The argument about LLMs not being copyright laundromats making sense hinges the scale and non-specificity of training. There's a difference between "LLM reproduced this piece of copyrighted work because it memorized it from being fed literally half the internet", vs. "LLM was intentionally trained to specifically reproduce variants of this particular work". Whatever one's stances on the former case, the latter case would be plain infringing copyrights and admitting to it.
In other words: GPT-4 gets to get away with occasionally spitting out something real verbatim. Llama2-7b-finetune-NYTArticles does not.
True, but if you research lots of sources and still emit significant blocks of verbatim text without attribution, it’s still plagiarism. At least that’s how human authors are judged.
This is a reductionist take. Maybe it's not illegal per se where you live, but it always have ramifications, and these ramifications affect your future a whole lot.
Scale might be a factor, but it's not the only one. Your neighbor might not care if you steal a grass stalk in its lawn, and feel powerless if you're the bloody dictator of the country which wastes tremendous amount of resources in socially useless whims thanks to overwhelming taxes.
But most people don't want to live in permanent mental distress due to shame of past action or fear of rebellion, I guess.
It likely comes from the saying similar to this one: "kill a few, you are a murderer. Kill millions, you are a conqueror".
More generally, we tend to view number of causalities in war as a large number, and not as the sum of every tragedies that it represent and that we perceive when fewer people die.
So, the law has this concept of 'de minimus' infringement, where if you take a very small amount - like, way smaller than even a fair use - the courts don't care. If you're taking a handful of word probabilities from every book ever written, then the portion taken from each work is very, very low, so courts aren't likely to care.
If you're only training on a handful of works then you're taking more from them, meaning it's not de minimus.
For the record, I got this legal theory from Cory Doctorow[0], but I'm skeptical. It's very plausible, but at the same time, we also thought sampling in music was de minimus until the Second Circuit said otherwise. Copyright law is extremely malleable in the presence of moneyed interests, sometimes without Congressional intervention even!
[0] who is NOT pro-AI, he just thinks labor law is a better bulwark against it than copyright
The word-probabilities are transformative use, a form of fair use and aren't an issue.
The specific output at each point in time is what would be judged to be fair use or copyright infringing.
I'd argue the user would be responsible for ensuring they're not infringing by using the output in a copyright infringing manner i.e. for profit, as they've fed certain inputs into the model which led to the output. In the same way you can't sue Microsoft for someone typing up copyrighted works into Microsoft Word and then distributing for profit.
De minimus is still helpful here, not all infringments are noteworthy.
MS Word does not actively collect and process all texts for all available sources and does not offer them in recombined form. MS Word is passive whereas the whole point of an LLM is to produce output using a model trained on ingested data. It is actively processing vast amounts of texts with intent to make them available for others to use and the T&C state that the user owns the copyright to the outputs based on works of other copyright owners. LLMs give the user a CCL (Collateralised Copyright Liability, a bit like a CDO) without a way of tracing the sources used to train the model.
Legally, copyright is only concerned with the specific end work. A unique or not so unique standalone object that is being scrutinized, if this analogy helps.
The process involved in obtaining that end work is completely irrelevant to any copyright case. It can be a claim against the models weights (not possible as it's fair use), or it's against the specific once off output end work (less clear), but it can't be looked at as a whole.
I don't think that's accurate. The us copyright office last year issued guidance that basically said anything generated with ai can't be copyrighted, as human authorship/creation is required for copyright. Works can incorporate ai generated content but then those parts aren't covered by copyright.
These are two sides of the same coin, and what I'm saying still stands.
This is talking about who you attribute authorship to when copyrighting a specific work. Basically on the application form, the author must be a human. The reason it's worth them clarifying is because they've received applications that attributed AI's, and legal persons do exist that aren't human (such as companies), they're just making it clear it has to be human.
Who created the work, it's the user who instructed the AI (it's a tool), you can't attribute it to the AI. It would be the equivalent of Photoshop being attributed as co-author on your work.
First, I agree with nearly everything that you wrote. Very thoughtful post! However, I have some issues with the last sentence.
> Collateralised Copyright Liability
Is this a real legal / finance term or did you make it up?
Also, I do not follow you leap to compare LLMs to CDOs (collateralised debt obligations). And, do you specifically mean CDO or any kind of mortgage / commercial loan structured finance deal?
My analogy is based on the fact that nobody could see what was inside CDOs nor did they want to see, all they wanted to do was pass them on to the next sucker. It was all fun until it all blew up. LLM operators behave in the same way with copyrighted material. For context, read https://nymag.com/news/business/55687/
Absolutely not true. Where did you get that idea? When pricing the bonds from a CDO you get to see the initial collateral. As a bond owner, you receive monthly updates about any portfolio updates. Weirdly, CDOs frequently have more collateral transparency compared to commercial or residential mortgage deals.
Let's say a torrent website asks the user through an LLM interface what kind of copyrighted content they want to download and then offers me links based on that, and makes money off of it.
The user is "inputting variables into their probability algorithm that's resulting in the copyright work".
Theoretically a torrent website that does not distribute the copyright files themselves in anyway should be legal, unless there's a specific law for this (I'm unaware of any, but I may be wrong).
They tend to try argue for conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, it's a tenuous case to make unless they can prove that was actually their intention. I think in most cases it's ISP/hosting terms and conditions and legal costs that lead to their demise.
Your example of the model asking specifically "what copyrighted content would you like to download", kinda implies conspiracy to commit copyright infringement would be a valid charge.
How is it any different than training a model on content protected under an NDA and allowing access to users via a web-portal?
What is the difference OpenAI has that lets them get away with, but not our hypothetical Mr. Smartass doing the same process trying to get around an NDA?
Well if OpenAI signed an NDA beforehand to not disclose certain training data it used, and then users actually do access this data, then yes it would be problematic for OpenAI, under the terms of their signed NDA.
There are some lawsuits, especially in the very reflexively copyright-pilled industries. However, a good chunk of publishers aren't suing for self-interested reasons. There's a lot of people in the creative industry who see a machine that can cut artists out of the copyright bargain completely and are shouting "omg piracy is based now" because LLMs can spit out content faster and for free.
Well if the end result is something completely different such as an algorithm for determining which music is popular or determining which song is playing then yes it's transformative.
It's not merely a compressed version of a song intended to be used in the same way as the original copyright work, this would be copyright infringement.
If your training process ingests the entire text of the book, and trains with a large context size, you're getting more than just "a handful of word probabilities" from that book.
If you've trained a 16-bit ten billion parameter model on ten trillion tokens, then the mean training token changes 2/125 of a bit, and a 60k word novel (~75k tokens) contributes 1200 bits.
It's up to you if that counts as "a handful" or not.
I think it’s questionable whether you can actually use this bit count to represent the amount of information from the book. Those 1200 bits represent the way in which this particular book is different from everything else the model has ingested. Similarly, if you read an entire book yourself, your brain will just store the salient bits, not the entire text, unless you have a photographic memory.
If we take math or computer science for example: some very important algorithms can be compressed to a few bits of information if you (or a model) have a thorough understanding of the surrounding theory to go with it. Would it not amount to IP infringement if a model regurgitates the relevant information from a patent application, even if it is represented by under a kilobyte of information?
I agree with what I think you're saying, so I'm not sure I've understood you.
I think this is all still compatible with saying that ingesting an entire book is still:
> If you're taking a handful of word probabilities from every book ever written, then the portion taken from each work is very, very low
(Though I wouldn't want to make a bet either way on "so courts aren't likely to care" that follows on from that quote: my not-legally-trained interpretation of the rules leads to me being confused about how traditional search engines aren't a copyright violation).
If I invent an amazing lossless compression algorithm such that adding an entire 60k word novel to my blob only increases the size by 1.2kb, does that mean I'm not copyright infringing if I release that model?
How is that relevant? If some LLM were able to regurgitate a 60k word novel verbatim on demand, sure, the copyright situation would be different. But last I checked they can’t, not 60k, 6k, or even 600 words. Perhaps they can do 60 words of some well-known passages from the Bible or other similar ubiquitous copyright-free works.
"It's lossy" is in isolation much too vague to say if it's OK or not.
A compression algorithm which loses 1 bit of real data is obviously not going to protect you from copyright infringement claims, something that reduces all inputs to a single bit is obviously fine.
So, for example, what the NYT is suing over is that it (or so it is claimed) allows the model to regenerate entire articles, which is not OK.
But to claim that it is a copyright infringement to "compress" a Harry Potter novel to 1200 bits, is to say that this:
> Harry Potter discovers he is a wizard and attends Hogwarts, where he battles dark forces, including the evil Voldemort, to save the wizarding world.
… which is just under 1200 bits, is an unlawful thing to post (and for the purpose of the hypothetical, imagine that quotation in the form of a zero-context tweet rather than the actual fact of this being a case of fair-use because of its appearance in a discussion about copyright infringement of novels).
I think anyone who suggests suing over this to a lawyer, would discover that lawyers can in fact laugh.
Now, there's also the question of if it's legal or not to train a model on all of the Harry Potter fan wikis, which almost certainly have a huge overlap with the contents of the novels and thus strengthens these same probabilities; some people accuse OpenAI et al of "copyright laundering", and I think ingesting derivative works such as fan sites would be a better description of "copyright laundering" than the specific things they're formally accused of in the lawsuits.
To be fair, OP raises an important question that I hope smart legal minds are pondering. In my view, they aren't looking for a "programmer answers about legal issue" response. Probably the right court might agree with their premise. What the damages or restrictions might be, I cannot speculate. Any IP lawyers here who want to share some thoughts?
As my not-legally-trained interpretation of the rules leads to me being confused about how traditional search engines aren't a copyright violation, I don't trust my own beliefs about the law.
xz can compress the text of Harry Potter by a factor of 30:1. Does that mean I can also distribute compressed copies of copyrighted works and that's okay?
Because that's the distinction being argued here: it's "a handful"[0] of probabilities, not the complete work.
[0] I'm not sold on the phrasing "a handful", but I don't care enough to argue terminology; the term "handful" feels like it's being used in a sorites paradox kind of way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox
Incredibly poor analogy. If an LLM were able to regurgitate Harry Potter on demand like xz can, the copyright situation would be much more black and white. But they can’t, and it’s not even close.
I recently read an article that I annoyingly can't find again about an art director at a company that decided to hire some prompters. They got some art, told them to completely change it, got other art, told them to make smaller changes... And then got nothing useful as the prompters couldn't tell the ai "like that but make this change". Ai art may get there in a few years or maybe a decade or two, but it's not there yet. (End of that article: they fired the prompters after a few days)
An ai-enhanced Photoshop, however, could do wonders though as the base capabilities seem to be mostly there. Haven't used any of the newer ai stuff myself but https://www.shruggingface.com/blog/how-i-used-stable-diffusi... makes it pretty clear the building blocks seem largely there. So my guess is the main disconnect is in making the machines understand natural language instructions for how to change the art.
When I was younger, I was told that the album from Beastie Boys called Paul's Boutique was the straw that broke the camel's back! I have no idea if this true, but that album has a batshit crazy amount of recognizable samples. I doubt very much that Beastie paid anything for the rights to sample.
You may or may not agree with it, but that's the only thing that makes it different - scale and non-specificity. Same thing that worked for search engines, for example.
My point isn't to argue merits of that case, it's just to point out that OP's joke is like a stereotypical output of an LLM: seems to make sense, but really doesn't.
It may not make a lot of sense but it follows the "fair use" doctrine. Which is generally based on the following 4 factors:
1) the purpose and character of use.
2) the nature of the copyrighted material.
3) the *amount* and *substantiality* of the portion taken, and.
4) the effect of the use upon the *potential market*.
So in that regard, if you're training a personal assistance GPT, and use some software code to teach your model logic, that is easy to defend as fair use.
But the extent of use matters, and if you're training an AI for the sole purpose of regurgitating specific copyrighted material, it is infringement, if it is copyrighted, but in this case, it is not copyright issue, it is contracts and NDAs.
This a brilliant phrase. You might as well put that into an Emacs paste macro now. It won't be the last time you will need it. And the OP is classic HN folly where programmer thinks laws and courts can be hacked with "this one weird trick".
Uber is no longer subsidized (or even cheap) in most places, it's just an app for summoning taxis and overpriced snacks. AirBnB is underregulated housing for nomads at this point.
Your examples sorta prove the point - they didn't succeed in what they aimed at doing, so they pivoted until the law permitted it.
My take away is that we should talk about our experience in companies at a large enough scale
that it becomes non specific in principle, and not targeted at a single company.
Basically, we need our open source version of Glassdoor as a LLM ?
And it matters how? I didn't say the argument is correct or approved by court, or that I even support it. I'm saying what the argument, which OP referenced, is about, and how it differs from their proposal.
Sounds like the standard disrupt formula should apply. Cant we stuff the court into an app? I kinda dislike the idea of getting a different sentence for anything related to appearance or presentation.
>And be rightfully sacked for maliciously burning millions of dollars on a retrain to purposefully poison the model?
Does it really take millions dollars of compute to add additional training data to an existing model?
Plus, we're talking about employees that are leaving / left anyway.
>Not to mention: LLMs aren't oracles. Whatever they say will be dismissed as hallucinations if it isn't corroborated by other sources.
Excellent. That means plausible deniability.
Surely all those horror stories about unethical behavior are just hallucinations, no matter how specific they are.
Absolutely no reason for anyone to take them seriously. Which is why the press will not hesitate to run with that, with appropriate disclaimers, of course.
Seriously, you seem to think that in a world where numbers about death toll in Gaza are taken verbatim from Hamas without being corroborated by other sources, an AI model output will not pass the test of public scrutiny?
To definitively prove this either way, they'll have to make their source code and model available (maybe under subpoena and/or gag order), so don't expect this issue to be actually tested in court (so long as the defendants have enough VC money).
The argument about LLMs not being copyright laundromats making sense hinges the scale and non-specificity of training. There's a difference between "LLM reproduced this piece of copyrighted work because it memorized it from being fed literally half the internet", vs. "LLM was intentionally trained to specifically reproduce variants of this particular work". Whatever one's stances on the former case, the latter case would be plain infringing copyrights and admitting to it.
In other words: GPT-4 gets to get away with occasionally spitting out something real verbatim. Llama2-7b-finetune-NYTArticles does not.