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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • When you use (read, view, listen to…) copyrighted material you’re subject to the licensing rules, no matter if it’s free (as in beer) or not.

    You’ve got that backwards. Copyright protects the owner’s right to distribution. Reading, viewing, listening to a work is never copyright infringement. Which is to say that making it publicly available is the owner exercising their rights.

    This means that quoting more than what’s considered fair use is a violation of the license, for instance. In practice a human would not be able to quote exactly a 1000 words document just on the first read but “AI” can, thus infringing one of the licensing clauses.

    Only on very specific circumstances, with some particular coaxing, can you get an AI to do this with certain works that are widely quoted throughout its training data. There may be some very small scale copyright violations that occur here but it’s largely a technical hurdle that will be overcome before long (i.e. wholesale regurgitation isn’t an actual goal of AI technology).

    Some licensing on copyrighted material is also explicitly forbidding to use the full content by automated systems (once they were web crawlers for search engines)

    Again, copyright doesn’t govern how you’re allowed to view a work. robots.txt is not a legally enforceable license. At best, the website owner may be able to restrict access via computer access abuse laws, but not copyright. And it would be completely irrelevant to the question of whether or not AI can train on non-internet data sets like books, movies, etc.




  • a much stronger one would be to simply note all of the works with a Creative Commons “No Derivatives” license in the training data, since it is hard to argue that the model checkpoint isn’t derived from the training data.

    Not really. First of all, creative commons strictly loosens the copyright restrictions on a work. The strongest license is actually no explicit license i.e. “All Rights Reserved.” No derivatives is already included under full, default, copyright.

    Second, derivative has a pretty strict legal definition. It’s not enough to say that the derived work was created using a protected work, or even that the derived work couldn’t exist without the protected work. Some examples: create a word cloud of your favorite book, analyze the tone of news article to help you trade stocks, produce an image containing the most prominent color in every frame of a movie, or create a search index of the words found on all websites on the internet. All of that is absolutely allowed under even the strictest of copyright protections.

    Statistical analysis of copyrighted materials, as in training AI, easily clears that same bar.



  • They do, though. They purchase data sets from people with licenses, use open source data sets, and/or scrape publicly available data themselves. Worst case they could download pirated data sets, but that’s copyright infringement committed by the entity distributing the data without the legal authority.

    Beyond that, copyright doesn’t protect the work from being used to create something else, as long as you’re not distributing significant portions of it. Movie and book reviewers won that legal battle long ago.


  • The examples they provided were for very widely distributed stories (i.e. present in the data set many times over). The prompts they used were not provided. How many times they had to prompt was not provided. Their results are very difficult to reproduce, if not impossible, especially on newer models.

    I mean, sure, it happens. But it’s not a generalizable problem. You’re not going to get it to regurgitate your Lemmy comment, even if they’ve trained on it. You can’t just go and ask it to write Harry Potter and the goblet of fire for you. It’s not the intended purpose of this technology. I expect it’ll largely be a solved problem in 5-10 years, if not sooner.








  • Hard disagree. There’s plenty of games that are little more than dressed up choose your own adventure stories. Plenty that are meant for chill and relaxing gameplay. Plenty that do little more than guide you through horror scenes. And so on.

    And even beyond that, most people don’t even play a game long enough to have any real “skill development over time.” I read from the Civ7 director recently that if you’ve ever finished a game of Civ you’re literally in a minority of the player base. And that tracks with what I’ve heard about other games as well.

    Most players of any given game never finish it. Most of those quit at the first sign of frustration and most are on the easiest game difficulties. This would indicate to me that the majority’s conception of “fun” has little to no relation to skill development in the game. They’re there for the moment to moment experiences. Rubber band mechanics are there to evoke those fun experiences more often in the majority of the player base.