• 3 Posts
  • 86 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • it’s basically impossible to tell where parts of the model came from

    AIs are deterministic.

    1. Train the AI on data without the copyrighted work.

    2. Train the same AI on data with the copyrighted work.

    3. Ask the two instances the same question.

    4. The difference is the contribution of the copyrighted work.

    There may be larger questions of precisely how an AI produces one answer when trained with a copyrighted work, and another answer when not trained with the copyrighted work. But we know why the answers are different, and we can show precisely what contribution the copyrighted work makes to the response to any prompt, just by running the AI twice.




  • There is literally not one single piece of art that is not derived from prior art in the past thousand years.

    This is false. Somebody who looks at a landscape, for example, and renders that scene in visual media is not deriving anything important from prior art. Taking a video of a cat is an original creation. This kind of creation happens every day.

    Their output may seem similar to prior art, perhaps their methods were developed previously. But the inputs are original and clean. They’re not using some existing art as the sole inputs.

    AI only uses existing art as sole inputs. This is a crucial distinction. I would have no problem at all with AI that worked exclusively from verified public domain/copyright not enforced and original inputs, although I don’t know if I’d consider the outputs themselves to be copyrightable (as that is a right attached to a human author).

    Straight up copying someone else’s work directly

    And that’s what the training set is. Verbatim copies, often including copyrighted works.

    That’s ultimately the question that we’re faced with. If there is no useful output without the copyrighted inputs, how can the output be non-infringing? Copyright defines transformative work as the product of human creativity, so we have to make some decisions about AI.



  • a derivative work is an expressive creation that includes major copyrightable elements of a first, previously created original work

    What was fed into the algorithm? A human decided which major copyrighted elements of previously created original work would seed the algorithm. That’s how we know it’s derivative.

    If I take somebody’s copyrighted artwork, and apply Photoshop filters that change the color of every single pixel, have I made an expressive creation that does not include copyrightable elements of a previously created original work? The courts have said “no”, and I think the burden is on AI proponents to show how they fed copyrighted work into an mechanical algorithm, and produced a new expressive creation free of copyrightable elements.