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.
AIās ingesting of text and other formats is ālearningā 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. Thereās a mechanism for individual copyright owners to grant rights to specific uses: itās 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.
What do you think āingestingā means if not learning?
Bear in mind that training AI does not involve copying content into its database, so copyright is not an issue. AI is simply predicting the next token /word based on statistics.
You can train AI in a book and it will give you information from the book - information is not copyrightable. You can read a book a talk about its contents on TV - not illegal if youāre a human, should it be illegal if youāre a machine?
There may be moral issues on training on someoneās hard gathered knowledge, but there is no legislature against it. Reading books and using that knowledge to provide information is legal. If you try to outlaw Automating this process by computers, there will be side effects such as search engines will no longer be able to index data.
Bear in mind that training AI does not involve copying content into its database, so copyright is not an issue.
Wrong. The infringement is in obtaining the data and presenting it to the AI model during the training process. It makes no difference that the original work is not retained in the modelās weights afterwards.
You can train AI in a book and it will give you information from the book - information is not copyrightable. You can read a book a talk about its contents on TV - not illegal if youāre a human, should it be illegal if youāre a machine?
Yes, because copyright law is intended to benefit human creativity.
If you try to outlaw Automating this process by computers, there will be side effects such as search engines will no longer be able to index data.
Wrong. Search engines retain a minimal amount of the indexed websiteās data, and the purpose of the search engine is to generate traffic to the website, providing benefit for both the engine and the website (increased visibility, the opportunity to show ads to make money). Banning the use of copyrighted content for AI training (which uses the entire copyrighted work and whose purpose is to replace the organizations whose work is being used) will have no effect.
But, really, I think people should be able to run algorithms on whatever data they want. Itās whether the output is sufficiently different or ātransformativeā that matters (and other laws like using peopleās likeness). Otherwise, I think the laws will get complex and nonsensical once you start adding special cases for āAI.ā And Iād bet if new laws are written, theyād be written by lobbiests to further erode the threat of competition (from free software, for instance).
Theyāre advising you to use a personal email that is tied more directly to your name or identity, like using Yahoo Mail, Outlook, or Gmail, which they view as more personalized.
If youād like, you could try creating an email address with your actual name (or a variation) on one of the recommended services, like: [email protected][email protected] This should resolve the issue
Now, imagine this revolutionary improvement: Find a way of putting the energy source outside of the train somehow, and save on weight by not hauling those heavy batteries around.
Christ, the amount of times techbros and tesla fanboys have accidentally āinventedā trains and trams these past few years is beyond stupidā¦
Because there already are tracks without electricity where I live. When coming from a nearby major city by me, the train has to stop for 40 minutes while they switch from an electric to diesel power car. Same process while taking a train into the city, switching from diesel to electric.
Well, theyād only need enough batteries to cover the distance without overhead lines. So for shortish sections itās probably fine, just charge while on the powered section.
Iām not a rail expert, but I thought for some reason that rails without electricity would be too old/unmaintained to be allowed to serve passenger traffic, lol.
40 minutes? I would have imagined that everyone would hop off at the station, theyād then drive out to a parking junction, and then drive back the electric train to the station for people to load in again. Isnāt it also very expensive to take the train (youāre from the US I assume)? Not weird that no one wants to take it when itās in such bad situations :/
There are definitely use cases for battery-electric trains:
We have these in Germany usually in areas with low traffic. E.g. if a train line is only serviced a couple of times a day, itās more cost-effective to carry the batteries with you than to electrify the line.
Another use case are train ferries. They are the reason why Germany also had Diesel-powered high-speed trains for a while.
Another challenge in Europe is the lack of harmonization of power supplies of train lines between countries. In cross-border traffic, trains have to be adapted to work with different energy supplies. Battery-electric trains can add flexibility for these scenarios. E.g. Germany uses AC 15 kV 16.7Hz, the Netherlands DC 1.5 kV on low-speed and AC 25 kV 50Hz on high-speed lines. When a train goes from the Netherlands to Germany, it disconnects from the Dutch system and reconnects to the German system on the fly. For a moment in between, the train loses power. If the train lacks momentum or has to stop unexpectedly, the train is stranded and has to be pushed over the border by another train that is independent of the power supply.
Man, am I glad I grew up with less horny games. Like Tomb raider, Metroid or Shantae.
The real reason is probably that we said comparable stuff, just as whispers and not written in an anonymous forum. And we werenāt even egged on by forum culture or our games to be as horny as possible, the former drives engagement while the ladder drives sales.
The āyou wouldnāt download a carā statement is made against personal cases of piracy, which got rightfully clowned upon. It obviously doesnāt work at all when you use its ridiculousness to defend big ass corporations that tries to profit from so many of the stuff they ādownloadedā.
Besides, it is not ātheftā. It is āplagiarismā. And Iām 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 get an extreme amount of secondhand embarassment reading these comments donāt get me wrong but at the end of the day its just some people doing some weird jokes on the internet. Even if the things they say are their actual worldview nearly everyone on the internet lacks the influence in the real world to enforce their worldviews to the masses so what does it matter if they say such stuff on the part of the internet where their kind of people usually hang out. Iād say live and let live in this case. No need to hate your fellow humans just because they hold different opinions than the popular ones or the ones you hold.
Aye it's ass. Even the temp mail idea is flawed because at some point you need to confirm your identity/ownership of the account.
I did a huge GDPR cleanup of various accounts I owned based on what I had and wanted gone from my password manager at the time. A mix of:
Please fill out this pdf with all your details of all the information you want deleted. If we can't find the data base don that form then it's on you. (Unnecessary amount of work. Solution, report to national GDPR Rep for obfuscation.)
Non-response from any active email. (Illegal for companies with operation sin the EU. Report to national GDPR rep for non0compliance.)
Did not respond for 30 days (Illegal for companies with operation sin the EU. Report to national GDPR rep for non0compliance.)
Asked for an extension to 60 days (Only possible in certain extreme circumstances that they need to prove to you. Report to national GDPR rep.)
Asked for copy of passport to confirm identity. (Unnecessary if emailing from the email they have on file. Tell them this. If they don't delete/ignore report them to national GDPR rep.)
Self-service deletion does not work and customer service will only refer you to that self-service. (Report to national GDPR rep.)
And probably more I don't remember. Maybe 30% of companies I reached out to actually just deleted it and confirmed as such within 30 days. If you're doing similar then you've got to get good at reporting people to strong arm them, especially if they just no respond after 30 days. Gotta proactively stay on top of that.
When they reply that they have deleted the account, do you assume that they also delete any information that they have stored or that they simply close it and keep the information?
Personally i want them to delete my email name and other information so that it is not at all in their systems.
The problem here is, that I canāt write and check, without them creating a new account for that email
Those claiming AI training on copyrighted works is ātheftā 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, theyāre extracting general patterns and concepts - the āBob Dylan-nessā or āHemingway-nessā - not copying specific text or images.
Not really. Sure, they take input and garble it up and it is ātransformativeā - but so is a human watching a TV series on a pirate site, for example. Hell, itās 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 āeducationalā fair use protection doesnāt stand.
The AI discards the original text, keeping only abstract representations in āvector spaceā. When generating new content, the AI isnāt recreating copyrighted works, but producing new expressions inspired by the concepts itās learned.
It does and it doesnāt discard the original. It isnāt 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, āsubstantial similarityā is needed, not one-for-one reproduction.
This is fundamentally different from copying a book or song.
Again, not really.
Itās more like the long-standing artistic tradition of being influenced by othersā work.
Sure. Except when it isnāt and the AI pumps out the original or something close enoigh to it.
The law has always recognized that ideas themselves canāt be owned - only particular expressions of them.
Iād be careful with the āalwaysā 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 āpatent trollā).
Moreover, thereās precedent for this kind of use being considered ātransformativeā 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 doesnāt have the capability of reproducing it (other than maybe the page it was on perhaps) - well, it does have the capability since itās in the index somewhere, but there are checks in place to make sure it doesnāt happen, which seem to be yet unachieved in AI.
While itās understandable that creators feel uneasy about this new technology, labeling it ātheftā 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 doesnāt make the current use of copyrighted works for AI training illegal or
Yes, new legislation will made to either let āBig AIā do as it pleases, or prevent it from doing so. Or, as usual, itāll be somewhere inbetween and vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
However,
that doesnāt make the current use of copyrighted works for AI training illegal or unethical.
this doesnāt really stand. Sure, morals are debatable and while Iād 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 isnāt lended out as the same time representing the legal āoriginalā). I think breaking DRM also isnāt illegal (but someone please correct me if Iām 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 āsubstantially similarā output, just as much as hosts of āclassicā 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).
Itās funny you mention the Katy Perry chord case, because Damien Riehl, who made the argument I referenced in my original post, actually talked about this exact case in the podcast I mentioned. He noted that Katy Perry was initially sued and a jury awarded $2.8 million over a very simple melody that appeared over 8,000 times in Riehlās dataset of generated melodies. However, after Riehl gave his TED talk about his āAll the Musicā project in early 2020, the judge reversed the jury verdict, saying the melody was unoriginal and therefore uncopyrightable.
I didnāt listen to the podcast so I wouldnāt know, but honestly, she was lucky. Sheās popular and her publishers had an interest in the case (theyād lose out on profits if she lost). And she initially did lose. It was only because of the publicity of the case that it was overruled (although money did help as well).
Unfortunately, this couldāve happened to any smaller artist, and it routinely happens with patent trolls I pointed to. Unfortunately, I donāt have a lawsuit I can point to, but given the volume, one surely exists.
Also, itās not as if I approve of the current state of copyright in the US (or EU for that matter).
Originally copyright was meant to protect rights of the author, but in time it was bastardised into the concept we have today where artist sign off their rights to publishers.
So my proposal is - if corporations like copyright, let them have it. I wonāt watch Disney movies outside of Disney+ ors the system weāve got and have to live with, why not let the corporatios feel it as well?
Why would Google, which makes loads of money from those demonetizations on one side of the law now be allowed to use copyrighted works of others for profit, while Internet users in the US get a fine or their service cut for alleged copright infringement while those in Germany get a stern letter with a big fake fine?
Big Tech shouldnāt get to profit both from the false copyright infringement claims as well as getting to use the actual copyrighted content to generate a profit.
This whole AI copyright situation is just a symptom of an ailing global copyright policy that needs to be fixed, and slapping an AI-free-for-all band-aid on top isnāt a fix.
My train of thought is this: If we donāt let a simple AI exceotion into the books, either training AI on copyrighted content stays illegal, or the entire system gets a reimagining.
If it stays the same, this will not mean much. Piracy sites and torrenting exists despite the current state of copyright law. I donāt see why AI couldāt exist in this way. This has the huge plus of keeping AI outside the hands of Big Tech. Hopefully this also means itās harder for harmful uses of AI to be legal.
Alternatively, we get a better copyright system for everyone, assuming it isnāt made to only benefit the corporations.
Iād be careful with the āalwaysā 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 āpatent trollā).
Are you really trying to argue against a point by providing evidence supporting it?
You made a lot of points here. Many I agree with, some I donāt, but I specifically want to address this because it seems to be such a common misconception.
It does and it doesnāt discard the original. It isnāt 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.
AI stores original works like a dictionary does. All the words are there, but the order and meaning is completely gone. An original work is possible to recreate by randomly selecting words from the dictionary, but itās unlikely.
The thing that makes AI useful is that it understands the patterns words are typically used in. It orders words in the right way far more often than random chance. It knows āIt was the best ofā has a lot of likely options for the next word, but if it selects ātimesā as the next word, itās far more likely to continue with, āit was the worst of times.ā Because that sequence of words is so ubiquitous due to references to the classic story. But over the course of following these word patterns, it will quickly glom onto a different pattern and create a wholly new work from the original āprompt.ā
There are only two cases in which an original work should be duplicated: either the training data is far too small and the model is overtrained on that particular work, or the work is the most derivative text imaginable lacking any flair or originality.
Adding more training data makes it less likely to recreate any original works.
I am aware of examples where it was claimed an LLM reproduced entirely code functions including original comments. That is either a case of overtraining, or far too many people were already copying that code verbatim into their own, thus making that work very over represented in the training data (same thing, but it was infringing developers who poisoned the data, not researchers using bad training data).
Bottom line: when created with enough data, no original works are stored in any way that allows faithful reproduction other than by chance so random that itās similar to rolling dice over a dictionary.
None of this means AI can do no wrong, I just donāt find the copyright claim compelling.
Based on this dumpster fire of a headline, I think the take-away can only be that Siemens and other train manufacturers have to start calling their trains āOMEGA RAILā and āCHUNGUS 3000ā or shit like that so itās worth a news article.
I just finished my summer internship at the Austrian Federal Railways āĆBBā and theyāre ordering a bunch of these Mireos which is why it struck me.
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