<story><title>Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/9/23788741/sarah-silverman-openai-meta-chatgpt-llama-copyright-infringement-chatbots-artificial-intelligence-ai</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DowsingSpoon</author><text>&amp;gt;you can train an AI on copyrighted material just like people can learn from copyrighted material.&lt;p&gt;No amount of whining and hand wringing from engineers will ever make this true. This is for the courts to decide.&lt;p&gt;A reasonable interpretation, in my eyes, is that the training process is a black box which takes in copyrighted works and produces a training model. The training model is a derivative work of the inputs. It therefore violates the copyrights of a large number of rights holders. The outputs of the model are derivative works which also violate copyright.&lt;p&gt;And anyone using or training a model trained on works for which they do not have the rights? Completely fucked. Or at least, they must accept this as a real risk.</text></item><item><author>JamesBarney</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s not was he&amp;#x27;s saying at all. He&amp;#x27;s saying you can train an AI on copyrighted material just like people can learn from copyrighted material.&lt;p&gt;If you acquire the material illegally that a separate issue that training AI doesn&amp;#x27;t give you any protection against.</text></item><item><author>kibwen</author><text>Excellent, so you&amp;#x27;re saying I&amp;#x27;ll be able to download any copyrighted work from any pirate site and be free of all consequence if I just claim that I&amp;#x27;m training an AI?</text></item><item><author>buildbot</author><text>Machine learning models have been trained with copyrighted data for a long time. Imagenet is full of copyrighted images, clearview literally just scanned the internet for faces, and I am sure there are other, older examples. I am unsure if this has been tested as fair use by a US court, but I am guessing it will be considered to be so if it is not already.</text></item><item><author>pessimizer</author><text>&amp;gt; The complaint lays out in steps why the plaintiffs believe the datasets have illicit origins — in a Meta paper detailing LLaMA, the company points to sources for its training datasets, one of which is called ThePile, which was assembled by a company called EleutherAI. ThePile, the complaint points out, was described in an EleutherAI paper as being put together from “a copy of the contents of the Bibliotik private tracker.” Bibliotik and the other “shadow libraries” listed, says the lawsuit, are “flagrantly illegal.”&lt;p&gt;This is the makers of AI explicitly saying that they did use copyrighted works from a book piracy website. If you downloaded a book from that website, you would be sued and found guilty of infringement. If you downloaded all of them, you would be liable for many billions of dollars in damages.&lt;p&gt;But companies like Google and Facebook get to play by different rules. Kill one person and you&amp;#x27;re a murderer, kill a million and to ask you about it is a &amp;quot;gotcha question&amp;quot; that you can react to with outrage.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dang</author><text>&amp;gt; No amount of whining and hand wringing from engineers will ever make this true&lt;p&gt;Please omit flamebait and swipes, as the site guidelines ask: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;newsguidelines.html&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;newsguidelines.html&lt;/a&gt;. Your comment would have been fine without that bit.</text></comment>
<story><title>Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/9/23788741/sarah-silverman-openai-meta-chatgpt-llama-copyright-infringement-chatbots-artificial-intelligence-ai</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DowsingSpoon</author><text>&amp;gt;you can train an AI on copyrighted material just like people can learn from copyrighted material.&lt;p&gt;No amount of whining and hand wringing from engineers will ever make this true. This is for the courts to decide.&lt;p&gt;A reasonable interpretation, in my eyes, is that the training process is a black box which takes in copyrighted works and produces a training model. The training model is a derivative work of the inputs. It therefore violates the copyrights of a large number of rights holders. The outputs of the model are derivative works which also violate copyright.&lt;p&gt;And anyone using or training a model trained on works for which they do not have the rights? Completely fucked. Or at least, they must accept this as a real risk.</text></item><item><author>JamesBarney</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s not was he&amp;#x27;s saying at all. He&amp;#x27;s saying you can train an AI on copyrighted material just like people can learn from copyrighted material.&lt;p&gt;If you acquire the material illegally that a separate issue that training AI doesn&amp;#x27;t give you any protection against.</text></item><item><author>kibwen</author><text>Excellent, so you&amp;#x27;re saying I&amp;#x27;ll be able to download any copyrighted work from any pirate site and be free of all consequence if I just claim that I&amp;#x27;m training an AI?</text></item><item><author>buildbot</author><text>Machine learning models have been trained with copyrighted data for a long time. Imagenet is full of copyrighted images, clearview literally just scanned the internet for faces, and I am sure there are other, older examples. I am unsure if this has been tested as fair use by a US court, but I am guessing it will be considered to be so if it is not already.</text></item><item><author>pessimizer</author><text>&amp;gt; The complaint lays out in steps why the plaintiffs believe the datasets have illicit origins — in a Meta paper detailing LLaMA, the company points to sources for its training datasets, one of which is called ThePile, which was assembled by a company called EleutherAI. ThePile, the complaint points out, was described in an EleutherAI paper as being put together from “a copy of the contents of the Bibliotik private tracker.” Bibliotik and the other “shadow libraries” listed, says the lawsuit, are “flagrantly illegal.”&lt;p&gt;This is the makers of AI explicitly saying that they did use copyrighted works from a book piracy website. If you downloaded a book from that website, you would be sued and found guilty of infringement. If you downloaded all of them, you would be liable for many billions of dollars in damages.&lt;p&gt;But companies like Google and Facebook get to play by different rules. Kill one person and you&amp;#x27;re a murderer, kill a million and to ask you about it is a &amp;quot;gotcha question&amp;quot; that you can react to with outrage.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kelnos</author><text>I think a reasonable interpretation is also that what you are saying is correct, that doing all that does indeed infringe others&amp;#x27; copyright, but that a fair use defense is valid.&lt;p&gt;I won&amp;#x27;t be particularly thrilled if that turns out to be the case, but I wouldn&amp;#x27;t be surprised if it does.&lt;p&gt;But as you say, we won&amp;#x27;t know until it&amp;#x27;s tested in court.  And even then, often court cases around a complex topic like this will end up with a ruling that only clarifies a narrow aspect of it.  So it might take many related court cases before we have a pretty good understanding of where the law stands.  And then, of course, the law could change.</text></comment>