I know a lot of people want to interpret copyright law so that allowing a machine to learn concepts from a copyrighted work is copyright infringement, but I think what people will need to consider is that all that’s going to do is keep AI out of the hands of regular people and place it specifically in the hands of people and organizations who are wealthy and powerful enough to train it for their own use.
If this isn’t actually what you want, then what’s your game plan for placing copyright restrictions on AI training that will actually work? Have you considered how it’s likely to play out? Are you going to be able to stop Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and the NSA from training an AI on whatever they want and using it to push propaganda on the public? As far as I can tell, all that copyright restrictions will accomplish to to concentrate the power of AI (which we’re only beginning to explore) in the hands of the sorts of people who are the least likely to want to do anything good with it.
I know I’m posting this in a hostile space, and I’m sure a lot of people here disagree with my opinion on how copyright should (and should not) apply to AI training, and that’s fine (the jury is literally still out on that). What I’m interested in is what your end game is. How do you expect things to actually work out if you get the laws that you want? I would personally argue that an outcome where Mark Zuckerberg gets AI and the rest of us don’t is the absolute worst possibility.
Except an AI is not taking inspiration, it’s compiling information to determine mathematical averages.
The AIs we’re talking about are neural networks. They don’t do statistics, they don’t have databases, and they don’t take mathematical averages. They simulate neurons, and their ability to learn concepts is emergent from that, the same way the human brain is. Nothing about an artificial neuron ever takes an average of anything, reads any database, or does any statistical calculations. If an artificial neural network can be said to be doing those things, then so is the human brain.
There is nothing magical about how human neurons work. Researchers are already growing small networks out of animal neurons and using them the same way that we use artificial neural networks.
There are a lot of “how AI works” articles in there that put things in layman’s terms (and use phrases like “statistical analysis” and “mathematical averages”, and unfortunately people (including many very smart people) extrapolate from the incorrect information in those articles and end up making bad assumptions about how AI actually works.
A human being is paid for the work they do, an AI program’s creator is paid for the work it did. And if that creator used copyrighted work, then he should be having to get permission to use it, because he’s profitting off this AI program.
If an artist uses a copyrighted work on their mood board or as inspiration, then they should pay for that, because they’re making a profit from that copyrighted work. Human beings should, as you said, be paid for the work they do. Right? If an artist goes to art school, they should pay all of the artists whose work they learned from, right? If a teacher teaches children in a class, that teacher should be paid a royalty each time those children make use of the knowledge they were taught, right? (I sense a sidetrack – yes, teachers are horribly underpaid and we desperately need to fix that, so please don’t misconstrue that previous sentence.)
There’s a reason we don’t copyright facts, styles, and concepts.
Oh, and if you want to talk about something that stores an actual database of scraped data, makes mathematical and statistical inferences, and reproduces things exactly, look no further than Google. It’s already been determined in court that what Google does is fair use.
The AIs we’re talking about are neural networks. They don’t do statistics, they don’t have databases, and they don’t take mathematical averages. They simulate neurons, and their ability to learn concepts is emergent from that, the same way the human brain is.
This is not at all accurate. Yes, there are very immature neural simulation systems that are being prototyped but that’s not what you’re seeing in the news today. What the public is witnessing is fundamentally based on vector mathematics. It’s pure math and there is nothing at all emergent about it.
If an artist uses a copyrighted work on their mood board or as inspiration, then they should pay for that, because they’re making a profit from that copyrighted work.
That’s not how copyright works, nor should it. Anyone who creates a mood board from a blank slate is using their learned experience, most of which they gathered from other works. If you were to write a book analyzing movies, for example, you shouldn’t have to pay the copyright for all those movies. You can make a YouTube video right now with a few short clips from a movie or quotes from a book and you’re not violating copyright. You’re just not allowed to make a largely derivative work.
So to clarify, are you making the claim that nothing that’s simulated with vector mathematics can have emergent properties? And that AIs like GPT and Stable Diffusion don’t contain simulated neurons?
@IncognitoErgoSum Gonna need a source on Large Language Models using neural networks based on the human brain here.
EDIT: Scratch that. I’m just going to need you to explain how this is based on the human brain functions.
I’m willing to, but if I take the time to do that, are you going to listen to my answer, or just dismiss everything I say and go back to thinking what you want to think?
Also, a couple of preliminary questions to help me explain things:
What’s your level of familiarity with the source material? How much experience do you have writing or modifying code that deals with neural networks? My own familiarity lies mostly with PyTorch. Do you use that or something else? If you don’t have any direct familiarity with programming with neural networks, do you have enough of a familiarity with them to at least know what some of those boxes mean, or do I need to explain them all?
Most importantly, when I say that neural networks like GPT-* use artificial neurons, are you objecting to that statement?
I need to know what it is I’m explaining.
@IncognitoErgoSum I don’t think you can. Because THIS? Is not a model of how humans learn language. It’s a model of how a computer learns to write sentences.
If what you’re going to give me is an oversimplified analogy that puts too much faith in what AI devs are trying to sell and not enough faith in what a human brain is doing, then don’t bother because I will dismiss it as a fairy tale.
But, if you have an answer that actually, genuinely proves that this “neural” network is operating similarly to how the human brain does… then you have invalidated your original post. Because if it really is thinking like a human, NO ONE should own it.
In either case, it’s probably not worth your time.
