Technology

they don’t give a shit about it in india, bangladesh, vietnam, china, the philippines, malaysia, singapore…

Unless it's their intellectual property, whereupon it's suddenly a whole different story. I'm sure you knew that.

But they're not developing AI in those countries they're developing it mostly in the US. In the US copyright law is enforced.

As per torrentfreak

OpenAI hasn’t disclosed the datasets that ChatGPT is trained on, but in an older paper two databases are referenced; “Books1” and “Books2”. The first one contains roughly 63,000 titles and the latter around 294,000 titles.

These numbers are meaningless in isolation. However, the authors note that OpenAI must have used pirated resources, as legitimate databases with that many books don’t exist.

Should be easy to defend against, right-out trivial: OpenAI, just tell us what those Books1 and Books2 databases are. Where you got them from, the licensing contracts with publishers that you signed to give you access to such a gigantic library. No need to divulge details, just give us information that makes it believable that you licensed them.

...crickets. They pirated the lot of it otherwise they would already have gotten that case thrown out. It's US startup culture, plain and simple, "move fast and break laws", get lots of money, have lots of money enabling you to pay the best lawyers to abuse the shit out of the US court system.

the AI companies have a pretty good defense in the fact analyzing publicly viewable information is a pretty deep rooted freedom that provides a lot of positives to the world

They are not "analyzing" the data. They are feeding it into a regurgitating mechanism. There's a big difference. Their defense is only "good" because AI is being misrepresented and misunderstood.

I agree that we shouldn't strive for more strict copyright. We should fight for a much more liberal system. But as long as everyone else has to live by the current copyright laws, we should not let AI companies get away with what they're doing.

Banning AI is out of the question. Even the EU accepts that and they tend to be pretty ban heavy, unlike the US.

But it's important that we have these discussions about how copyright applies to AI so that we can actually get an answer and move on, right now it's this legal quagmire that no one really wants to get involved in except the big companies. If a small group of university students want to build an AI right now they can't because of the legal nightmare that would be the Twilight zone of law that is acquiring training data.

It doesn't matter anyway, we still need the big companies to bankroll AI. So it effectively does belong to them whatever we do.

Hopefully at some point people can get the processor requirements to something sane and AI development opens up to us all.

We essentially do have the death penalty for corporations, it's called being declared a criminal organisation.

Yes, mining companies should all be nationalised for digging up the country's ground and putting carbon in the country's air.

They should be, but currently it depends on the type of bailout, I suppose.

For instance, if a bank completely fails and goes under, the FDIC usually is named Receiver of the bank's assets, and now effectively owns the bank.

Public domain wouldn't be the right term for banks being publicly owned. At least for the normal usage of Public Domain in copyright. You can copy text and data, you can't copy a company with unique customers and physical property.

Unlikely, I'd say, In EU jurisdictions copyright requires creative authorship, not "sweat of the brow" which is why by default databases aren't included, which is why they're have their own protection regime.

Quote, emphasis mine:

In the meaning of the European Union Directive 96/9/EC on the legal protection of databases,the term database refers to a collection of independent works, data or other materials, which have been arranged in a systematic or methodical way, and have been made individually accessible by electronic or other means. In the meaning of the Directive the data or materials:

• must not be linked, or must be capable of separation without losing their informative content;
• must be organised according to specific criteria, which means that only planned collections are covered;
• must be individually accessible – mere storage of data is not covered by the term database.

In AI models the organisation is inferred from the data, it's not planned into the database. The first bullet point is on less shaky, a summary an AI can make of a book can reasonably be regarded to be "informative content", nothing about db protections says that they have to store full works it could also be references, citations, etc.

Just a little note about the word "model", in the article it's used in a way that actually includes the weights, and I think this is the usual way of using it! If you change the weights, you get a different model, though the two models will have the same structure.

Anyway, you make good points!

Legislation that prohibits publicly-viewable information from being analyzed without permission from the copyright holder would have some pretty dramatic and dire unintended consequences.

They pulled a very pubic and out in the open data heist

Oh no, not the pubes! Get those curlies outta here!

It's like what happened with Spotify. The artists and the labels were unhappy with the copyright infringement of music happening with Napster, Limewire, Kazaa, etc. They wanted the music model to be the same "buy an album from a record store" model that they knew and had worked for decades. But, users liked digital music and not having to buy a whole album for just one song, etc.

Spotify's solution was easy: cut the record labels in. Let them invest and then any profits Spotify generated were shared with them. This made the record labels happy because they got money from their investment, even though their "buy an album" business model was now gone. It was ok for big artists because they had the power to negotiate with the labels and get something out of the deal. But, it absolutely screwed the small artists because now Spotify gives them essentially nothing.

I just hope that the law that nothing created by an LLM is copyrightable proves to be enough of a speed bump to slow things down.