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The AI-focused COPIED Act would make removing digital watermarks illegal (as well as training any kind of AI on copyrighted content)

A bipartisan group of senators introduced a new bill to make it easier to authenticate and detect artificial intelligence-generated content and protect journalists and artists from having their work gobbled up by AI models without their permission.

The Content Origin Protection and Integrity from Edited and Deepfaked Media Act (COPIED Act) would direct the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to create standards and guidelines that help prove the origin of content and detect synthetic content, like through watermarking. It also directs the agency to create security measures to prevent tampering and requires AI tools for creative or journalistic content to let users attach information about their origin and prohibit that information from being removed. Under the bill, such content also could not be used to train AI models.

Content owners, including broadcasters, artists, and newspapers, could sue companies they believe used their materials without permission or tampered with authentication markers. State attorneys general and the Federal Trade Commission could also enforce the bill, which its backers say prohibits anyone from “removing, disabling, or tampering with content provenance information” outside of an exception for some security research purposes.

(A copy of the bill is in he article, here is the important part imo:

Prohibits the use of “covered content” (digital representations of copyrighted works) with content provenance to either train an AI- /algorithm-based system or create synthetic content without the express, informed consent and adherence to the terms of use of such content, including compensation)

Lets_Eat_Grandma ,

Doesn’t this infringe on fair use? e.g. if i’m making a parody of something and I mimic the original even by using a portion of the original’s text word for word.

Everyone is so obsessed with having a monopoly over everything, it’s not what is best for 8 billion people.

Zink ,

This sounds like a way to get media companies and tech companies to fight.

Unfortunately I expect that they will both somehow win and individuals will be worse off. This is the U-S-A god damn it.

Randomgal ,

There will be no fight. Some fat stacks of cheddar will change hands and this will fail at the voting stage.

SplashJackson ,

Why do these acts always have such stupid acronyms

LordCrom ,

There’s absolutely no way to enforce this.

piecat ,

No? You don’t think the courts would approve of a fishing expedition for forth amendment violation access to your computer?

Treczoks ,

As if a law could prevent anything of that. They simply demand “Pigs Must Fly”, and don’t waste a thought on how utterly unrealistic this is.

UnderpantsWeevil ,
@UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world avatar

As if a law could prevent anything of that.

Generating legal liability goes a long way towards curbing how businesses behave, particularly when they can be picked on by rival mega-firms.

But because we’ve made class action lawsuits increasingly difficult, particularly after Comcast Corp. v. Behrend, the idea that individual claimants can effectively prosecute a case against an interstate or international entity is increasingly farcical. You’re either going to need big state agencies (the EU seems increasingly invested in cracking down on American tech companies for anti-competitive practices) or rivalrous business interests (MPAA/RIAA going after Big Tech backed AI firms) to leverage this kind of liability. It’s still going to be open season on everyone using DeviantArt or Pinterest or whatever.

IzzyJ ,
@IzzyJ@lemmy.world avatar

I posted this in a thread, but Im gonna make it a parent comment for those who support this bill.

Consider youtube poop, Im serious. Every clip in them is sourced from preexisting audio and video, and mixed or distorted in a comedic format. You could make an AI to make youtube poops using those same clips and other “poops” as training data. What it outputs might be of lower quality (less funny), but in a technical sense it would be made in an identical fashion. And, to the chagrin of Disney, Nintendo, and Viacom, these are considered legally distinct entities; because I dont watch Frying Nemo in place of Finding Nemo. So why would it be any different when an AI makes it?

hark ,
@hark@lemmy.world avatar

My best guess would be intent, which I think is an important component of fair use. The intent of youtube poop creators could be considered parody and while someone could use AI to create parody, the intent of creating the AI model itself is not parody (at least not for these massive AI models that most people use).

IzzyJ ,
@IzzyJ@lemmy.world avatar

Transformation is in itself fair use is the thing. Ytp doesnt need to be parody or critique or anything else, because its fundamentally no longer the same product as whatever the source was as a direct result of editing

hark ,
@hark@lemmy.world avatar

Still, the AI model itself is not transformative, it is merely incorporating that data into its training set.

IzzyJ ,
@IzzyJ@lemmy.world avatar

But what it outputs IS transformative, which- of course- is the e primary use

hark ,
@hark@lemmy.world avatar

If I include an image of mickey mouse (ripped straight from disney) in my application in a proprietary compression format, then the application decompresses that image and changes the hue (or whatever other kind of modification), then these are technically “transformations” but they’re not transformative.

IzzyJ ,
@IzzyJ@lemmy.world avatar

The law being violated there is trademark, not copyright

hark ,
@hark@lemmy.world avatar

No it isn’t. The image of mickey mouse was literally copied (hence copyright, literally right to copy). Regardless, that’s still IP law being violated so I don’t know how that helps your case.

IzzyJ ,
@IzzyJ@lemmy.world avatar

If you arent calling it mickey mouse, it would actually be fine from a copyright perspective. What youd get sued for is the character design itself being too similar, which is a trademark/IP issue

MeaanBeaan ,

I see this argument a lot as a defense for AI art and I see a couple major flaws in this line of thinking.

First, it’s treating the AI art as somehow the same as a dirivitive (or parody) work made by an actual person. These two things are not the same and should not be argued like they are.

AI art isn’t just dirivitive. It’s a Frankenstein’s Monster of a bunch of different pieces of art stitched together in a procedural way that doesn’t credit and in fact obfuscates the original works. This is problematic at best and flat out dishonest thievery at worst. Whereas a work made by a person that is dirivitive or parody has actual work and thought put into it by an actual person. And would typically at least credit the original works being riffed on. This involves actual creative thought and human touch. Even if it is dirivitive it’s unique in some way simply by virtue of being made by a person.

AI art cannot and will not ever be unique, at least not when used to just create a work wholesale. Because it’s not being creative. It’s calculating and nothing more. (at least if we’re talking about current tachnology. A possible future General AI could flout this argument. But that would get into an AI personhood conversation not really relevant to our current machine learning tech).

Secondly, no one is worried that some hypothetical shitty AI video is going to somehow usurp the work that it’s stealing from. What people are worried about is that AI art is going to be used in place of hiring actual artists for bigger projects. And the fact that this AI art exists solely because it’s scraped the internet of art from those same artists now losing their livelihoods makes the tech incredibly fucked up.

Now don’t get me wrong though. I do believe machine learning has its place in society. And we’ve already been using it for a long time to help with large tasks that would be incredibly difficult if not impossible for people to do on their own in a bunch of different industries. Things like medicine research in the pharmaceutical sector and fraud monitoring in the banking sector come to mind.

Also, there is an argument to be had that machine learning algorithms could be used as tools in creating art. I don’t really have a problem with those use cases. Things that come to mind are a bunch of different tools that exist in music production right now that in my opinion help in allowing artists to fulfill their vision. Watch some There I Ruined It videos on YouTube to see what I mean. Yeah that guy is using AI to make himself sound like other musicians. But that guy also had to be a really solid singer and impressionist in the first place for those songs to be any good at all.

Grimy OP , (edited )

It’s a Frankenstein’s Monster of a bunch of different pieces of art stitched together in a procedural way that doesn’t credit and in fact obfuscates the original works

What you described is collage and is completely legal. How image generation works is much more complicated but in any case, both it and collage clearly fall under transformative use.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use

Schadrach ,

This is problematic at best and flat out dishonest thievery at worst.

You could say that about literally all art - no artist can name and attribute every single influence that played even the smallest effect on the work created. Say I commissioned an image of an anime man in a french maid uniform in a 4 panel pop art style. In creating it at some level you are going to draw on every anime image you’ve seen, every picture of a french maid uniform, every 4 panel pop art image and create something that’s a synthesis of all those things. You can’t name and attribute every single example of all of those things you have ever seen, as well as anything else that might have influenced you.

Whereas a work made by a person that is dirivitive or parody has actual work and thought put into it by an actual person.

…and this is the crux of it - it’s not anything related to the actual content of the image, it’s simple protectionism for a class of worker. Basically creatives are seeing the possibility of some of their jobs being automated away and are freaking out because losing jobs to automation is something that’s only supposed to effect manufacturing workers.

Even if it is dirivitive it’s unique in some way simply by virtue of being made by a person.

Again, the argument is it’s nothing to do with the actual result, but with it being done by an actual human as opposed to a mere machine. A pixel for pixel identical image create by a human would be “art” by virtue of it being a human that put each pixel there?

MeaanBeaan ,

You could say that about literally all art

Except I couldn’t. Because a person being influenced by an artwork and then either intentionally or subconsciously reinterpreting that artwork into a new work of art is a fundamentally different thing from a power hungry machine learning algorithm digesting the near entirety of modern humanity’s art output to churn out an image manufactured to best satisfy some random person’s text prompt.

They’re just not the same thing at all.

The whole purpose of art is to be an outlet for expressing ourselves as human beings. It exists out of this need for expression; part of what makes a work worth appreciating is the human person(s) behind that said work and the effort and skill they put into making it.

…and this is the crux of it - it’s not anything related to the actual content of the image, it’s simple protectionism for a class of worker. Basically creatives are seeing the possibility of some of their jobs being automated away and are freaking out because losing jobs to automation is something that’s only supposed to effect manufacturing workers.

Yes it has nothing to do with the content of the image. I never claimed otherwise. In fact AI art sometimes being indistinguishable from human made art is part of the problem. But we’re not just talking about automating someone’s job. We’re talking about automating someone’s passion. Automating someone’s dream career. In an ideal world we’d automate all the shitty jobs and pay everyone to play guitar, paint a portrait, write a book, or direct a film. Art being made by AI won’t just take away jobs for creatives, it’ll sap away the drive we have as humans to create. And when we create less our existence will be filled with even more bleakness than it already is.

Again, the argument is it’s nothing to do with the actual result, but with it being done by an actual human as opposed to a mere machine. A pixel for pixel identical image create by a human would be “art” by virtue of it being a human that put each pixel there?

I’m not certain I understand what you’re asking. But If the human is the one making the decision on where to put the pixel then yeah that would be fine. But at no point am I arguing about whether or not AI art is “art”. That would just be a dumb semantic argument that’d go nowhere. I’m merely discussing why I believe AI art to be unethical. And the taking away work from creatives point is only one facet as to why I do.

JamesFire ,

The whole purpose of art is to be an outlet for expressing ourselves as human beings. It exists out of this need for expression; part of what makes a work worth appreciating is the human person(s) behind that said work and the effort and skill they put into making it.

This is completely and utterly your own opinion, not a fact. I know several people who can’t draw for shit, due to various reasons, but now AI allows them to create images they enjoy. One of them has aphantasia (They literally cannot imagine images).

This is basically trying to argue there’s only 1 correct way to make “art”, which is complete and utter bullshit. Imagine trying to say that a sculpture isn’t art because it was 3D printed instead of chiseled. It makes 0 sense for the method of making the art to impact whether or not it is art. “Expression” can take many forms. Why is this form invalid?

MeaanBeaan ,

This is completely and utterly your own opinion, not a fact. I know several people who can’t draw for shit, due to various reasons, but now AI allows them to create images they enjoy. One of them has aphantasia (They literally cannot imagine images).

Never claimed it wasn’t an opinion. And I fully acknowledge that tools can make creating art easier. Hell, I even support the use of machine learning tools when making art. When used as tools and not as a means of creating art wholesale they can enable creativity. But, I’m sorry, writing a text prompt for an AI to produce an image is not making art (for the person writing the prompt). It’s writing a prompt. In the same way that a project manager writing a brief for a contract artist to fullfil is also not creating the art. The AI is producing the art (and by extension the artists who created the works the AI was trained off of). Your friend with aphantasia is not.

This is basically trying to argue there’s only 1 correct way to make “art”, which is complete and utter bullshit. Imagine trying to say that a sculpture isn’t art because it was 3D printed instead of chiseled. It makes 0 sense for the method of making the art to impact whether or not it is art. “Expression” can take many forms. Why is this form invalid?

Again, I never said any form of art was invalid. Not even AI art. Nor do I think AI art isn’t art. AI art is perfectly capable of creating something worthwhile by means of its content. It’s basing it’s output on worthwhile works of art created by people after all. I’m merely arguing AI art is unethical. If you made a mural out of the blood of children you murdered it’d still be art. But it sure as shit wouldn’t be ethical.

Drewelite ,

With all respect, your argument has a pretty obvious emotional valence. You don’t care if the result is 1:1, you care that it happened in a way that makes you uncomfortable. Art can be an outlet for self expression and no one is taking that away. What’s it to you if I enjoy asking an AI for art?

The fact of the matter is, capitalism has never been a good place for artists who want to follow their dream. If that’s something you want, then I’d suggest supporting the end of all work for money that automation provides. Then people can truly work on whatever they care about all day and not have to worry about feeding themselves.

Schadrach ,

Except I couldn’t. Because a person being influenced by an artwork and then either intentionally or subconsciously reinterpreting that artwork into a new work of art is a fundamentally different thing from a power hungry machine learning algorithm digesting the near entirety of modern humanity’s art output

The big differences there are whether it’s a person or a machine and just how much art one can digest as inspiration. Again, reference my example of a commission above - the main difference between a human and an AI making it is whether they look up a couple dozen examples of each element to get a general idea or 100 million examples of each element to mathematically generalize the idea, and the main reason the number of examples and power requirements need to be so different is that humans are extremely efficient pattern developing and matching machines, so efficient that sometimes the brain just fills in the pattern instead of bothering to fully process sensory inputs (which is why a lot of optical illusions work).

to churn out an image manufactured to best satisfy some random person’s text prompt.

At a level, “churning out an image to best satisfy some random person’s” description is essentially what happens when someone commissions a work or when producing things to spec as part of some project. They don’t generally say “just draw whatever you are inspired to” and hope they like the result. This is the thing that AI image generators are specifically good at, and is why I say it’s about protectionism for a class of workers who didn’t think their jobs could be automated away in whole or in part.

But we’re not just talking about automating someone’s job.

Except you are, you are just deeming that job “someone’s dream career” as though that changes whether or not it’s a job that is being automated in whole or part. Yes, it’s going to hurt the market for commissioned art works and the like. Again, upset because those jobs are supposed to be immune to automation and - whoopsie - they aren’t. Join the people in manufacturing, or the makers of buggy whips.

We’re talking about automating someone’s passion.

Literally no one is going to ban or forbid anyone from creating art because AI art exists.

Fuzzypyro ,

For those who are saying just photoshop.

methodshop.com/photoshop-money/

Obviously you can just use other software but PS is the main choice for image editing. What they need to do is put legislation in place and it will make the biggest players implement this form of drm.

interdimensionalmeme ,

The main goal is cementing the position of the giants, creating a bureaucratic mote around them to keep small players economically unviable.

admin ,
@admin@lemmy.my-box.dev avatar

People keep saying that, all the while ignoring that this bill is granting rights to small time creators to decide if they want their works used for machine learning.

Yes, this gives a head start to companies that have been abusing the system while it was still allowed. But stopping that behaviour too late is still better than not stopping it at all.

afraid_of_zombies ,

You said nothing about creators getting screwed for untold centuries, only when big corporations were threatened slightly did you speak up.

interdimensionalmeme ,

Small creators aren’t competition or an alternative to big tech.

If the only game in town is still big tech. You will need an army of lawyer to get leverage on them.

afraid_of_zombies ,

Anyone supporting this better be against right of repair and jail time for anyone discussing a sporting event without written permission

BlanK0 ,

How would this even work when you sometimes can just remove the watermark by photoshoping?

admin ,
@admin@lemmy.my-box.dev avatar

In the same way that the law doesn’t prevent you from murdering someone, but just makes it illegal to do so.

afraid_of_zombies ,

Wow so much freedom. You can’t even alter a picture that you own.

admin ,
@admin@lemmy.my-box.dev avatar

?

afraid_of_zombies ,

I have ever right to remove a watermark from any image on my computer.

ILikeBoobies ,

Not true however if you actually own the image then it’s unlikely to have a watermark

afraid_of_zombies ,

Is the photo of the image on my device? If so I own it. If you take a photo of it you own that photo as well.

admin ,
@admin@lemmy.my-box.dev avatar

I’m sure that’s how it works in your ideal world or imaginationland. But you do realise there’s like no legal basis for this in the real world, right? Just because you downloaded an Iron man torrent, does not mean you own part of the MCU.

afraid_of_zombies ,

Try and stop me

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/8e07a553-d20f-498e-b540-d184498acb24.jpeg

admin ,
@admin@lemmy.my-box.dev avatar

You should change your name to afraid_of_reality. Have fun in your dream world, I’m out.

afraid_of_zombies ,

Pay me five bucks, I’m out is under my copyright

sab ,

Let me get this straight - if a vengeful ex or someone else gets a hand on naked pictures of you, they can do whatever they want to them? You wouldn’t want any limits on their ability to alter them and spread them?

afraid_of_zombies ,

Nope, that would be sexual harassment if they spread them if it was truly awful they could also be hit for liable as well. However, if they kept it on their device and never showed anyone they can do what they want.

There is a difference between owning a hammer and hitting someone with a hammer.

aidan ,

Not true

Why not? I can tear out the copyright section of book I own, how is removing a watermark different?

Reproduction is the primary complaint, but if I don’t distribute it that’s invalid.

match ,
@match@pawb.social avatar

i think you can remove it if you own the copyright on it

afraid_of_zombies ,

How gracious of them.

sab ,

Quite the contrary, actually. Thanks to this law you won’t have to watermark something you own, in order to prevent companies to use it for profit.

Unless of course you have the misconception that downloading something that someone else made is the same as owning it. In which case, I understand this might be difficult for you to grasp.

afraid_of_zombies ,

Unless of course you have the misconception that downloading something that someone else made is the same as owning it. In which case, I understand this might be difficult for you to grasp.

Oh hi Disney. Here to shut down another daycare for having a picture of Mickey Mouse?

I have full rights to do whatever the fuck I want with content and tech. If I want to make Daffy Duck solve a mystery with Cheech in Victorian England with Genghis Khan as the chief of Scotland yard and Fred Rodgers as the bad guy I am free to do so. If I buy a machine I can take apart all of it, reverse engineer it, modify it, and comment on it on YouTube.

Bite me corporate

rottingleaf ,

There are people who think that something being official law is automatically legal. It’s a bit inconvenient that Nazi Germany is the first example that comes to mind to explain why they are wrong.

afraid_of_zombies ,

It’s a moral ought from an is. Informal logical fallacy.

Something is illegal therefore it is immoral.

No, those are two different facts. Perhaps in a better world there would be a lot of overlap between those two but in the world we live in it is not a given or even likely.

rottingleaf ,

No, it’s another distinction. Three different things. Something legal can be moral or not. Something made law can be legal or not. For example, if it’s forced in some way so that formally you couldn’t prevent it becoming law, but it’s still illegal, it’s still illegal.

Which is, other than copyright except for protecting the fact of authorship, why all censorship and surveillance is illegal, and, say, why Armenia legally includes Van, Erzurum, Nakhijevan etc, and the fact that Wilson’s mediation and French mandate have been buried by force just means that Cilicia and Melitene are as well.

Restoring law and order takes effort, though.

sab ,

Yes. Your content and tech. And you even get a say in how others get to use it. Thanks to laws like these. Not to someone else’s.

afraid_of_zombies ,

Yes my content and my tech. It is physically in my possession it is mine. If you take a picture of it congrats that picture is your picture. What part is confusing you exactly?

Did I see a sportsball event? I can talk about it to whom I want when I want.

Did I buy a physical book? I can take as many photos of it as I want.

Did I buy a cell phone? I can take apart it, modify it, reverse engineer it, benchmark it, and review it.

Now answer my question if you plan to go after another Daycare, Disney. No more evasions

sab ,

Did I see a sportsball event? I can talk about it to whom I want when I want.

Sure.

Did I buy a physical book? I can take as many photos of it as I want.

Nope. You can’t, for example, take a picture of all the pages and then redistribute those.

Now answer my question if you plan to go after another Daycare, Disney. No more evasions

Only if you tell me whether or not you stopped beating your wife.

What part is confusing you exactly?

I initially thought you were ignorant of the core principle of intellectual property, but now I see you’re just wilfully delusional.

afraid_of_zombies ,

Sure.

Oh really? For someone bragging about their knowledge of copyright law I am surprised yo do know about the MLB copyright warning.

pages and then redistribute those

I can too.

Only if you tell me whether or not you stopped beating your wife.

What you are shilling for free for them on the weekend? Jesus.

initially thought you were ignorant of the core principle of intellectual property, but now I see you’re just wilfully delusional.

And I originally thought Disney was paying you but you are apparently giving it to corporate for free.

xthexder ,
@xthexder@l.sw0.com avatar

Copyright can’t be applied to just talking about an event? MLB cannot copywrite facts such as who won a game or what occurred during the game. Their copywrite notice is not enforceable. medialoper.com/warning-those-copyright-warnings-m…

The only thing they can prevent is rebroadcasts and recordings of the game. Just talking about it is in no way related to copyright law.

sab ,

Ha. I knew there was something fishy about that. Anyway, I’m done feeding this troll. I hope he got his worth out of shilling for Altman.

afraid_of_zombies ,

Their copywrite notice is not enforceable

Woah did you just make the claim that if a law can’t be enforced it doesn’t exist? Hehehehehehe oh man this is so great 😃 Hey thanks for steelmanning my argument for me. Hey everybody this guy just admitted that copyright is a joke. You heard it, if I can physically copy data with nothing stopping me the law holds no power.

The only thing they can prevent is rebroadcasts and recordings of the game. Just talking about it is in no way related to copyright law.

Which is not at all like a LLM talking about copyrighted pictures and texts. Why can’t you keep your position consistent? I can.

xthexder ,
@xthexder@l.sw0.com avatar

I’m making the claim that there is no such law that allows the MLB to prevent you from talking about a game. I’m not saying there is a law that’s unenforceable.

Why can’t you keep your position consistent?

I’m not the person you were talking with earlier. I never mentioned AI, just the MLB copyright notice that you brought up.

linearchaos ,
@linearchaos@lemmy.world avatar

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, before you stands 8-year-old Billy Smith. He stands accused of training on copyrighted material. We actually have live video of him looking and reading books from the library. He he trained on the contents of over 100 books this year.

We ask you to enforce the maximum penalty and send his parents to prison.

TheGrandNagus ,

I get what you’re saying, but there’s something of a difference between someone studying something for months or years then writing about it, and a language model ran by one of the tech giants scraping media and immediately generating stuff from it, for commercial use, for the profit of the company that owns it.

It’s kinda like how plagiarising somebody’s book word for word never used to be a crime when it was a painstaking process of manually writing it back out for every copy. When the printing press came out, though? It allowed dodgy businesses to large-scale fuck over authors, and the law had to play catch-up.

I don’t actually think this proposal is that well thought out, but I also don’t think we should think of AI models or corporations as being people - they aren’t people, and they shouldn’t necessarily have the same rights and privileges that we do.

Evotech ,

There’s a lot of private people training models (Lora, Dora’s etc) / fine-tuning checkpoints and what have you

Training models is not just giant tech corps anymore

TheGrandNagus , (edited )

I know, I have one running locally on my PC, it’s neat.

I still don’t think that changes my point, though - that a large AI model, particularly one that can scrape the whole web of any content it can find, then immediately be used to generate a practically infinite amount of content in seconds is very different to the idea of a little 8 year old in a library reading books then writing something himself.

And I still maintain that companies aren’t people and shouldn’t necessarily have the same rights as a person.

IzzyJ ,
@IzzyJ@lemmy.world avatar

What of the images random people generate from software like dall e? Those are made from the same training data, and what this poicy does to them is make media creation more inaccessible even though the technology exists. Also, copying a book word for word by hand isnt/wasnt plagarism, its unlicensed duplication. Plagarism would be changing just the proper nouns and pretending like its a completely seperate book

ZILtoid1991 ,
  1. Your machine learning algorithms are not people. No amount of calling it Alex or giving it a voice stolen from a well-known actress will change that fact.
  2. If I traced an artwork or copied GPL licensed code into an non-GPL one, my ass would be beaten by others on the internet.
  3. So far, the main usecase of this generative technology is scamming, intentionally creating distrust in the artist community, and an even worse and scummier form of plagiarism, but it doesn’t matter because some shitpost that goes hard, “what if a content creator needs a stock photo?”, and “what if it could be used to resurrect your favorite artist?”.
  4. Power imbalance. There’s a difference a young creator not having money to buy a training material and a big corporation wanting to destroy their profession.
ArmokGoB ,

If I traced an artwork or copied GPL licensed code into an non-GPL one, my ass would be beaten by others on the internet.

If I gave you an arbitrary image from Midjourney and all of the training data from it, I doubt you could match it to the “source art.” AI images are usually transformative.

IzzyJ ,
@IzzyJ@lemmy.world avatar

This, exactly. AI is generating new images. Oh whoop de do, they did it by mixing a bunch of pixels. As though making an image out of tiny photos isnt literally the same thing and considered transformative. People just have a double standard about a program instead of a person doing it. (Except for that subset kd online artists, they’re just bezerk about copyright and credit in general)

ZILtoid1991 ,

Which part of “an even worse and scummier form of plagiarism” you didn’t understand?

ArmokGoB ,

What part of “transformative” did you not understand?

ZILtoid1991 ,

Different scale, but just go on and defend your billion dollar industry, because “what if it was open source” despite the open source community would never have the ability and the resources to train these models.

ArmokGoB ,

I honestly could not give less of a shit who’s training the models. I’m not gonna boycott C# because it was developed by Microsoft. There are open source implementations of generative AI that make use of freely-available models.

ClamDrinker ,

What are you talking about? The open source community has trained these kinds of models. They’re out there.

interdimensionalmeme ,

Thanks chatgpt

ZILtoid1991 ,

Pleased to take part in creating the scarcity free future by letting hustle bros to ruin art communities, and letting terminally online people to create endless followups to Metropolis Pt. II instead of them sending death threats to Dream Theater!

assassin_aragorn ,

No matter how much you’d like for it to be the case, proprietary algorithms owned by big corporations are not remotely comparable to children.

0laura ,
@0laura@lemmy.world avatar

proprietary algorithms owned by big corporations

tell that to civitai users lol

werefreeatlast ,

Introducing Chat-Stupid! It just like Chat-GPT but it wishes for any conversation with humans so it can legally learn…don’t disclose company secrets or it will legally learn those too.

General_Effort ,

This is a brutally dystopian law. Forget the AI angle and turn on your brain.

Any information will get a label saying who owns it and what can be done with it. Tampering with these labels becomes a crime. This is the infrastructure for the complete control of the flow of all information.

Throw_away_migrator ,

Maybe I’m missing something, but my read is that it creates a mechanism/standard for labeling content. If content is labeled under this standard, it is illegal to remove the labeling or use it in a way the labeling prohibits. But I don’t see a requirement to label content with this mechanism.

If that’s the case I don’t see a problem. Now, if all the content is required to be labeled, then yes it’s a privacy nightmare. But my interpretation was that this is a mechanism to prevent AI companies from gobbling up content without consent and saying, “What? There’s nothing saying I couldn’t use it.”

IzzyJ ,
@IzzyJ@lemmy.world avatar

Most everyone from corporations to tumblr artists will be opting into that. While it doesnt guarantee an information dystopia, it does enable it

I download images from the internet and remove watermarks to edit them in youtube videos as visual aid. I add a credit to the description because Im not a cunt, I just do it to make the video look better. I dont monetize content. Utterly and totally harmless, and would be illegal with such a label

General_Effort ,

It’s rather more than that. In the very least, it is a DRM system, meant to curtail fair use. We’re not just talking about AI training. The AutoTLDR bot here would also be affected. Manually copy/pasting articles while removing the metadata becomes illegal. Platforms have a legal duty to stop copyright infringement. In practice, they will probably have to use the metadata label to stop reposts and re-uploads of images and articles.

This bill was obviously written by lobbyists for major corpos like Adobe. This wants to make the C2PA standard legally binding. They have been working on this for the last couple years. OpenAI already uses it.

In the very least, this bill will entrench the monopolies of the corporations behind it; at the expense of the rights of ordinary people.

I don’t think it’ll stop there. Look at age verification laws in various red states and around the world. Once you have this system in place, it would be obvious to demand mandatory content warnings in the metadata. We’re not just talking about erotic images but also about articles on LGBTQ matters.

More control over the flow of information is the way we are going anyway. From age-verification to copyright enforcement, it’s all about making sure that only the right people can access certain information. Copyright used to be about what businesses can print a book. Now it’s about what you can do at home with your own computer. We’re moving in this dystopian direction, anyway, and this bill is a big step.

The bill talks about “provenance”. The ambition is literally a system to track where information comes from and how it is processed. If this was merely DRM, that would be bad enough. But this is an intentionally dystopian overreach.

EG you have cameras that automatically add the tracking data to all photos and then photoshop adds data about all post-processing. Obviously, this can’t be secure. (NB: This is real and not hypothetical. More)

The thing is, a door lock isn’t secure either. It takes seconds to break down a door, or to break a window instead. The secret ingredient is surveillance and punishment. Someone hears or sees something and calls the police. To make the ambition work, you need something at the hardware level in any device that can process and store data. You also need a lot of surveillance to crack down on people who deal in illegal hardware.

I’m afraid, this is not as crazy as it sounds. You may have heard about the recent “Chat Control” debate in the EU. That is a proposal, with a lot of support, that would let police scan the files on a phone to look for “child porn” (mind that this includes sexy selfies that 17-year-olds exchange with their friends). Mandatory watermarking, that let the government trace a photo to the camera and its owner, is mild by comparison.

The bill wants government agencies like DARPA to help in the development of better tracking systems. Nice for the corpos that they get some of that tax money. But it also creates a dynamic in the government that will make it much more likely that we continue on a dystopian path. For agencies, funding will be on the line; plus there are egos. Meanwhile, you still have the content industry lobbying for more control over its intellectual “property”.

msgraves ,

Exactly, this isn’t about any sort of AI, this is the old playbook of trying to digitally track images, just with the current label slapped on. Regardless of your opinion on AI, this is a terrible way to solve this.

ArchRecord ,

It’s like applying DRM law to all media ever. And we know the problems with DRM already, as exemplified 2 decades ago by Cory Doctorow in his talk at Microsoft to convince them not to endorse and use it.

96VXb9ktTjFnRi ,

I don’t like AI but I hate intellectual property. And the people that want to restrict AI don’t seem to understand the implications that has. I am ok with copying as I think copyright is a load of bullocks. But they aren’t even reproducing the content verbatim are they? They’re ‘taking inspiration’ if you will, transforming it into something completely different. Seems like fair use to me. It’s just that people hate AI, and hate the companies behind it, and don’t get me wrong, rightfully so, but that shouldn’t get us all to stop thinking critically about intellectual property laws.

admin ,
@admin@lemmy.my-box.dev avatar

I’m the opposite, actually. I like generative AI. But as a creator who shares his work with the public for their (non-commercial) enjoyment, I am not okay with a billionaire industry training their models on my content without my permission, and then use those models as a money machine.

interdimensionalmeme ,

This law will ensure only giant tech company have this power. Hobbyists and home players will be prevented.

admin ,
@admin@lemmy.my-box.dev avatar

What are you basing that on?

Content owners, including broadcasters, artists, and newspapers, could sue companies they believe used their materials without permission or tampered with authentication markers.

Doesn’t say anything about the right just applying to giant tech companies, it specifically mentions artists as part of the protected content owners.

interdimensionalmeme ,

That’s like saying you are just as protected regardless which side of the mote you stand on.

It’s pretty clear the way things are shaping up is only the big tech elite will control AI and they will lord us over with it.

The worst thing that could happen with AI. It falling into the hands of the elites, is happening.

admin ,
@admin@lemmy.my-box.dev avatar

I respectfully disagree. I think small time AI (read: pretty much all the custom models on hugging face) will get a giant boost out of this, since they can get away with training on “custom” data sets - since they are too small to be held accountable.

However, those models will become worthless to enterprise level models, since they wouldn’t be able to account for the legality. In other words, once you make big bucks of of AI you’ll have to prove your models were sourced properly. But if you’re just creating a model for small time use, you can get away with a lot.

interdimensionalmeme ,

I am skeptical that this is how it will turn out. I don’t really believe there will be a path from 0$ to challenging big tech without a roadblock of lawyers shutting you down with no way out on the way.

admin ,
@admin@lemmy.my-box.dev avatar

I don’t think so either, but to me that is the purpose.

Somewhere between small time personal-use ML and commercial exploitation, there should be ethical sourcing of input data, rather than the current method of “scrape all you can find, fuck copyright” that OpenAI & co are getting away with.

interdimensionalmeme ,

I mean this is exactly the kind of regulation that microsoft/openai is begging for to cement their position. Then is going to be just a matter of digesting their surviving competitors until only one competitor remains, similar to Intel / AMD relationship. Then they can have a 20 year period of stagnation while they progressively screw over customers and suppliers.

I think that’s the bad ending. By desperately trying to keep the old model of intellectual property going, they’re going to make the real AI nightmare of an elite few in control of the technology with an unconstrained ability to leverage the benefits and further solidifying their lead over everyone else.

The collective knowledge of humanity is not their exclusive property. It also isn’t the property of whoever is the lastest person to lay a claim to an idea in effective perpetuity.

admin ,
@admin@lemmy.my-box.dev avatar

Why?

Once this passes, OpenAI can’t build ChatGPT on the same (“stolen”) dataset. How does that cement their position?

Taking someone’s creation (without their permission) and turning it into a commercial venture, without giving payment or even attribution is immoral.

If a creator (in the widest meaning of the word) is fine with their works being used as such - great, go ahead. But otherwise you’ll just have to wait before the work becomes public domain (which obviously does not mean publicly available).

rekorse ,

Just because intellectual property laws currently can be exploited doesnt mean there is no place for it at all.

96VXb9ktTjFnRi ,

That’s an opinion you can have, but I can just as well hold mine, which is that restricting any form of copying is unnatural and harmful to society.

rekorse ,

Do you believe noone should be able to charge money for their art?

96VXb9ktTjFnRi ,

That’s right. They can put their art up for sale, but if someone wants to take a free copy nothing should be able to stop them.

rekorse ,

That effectively makes all art free. At best its donation based.

96VXb9ktTjFnRi ,

Yes, that would be best.

rekorse ,

That would lead to most art being produced by people who are wealthy enough to afford to produce it for free, wouldn’t it?

What incentive would a working person have to work on becoming an artist? Its not like artists are decided at birth or something.

96VXb9ktTjFnRi ,

Most people who make art don’t make any money from it. Some make a little bit of money. A small number of people can afford a living just by making art, and just a fraction of that actually get most of the money that’s being earned by artists, and then of course there is a lot of money that’s being paid for art that never reaches the artist. The business as it is is not working very well for anyone except for some big media companies. The complete lack of commercial success hasn’t stopped a lot of artists, it won’t stop them in the future. Thank god, because it wouldn’t be the first time that after decades of no commercial success whatsoever such an outsider is discovered by the masses. Sure, lack of commercial success has stopped others, but that’s happening now just as it will happen without copyright laws. If donating to artists out of free will would be the norm, and people knew that that’s the main source of income for certain types of artists, then I’m sure a lot of people would do so. And aside from private donations there could be governments and all sorts of institutions financing art. And if someone still can’t make a living, then still none of that could legitimize copyright in my view. We should strive for a world where everyone that wants to follow up on their creative impulses has time and opportunity to do so, irrespective of their commercial success. But there should also be unrestricted access to knowledge, ideas, art, etc. Brilliant research, photography or music shouldn’t be reserved for those who can afford access. The public domain should be the norm so that our shared project of human creativity can reach maximum potential. Copyright seems to me to be a rather bizarre level of control over the freedom of others. It’s making something public for others to see, but then telling these people you’re not allowed to be inspired by it, you can’t take a free copy to show others, you can’t take the idea and do with it as you please. It’s severely limiting us culturally, it’s harming human creativity. And at the same time it’s hypocritical. Artistic ideas are often completely based of the ideas of others, everyone can see that the output is the result of a collective effort. The Beatles didn’t invent pop music, they just made some songs, precisely copying all that came before them, and then added a tiny bit of their own. And that’s not a criticism, that’s how human creativity functions. That’s what people should strive for. To limit copying, is to limit humanity in it’s core. Again, human creativity is very clearly a collective effort. But despite this fact, when someone gets successful suddenly it’s a personal achievement and they are allowed to ask for a lot of money for it. Well my answer is, yes they are allowed to ask, and I am very willing to pay, but they shouldn’t be allowed to go beyond asking, they shouldn’t be allowed to restrict access of something that has been published.

rekorse ,

What if there was some sort of model that would pay an artist outright for their contributions now and into the future. Like crowdsourcing art from your favorite artists.

It might cost a lot if a lot of people want something from them of course, if demand is high. They might even work out a limited payment scheme where you pay for limited access to the art for less.

Sound a lot like we have now?

And right now, I have to disagree, most artists create with the hope they can make big money, which wouldnt exist without artists who make big money. All artists should be making more money, and even the wealthy artists now have people above them making more money than them who have nothing to do with art.

We dont need to throw out all of our ideas, we just need to keep increasing visibility into industries and advocating for the artist (or the entry level worker, or the 9-5ers, or any other of those who produce everything a company profits off of but are unfairly compensated for it).

For you to argue AI will help artists is absurd. They’ve been stolen from, and now the result of that theft is driving them out of work. It only is good for artists if by artists you mean yourself, and anyone else who only cares about the self. Same people who tend to use societal arguments only when it benefits them somehow, which is ironic isnt it?

afraid_of_zombies ,

True but you people have had hundreds of years to fix the system and have not.

Adderbox76 ,

They’re ‘taking inspiration’ if you will, transforming it into something completely different.

That is not at all what takes place with A.I.

An A.I. doesn’t “learn” like a human does. It aggregates multiple chunks from multiple sources. It’s just really really tiny chunks so it’s hard to tell sometimes.

That’s why you can ask two AI’s to write a story based on the same prompt and some of their lines will be exactly the same. Because it’s not taking inspiration from, it’s literally copying bits and pieces of other works and it happens that they both chose that particular bit.

If you do that when writing a paper in university it’s called plagerism.

Get the fuck out of here with your “A.I. takes inspiration…” it copies nothing more. It doesn’t add anything new to the sum total of the creative zeitgeist because it’s just remixes of things that already exist.

ricdeh ,
@ricdeh@lemmy.world avatar

You just reiterate what other anti-ML extremists have said like a sad little parrot. No, LLMs don’t just copy. They network information and associations and can output entirely new combinations of them. To do this, they make use of neural networks, which are computational concepts analogous to the way your brain works. If, according to you, LLMs just copy, then that’s all that you do as well.

LainTrain , (edited )

it copies nothing more

it’s just remixes of things that already exist.

So it does do more than copying? Because as you said - it remixes.

It sounds like the line you’re trying to draw is not only arbitrary, but you yourself can’t even stick with it for more than one sentence.

Everything new is some unique combination of things that already exist, the elements it draws from are called sources and influences, and rules according to which they’re remixed are called techniques/structures e.g. most movies are three acts, and many feature specific techniques like J-cuts.

Heck even re-arranging elements of just one thing is a unique and different thing, or is your favourite song and a remix of it literally the same? Or does the remix not have artistic value, even though someone out there probably likes the remix, but not the original?

I think your confusion stems from the fact you’re a top shelf, grade-A Moron.

You’re an organic, locally sourced and ethically produced idiot, and you need to learn how basic ML works, what “new” is, and glance at some basic epistemology and metaphysics before you lead us to ruin because you don’t even understand what “new” entails, before your reactionary rhetoric leads us all down straight to cyberpunk dystopias.

NikkiDimes ,

Damn, attack the argument, not the person, homie.

LainTrain ,

Yeah, sorry

afraid_of_zombies ,

You can do the same thing with the Hardy Boys. You can find the same page word for word in different books. You can also do that with the Bible. The authors were plagiarizing each other.

It doesn’t add anything new to the sum total of the creative zeitgeist because it’s just remixes of things that already exist.

Do yourself a favor and never ever go into design of infrastructure equipment or eat at a Pizza Hut or get a drink from Starbucks or work for an American car company or be connected to Boeing.

Everyone has this super impressive view of human creativity and I am waiting to see any of it. As far as I can tell the less creative you are the more success you will have. But let me guess you ride a Segway, wear those shoes with toes, have gone through every recipe of Julia Childs, and compose novels that look like Finnegan’s Wake got into a car crash with EE Cummings and Gravity’s Rainbow.

Now leave me alone with I eat the same burger as everyone else and watch reruns of Family Guy in my house that looks like all the other ones on the street

IzzyJ ,
@IzzyJ@lemmy.world avatar

Consider youtube poop, Im serious. Everyclip in them is sourced from preexisting audio and video, and mixed or distorted in a comedic format. You could make an AI to make youtube poops using those same clips and other “poops” as training data. What it outputs might be of lower quality, but in a technical sense it would be made in an identical fashion. And, to the chagrin of Disney, Nintendo, and Viacom, these are considered legally distinct entities; because I dont watch Frying Nemo in place of Finding Nemo. So why would it be any different when an AI makes it?

riodoro1 ,

So the rich have already scalped what they could. Now it can be made illegal

admin ,
@admin@lemmy.my-box.dev avatar

Because even when some of the water has gotten out, you still go plug the dam.

The best moment was earlier. The second best moment is now.

Grimy OP ,

This is more akin to diverting a public river into private land so the landowner can charge everyone what they were getting for free.

The river cannot be dammed and this bill doesn’t aim to even try.

A better solution would be to make all models copyleft, so even if corporations dip their cup in the water, whatever they produce has to be thrown back in.

trollbearpig ,

Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t understand what you guys mean by “the river cannot be dammed”. The LLM models need to be retrained all the time to include new data and in general to get them to change their behavior in any way. Wouldn’t this bill apply to all these companies as soon as they retrain their models?

I mean, I get the point that old models would be exempt from the law since laws can’t be retroactive. But I don’t get how that’s such a big deal. These companies would be stuck with old models if they refuse to train new ones. And as much hype as there is around AI, current models are still shit for the most part.

Also, can you explain why you guys think this would stop open source models? I have always though that the best solution to stop these fucking plagiarism machines was for the open source community to create an open source training set were people contribute their art/text/whatever. Does this law prevents this? Honestly to me this panic sounds like people without any artistic talent wanted to steal the work of artists and they are now mad they can’t do it.

Grimy OP ,

The game right now is about better training methods and curating current datasets, new data is not needed.

Obviously though, eventually they will want new data so their models aren’t stuck in the past but this won’t stop them from getting it. There isn’t a future where individuals negotiate with google on how much they get paid, all that data is already owned by the platform it’s being posted on. Almost all websites slap on their own copyright or something similar, even for images. Deviant art and even Cara, the platform that’s suppose to be artist friendly, does this. Anything uploaded to Google maps gets a copyright on it if I’m not mistaken, Reddit as well. This data will be prohibitively expensive as to create a moat and strengthen soft monopolies.

Public datasets are great but aren’t enough in most cases. This is also the equivalent of saying “well they diverted the river, why don’t you build yourself a stream”. It’s also problematic since by it’s public nature, it means corporations can come over, dip their cup in the water and throw it into their river. It brings down their costs while making sure nothing can actually compete with them.

Also worth noting that there is no worthy public dataset for videos. 98% of the data is owned by YouTube or Hollywood.

trollbearpig ,

My man, I think you are mixin a lot of things. Let’s go by parts.

First, you are right that almost all websites get some copyright rights when you post on their platforms. At best, some license the content as Creative Commons or similar licenses. But that’s not new, that has been this way forever. If people are surprised that they are paying with their data at this point I don’t know what to say hahaha. The change with this law would be that no one, big tech companies or open source, gets to use this content for free to train new models right?

Which brings me back to my previous question, this law applies to old data too right? You say “new data is not needed” (which is not true for chat LLMs that want to include new data for example), but old data is still needed to use the new methods or to curate the datasets. And most of this old data was acquired by ignoring copyright laws. What I get from this law is that no one, including these companies, gets to keep using this “illegaly” acquired data now right? I mean, I’m pretty sure this is the case since movie studios and similar are the ones pushing for this law, they will not go like “it’s ok you stole all our previous libraries, just don’t steal the new stuff” hahahaha.

I do get your point that the most likely end result is that movie studios, record labels, social media platforms, etc, will just start selling the rights to train on their data and the only companies who will be able to afford this are the big tech companies. But still, I think this is a net possitive (weird times for me to be on the side of these awful companies hahaha).

First of all, it means no one, including big tech companies, get to steal content that is not theirs or given to them willingly. I’m particularly interested in open source code, but the same applies to indie art and any other form of art outside of the big companies. When we say that we want to stop the plagiarism it’s not a joke. Tech companies are using LLMs to attack the open source community by stealing the code under the excuse of LLMs being transformative (bullshit of course). Any law that stops this is a possitive to me.

And second of all, consider the 2 futures we have in front of us. Option one is we get laws like this, forcing AI to comply with copyright law. Which basically means we maintain the current status quo for intellectual property. Not great obviously, but the alrtenative is so much worse. Option two is we allow people to use LLMs to steal all the intellectual property they want, which puts an end to basically any market incentives to produce art by humans. Again, the current copyright system is awful. But why do you guys want a system were we as individuals have to keep complying with copyright but any company can bypass that with an LLM? Or how do you guys think this is going to pan out if we just don’t regulate AI?

Grimy OP ,

Google already paid 6 million to Reddit for their dataset (preemptively since I’m guessing they are lobbying for laws like this), I didn’t get a dime. Who do you think this helps here?

The change with this law would be that no one, big tech companies or open source, gets to use this content for free to train new models right?

My point is that this essentially insure that ONLY big tech companies will get to use the content. Do you think they mind spending a few million if it gives them a monopoly? They actively want this.

If it’s between the platform I used getting paid for my content while I get nothing and then I have to pay Openai to use a tool built with my content or the platform and me getting nothing while I get free AI, I will chose the latter.

There are two scenarios and in both, AI massively brings up productivity and huge layoffs happen. The difference is in one scenario, the tools are priced low enough so it’s economical to replace 5 workers with them but high enough so those same workers can’t afford them and compete with the business that just fired them. A situation where no company can remain competitive without paying Openai or Google 50k a month is a dystopian nightmare.

Open source is the best way to make sure this doesn’t happen and while these laws are the smallest of speed bumps for big tech companies, it is a literal wall for FOSS.

The best solution would be to copyleft all models using public data, the second best would be to leave things as is. This isn’t a solution but regulatory capture.

trollbearpig ,

My man, I think you are delisuonal hahahaha. You are giving AI way too much credit to a technology that’s just a glorified autocomoplete. But I guess I get your point, if you think that AI (and LLMs in particular hahahaha) is the way of the future and all that, then this is apocalyptic hahahahaha.

But you are delisuonal my man. The only practical use so far for these stupid LLMs is autocomplete which works great when it works. And bypassing copyright law by pretending it’s producing novel shit. But that’s a whole other discussion, time will show this is just another bubble like crypto hahahaha. For now, I hope they at least force everyone to stop plagiarising other peoples work with AI.

Grimy OP ,

Prohibits the use of “covered content” (digital representations of copyrighted works) with content provenance to either train an AI- /algorithm-based system or create synthetic content without the express, informed consent and adherence to the terms of use of such content, including compensation

This affects a lot more than just llms and essentially fucks any use of machine learning. You do not understand what you are defending. This kills kaggle and huggingface over night since I figure corporation will be able to keep already created datasets for internal use but distribution will be a no go.

You also have to be willfully blind to seriously think llms have no use cases. Ignoring the entertainment value, it’s a huge productivity boost, chatbots using it are now commonplace on websites (I preferred when it was actual people but that’s beside the point). I work in research and we are currently building a bunch of internal tools to use with our data.

Hahaha all you want but you are defending something completely against your own self interests and those of society.

trollbearpig ,

So you are saying that content scraped before the law is fair game to train new models? If so it’s fucking terrible. But again, I doubt this is the case since this would be against the interests of the big copyright holders. And if it’s not the case you are just creating a storm in glass of water since this affects the companies too.

As a side point, I’m really curious about LLM uses. As a programmer the only useful product I have seen so far is copilot and similar tools. And I ended up disabling the fucking thing because it produces too much garbage hahaha. But I’m the first to admit I haven’t been following this hype cycle hahahaha, so I’m really curious what the big things will be. You clearly know so much, so want to enligten me?

Grimy OP ,

This bill is being built with the interests of the big tech companies in mind imo, big copyright holders are just an afterthought. I figure since big tech spent quite a bit of money building those datasets and since they were built before the law, they will be able to keep using them as long as they don’t add anything new but I can’t be certain.

The use cases are vast. This is a huge boon for the indie gaming and animation industry. I’m seriously excited to have NPCs running on llms and don’t want to be forced into a subscription just to play my games. It’s also going to bring smart homes to an other level. Systems can be built that are much stronger than Alexa without having to send all that insanely private data to Amazon. There’s a huge privacy issue if all the available models only run on Google or openais cloud, but I won’t get into that (not to mention that these corporate llms will eventually be trained for advertisement and will essentially be poisoned to prefer whoever is paying its creator).

I’ll give some more concrete example with my work but it will be a bit vague to preserve my anonymity.

I work in research (I originally studied software engineering and robotics) and we have about 20 years worth of projects. None of it is standardized and it’s honestly a mess. I built a system in the space of a few days that grabs everyone of those docs, reads through it with an LLM and then classifies them doc per doc into an excel sheet with a SharePoint link. I’ve got 20 columns in there, it summarizes them, choses from a list of 30 types of documents I gave it, extracts related towns and people as well as companies and domain, it extracts the columns if there are any tables inside and generally establishes a bunch of different relationships. It doesn’t sound like much but doing it by hand would have been weeks of tedious work. My computer did it in 20 minutes using a local LLM so any sensitive client data doesn’t leave the building.

Right now I’m working on a GraphRAG system that will take all those docuuments and turns into into vectors, then an LLM adds relationships to those vectors. It will be incorporated into an internal chatbots so people can ask questions and not only get a natural language answer but have the references where the information was found and quick access to it. It’s vector search on steroids and will cost nothing to run. I’m planning on eventually training the chatbots itself on our data so it can have a better understanding of our research sector as well as direct access to all the documents.

Next is building something that gets info automatically from the web. Sometimes we have to create long Excel sheets with a bunch of different data points. We stay at a state level usually but it can sometimes mean 1000 businesses and we have to google each one manually and find the info. It’s sometimes weeks of work and honestly sucks doing. Llms are entirely capable of doing this kind of work and would take a few hours at most, again at no cost.

These things are seriously great whenever it’s dealing with data that isn’t just numbers and is hard to quantify. I hate Reddit and will never create an account there after what happened but I still go daily to the localllama subreddit, it’s a great source of information if you want to keep abreast with what’s happening.

trollbearpig ,

I figure since big tech spent quite a bit of money building those datasets and since they were built before the law, they will be able to keep using them as long as they don’t add anything new but I can’t be certain.

This is a very weird assumption you are making man. The quoted text you sent above pretty much says the opposite. It says everyone who wants to train their models wirh copyrigthed data needs to get permission from the copyright holders. That is great for me period. No one, not a big company nor the open source community, gets to steal the work of people producing art, code, etc. I honestly don’t get why you assume all the data scrapped before would be exempt. Again, very weird assumption.

As for ML algorithms having use, of course they have. Hell, pretty much every company I have worked with has used them for decades. But take a look at the examples you provided. None of them requires you or your company scrapping a bunch of information from randoms on the internet. Specially not copyrighted art, literature, or code. And that’s the point here, you are acting like all of that stops with these laws but that’s ridiculous.

Grimy OP ,

The article is pro corpo, I’m looking at the bill and it’s quite clear where it’s headed.

None of what I mentioned is possible without the LLM that’s at its heart. Just training an LLM is a million or two in compute power. We don’t get the next generation for free if laws like this tack on an extra 80 million. 6 million for Reddit and that was when you could scrap it for free, and that’s just a drop in the bucket.

afraid_of_zombies ,

Yeah it is really messed up that Disney made untold tens of billions of dollars on public domain stories, effectively cut us off from our own culture, then extended the duration to indefinite. I wonder why near everyone was silent about this issue for multiple decades until it became cliche to pretend to care about furry porn creators.

Creatives have always been screwed, we are the first civilization to not only screw them but screw the general public. As shit as it was in the past you could just copy a freaken scroll.

Anyway you guys have fun defending some of the worst assholes in human history while acting like you care about people you weren’t even willing to give a buck a month to on patreon.

NeoNachtwaechter ,

LOL

So I take your photo, remove your watermark, put my own watermark on it, and then I sue you for removing my watermark.

General_Effort ,

Don’t be a fool. Of course, content corporations like Disney or the NYT are able to prove just when something was made.

NeoNachtwaechter ,

Don’t be a fool either.

Of course I am going to do this to you, not to Disney etc. because I am way better at creating proof than you are.

And of course Disney etc. are going to do this to you and me, because they are even better at creating proof than you and me are.

That’s how foolish this law is.

Womble ,

So what you’re saying is that this is a law designed to extend corporate control over information and culture even further?

General_Effort ,

This bill reads like it was written by Adobe.

This provenance labelling scheme already exists. Adobe was a major force behind it. (see here: en.wikipedia.org/…/Content_Authenticity_Initiativ… ). This bill would make it so that further development will be tax-funded through organizations like DARPA.

Of course, they are also against fair use. They pay license fees for AI training. For them, it means more cash flow.

explodicle ,

It’s pretty cheap to just time stamp everything.

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