• silence7@slrpnk.netOP
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    1 year ago

    The problem is that the LLMs (and image AIs) effectively store pieces of works as correlations inside them, occasionally spitting some of them back out. You can’t just say “it saw it” but can say “it’s like a scrapbook with fragments of all these different works”

    • fubo@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’ve memorized some copyrighted works too.

      If I perform them publicly, the copyright holder would have a case against me.

      But the mere fact that I could recite those works doesn’t make everything that I say into a copyright violation.

      The copyright holder has to show that I’ve actually reproduced their work, not just that I’ve memorized it inside my brain.

      • silence7@slrpnk.netOP
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        1 year ago

        The difference is that your brain isn’t a piece of media which gets copied. The AI is. So when it memorized, it commits a copyright violation

        • fubo@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          If that reasoning held, then every web browser, search engine bot, etc. would be violating copyright every time it accessed a web page, because doing so involves making a copy in memory.

          Making an internal copy isn’t the same as publishing, performing, etc. a work.

          • silence7@slrpnk.netOP
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            1 year ago

            There’s an implied license to use content for the purpose of displaying it for web content. Copies for other purposes…not so much. There have been a whole series of lawsuits over the years over just how much you can copy for what purpose.

            • fubo@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              There isn’t an “implied license”. Rather, copyright is simply not infringed until the work is actually republished, performed, etc. without the copyright holder’s permission.

              Making internal in-memory copies — e.g. for search-engine indexing — is simply not an infringement to begin with; just as it’s not an infringement for me to memorize a copyrighted work, but it would be an infringement if I were to recite it in a public performance without permission.

              Copyright simply does not grant the copyright-holder absolute & total control of everything downstream from the work. It restricts republishing, performing, etc.; it does not restrict memorization, indexing, summarizing in a review, etc.

              Again: if the AI system is made to regurgitate the actual text of the work, that’s still a copyright infringement. But merely having learned from it is not.

              • silence7@slrpnk.netOP
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                1 year ago

                This is different from those, and not at all tested in the courts. There are likely to be a whole bunch of lawsuits and several years before this is settled.

                • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
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                  1 year ago

                  There is no possible basis in law for copyright infringement.

                  Copyright infringement isn’t “you can do these things with copyrighted materials and everything else is banned”. It’s “these specific things (redistributing substantial portions of published works) are disallowed, unless you meet exceptions, and anything not explicitly disallowed is legal”.

                  You are unconditionally allowed to learn from copyrighted works. There is no legal basis for preventing it. There is no possible basis in copyright law preventing it. It would take new legislation restricting doing so, and it would be impossible to apply to any training that happened before this new crime against humanity of a law was written.

        • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          No, it doesn’t. Learning from copyrighted material is black and white fair use.

          The fact that the AI isn’t intelligent doesn’t matter. It’s protected.