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. https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly/episodes/744
We have hundreds of years of out of copyright books and newspapers. I look forward to interacting with old-timey AI.
“Fiddle sticks! These mechanical horses will never catch on! They’re far too loud and barely more faster than a man can run!”
“A Woman’s place is raising children and tending to the house! If they get the vote, what will they demand next!? To earn a Man’s wage!?”
That last one is still relevant to today’s discourse somehow!?
If they can base their business on stealing, then we can steal their AI services, right?
How do you feel about Meta and Microsoft who do the same thing but publish their models open source for anyone to use?
Those aren’t open source, neither by the OSI’s Open Source Definition nor by the OSI’s Open Source AI Definition.
The important part for the latter being a published listing of all the training data. (Trainers don’t have to provide the data, but they must provide at least a way to recreate the model given the same inputs).
Data information: Sufficiently detailed information about the data used to train the system, so that a skilled person can recreate a substantially equivalent system using the same or similar data. Data information shall be made available with licenses that comply with the Open Source Definition.
They are model-available if anything.
For the purposes of this conversation. That’s pretty much just a pedantic difference. They are paying to train those models and then providing them to the public to use completely freely in any way they want.
It would be like developing open source software and then not calling it open source because you didn’t publish the market research that guided your UX decisions.
Tell me you’ve never compiled software from open source without saying you’ve never compiled software from open source.
The only differences between open source and freeware are pedantic, right guys?
You said open source. Open source is a type of licensure.
The entire point of licensure is legal pedantry.
And as far as your metaphor is concerned, pre-trained models are closer to pre-compiled binaries, which are expressly not considered Open Source according to the OSD.
Well how long to you think that’s going to last? They are for-profit companies after all.
I mean we’re having a discussion about what’s fair, my inherent implication is whether or not that would be a fair regulation to impose.
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Pirating isn’t stealing but yes the collective works of humanity should belong to humanity, not some slimy cabal of venture capitalists.
Yes, that’s exactly the point. It should belong to humanity, which means that anyone can use it to improve themselves. Or to create something nice for themselves or others. That’s exactly what AI companies are doing. And because it is not stealing, it is all still there for anyone else. Unless, of course, the copyrightists get there way.
Unlike regular piracy, accessing “their” product hosted on their servers using their power and compute is pretty clearly theft. Morally correct theft that I wholeheartedly support, but theft nonetheless.
Is that how this technology works? I’m not the most knowledgeable about tech stuff honestly (at least by Lemmy standards).
There’s self-hosted LLMs, (e.g. Ollama), but for the purposes of this conversation, yeah - they’re centrally hosted, compute intensive software services.
Also, ingredients to a recipe aren’t covered under copyright law.
ingredients to a recipe may well be subject to copyright, which is why food writers make sure their recipes are “unique” in some small way. Enough to make them different enough to avoid accusations of direct plagiarism.
E: removed unnecessary snark
I think there is some confusion here between copyright and patent, similar in concept but legally exclusive. A person can copyright the order and selection of words used to express a recipe, but the recipe itself is not copy, it can however fall under patent law if proven to be unique enough, which is difficult to prove.
So you can technically own the patent to a recipe keeping other companies from selling the product of a recipe, however anyone can make the recipe themselves, if you can acquire it and not resell it. However that recipe can be expressed in many different ways, each having their own copyright.
In what country is that?
Under US law, you cannot copyright recipes. You can own a specific text in which you explain the recipe. But anyone can write down the same ingredients and instructions in a different way and own that text.
Keep in my that “ingredients to a recipe” here refers to the literal physical ingredients, based on the context of the OP (where a sandwich shop owner can’t afford to pay for their cheese).
While you can’t copyright a recipe, you can patent the ingredients themselves, especially if you had a hand in doing R&D to create it. See PepsiCo sues four Indian farmers for using its patented Lay’s potatoes.
No, you cannot patent an ingredient. What you can do - under Indian law - is get “protection” for a plant variety. In this case, a potato.
That law is called Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act, 2001. The farmer in this case being PepsiCo, which is how they successfully sued these 4 Indian farmers.
Farmers’ Rights for PepsiCo against farmers. Does that seem odd?
I’ve never met an intellectual property freak who didn’t lie through his teeth.
So if I watch all Star Wars movies, and then get a crew together to make a couple of identical movies that were inspired by my earlier watching, and then sell the movies, then this is actually completely legal.
It doesn’t matter if they stole the source material. They are selling a machine that can create copyright infringements at a click of a button, and that’s a problem.
This is not the same as an artist looking at every single piece of art in the world and being able to replicate it to hang it in the living room. This is an army of artists that are enslaved by a single company to sell any copy of any artwork they want. That army works as long as you feed it electricity and free labor of actual artists.
Theft actually seems like a great word for what these scammers are doing.
If you run some open source model on your own machine, that’s a different story.
I’m I the only person that remembers that it was “you wouldn’t steal a car” or has everyone just decided to pretend it was “you wouldn’t download a car” because that’s easier to dunk on.
You wouldn’t shoot a policeman and then steal his helmet.
These anti piracy commercials have gotten really mean.
I’m pretty sure it’s either Mandela Effect or a massive gaslighting conspiracy. Though I guess that’s true for everything that’s collectively misremembered.
People remember the parody, which is usually modified to be more recognizable. Like Darth Vader never said “Luke, I am your father”; in the movie it’s actually “No, I am your father”.
Maybe add a spoiler alert next time. Jeez.
Spoiler alert, but Rosebud was his sled all along.
Not even stealing cheese to run a sandwich shop.
Stealing cheese to melt it all together and run a cheese shop that undercuts the original cheese shops they stole from.
Whatever happened to copying isn’t stealing?
I think the crux of the conversation is whether or not the world is better with ChatGPT. I say yes. We can tackle the disinformation in another effort.
When you copy to consume yourself it’s way different than when you copy to sell the copy for a lower price.
They’re not selling the copy, bruh. They’re selling a technology that very few understand. Smart people pretend they get it, but they don’t. That’s how rare the math is.
So because you don’t understand it, everything it does should be legal?
It’s not rare maths. There are trns of thousands of AI experts. And most CS graduates (millions) have a good understanding on how they work, just not the specifics of the maths.
Yeah, they’re not selling a copy, they are just selling a subscription to a copying machine loaded with the information needed to make a copy. Totally different.
I should start a business of printers and attach a USB with the PNG of a dollar bill. And of course my printers won’t have any government mandated firmware that disables printing fake money.
I’m not printing fake money! It’s my clients! Totally legal.
The problem with your argument is that it is 100% possible to get ChatGPT to produce verbatim extracts of copyrighted works. This has been suppressed by OpenAI in a rather brute force kind of way, by prohibiting the prompts that have been found so far to do this (e.g. the infamous “poetry poetry poetry…” ad infinitum hack), but the possibility is still there, no matter how much they try to plaster over it. In fact there are some people, much smarter than me, who see technical similarities between compression technology and the process of training an LLM, calling it a “blurry JPEG of the Internet”… the point being, you wouldn’t allow distribution of a copyrighted book just because you compressed it in a ZIP file first.
You know, those obsessed with pushing AI would do a lot better if they dropped the patronizing tone in every single one of their comments defending them.
It’s always fun reading “but you just don’t understand”.
The argument seem most commonly from people on fediverse (which I happen to agree with) is really not about what current copyright laws and treaties say / how they should be interpreted, but how people view things should be (even if it requires changing laws to make it that way).
And it fundamentally comes down to economics - the study of how resources should be distributed. Apart from oligarchs and the wannabe oligarchs who serve as useful idiots for the real oligarchs, pretty much everyone wants a relatively fair and equal distribution of wealth amongst the people (differing between left and right in opinion on exactly how equal things should be, but there is still some common ground). Hardly anyone really wants serfdom or similar where all the wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of a few (obviously it’s a spectrum of how concentrated, but very few people want the extreme position to the right).
Depending on how things go, AI technologies have the power to serve humanity and lift everyone up equally if they are widely distributed, removing barriers and breaking existing ‘moats’ that let a few oligarchs hoard a lot of resources. Or it could go the other way - oligarchs are the only ones that have access to the state of the art model weights, and use this to undercut whatever they want in the economy until they own everything and everyone else rents everything from them on their terms.
The first scenario is a utopia scenario, and the second is a dystopia, and the way AI is regulated is the fork in the road between the two. So of course people are going to want to cheer for regulation that steers towards the utopia.
That means things like:
- Fighting back when the oligarchs try to talk about ‘AI Safety’ meaning that there should be no Open Source models, and that they should tightly control how and for what the models can be used. The biggest AI Safety issue is that we end up in a dystopian AI-fueled serfdom, and FLOSS models and freedom for the common people to use them actually helps to reduce the chances of this outcome.
- Not allowing ‘AI washing’ where oligarchs can take humanities collective work, put it through an algorithm, and produce a competing thing that they control - unless everyone has equal access to it. One policy that would work for this would be that if you create a model based on other people’s work, and want to use that model for a commercial purpose, then you must publicly release the model and model weights. That would be a fair trade-off for letting them use that information for training purposes.
Fundamentally, all of this is just exacerbating cracks in the copyright system as a policy. I personally think that a better system would look like this:
- Everyone gets a Universal Basic Income paid, and every organisation and individual making profit pays taxes in to fund the UBI (in proportion to their profits).
- All forms of intellectual property rights (except trademarks) are abolished - copyright, patents, and trade secrets are no longer enforced by the law. The UBI replaces it as compensation to creators.
- It is illegal to discriminate against someone for publicly disclosing a work they have access to, as long as they didn’t accept valuable consideration to make that disclosure. So for example, if an OpenAI employee publicly released the model weights for one of OpenAI’s models without permission from anyone, it would be illegal for OpenAI to demote / fire / refuse to promote / pay them differently on that basis, and for any other company to factor that into their hiring decision. There would be exceptions for personally identifiable information (e.g. you can’t release the client list or photos of real people without consequences), and disclosure would have to be public (i.e. not just to a competitor, it has to be to everyone) and uncompensated (i.e. you can’t take money from a competitor to release particular information).
If we had that policy, I’d be okay for AI companies to be slurping up everything and training model weights.
However, with the current policies, it is pushing us towards the dystopic path where AI companies take what they want and never give anything back.
You should look at the energy cost of AI. It’s not a miracle machine.
I agree that this is a major concern, especially if non-renewable energy is used, and until the production process for computer technology and solar panels is much more of a circular economy. More renewable energy and circular economies, and following the sun for AI training and inference (it isn’t going to be low latency anyway, so if you need AI inference in the northern hemisphere night, just do it on the other side of the world) could greatly decrease the impact.
The joke is of course that “paying for copyright” is impossible in this case. ONLY the large social media companies that own all the comments and content that has accumulated by the community have enough data to train AI models. Or sites like stock photo libraries or deviantart who own the distribution rights for the content. That means all copyright arguments practically argue that AI should be owned by big corporations and should be inaccessible to normal people.
Basically the “means of generation” will be owned by the capitalists, since they are the only ones with the economic power to license these things.
That is basically the worst case scenario. Not only will the value of work diminish greatly, the advances in productivity will also be only accessible to big capitalists.
Of course, that is basically inevitable anyway. Why wouldn’t they want this? It’s just sad seeing the stupid morons arguing for this as if they had anything to gain.
I hate to say this but “let the market decide” if Ai is something the consumer wants/needs they’ll pay for it otherwise let it die.
A perfect analogy.
Considering that original works are discarded, it’s strange how effective they’re at plagiarizing them
Yep, its definitely not possible that nice small businesses like universal and sony would sue without an actual case in order to try and crush competitors with costs.
In the same way that a person can learn the material and also use that knowledge to potentially plagiarize it, though. It’s no different in that sense. What is different is the speed of learning and both the speed and capacity of recall. However, it doesn’t change the fundamental truths of OP’s explanation.
Also, when you’re talking specifically about music, you’re talking about a very limited subset of note combinations that will sound pleasing to human ears. Additionally, even human composers commonly struggle to not simply accidentally reproduce others’ work, which is partly why the music industry is filled with constant copyright litigation.
I mean saying they learn is huge kudos to the people that made this tbh
Copyright laws protects the ability of copyright holder to make money. The laws were created before AI and now obviously have to be adapted to new technology (like you didn’t really need copyright before the invention of printing). How exactly AI will be regulated is in the end up to society to decide, which most likely will come down who has the better lobby.
The sad news is:
Their argument could fall on fertile ground.
The Usamerican legal system protects a running business. When such a rich and famous corporation argues (and it would be highly paid lawyers arguing) that their business could be in jeopardy, they are going to listen, no matter how ridiculous the reasoning.
In other countries, they just make a judge laughing out loud.
Yep, that’s textbook big tech strategy: -Build up the hype -Get the product out there, make sure as many orgs and people start using it as possible. Make it free or sell at loss if necessary -Oh yes, we broke a few laws for this. If we don’t get a waiver, we’ll have to close the service for everyone, do you realize the impact?
That’s Facebook on privacy, Uber on workers rights, etc. Now N+1th: OpenAI on copyright.
