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The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates

Those claiming AI training on copyrighted works is “theft” misunderstand key aspects of copyright law and AI technology. Copyright protects specific expressions of ideas, not the ideas themselves. When AI systems ingest copyrighted works, they’re extracting general patterns and concepts - the “Bob Dylan-ness” or “Hemingway-ness” - not copying specific text or images.

This process is akin to how humans learn by reading widely and absorbing styles and techniques, rather than memorizing and reproducing exact passages. The AI discards the original text, keeping only abstract representations in “vector space”. When generating new content, the AI isn’t recreating copyrighted works, but producing new expressions inspired by the concepts it’s learned.

This is fundamentally different from copying a book or song. It’s more like the long-standing artistic tradition of being influenced by others’ work. The law has always recognized that ideas themselves can’t be owned - only particular expressions of them.

Moreover, there’s precedent for this kind of use being considered “transformative” and thus fair use. The Google Books project, which scanned millions of books to create a searchable index, was ruled legal despite protests from authors and publishers. AI training is arguably even more transformative.

While it’s understandable that creators feel uneasy about this new technology, labeling it “theft” is both legally and technically inaccurate. We may need new ways to support and compensate creators in the AI age, but that doesn’t make the current use of copyrighted works for AI training illegal or unethical.

For those interested, this argument is nicely laid out by Damien Riehl in FLOSS Weekly episode 744. twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly/episodes/744

LupertEverett ,
@LupertEverett@lemmy.world avatar

The “you wouldn’t download a car” statement is made against personal cases of piracy, which got rightfully clowned upon. It obviously doesn’t work at all when you use its ridiculousness to defend big ass corporations that tries to profit from so many of the stuff they “downloaded”.

Besides, it is not “theft”. It is “plagiarism”. And I’m glad to see that people that tries to defend these plagiarism machines that are attempted to be humanised and inflated to something they can never be, gets clowned. It warms my heart.

gcheliotis ,

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 protecting the average person and public-serving non-profit institutions, such as digital archives and libraries, from big copyright owners who would sue and lobby for total control over every file in their catalogue, sometimes in the process severely limiting human potential.

AI’s ingesting of text and other formats is “learning” in name only, a term borrowed by computer scientists to describe a purely computational process. It does not hold the same value socially or morally as the learning that humans require to function and progress individually and socially.

AI is not a person (unless we get definitive proof of a conscious AI, or are willing to grant every implementation of a statistical model personhood). Also AI it is not vital to human development and as such one could argue does not need special protections or special treatment to flourish. AI is a product, even more clearly so when it is proprietary and sold as a service.

Unlike past debates over copyright, this is not about protecting the little guy or organizations with a social mission from big corporate interests. It is the opposite. It is about big corporate interests turning human knowledge and creativity into a product they can then use to sell services to - and often to replace in their jobs - the very humans whose content they have ingested.

See, the tables are now turned and it is time to realize that copyright law, for all its faults, has never been only or primarily about protecting large copyright holders. It is also about protecting your average Joe from unauthorized uses of their work. More specifically uses that may cause damage, to the copyright owner or society at large. While a very imperfect mechanism, it is there for a reason, and its application need not be the end of AI. There’s a mechanism for individual copyright owners to grant rights to specific uses: it’s called licensing and should be mandatory in my view for the development of proprietary LLMs at least.

TL;DR: AI is not human, it is a product, one that may augment some tasks productively, but is also often aimed at replacing humans in their jobs - this makes all the difference in how we should balance rights and protections by law.

gap_betweenus ,

Copyright laws protects the ability of copyright holder to make money. The laws were created before AI and now obviously have to be adapted to new technology (like you didn’t really need copyright before the invention of printing). How exactly AI will be regulated is in the end up to society to decide, which most likely will come down who has the better lobby.

Roflmasterbigpimp ,
@Roflmasterbigpimp@lemmy.world avatar

Okay that’s just stupid. I’m really fond of AI but that’s just common Greed.

“Free the Serfs?! We can’t survive without their labor!!” “Stop Child labour?! We can’t survive without them!” “40 Hour Work Week?! We can’t survive without their 16 Hour work Days!”

If you can’t make profit yet, then fucking stop.

joshcodes ,
@joshcodes@programming.dev avatar

Studied AI at uni. I’m also a cyber security professional. AI can be hacked or tricked into exposing training data. Therefore your claim about it disposing of the training material is totally wrong.

Ask your search engine of choice what happened when Gippity was asked to print the word “book” indefinitely. Answer: it printed training material after printing the word book a couple hundred times.

Also my main tutor in uni was a neuroscientist. Dude straight up told us that the current AI was only capable of accurately modelling something as complex as a dragon fly. For larger organisms it is nowhere near an accurate recreation of a brain. There are complexities in our brain chemistry that simply aren’t accounted for in a statistical inference model and definitely not in the current gpt models.

Loki ,
@Loki@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Even if you come to the conclusion that these models should be allowed to “learn” from copyrighted material, the issue is that they can and will reproduce copyrighted material.

They might not recreate a picture of Mickey Mouse that exists already, but they will draw a picture of Mickey Mouse. Just like I could, except I’m aware that I can’t monetize it in any way. Well, new Mickey Mouse.

LANIK2000 ,

This process is akin to how humans learn…

I’m so fucking sick of people saying that. We have no fucking clue how humans LEARN. Aka gather understanding aka how cognition works or what it truly is. On the contrary we can deduce that it probably isn’t very close to human memory/learning/cognition/sentience (any other buzzword that are stands-ins for things we don’t understand yet), considering human memory is extremely lossy and tends to infer its own bias, as opposed to LLMs that do neither and religiously follow patters to their own fault.

It’s quite literally a text prediction machine that started its life as a translator (and still does amazingly at that task), it just happens to turn out that general human language is a very powerful tool all on its own.

I could go on and on as I usually do on lemmy about AI, but your argument is literally “Neural network is theoretically like the nervous system, therefore human”, I have no faith in getting through to you people.

ulterno ,
@ulterno@lemmy.kde.social avatar

Now just if we had all famous people saying stuff like this.
But they won’t. Guess why? Because the “won’t” is what made them famous (and rich),

Lay people give more heed to those acting from the start, like they have the answers. That’s what “charisma” is about.
Also one of the reasons why religion gets easier wins. Because when people hear something that makes them have to think more, they ignore it more.

ZILtoid1991 ,

Even worse is, in order to further humanize machine learning systems, they often give them human-like names.

calcopiritus ,

I’ll train my AI on just the bee movie. Then I’m going to ask it “can you make me a movie about bees”? When it spits the whole movie, I can just watch it or sell it or whatever, it was a creation of my AI, which learned just like any human would! Of course I didn’t even pay for the original copy to train my AI, it’s for learning purposes, and learning should be a basic human right!

stephen01king ,

That would be like you writing out the bee movie yourself after memorizing the whole movie and claiming it is your own idea or using it as proof that humans memorizing a movie is violating copyright. Just because an AI is violating copyright by outputting the whole bee movie, it doesn’t mean training the AI on copyright stuff is violating copyright.

Let’s just punish the AI companies for outputting copyright stuff instead of for training with them. Maybe that way they would actually go out of their way to make their LLM intelligent enough to not spit out copyrighted content.

Or, we can just make it so that any output made by an AI that is trained on copyrighted stuff cannot be copyrighted.

calcopiritus ,

If the solution is making the output non-copyrighted it fixes nothing. You can sell the pirating machine on a subscription. And it’s not like Netflix where the content ends when the subscription ends, you have already downloaded all the not-copyrighted content you wanted, and the internet would be full of non-copyrighted AI output.

Instead of selling the bee movie, you sell a bee movie maker, and a spiderman maker, and a titanic maker.

Sure, file a copyright infringement each time you manage to make an AI output copyrighted content. Just run it on a loop and it’s a money making machine. That’s fine by me.

stephen01king ,

Yeah, because running the AI also have some cost, so you are selling the subscription to run the AI on their server, not it’s output.

I’m not sure what is the legality of selling a bee movie maker, so you’d have to research that one yourself.

It’s not really a money making machine if you lose more money running the AI on your server farm, but whatever floats your boat. Also, there are already lawsuits based on outputs created from chatgpt, so it is exactly what is already happening.

Danterious ,

There is actually already a website where people just recreated the bee movie by hand so idk it might actually work as a legal argument.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/deed.en

ZILtoid1991 ,

I don’t think that’s a feasible dream in our current system. They’ll just lobby for it, some senators will say something akin to “art should have been always a hobby, not a profession”, then make adjustments for the current copyright laws so that they can be copyrighted.

FatCat OP ,
@FatCat@lemmy.world avatar

I am thrilled to see the output you get!

Valmond ,

In the meantime I’ll introduce myself into the servers of large corporations and read their emails, codebase, teams and strategic analysis, it’s just learning!

ContrarianTrail ,

I never fully figured out how the people who are against AI companies using copyrighted content on the training data fit that in with their general attitude towards online piracy. Seems contradictory to be against one but not another.

Big_Boss_77 ,

Is the pirate valued at $100,000,000,000? Will the pirate ever make enough of a dent to be considered a rounding error in a $100bn valuation? Is the pirate even attempting to turn a profit?

If the training data was for personal consumption, knock yourself out. When you try to say you’re worth billions but can’t afford to pay for the material? Fuck all the way off. I’m sure fucknuts at the top of this is gonna get a fat fucking pay day, so scrape a few fucking zeros off their quartly bonus and pay the people actually making the fucking content you are ABSOLUTELY going to turn around and try to make a profit off of.

ContrarianTrail ,

I don’t see how this addresses my question. Just because someone is causing bigger harm it doesn’t justify causing a little harm. Stealing a lollipop is less bad than stealing a car but it’s still both stealing. AI companies can afford paying for the material just like online pirate can afford paying for the movie.

daellat ,

Because the small thief in this example is not making money from the theft

ContrarianTrail ,

No, but they’re saving money which is effectively the same thing. There’s no practical difference between earning 50 bucks and getting a 50 buck discount.

keegomatic ,

That’s not quite true, though, is it?

$50 earned is yours to spend on anything. A $50 discount is offered by a vendor to entice you to spend enough of your money on them to make the discount worthwhile.

Pirates don’t pirate because they’re trying to save money on something they would have bought otherwise… typically they pirate because the amount they consume would bankrupt them if they purchased it through legitimate means, so they would never have been a paying customer in the first place.

So, if they wouldn’t have bought it anyway, and they’re not reselling it, did they really harm the vendor? Whether they pirated it or not, it wouldn’t affect the vendor either way.

That’s not really the same thing, in my opinion.

If you were able to pay for everything handily but pirated anyway, or if you resold pirated content, then yeah you have something similar to theft going on. But that’s not really the norm; those people are doing something bad irrespective of the piracy itself, aren’t they?

ContrarianTrail ,

They wouldn’t have bought all the content they have pirated if piracy was not an option but they would have bought some of it.

Piracy has saves money. Saving money means I have more money to spend on other things. Earning money means I have more money to spend on other things. There’s no practical difference between the two.

In my view, my point still stands; being against one but not the other is hypocritical.

keegomatic ,

It’s not hypocritical if you believe that theft is wrong because it hurts another person, rather than wrong because you don’t deserve the thing or that it offers you an unfair advantage. Your argument leans heavily on the latter but mine the former.

ContrarianTrail ,

Then please explain how pirating movies or games doesn’t cause harm to other people but training AI with the copyrighted work of others does.

In both cases you’re taking something for free that you’re expected to pay for. In both cases there’s someone not getting paid. The only difference between the two that I can see is the scale which is irrelevant from the point of view of the argument I’m making which is that it’s hypocritical to be against one but not the other.

ZILtoid1991 ,

Don’t forget that the pirates usually don’t say “art should have been just a weekend hobby, not a profession”.

petrol_sniff_king ,

It’s not because what they’re against is the consolidation of power.

If the principle “information is free” can lead to systems where information is not free, then that’s not really desirable, is it.

If free information to inspire more creative works can lead to systems with less creative works, then that’s not really desirable, is it.

toddestan ,

Your average pirate isn’t looking to profit from their copyright infringement.

In a similar way, someone getting busted for downloading a movie is a civil matter, but if they get busted for selling unauthorized copies on DVD then it can become a criminal matter.

ContrarianTrail ,

They’re saving money which is effectively the same thing.

toddestan ,

The pirate is looking to save money with their copyright infringement.

These AI companies are looking to make money from it.

ContrarianTrail ,

There’s no practical difference between the two.

If I save 100 bucks a month from my expenses it means I have an extra 100 bucks to spend on something else.

If I earn additional 100 bucks a month it means I have an extra 100 bucks to spend on something else.

wewbull ,

The scale is the difference and who is harmed.

Billion dollar company losing $100. Who cares?!

Billion dollar company stealing from all artists in the world. We care.

ContrarianTrail ,

Exactly. The difference is in people’s head. Not in the act in of itself.

Thief steals a lollipop. Who cares?

Thief steals a car. We care.

Both are still thieves.

Varyk ,

tweet is good, your body argument is completely wrong

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

Those claiming AI training on copyrighted works is “theft” misunderstand key aspects of copyright law and AI technology.

Or maybe they’re not talking about copyright law. They’re talking about basic concepts. Maybe copyright law needs to be brought into the 21st century?

Valmond ,

“No, not like that!”

arin ,

Kids pay for books, openAI should also pay for the material access used for training.

FatCat OP ,
@FatCat@lemmy.world avatar

OpenAI like other AI companies keep their data sources confidential. But there are services and commercial databases for books that people understand are commonly used in the AI industry.

EddoWagt ,

OpenAI like other AI companies keep their data sources confidential.

“We trained on absolutely everything, but we won’t tell them that because it will get us in a lot of trouble”

Veneroso ,

We have hundreds of years of out of copyright books and newspapers. I look forward to interacting with old-timey AI.

“Fiddle sticks! These mechanical horses will never catch on! They’re far too loud and barely more faster than a man can run!”

“A Woman’s place is raising children and tending to the house! If they get the vote, what will they demand next!? To earn a Man’s wage!?”

That last one is still relevant to today’s discourse somehow!?

VerbFlow ,
@VerbFlow@lemmy.world avatar

There are a few problems, tho. 123456

NeoNachtwaechter ,

The sad news is:

Their argument could fall on fertile ground.

The Usamerican legal system protects a running business. When such a rich and famous corporation argues (and it would be highly paid lawyers arguing) that their business could be in jeopardy, they are going to listen, no matter how ridiculous the reasoning.

In other countries, they just make a judge laughing out loud.

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