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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

makyo ,

I thought the larger point was that they’re using plenty of sources that do not lie in the public domain. Like if I download a textbook to read for a class instead of buying it - I could be proscecuted for stealing. And they’ve downloaded and read millions of books without paying for them.

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org avatar

So, is the Internet caring about copyright now? Decades of Napster, Limewire, BitTorrent, Piratebay, bootleg ebooks, movies, music, etc, but we care now because it's a big corporation doing it?

Just trying to get it straight.

ManixT ,

You tell me, was it people suing companies or companies suing people?

Is a company claiming it should be able to have free access to content or a person?

riskable ,
@riskable@programming.dev avatar

Just a point of clarification: Copyright is about the right of distribution. So yes, a company can just “download the Internet”, store it, and do whatever TF they want with it as long as they don’t distribute it.

That the key: Distribution. That’s why no one gets sued for downloading. They only ever get sued for uploading. Furthermore, the damages (if found guilty) are based on the number of copies that get distributed. It’s because copyright law hasn’t been updated in decades and 99% of it predates computers (especially all the important case law).

What these lawsuits against OpenAI are claiming is that OpenAI is making a derivative work of the authors/owners works. Which is kinda what’s going on but also not really. Let’s say that someone asks ChatGPT to write a few paragraphs of something in the style of Stephen King… His “style” isn’t even cooyrightable so as long as it didn’t copy his works word-for-word is it even a derivative? No one knows. It’s never been litigated before.

My guess: No. It’s not going to count as a derivative work. Because it’s no different than a human reading all his books and performing the same, perfectly legal function.

General_Effort ,

It’s more about copying, really.

That’s why no one gets sued for downloading.

People do get sued in some countries. EG Germany. I think they stopped in the US because of the bad publicity.

What these lawsuits against OpenAI are claiming is that OpenAI is making a derivative work of the authors/owners works.

That theory is just crazy. I think it’s already been thrown out of all these suits.

catloaf ,

The Internet is not a person

masterspace ,

People on Lemmy. I personally didn’t realize everyone here was such big fans of copyright and artificial scarcity.

The reality is that people hate tech bros (deservedly) and then blindly hate on everything they like by association, which sometimes results in dumbassery like everyone now dick-riding the copyright system.

Quill7513 ,

Personally for me its about the double standard. When we perform small scale “theft” to experience things we’d be willing to pay for if we could afford it and the money funded the artists, they throw the book at us. When they build a giant machine that takes all of our work and turns it into an automated record scratcher that they will profit off of and replace our creative jobs with, that’s just good business. I don’t think it’s okay that they get to do things like implement DRM because IP theft is so terrible, but then when they do it systemically and against the specific licensing of the content that has been posted to the internet, that’s protected in the eyes of the law

masterspace ,

What about companies who scrape public sites for training data but then publish their trained models open source for anyone to use?

That feels a lot more reasonable and fair to me personally.

leftzero ,

If they still profit from it, no.

Open models made by nonprofit organisations, listing their sources, not including anything from anyone who requests it not to be included (with robots.txt, for instance), and burdened with a GPL-like viral license that prevents the models and their results from being used for profit… that’d probably be fine.

masterspace ,

And also be useless for most practical applications.

leftzero ,

We’re talking about LLMs. They’re useless for most practical applications by definition.

And when they’re not entirely useless (basically, autocomplete) they’re orders of magnitude less cost-effective than older almost equivalent alternatives, so they’re effectively useless at that, too.

They’re fancy extremely costly toys without any practical use, that thanks to the short-sighted greed of the scammers selling them will soon become even more useless due to model collapse.

Not_mikey ,

I mean openais not getting off Scott free, they’ve been getting sued a lot recently for this exact copy right argument. New York times is suing them for potential billions.

They throw the book at us

Do they though, since the Metallica lawsuits in the aughts there hasnt been much prosecution at the consumer level for piracy, and what little there is is mostly cease and desists.

Cryophilia ,

Kill a person, that’s a tragedy. Kill a hundred thousand people, they make you king.

Steal $10, you go to jail. Steal $10 billion, they make you Senator.

If you do crime big enough, it becomes good.

leftzero ,

If you do crime big enough, it becomes good.

No, no it doesn’t.

It might become legal, or tolerated, or the laws might become unenforceable.

But that doesn’t make it good, on the contrary, it makes it even worse.

Cryophilia ,

No shit

TheGrandNagus ,

That’s their point.

Floey ,

It’s not hypocritical to care about some parts of copyright and not others. For example most people in the foss crowd don’t really care about using copyright to monetarily leverage being the sole distributor of a work but they do care about attribution.

kryptonianCodeMonkey ,

There is a kernal of validity to your point, but let’s not pretend like those things are at all the same. The difference between copyright violation for personal use and copyright violation for commercialization is many orders of magnitude.

FireTower ,
@FireTower@lemmy.world avatar

People don’t like when you punch down. When a 13 year old illegally downloaded a Limp Bizkit album no one cared. When corporations worth billions funded by venture capital systematically harvest the work of small creators (often with appropriate license) to sell a product people tend to care.

PenisDuckCuck9001 , (edited )

Honestly, if this somehow results in regulators being like “fuck it, piracy is legal now” it won’t negatively impact me in any way…

Corporations have abused copyright law for decades, they’ve ruined the internet, they’ve ruined media, they’ve ruined video games. I want them to lose more than anything else.

The shitty and likely situation is they’ll be like “fuck it corporate piracy is legal but individuals doing it is still a crime”.

Starbuncle ,

I think that training models on scraped internet data should be legal if and only if those models’ weights are required to be open-source. It’d be like slapping a copyleft license on the internet - you can do what you want with public data, but you have to give what you use it for back to the public.

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.

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.

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?

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.

xenomor , (edited )

This take is correct although I would make one addition. It is true that copyright violation doesn’t happen when copyrighted material is inputted or when models are trained. While the outputs of these models are not necessarily copyright violations, it is possible for them to violate copyright. The same standards for violation that apply to humans should apply to these models.

I entirely reject the claims that there should be one standard for humans and another for these models. Every time this debate pops up, people claim some province based on ‘intelligence’ or ‘conscience’ or ‘understanding’ or ‘awareness’. This is a meaningless argument because we have no clear understanding about what those things are. I’m not claiming anything about the nature of these models. I’m just pointing out that people love to apply an undefined standard to them.

We should apply the same copyright standards to people, models, corporations, and old-school algorithms.

Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

The ingredient thing is a bit amusing, because that’s basically how one of the major fast food chains got to be so big (I can’t remember which one it was ATM though; just that it wasn’t McDonald’s). They cut out the middle-man and just bought their own farm to start growing the vegetables and later on expanded to raising the animals used for the meat as well.

NeoNachtwaechter ,

Wait… they actually STOLE the cheese from the cows?

😆

macrocephalic ,

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

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.

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.

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.

Imgonnatrythis ,

I hear you about the cheese bro.

VerbFlow ,
@VerbFlow@lemmy.world avatar

There are a few problems, tho. 123456

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