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this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Neither are infringement. Artists attempting to bully platforms into not training on them doesn't change the fact that training on information would be black and white fair use if it didn't have absolutely nothing in common with copyright infringement. Learning from copyrighted material is not distributing it.
If the court doesn't just ignore the law, which has nothing that could theoretically be interpreted to support the idea that training is infringement in any way, this case will be the precedent that sets AI training free.
And you, as an individual, should want that. Breaking the ability to learn from prior art is still literally guaranteed to disenfranchise the overwhelming majority of creators in all formats, because there are massive IP holders who have the data sets to build generative AI and produce unlimited "free" content, while no individual will be able to do the same because they'll have nothing to train on. If you think Disney has a monopoly now, wait until they can train AI on 100 years of 95% of TV and movies and no one else can make AI.
Well I hear what you're saying, although I don't much appreciate being told what I should want the outcome to be.
My own wants notwithstanding, I know copyright law is notoriously thorny – fair use doubly so – and I'm no lawyer. I'd be a little bit surprised if NYT decides to raise this suit without consulting their own lawyers though, so it stands to reason that if they do indeed decide to sue then there are at least some copyright lawyers who think it'll have a chance. As I said, we'll see.
Fair use isn't relevant.
Copyright law does not prevent learning from copyrighted material. There is no potential infringement for fair use to be applied to. Nothing is being copied and shared.
If they're suing, they're doing it because they think they can manipulate a ruling that does not in any way follow the law and because the benefit if they can do so is huge, not because any intelligent rational human being can read the law and possibly interpret anything as infringement. It's not ambiguous in any way. There can't be infringement if you don't distribute someone else's work.
But there is no one learning from it. It serves as a building block / source material to build these LLMs. I feel like the fact that it’s called learning gives folks the impression that it’s similar to what a human would do.
"AI" isn't intelligent, but that has literally zero relevance.
Seeing copyrighted material and forming takeaways does not in any way resemble copyright infringement. It's not the fact that a human is doing so that matters. It's the fact that no sort of analysis constitutes copying or copyright infringement.
But they aren’t forming take aways from it. They literally used that material to build this system. I also cannot just go around and take arbitrary data from anywhere and use it to build my own program. There are licenses attached to it and I have to be mindful of who’s work I can use to build my system and who’s I can’t use without explicit permission.
Building this system isn’t looking at other folks material and forming take aways from it. It’s literally using that material as input for building the system.
Yes they are.
And yes, you absolutely can use entirely New York Times articles as research material to write your own article based on conclusions from them. You can't outright copy paste their articles, but you can freely use information learned from their articles however the hell you want.
It's the exact same thing. "AI" looks at their articles, integrates information, and does not retain the actual article. That has no similarity in any way to copyright infringement.
Well. When I copy and paste source code into my program and compile it it also doesn’t retain the actual code. It’s still not allowed.
If I on the other hand read source code, remember and reapply it in a sort of similar way later on then that’s totally fine. But that’s not what OpenAI did there. There wasn’t a human involved that read the articles and then used that knowledge to adjust the LLM.
There question i would have is where is the line there? Does that mean that as soon as there is some automated process that uses the data it’s fine?
E.g. could I have a script that reads all NYT articles, extracts interesting information and provides them in a different format to users?
Yes, you can rewrite something in your own words and as it isn't copied verbatim, then it isn't infringement. You can't copyright the idea of something.
It is similar to what humans do. The principal difference is that the AI tech we have (as of yet) can't learn how to learn: Those systems come with pre-determined rules to learn, we come with pre-determined rules on how to learn how to learn.
And yes AIs abstract the knowledge they get fed. What they have trouble with is not forgetting how to play soccer when learning how to cook spaghetti as without the capacity to learn to learn they can't vary encoding of information between topics and everything gets mushed together, new information blindly overwriting unrelated old information.