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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

uriel238 ,
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I personally am down for this punch-up between Alphabet and Sony. Microsoft v. Disney.

🍿

overload ,

Surely it’s coming. We have The music publishing cartel vs Suno already.

randon31415 ,

I finally understand Trump supporters “Fuck it, burn it all to the ground cause we can’t win” POV. Only instead of democracy, it is copyright and instead of Trump, it is AI.

TunaCowboy ,

I wouldn’t say I’m on OAI’s side here, but I’m down to eliminate copyright. New economic models will emerge, especially if more creatives unionize.

Shanedino ,

Maybe if you would pay for training data they would let you use copyright data or something?

T156 ,

Had the company paid for the training data and/or left it as voluntary, there would be less of a problem with it to begin with.

Part of the problem is that they didn’t, but are still using it for commercial purposes.

andrew_bidlaw ,
@andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works avatar

Their business strategy is built on top of assumption they won’t. They don’t want this door opened at all. It was a great deal for Google to buy Reddit’s data for some $mil., because it is a huge collection behind one entity. Now imagine communicating to each individual site owner whose resources they scrapped.

If that could’ve been how it started, the development of these AI tools could be much slower because of (1) data being added to the bunch only after an agreement, (2) more expenses meaning less money for hardware expansion and (3) investors and companies being less hyped up about that thing because it doesn’t grow like a mushroom cloud while following legal procedures. Also, (4) the ability to investigate and collect a public list of what sites they have agreement with is pretty damning making it’s own news stories and conflicts.

macrocephalic ,

It’s an interesting area. Are they suggesting that a human reading copyright material and learning from it is a breach?

EldritchFeminity ,

The argument that these models learn in a way that’s similar to how humans do is absolutely false, and the idea that they discard their training data and produce new content is demonstrably incorrect. These models can and do regurgitate their training data, including copyrighted characters.

And these things don’t learn styles, techniques, or concepts. They effectively learn statistical averages and patterns and collage them together. I’ve gotten to the point where I can guess what model of image generator was used based on the same repeated mistakes that they make every time. Take a look at any generated image, and you won’t be able to identify where a light source is because the shadows come from all different directions. These things don’t understand the concept of a shadow or lighting, they just know that statistically lighter pixels are followed by darker pixels of the same hue and that some places have collections of lighter pixels. I recently heard about an ai that scientists had trained to identify pictures of wolves that was working with incredible accuracy. When they went in to figure out how it was identifying wolves from dogs like huskies so well, they found that it wasn’t even looking at the wolves at all. 100% of the images of wolves in its training data had snowy backgrounds, so it was simply searching for concentrations of white pixels (and therefore snow) in the image to determine whether or not a picture was of wolves or not.

Riccosuave ,
@Riccosuave@lemmy.world avatar

Even if they learned exactly like humans do, like so fucking what, right!? Humans have to pay EXORBITANT fees for higher education in this country. Arguing that your bot gets socialized education before the people do is fucking absurd.

v_krishna ,
@v_krishna@lemmy.ml avatar

That seems more like an argument for free higher education rather than restricting what corpuses a deep learning model can train on

Malfeasant ,

Tomato, tomato…

nickwitha_k ,

Porque no los dos? Allowing major corps to put even more downward pressure on workers doesn’t help anyone but the rich. LLMs aren’t going to save the world or become sentient.

interdimensionalmeme ,

The solution is any AI must always be released on a strong copyleft and possibly abolish copyright outright has it has only served the powerful by allowing them to enclose humanity common intellectual heritage (see Disney’s looting and enclosing if ancestral children stories). If you choose to strengthen the current regime, don’t expect things to improve for you as an irrelevant atomised individual,

Dran_Arcana ,

Devil’s Advocate:

How do we know that our brains don’t work the same way?

Why would it matter that we learn differently than a program learns?

Suppose someone has a photographic memory, should it be illegal for them to consume copyrighted works?

EldritchFeminity ,

Because we’re talking pattern recognition levels of learning. At best, they’re the equivalent of parrots mimicking human speech. They take inputs and output data based on the statistical averages from their training sets - collaging pieces of their training into what they think is the right answer. And I use the word think here loosely, as this is the exact same process that the Gaussian blur tool in Photoshop uses.

This matters in the context of the fact that these companies are trying to profit off of the output of these programs. If somebody with an eidetic memory is trying to sell pieces of works that they’ve consumed as their own - or even somebody copy-pasting bits from Clif Notes - then they should get in trouble; the same as these companies.

Given A and B, we can understand C. But an LLM will only be able to give you AB, A(b), and B(a). And they’ve even been just spitting out A and B wholesale, proving that they retain their training data and will regurgitate the entirety of copyrighted material.

ricecake ,

Basing your argument around how the model or training system works doesn’t seem like the best way to frame your point to me. It invites a lot of mucking about in the details of how the systems do or don’t work, how humans learn, and what “learning” and “knowledge” actually are.

I’m a human as far as I know, and it’s trivial for me to regurgitate my training data. I regularly say things that are either directly references to things I’ve heard, or accidentally copy them, sometimes with errors.
Would you argue that I’m just a statistical collage of the things I’ve experienced, seen or read? My brain has as many copies of my training data in it as the AI model, namely zero, but “Captain Picard of the USS Enterprise sat down for a rousing game of chess with his friend Sherlock Holmes, and then Shakespeare came in dressed like Mickey mouse and said ‘to be or not to be, that is the question, for tis nobler in the heart’ or something”. Direct copies of someone else’s work, as well as multiple copyright infringements.
I’m also shit at drawing with perspective. It comes across like a drunk toddler trying their hand at cubism.

Arguing about how the model works or the deficiencies of it to justify treating it differently just invites fixing those issues and repeating the same conversation later. What if we make one that does work how humans do in your opinion? Or it properly actually extracts the information in a way that isn’t just statistically inferred patterns, whatever the distinction there is? Does that suddenly make it different?

You don’t need to get bogged down in the muck of the technical to say that even if you conceed every technical point, we can still say that a non-sentient machine learning system can be held to different standards with regards to copyright law than a sentient person. A person gets to buy a book, read it, and then carry around that information in their head and use it however they want. Not-A-Person does not get to read a book and hold that information without consent of the author.
Arguing why it’s bad for society for machines to mechanise the production of works inspired by others is more to the point.

Computers think the same way boats swim. Arguing about the difference between hands and propellers misses the point that you don’t want a shrimp boat in your swimming pool. I don’t care why they’re different, or that it technically did or didn’t violate the “free swim” policy, I care that it ruins the whole thing for the people it exists for in the first place.

I think all the AI stuff is cool, fun and interesting. I also think that letting it train on everything regardless of the creators wishes has too much opportunity to make everything garbage. Same for letting it produce content that isn’t labeled or cited.
If they can find a way to do and use the cool stuff without making things worse, they should focus on that.

keegomatic ,

I’m not the above poster, but I really appreciate your argument. I think many people overcorrect in their minds about whether or not these models learn the way we do, and they miss the fact that they do behave very similarly to parts of our own systems. I’ve generally found that that overcorrection leads to bad arguments about copyright violation and ethical concerns.

However, your point is very interesting (and it is thankfully independent of that overcorrection). We’ve never had to worry about nonhuman personhood in any amount of seriousness in the past, so it’s strangely not obvious despite how obvious it should be: it’s okay to treat real people as special, even in the face of the arguable personhood of a sufficiently advanced machine. One good reason the machine can be treated differently is because we made it for us, like everything else we make.

I think there still is one related but dangling ethical question. What about machines that are made for us but we decide for whatever reason that they are equivalent in sentience and consciousness to humans?

A human has rights and can take what they’ve learned and make works inspired by it for money, or for someone else to make money through them. They are well within their rights to do so. A machine that we’ve decided is equivalent in sentience to a human, though… can that nonhuman person go take what it’s learned and make works inspired by it so that another person can make money through them?

If they SHOULDN’T be allowed to do that, then it’s notable that this scenario is only separated from what we have now by a gap in technology.

If they SHOULD be allowed to do that (which we could make a good argument for, since we’ve agreed that it is a sentient being) then the technology gap is again notable.

I don’t think the size of the technology gap actually matters here, logically; I think you can hand-wave it away pretty easily and apply it to our current situation rather than a future one. My guess, though, is that the size of the gap is of intuitive importance to anyone thinking about it (I’m no different) and most people would answer one way or the other depending on how big they perceive the technology gap to be.

petrol_sniff_king ,

Arguing why it’s bad for society for machines to mechanise the production of works inspired by others is more to the point.

I agree, but the fact that shills for this technology are also wrong about it is at least interesting.

Rhetorically speaking, I don’t know if that’s useless.

I don’t care why they’re different, or that it technically did or didn’t violate the “free swim” policy,

I do like this point a lot.

If they can find a way to do and use the cool stuff without making things worse, they should focus on that.

I do miss when the likes of cleverbot was just a fun novelty on the Internet.

Eatspancakes84 ,

I am also not really getting the argument. If I as a human want to learn a subject from a book I buy it ( or I go to a library who paid for it). If it’s similar to how humans learn, it should cost equally much.

The issue is of course that it’s not at all similar to how humans learn. It needs VASTLY more data to produce something even remotely sensible. Develop AI that’s truly transformative, by making it as efficient as humans are in learning, and the cost of paying for copyright will be negligible.

petrol_sniff_king ,

If I as a human want to learn a subject from a book, I buy it

xD
That’s good.

Deathcrow ,

Dude never heard of a library. I only bought a handful of books during my degree, I would’ve been homeless if I had to buy a copy of every learning source

stephen01king ,

If I as a human want to learn a subject from a book I buy it ( or I go to a library who paid for it). If it’s similar to how humans learn, it should cost equally much.

You’re on Lemmy where people casually says “piracy is morally the right thing to do”, so I’m not sure this argument works on this platform.

spacesatan ,

I’m I the only person that remembers that it was “you wouldn’t steal a car” or has everyone just decided to pretend it was “you wouldn’t download a car” because that’s easier to dunk on.

roguetrick ,

You wouldn’t shoot a policeman and then steal his helmet.

C126 ,

These anti piracy commercials have gotten really mean.

JasonDJ ,

I’m pretty sure it’s either Mandela Effect or a massive gaslighting conspiracy. Though I guess that’s true for everything that’s collectively misremembered.

Cornelius_Wangenheim ,

People remember the parody, which is usually modified to be more recognizable. Like Darth Vader never said “Luke, I am your father”; in the movie it’s actually “No, I am your father”.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

Maybe add a spoiler alert next time. Jeez.

stephen01king ,

Maybe it’s being confused with the “download more ram” thing.

renrenPDX ,

Then OpenAI should pay for a copy, like we do.

mightyfoolish ,

Is their an official statement if OpenAI pays for at least one copy of whatever they throw into the bots?

kibiz0r ,

Not even stealing cheese to run a sandwich shop.

Stealing cheese to melt it all together and run a cheese shop that undercuts the original cheese shops they stole from.

TheKMAP ,

Whatever happened to copying isn’t stealing?

I think the crux of the conversation is whether or not the world is better with ChatGPT. I say yes. We can tackle the disinformation in another effort.

calcopiritus ,

When you copy to consume yourself it’s way different than when you copy to sell the copy for a lower price.

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.

VerbFlow ,
@VerbFlow@lemmy.world avatar

There are a few problems, tho. 123456

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!?

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.

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?

Varyk ,

tweet is good, your body argument is completely wrong

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