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0 pointscogman102mo ago0 comments

The issue is that of copyright law WRT to derivative works. Machine transformations on original works does not create a new copyright for the person that directed the machine transformation. That's why you can't pirate a bunch of media by simply adding a red pixel to the righthand corner or by color shifting the video.

Copyright law is very clear that if a machine does it, the original copyright on the input is kept. This is why your distributed binaries are still copyrighted, because the machine transformed, very significantly, the source code into binary which maintains the copyright throughout.

It would be inconsistent for the courts to suddenly decide that "actually, this specific type of machine transformation is actually innovative."

I know this is generally really bad for the AI industry, so they just ignore it until a court tells them they can't anymore. And they might get away with it as I don't have faith that the courts will be consistent.

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red75prime2mo ago· 2 in thread

Shredding is a machine transformation. Does it mean that shreds retain original copyright even if the content can't be restored and the provenance can't be traced? Just an example that treating all machine transformations equally with no regard to the specifics doesn't make much sense.

And the specifics of autoregressive pretraining is that it is lossy compression. Good luck finding which copyrighted materials have made it into the final weights.

cogman10OP2mo ago

> Does it mean that shreds retain original copyright even if the content can't be restored?

Yup, it absolutely does. In fact, that's why you are still violating copyright law by using bittorrent even though each of the users is only giving out a small slice or shred of the original content.

The US has a granted defense in the case of something like shredding called "Fair Use" but that doesn't mean or imply that a copyright is void simply because of a fair use claim.

> And the specifics of autoregressive pretraining is that it is lossy compression.

That doesn't matter. Why would it? If I take a FLAC recording and change it to an MP3. The fact that it was a lossy transform doesn't suddenly give me the legal right to distribute the MP3.

> Good luck finding which copyrighted materials have made it into the final weights.

That's what the NYT v. OpenAI lawsuit is all about. And for earlier models they could, in fact, pull out full NYT articles which proved they made it into the final weights.

Further, the NYT is currently in discovery which means OpenAI must open up to the NYT what goes into their weights. A move that, if OpenAI loses, other litigants can also use because there's a real good shot that OpenAI also included their works in the dataset.

red75prime2mo ago

> Yup, it absolutely does

Well, it's not the first time when the law contradicts laws of nature (for the entertainment of the future generations). Bittorent is not a relevant example, because the system is designed to restore the work in its fullness.

> in fact, pull out full NYT articles

That's when they used their knowledge of the exact text they wanted to "retrieve" to get the text? It wouldn't be so efficient with a random number generator, but it's doable.

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