A new research paper laid out ways in which AI developers should try and avoid showing LLMs have been trained on copyrighted material.
OpenAI now tries to hide that ChatGPT was trained on copyrighted books, including J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series::A new research paper laid out ways in which AI developers should try and avoid showing LLMs have been trained on copyrighted material.
His point is equally valid. Can an artist be compelled to show the methods of their art? Is it as right to force an artist to give up methods if another artist thinks they are using AI to derive copyrighted work? Haven't we already seen that LLMs are really poor at evaluating whether or not something was created by an LLM? Wouldn't making strong laws on such an already opaque and difficult-to-prove issue be more of a burden on smaller artists vs. large studios with lawyers-in-tow.
If I read Harry Potter and wrote a novel of my own, no doubt ideas from it could consciously or subconsciously influence it and be incorporated into it. Hey is that any different from what an LLM does?
You joke but AI advocates seem to forget that people have fundamentally different rights than tools and objects. A photocopier doesn't get the right to "memorize" and "learn" from a text that a human being does. As much as people may argue that AIs work different, AIs are still not people.
And if they ever become people, the situation will be much more complicated than whether they can imitate some writer. But we aren't there yet, even their advocates just uses them as tools.
But this falls exactly under what I just said. To say that using Machine Learning to imitate an artist without permission is fine, because humans are allowed to learn to each other, is making the mistake of assigning personhood to the system, that it ought to have the same rights that human beings do. There is a distinction between the rights of humans as opposed to tools, so to say that an AI can't be trained on someone's works to replicate their style doesn't need to apply to people.
Even if you support that reasoning, that still doesn't help the writers and artists whose job is threatened by AI models based on their work. That it isn't an exact reproduction doesn't change that it relied on using their works to begin with, and it doesn't change that it serves as a way to undercut them, providing a cheaper replacement for their work. Copyright law as it was, wasn't envisioned for a world where Machine Learning exists. It doesn't really solve the problem to say that technically it's not supposed to cover ideas and styles. The creators will be struggling just the same.
Either the law will need to emphasize the value of human autorship first, or we will need to go through drastic socioeconomic changes to ensure that these creators will be able to keep creating despite losing market to AI. Otherwise, to simply say that AI gets to do this and change nothing else, will cause enormous damage to all sort of creative careers and wider culture. Even AI will become more limited with less fresh new creators to learn elements from.
There is a difference between "analyzing" and derivating. The authorship of AI-created works is also not the user's, it takes more than a prompt for that, and that seems to be the conclusion courts are leaning towards.
Still, even if that turns out to be technically correct, it still doesn't help the creators getting undercut who might be driven out of their careers by AI.
They do specify that the human's involvement needs to be more extensive than prompting for a certain image or text. The output itself is not copyrightable. If we are speaking about the process of "analysis" that the ML model does, then the user does not get the rights over it.
This discussion is becoming increasingly overly specific and getting away from my point. My sole concern in all this is what happens to the artists who'll have to compete with AI?
They do specify that the human’s involvement needs to be more extensive than prompting for a certain image or text. The output itself is not copyrightable. If we are speaking about the process of “analysis” that the ML model does, then the user does not get the rights over it.
It says :
In other cases, however, a work containing AI-generated material will also contain sufficient human authorship to support a copyright claim. For example, a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that “the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.” Or an artist may modify material originally generated by AI technology to such a degree that the modifications meet the standard for copyright protection.
And you do get rights to your own original analysis of data. That isn't even in question.
This discussion is becoming increasingly overly specific and getting away from my point. My sole concern in all this is what happens to the artists who’ll have to compete with AI?
I guess all I have to say here is that generative models are a free and open source tool anyone can use. It took us 100,000 years to get from cave drawings to Leonard Da Vinci. This is just another step, like Camera Obscura.
When you call the output itself "analysis", that's not what they say.
In February 2023, the Office concluded that a graphic novel comprised of human-authored text combined with images generated by the AI service Midjourney constituted a copyrightable work, but that the individual images themselves could not be protected by copyright
This is in your own link. Simply prompting Midjourney doesn't get the user copyright.
I guess all I have to say here is that generative models are a free and open source tool anyone can use. It took us 100,000 years to get from cave drawings to Leonard Da Vinci. This is just another step, like Camera Obscura.
That is not something many of those people whose work is being used to enable it even want to use. Not to mention, if AI art were to be the "next evolution" in media, which it isn't since it output the same medium, there wouldn't be a need for as many AI prompters as there are artists right now. This glosses over the issue entirely.
Exactly. If I write some Loony toons fan fiction, Warner doesn't own that. This ridiculous view of copyright (that's not being challenged in the public discourse) needs to be confronted.
They can own it, actually. If you use the characters of Bugs Bunny, etc., or the setting (do they have a canonical setting?) then Warner does own the rights to the material you're using.
For example, see how the original Winnie the Pooh material just entered public domain, but the subsequent Disney versions have not. You can use the original stuff (see the recent horror movie for an example of legal use) but not the later material like Tigger or Pooh in a red shirt.
Now if your work is satire or parody, then you can argue that it's fair use. But generally, most companies don't care about fan fiction because it doesn't compete with their sales. If you publish your Harry Potter fan fiction on Livejournal, it wouldn't be worth the money to pay the lawyers to take it down. But if you publish your Larry Cotter and the Wizard's Rock story on Amazon, they'll take it down because now it's a competing product.
Can't but theyre pretty open on how they trained the model, so like almost admitted guilt (though they werent hosting the pirated content, its still out there and would be trained on). Cause unless they trained it on a paid Netflix account, there's no way to get it legally.
Idk where this lands legally, but I'd assume not in their favour
It's honestly a good question. It's perfectly legal for you to memorize a copyrighted work. In some contexts, you can recite it, too (particularly the perilous fair use). And even if you don't recite a copyrighted work directly, you are most certainly allowed to learn to write from reading copyrighted books, then try to come up with your own writing based off what you've read. You'll probably try your best to avoid copying anyone, but you might still make mistakes, simply by forgetting that some idea isn't your own.
But can AI? If we want to view AI as basically an artificial brain, then shouldn't it be able to do what humans can do? Though at the same time, it's not actually a brain nor is it a human. Humans are pretty limited in what they can remember, whereas an AI could be virtually boundless.
If we're looking at intent, the AI companies certainly aren't trying to recreate copyrighted works. They've actively tried to stop it as we can see. And LLMs don't directly store the copyrighted works, either. They're basically just storing super hard to understand sets of weights, which are a challenge even for experienced researchers to explain. They're not denying that they read copyrighted works (like all of us do), but arguably they aren't trying to write copyrighted works.
No, because you paid for a single viewing of that content with your cinema ticket. And frankly, I think that the price of a cinema ticket (= a single viewing, which it was) should be what OpenAI should be made to pay.