason, and its application need not be the end of AI. There’s a mechanism for individual copyright owners to grant rights to specific uses: it’s called licensing and should be mandatory in my view for the development of proprietary LLMs at least.
TL;DR: AI is not human, it is a product, one that may augment some tasks productively, but is also often aimed at replacing humans in their jobs - this makes all the difference in how we should balance rights and protections in law.
Counteroffer. We eliminate copyright laws all together. For anyone and everyone.
Let move to a system in which we found the projects before their release. And once released they are available to everyone for free.
Also let's make a system where everyone can work a basic work like 20-30 hours a week and get a living wage and the rest of the time we can just produce art of any kind of thing for free to anyone as we'll already had our needs covered and we won't have the need to monetize every second of out existence.
Studied AI at uni. I'm also a cyber security professional. AI can be hacked or tricked into exposing training data. Therefore your claim about it disposing of the training material is totally wrong.
Ask your search engine of choice what happened when Gippity was asked to print the word "book" indefinitely. Answer: it printed training material after printing the word book a couple hundred times.
Also my main tutor in uni was a neuroscientist. Dude straight up told us that the current AI was only capable of accurately modelling something as complex as a dragon fly. For larger organisms it is nowhere near an accurate recreation of a brain. There are complexities in our brain chemistry that simply aren't accounted for in a statistical inference model and definitely not in the current gpt models.
Okay that's just stupid. I'm really fond of AI but that's just common Greed.
"Free the Serfs?! We can't survive without their labor!!"
"Stop Child labour?! We can't survive without them!"
"40 Hour Work Week?! We can't survive without their 16 Hour work Days!"
The "you wouldn't download a car" statement is made against personal cases of piracy, which got rightfully clowned upon. It obviously doesn't work at all when you use its ridiculousness to defend big ass corporations that tries to profit from so many of the stuff they "downloaded".
Besides, it is not "theft". It is "plagiarism". And I'm glad to see that people that tries to defend these plagiarism machines that are attempted to be humanised and inflated to something they can never be, gets clowned. It warms my heart.
I'm so fucking sick of people saying that. We have no fucking clue how humans LEARN. Aka gather understanding aka how cognition works or what it truly is. On the contrary we can deduce that it probably isn't very close to human memory/learning/cognition/sentience (any other buzzword that are stands-ins for things we don't understand yet), considering human memory is extremely lossy and tends to infer its own bias, as opposed to LLMs that do neither and religiously follow patters to their own fault.
It's quite literally a text prediction machine that started its life as a translator (and still does amazingly at that task), it just happens to turn out that general human language is a very powerful tool all on its own.
I could go on and on as I usually do on lemmy about AI, but your argument is literally "Neural network is theoretically like the nervous system, therefore human", I have no faith in getting through to you people.
I'll train my AI on just the bee movie. Then I'm going to ask it "can you make me a movie about bees"? When it spits the whole movie, I can just watch it or sell it or whatever, it was a creation of my AI, which learned just like any human would! Of course I didn't even pay for the original copy to train my AI, it's for learning purposes, and learning should be a basic human right!
Even if you come to the conclusion that these models should be allowed to "learn" from copyrighted material, the issue is that they can and will reproduce copyrighted material.
They might not recreate a picture of Mickey Mouse that exists already, but they will draw a picture of Mickey Mouse. Just like I could, except I'm aware that I can't monetize it in any way. Well, new Mickey Mouse.
Copyright laws protects the ability of copyright holder to make money. The laws were created before AI and now obviously have to be adapted to new technology (like you didn't really need copyright before the invention of printing). How exactly AI will be regulated is in the end up to society to decide, which most likely will come down who has the better lobby.
The argument that these models learn in a way that's similar to how humans do is absolutely false, and the idea that they discard their training data and produce new content is demonstrably incorrect. These models can and do regurgitate their training data, including copyrighted characters.
And these things don't learn styles, techniques, or concepts. They effectively learn statistical averages and patterns and collage them together. I've gotten to the point where I can guess what model of image generator was used based on the same repeated mistakes that they make every time. Take a look at any generated image, and you won't be able to identify where a light source is because the shadows come from all different directions. These things don't understand the concept of a shadow or lighting, they just know that statistically lighter pixels are followed by darker pixels of the same hue and that some places have collections of lighter pixels. I recently heard about an ai that scientists had trained to identify pictures of wolves that was working with incredible accuracy. When they went in to figure out how it was identifying wolves from dogs like huskies so well, they found that it wasn't even looking at the wolves at all. 100% of the images of wolves in its training data had snowy backgrounds, so it was simply searching for concentrations of white pixels (and therefore snow) in the image to determine whether or not a picture was of wolves or not.
I'm I the only person that remembers that it was "you wouldn't steal a car" or has everyone just decided to pretend it was "you wouldn't download a car" because that's easier to dunk on.
The whole point of copyright in the first place, is to encourage creative expression, so we can have human culture and shit.
The idea of a "teensy" exception so that we can "advance" into a dark age of creative pointlessness and regurgitated slop, where humans doing the fun part has been made "unnecessary" by the unstoppable progress of "thinking" machines, would be hilarious, if it weren't depressing as fuck.
Here's an experiment for you to try at home. Ask an AI model a question, copy a sentence or two of what they give back, and paste it into a search engine. The results may surprise you.
And stop comparing AI to humans but then giving AI models more freedom. If I wrote a paper I'd need to cite my sources. Where the fuck are your sources ChatGPT? Oh right, we're not allowed to see that but you can take whatever you want from us. Sounds fair.
The argument seem most commonly from people on fediverse (which I happen to agree with) is really not about what current copyright laws and treaties say / how they should be interpreted, but how people view things should be (even if it requires changing laws to make it that way).
And it fundamentally comes down to economics - the study of how resources should be distributed. Apart from oligarchs and the wannabe oligarchs who serve as useful idiots for the real oligarchs, pretty much everyone wants a relatively fair and equal distribution of wealth amongst the people (differing between left and right in opinion on exactly how equal things should be, but there is still some common ground). Hardly anyone really wants serfdom or similar where all the wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of a few (obviously it's a spectrum of how concentrated, but very few people want the extreme position to the right).
Depending on how things go, AI technologies have the power to serve humanity and lift everyone up equally if they are widely distributed, removing barriers and breaking existing 'moats' that let a few oligarchs hoard a lot of resources. Or it could go the other way - oligarchs are the only ones that have access to the state of the art model weights, and use this to undercut whatever they want in the economy until they own everything and everyone else rents everything from them on their terms.
The first scenario is a utopia scenario, and the second is a dystopia, and the way AI is regulated is the fork in the road between the two. So of course people are going to want to cheer for regulation that steers towards the utopia.
That means things like:
Fighting back when the oligarchs try to talk about 'AI Safety' meaning that there should be no Open Source models, and that they should tightly control how and for what the models can be used. The biggest AI Safety issue is that we end up in a dystopian AI-fueled serfdom, and FLOSS models and freedom for the common people to use them actually helps to reduce the chances of this outcome.
Not allowing 'AI washing' where oligarchs can take humanities collective work, put it through an algorithm, and produce a competing thing that they control - unless everyone has equal access to it. One policy that would work for this would be that if you create a model based on other people's work, and want to use that model for a commercial purpose, then you must publicly release the model and model weights. That would be a fair trade-off for letting them use that information for training purposes.
Fundamentally, all of this is just exacerbating cracks in the copyright system as a policy. I personally think that a better system would look like this:
Everyone gets a Universal Basic Income paid, and every organisation and individual making profit pays taxes in to fund the UBI (in proportion to their profits).
All forms of intellectual property rights (except trademarks) are abolished - copyright, patents, and trade secrets are no longer enforced by the law. The UBI replaces it as compensation to creators.
It is illegal to discriminate against someone for publicly disclosing a work they have access to, as long as they didn't accept valuable consideration to make that disclosure. So for example, if an OpenAI employee publicly released the model weights for one of OpenAI's models without permission from anyone, it would be illegal for OpenAI to demote / fire / refuse to promote / pay them differently on that basis, and for any other company to factor that into their hiring decision. There would be exceptions for personally identifiable information (e.g. you can't release the client list or photos of real people without consequences), and disclosure would have to be public (i.e. not just to a competitor, it has to be to everyone) and uncompensated (i.e. you can't take money from a competitor to release particular information).
If we had that policy, I'd be okay for AI companies to be slurping up everything and training model weights.
However, with the current policies, it is pushing us towards the dystopic path where AI companies take what they want and never give anything back.
Bullshit. AI are not human. We shouldn't treat them as such. AI are not creative. They just regurgitate what they are trained on. We call what it does "learning", but that doesn't mean we should elevate what they do to be legally equal to human learning.
It's this same kind of twisted logic that makes people think Corporations are People.
The Usamerican legal system protects a running business. When such a rich and famous corporation argues (and it would be highly paid lawyers arguing) that their business could be in jeopardy, they are going to listen, no matter how ridiculous the reasoning.
In other countries, they just make a judge laughing out loud.
While I agree that using copyrighted material to train your model is not theft, text that model produces can very much be plagiarism and OpenAI should be on the hook when it occurs.
Honestly, if this somehow results in regulators being like "fuck it, piracy is legal now" it won't negatively impact me in any way..
Corporations have abused copyright law for decades, they've ruined the internet, they've ruined media, they've ruined video games. I want them to lose more than anything else.
The shitty and likely situation is they'll be like "fuck it corporate piracy is legal but individuals doing it is still a crime".
I thought the larger point was that they're using plenty of sources that do not lie in the public domain. Like if I download a textbook to read for a class instead of buying it - I could be proscecuted for stealing. And they've downloaded and read millions of books without paying for them.
Are the models that OpenAI creates open source? I don't know enough about LLMs but if ChatGPT wants exemptions from the law, it result in a public good (emphasis on public).
This take is correct although I would make one addition. It is true that copyright violation doesn’t happen when copyrighted material is inputted or when models are trained. While the outputs of these models are not necessarily copyright violations, it is possible for them to violate copyright. The same standards for violation that apply to humans should apply to these models.
I entirely reject the claims that there should be one standard for humans and another for these models. Every time this debate pops up, people claim some province based on ‘intelligence’ or ‘conscience’ or ‘understanding’ or ‘awareness’. This is a meaningless argument because we have no clear understanding about what those things are. I’m not claiming anything about the nature of these models. I’m just pointing out that people love to apply an undefined standard to them.
We should apply the same copyright standards to people, models, corporations, and old-school algorithms.
The ingredient thing is a bit amusing, because that's basically how one of the major fast food chains got to be so big (I can't remember which one it was ATM though; just that it wasn't McDonald's). They cut out the middle-man and just bought their own farm to start growing the vegetables and later on expanded to raising the animals used for the meat as well.
I never fully figured out how the people who are against AI companies using copyrighted content on the training data fit that in with their general attitude towards online piracy. Seems contradictory to be against one but not another.
I finally understand Trump supporters "Fuck it, burn it all to the ground cause we can't win" POV. Only instead of democracy, it is copyright and instead of Trump, it is AI.
So, is the Internet caring about copyright now? Decades of Napster, Limewire, BitTorrent, Piratebay, bootleg ebooks, movies, music, etc, but we care now because it's a big corporation doing it?