You cant steal data. violating copyright (Which ai training does not do) is not theft.
violating copywright (Which ai training does not do) I would say that’s still very much up for debate, legally and morally
At the risk of being pedantic, I should point out that morality doesn’t come into the question. Copyright is a matter of law, and nothing else. Personally, I don’t consider it a legitimate institution; the immorality is how companies wield it like a cudgel to entrench their control over culture.
copyright is a matter of law, and nothing else
This assertion dismisses the ethical considerations often intertwined with legal principles. Laws (including copyright laws) are influenced by moral and ethical values, and there are often huge books on theories about the validity of certain things which serve as the starting point of collections of laws.
the immorality is how companies wield it like a cudgel to entrench their control over culture
While some companies do exploit copyright laws, not all companies use it in this way and whether it brings more harm than good is a point of discussion. But it can’t be generalized.
This completely overlooks the positive aspects of copyright as well, such as protecting the rights of individual creators and ensuring they can earn something from their own work.
copying is not theft
Is it that or is it that the laws are selectively applied on little guys and ignored once you make enough money? It certainly looks that way. Once you’ve achieved a level of “fuck you money” it doesn’t matter how unscrupulously you got there. I’m not sure letting the big guys get away with it while little guys still get fucked over is as big of a win as you think it is?
Examples:
The Pirate Bay: Only made enough money to run the site and keep the admins living a middle class lifestyle.
VERDICT: Bad, wrong, and evil. Must be put in jail.
OpenAI: Claims to be non-profit, then spins off for-profit wing. Makes a mint in a deal with Microsoft.
VERDICT: Only the goodest of good people and we must allow them to continue doing so.
The IP laws are stupid but letting fucking rich twats get away with it while regular people will still get fucked by the same rules is kind of a fucking stupid ass hill to die on.
But sure, if we allow the giant companies to do it, SOMEHOW the same rules will “trickle down” to regular people. I think I’ve heard that story before… No, they only make exceptions for people who can basically print money. They’ll still fuck you and me six ways to Sunday for the same.
I mean, the guys who ran Jetflicks, a pirate streaming site, are being hit with potentially 48 year sentences. Longer than a lot of way more serious fucking crimes. I’ve literally seen murderers get half that.
But yeah, somehow, the same rules will end up being applied to us? My ass. They’re literally jailing people for it right now. If that wasn’t the case, maybe this argument would have legs.
But AI companies? Totes okay, bro.
The laws are currently the same for everyone when it comes to what you can use to train an AI with. I, as an individual, can use whatever public facing data I wish to build or fine tune AI models, same as Microsoft.
If we make copyright laws even stronger, the only one getting locked out of the game are the little guys. Microsoft, google and company can afford to pay ridiculous prices for datasets. What they don’t own mainly comes from aggregators like Reddit, Getty, Instagram and Stack.
Boosting copyright laws essentially kill all legal forms of open source AI. It would force the open source scene to go underground as a pirate network and lead to the scenario you mentioned.
Yes, it is a travesty that people are being hounded for sharing information, but the solution to that isn’t to lock up information tighter by restricting access to the open web and saying if you download something we put up to be freely accessed and then use it in a way we don’t like you owe us.
The solution to bad laws being applied unevenly isn’t to apply the bad laws to everyone equally, its to get rid of the bad laws.
“Copying is theft” is the argument of corporations for ages, but if they want our data and information, to integrate into their business, then, suddenly they have the rights to it.
If copying is not theft, then we have the rights to copy their software and AI models, as well, since it is available on the open web.
They got themselves into quite a contradiction.
If copying is not theft, then we have the rights to copy their software
No we don’t, copying copyrighted material is copyright infringement. Which is illegal. that does not make it theft though.
Oversimplifying the issue makes for an uninformed debate.
You realize that half of Lemmy is tying themselves in inconsistent logical knots trying to escape the reverse conundrum?
Copying isn’t stealing and never was. Our IP system that artificially restricts information has never made sense in the digital age, and yet now everyone is on here cheering copyright on.
Yeah, I’m not a fan of AI but I’m generally of the view that anything posted on the internet, visible without a login, is fair game for indexing a search engine, snapshotting a backup (like the internet archive’s Wayback Machine), or running user extensions on (including ad blockers). Is training an AI model all that different?
Yes, it kind of is. A search engine just looks for keywords and links, and that’s all it retains after crawling a site. It’s not producing any derivative works, it’s merely looking up an index of keywords to find matches.
An LLM can essentially reproduce a work, and the whole point is to generate derivative works. So by its very nature, it runs into copyright issues. Whether a particular generated result violates copyright depends on the license of the works it’s based on and how much of those works it uses. So it’s complicated, but there’s very much a copyright argument there.
My brain also takes information and creates derivative works from it.
Shit, am I also a data thief?
An LLM can essentially reproduce a work, and the whole point is to generate derivative works. So by its very nature, it runs into copyright issues.
Derivative works are not copyright infringement. If LLMs are spitting out exact copies, or near-enough-to-exact copies, that’s one thing. But as you said, the whole point is to generate derivative works.
You can’t be for piracy but against LLMs fair the same reason
And I think most of the people on Lemmy are for piracy,
I’m not in favor of piracy or LLMs. I’m also not a fan of copyright as it exists today (I think we should go back to the 1790 US definition of copyright).
I think a lot of people here on lemmy who are “in favor of piracy” just hate our current copyright system, and that’s quite understandable and I totally agree with them. Having a work protected for your entire lifetime sucks.
None of those things replace that content, though.
Look, I dunno if this is legally a copyrights issue, but as a society, I think a lot of people have decided they’re willing to yield to social media and search engine indexers, but not to AI training, you know? The same way I might consent to eating a mango but not a banana.
Issue is power imbalance.
There’s a clear difference between a guy in his basement on his personal computer sampling music the original musicians almost never seen a single penny from, and a megacorp trying to drive out creative professionals from the industry in the hopes they can then proceed to hike up the prices to use their generative AI software.
The web isn’t open because we have to pay to access it.
copying isn’t stealing
If the model isn’t overfitted it’s also not even copying. By their nature LLMs are transformative which is the whole point of fair use.
So I have a LLM read a book and paraphrase its contents, that’s not stealing?
!Arthur Dent has his home demolished while humans simultaneously have Earth demolished by an alien race called Vogons, but him and Ford Prefect escape by hitchhiking onto the Vogon ship. They’re discovered and thrown into space, but miraculously saved by Ford’s relative (can’t remember how they’re related) and his ship The Heart of Gold, which is powerful but unpredictable. They wind up on a mythical planet due to that unpredictability, and learn that Earth was a designer planet created to calculate
the ultimate answer to theultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. (The famous “42” thing). The whole crew escapes the planet and decides to go to The Restaurant at the End of The Universe to eat and watch the universe end.!<
Have I just stolen The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and given it to you?
Again, even an exact copy is not stealing. It’s copyright infringement. Theft is a different crime.
But paraphrasing is not copyright infringement either. It’s no different than Wikipedia having a synopsis for every single episode of a TV series. Telling someone about what a work contains for informational purposes is perfectly fine.
