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GenAI tools ‘could not exist’ if firms are made to pay copyright (www.computerweekly.com)
submitted 2 years ago by [M, B] to c/technology@lemmy.world
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GenAI tools ‘could not exist’ if firms are made to pay copyright::undefined

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[–] 38 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Reproduction of copyrighted material would be breaking the law. Studying it and using it as reference when creating original content is not.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Reproduction of copyrighted material would be breaking the law. Studying it and using it as reference when creating original content is not.

    I’m curious why we think otherwise when it is a student obtaining an unauthorized copy of a textbook to study, or researchers getting papers from sci-hub. Probably because it benefits corporations and they say so?

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    While I would like to be in a world where knowledge is free, this is apples and oranges.

    OpenAI can purchase a textbook and read it. If their AI uses the knowledge gained to explain maths to an individual, without reproducing the original material, then there's no issue.

    The difference is the student in your example didn't buy their textbook. Someone else bought it and reproduced the original for others to study from.

    If OpenAI was pirating textbooks, that would be a wholly separate issue.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    The fact that the "AI" can spit out whole passages verbatim when given the right prompts, suggests that there is a big problem here and they haven't a clue how to fix it.

    It's not "learning" anything other than the probable order of words.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    I really hate this reduction of gpt models. Is the model probabilistic? Absolutely. But it isn't simply learning a comprehensible probability of words--it is generating a massively complex conditional probability sequence for words. Largely, humans might be said to do the same thing. We make a best guess at the sequence of words we decide to use based on conditional probabilities along a myriad number of conditions (including semantics of the thing we want to say).

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago

    Completely agree. And that should be the focal point of the issue.

    Sam Altman is correctly stating that AI is not possible without using copyrighted materials. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

    His mistake is not redirecting the conversation. He should be talking about the efforts they're making to stop their machine from reproducing copyrighted works. Not whether or not they should be allowed to use it in the first place.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    I agree that the issues

    • whether AI output are derivative works of its input, and
    • whether input to AI is fair use and requires no compensation

    are separate, but I think they are related, in that AI companies are trying to impose whatever interpretation of copyright that is convenient to them to the rest of the society.

    And indeed Meta pirated books to feed its AI.

    https://www.techspot.com/news/101507-meta-admits-using-pirated-books-train-ai-but.html

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    humans studying it, is fair use.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Copyright can only be granted to works created by a human, but I don’t know of any such restriction for fair use. Care to share a source explaining why you think only humans are able to use fair use as a defense for copyright infringement?

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  • [+] -6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Because a human has to use talent+effort to make something that's fair use. They adapt a product into something that while similar is noticeably different. AI will

    1. make things that are not just similar but not noticeably different.

    2. There's not an effort in creation. There's human thought behind a prompt but not on the AI following it.

    3. If allowed to AI companies will basically copyright everything...

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    You are aware of the insane amounts of research, human effort and the type of human talent that is required to make a simple piece of software, let alone a complex artificial neural network model whose function is to try and solve whatever stuff...right?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    I don't agree. The publisher of the material does not get to dictate what it is used for. What are we protecting at the end of the day and why?

    In the case of a textbook, someone worked hard to explain certain materials in a certain way to make the material easily digestible. They produced examples to explain concepts. Reproducing and disseminating that material would be unfair to the author who worked hard to produce it.

    But the author does not have jurisdiction over the knowledge gained. They cannot tell the reader that they are forbidden from using the knowledge gained to tutor another person in calculus. That would be absurd.

    IP law protects the works of the creator. The author of a calculus textbook did not invent calculus. As such, copyright law does not apply.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    The model itself is a derivative work. It's existence is what is under dispute. It's not about using the model to produce further works

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Then every single student graduating college produces derivative work.

    Everything that required the underlying knowledge gained from the textbooks studied, or research papers read, is derivative work.

    At the core of this, what are we saying? Your machine could only explain calculus because it was provided information from multiple calculus textbooks? Well, that applies to literally everyone.

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