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Judge dismisses authors' copyright lawsuit against Meta over AI training

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  • Alsup? Is this the same judge who also presided over Oracle v. Google over the use of Java in Android? That guy really does his homework over cases he presides on, he learned how to code to see if APIs are copyrightable.

    As for the ruling, I'm not in favour of AI training on copyrighted material, but I can see where the judgement is coming from. I think it's a matter of what's really copyrightable: the actual text or images or the abstract knowledge in the material. In other words, if you were to read a book and then write a summary of a section of it in your own words or orally described what you learned from the book to someone else, does that mean copyright infringement? Or if you watch a movie and then describe your favourite scenes to your friends?

    Perhaps a case could be made that AI training on copyrighted materials is not the same as humans consuming the copyrighted material and therefore it should have a different provision in copyright law. I'm no lawyer, but I'd assume that current copyright law works on the basis that humans do not generally have perfect recall of the copyrighted material they consume. But then again a counter argument could be that neither does the AI due to its tendency to hallucinate sometimes. However, it still has superior recall compared to humans and perhaps could be the grounds for amending copyright law about AI training?

    Your last paragraph would be ideal solution in ideal world but I don't think ever like this could happen in the current political and economical structures.

    First its super easy to hide all of this and enforcement would be very difficult even domestically. Second, because we're in AI race no one would ever put themselves in such disadvantage unless its real damage not economical copyright juggling.

    People need to come to terms with these facts so we can address real problems rather than blow against the wind with all this whining we see on Lemmy. There are actual things we can do.

  • Terrible judgement.

    Turn the K value down on the model and it reproduces text near verbatim.

    Ah the Schrödinger's LLM - always hallucinating and also always accurate

  • Alsup? Is this the same judge who also presided over Oracle v. Google over the use of Java in Android? That guy really does his homework over cases he presides on, he learned how to code to see if APIs are copyrightable.

    As for the ruling, I'm not in favour of AI training on copyrighted material, but I can see where the judgement is coming from. I think it's a matter of what's really copyrightable: the actual text or images or the abstract knowledge in the material. In other words, if you were to read a book and then write a summary of a section of it in your own words or orally described what you learned from the book to someone else, does that mean copyright infringement? Or if you watch a movie and then describe your favourite scenes to your friends?

    Perhaps a case could be made that AI training on copyrighted materials is not the same as humans consuming the copyrighted material and therefore it should have a different provision in copyright law. I'm no lawyer, but I'd assume that current copyright law works on the basis that humans do not generally have perfect recall of the copyrighted material they consume. But then again a counter argument could be that neither does the AI due to its tendency to hallucinate sometimes. However, it still has superior recall compared to humans and perhaps could be the grounds for amending copyright law about AI training?

    Acree 100%

    Hope we can refactor this whole copyright/patent concept soon..

    It is more a pain for artists, creators, releasers etc.

    I see it with EDM, I work as a Label, and do sometimes produce a bit

    Most artists will work with samples and presets etc. And keeping track of who worked on what and who owns how much percent of what etc. just takes the joy out of creating..

    Same for game design: You have a vision for your game, make a poc, and then have to change the whole game because of stupid patent shit not allowing you e.g. not land on a horse and immediately ride it, or throwing stuff at things to catch them…

  • Acree 100%

    Hope we can refactor this whole copyright/patent concept soon..

    It is more a pain for artists, creators, releasers etc.

    I see it with EDM, I work as a Label, and do sometimes produce a bit

    Most artists will work with samples and presets etc. And keeping track of who worked on what and who owns how much percent of what etc. just takes the joy out of creating..

    Same for game design: You have a vision for your game, make a poc, and then have to change the whole game because of stupid patent shit not allowing you e.g. not land on a horse and immediately ride it, or throwing stuff at things to catch them…

    I'm inclined to agree. I hate AI, and I especially hate artists and other creatives being shafted, but I'm increasingly doubtful that copyright is an effective way to ensure that they get their fair share (whether we're talking about AI or otherwise).

  • Bad judgement.

    Any reason to say that other than that it didn't give the result you wanted?

  • I'm inclined to agree. I hate AI, and I especially hate artists and other creatives being shafted, but I'm increasingly doubtful that copyright is an effective way to ensure that they get their fair share (whether we're talking about AI or otherwise).

    In an ideal world, there would be something like a universal basic income, which would reduce the pressure on artists that they have to generate enough income with their art, this would allow artists to make art less for mainstream but more unique and thus would, in my opinion, allow to weaken copyright laws

    Well, that would be the way I would try to start change.

  • Ah the Schrödinger's LLM - always hallucinating and also always accurate

    "hallucination refers to the generation of plausible-sounding but factually incorrect or nonsensical information"

    Is an output an hallucination when the training data involved in that output included factually incorrect data? Suppose my input is "is the would flat" and then an LLM, allegedly, accurately generates a flat-eather's writings saying it is.

  • Your last paragraph would be ideal solution in ideal world but I don't think ever like this could happen in the current political and economical structures.

    First its super easy to hide all of this and enforcement would be very difficult even domestically. Second, because we're in AI race no one would ever put themselves in such disadvantage unless its real damage not economical copyright juggling.

    People need to come to terms with these facts so we can address real problems rather than blow against the wind with all this whining we see on Lemmy. There are actual things we can do.

    One way I could see this being enforced is by mandating that AI models not respond to questions that could result in speaking about a copyrighted work. Similar to how mainstream models don't speak about vulgar or controversial topics.

    But yeah, realistically, it's unlikely that any judge would rule in that favour.

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    It sounds like the precedent has been set

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    Grab em by the intellectual property! When you're a multi-billion dollar corporation, they just let you do it!

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    I’ll leave this here from another post on this topic…

  • Ah the Schrödinger's LLM - always hallucinating and also always accurate

    Accuracy and hallucination are two ends of a spectrum.

    If you turn hallucinations to a minimum, the LLM will faithfully reproduce what's in the training set, but the result will not fit the query very well.

    The other option is to turn the so-called temperature up, which will result in replies fitting better to the query but also the hallucinations go up.

    In the end it's a balance between getting responses that are closer to the dataset (factual) or closer to the query (creative).

  • Ah the Schrödinger's LLM - always hallucinating and also always accurate

    There is nothing intelligent about "AI" as we call it. It parrots based on probability. If you remove the randomness value from the model, it parrots the same thing every time based on it's weights, and if the weights were trained on Harry Potter, it will consistently give you giant chunks of harry potter verbatim when prompted.

    Most of the LLM services attempt to avoid this by adding arbitrary randomness values to churn the soup. But this is also inherently part of the cause of hallucinations, as the model cannot preserve a single correct response as always the right way to respond to a certain query.

    LLMs are insanely "dumb", they're just lightspeed parrots. The fact that Meta and these other giant tech companies claim it's not theft because they sprinkle in some randomness is just obscuring the reality and the fact that their models are derivative of the work of organizations like the BBC and Wikipedia, while also dependent on the works of tens of thousands of authors to develop their corpus of language.

    In short, there was a ethical way to train these models. But that would have been slower. And the court just basically gave them a pass on theft. Facebook would have been entirely in the clear had it not stored the books in a dataset, which in itself is insane.

    I wish I knew when I was younger that stealing is wrong, unless you steal at scale. Then it's just clever business.

  • There is nothing intelligent about "AI" as we call it. It parrots based on probability. If you remove the randomness value from the model, it parrots the same thing every time based on it's weights, and if the weights were trained on Harry Potter, it will consistently give you giant chunks of harry potter verbatim when prompted.

    Most of the LLM services attempt to avoid this by adding arbitrary randomness values to churn the soup. But this is also inherently part of the cause of hallucinations, as the model cannot preserve a single correct response as always the right way to respond to a certain query.

    LLMs are insanely "dumb", they're just lightspeed parrots. The fact that Meta and these other giant tech companies claim it's not theft because they sprinkle in some randomness is just obscuring the reality and the fact that their models are derivative of the work of organizations like the BBC and Wikipedia, while also dependent on the works of tens of thousands of authors to develop their corpus of language.

    In short, there was a ethical way to train these models. But that would have been slower. And the court just basically gave them a pass on theft. Facebook would have been entirely in the clear had it not stored the books in a dataset, which in itself is insane.

    I wish I knew when I was younger that stealing is wrong, unless you steal at scale. Then it's just clever business.

    Except that breaking copyright is not stealing and never was. Hard to believe that you'd ever see Copyright advocates on foss and decentralized networks like Lemmy - its like people had their minds hijacked because "big tech is bad".

  • Except that breaking copyright is not stealing and never was. Hard to believe that you'd ever see Copyright advocates on foss and decentralized networks like Lemmy - its like people had their minds hijacked because "big tech is bad".

    What name do you have for the activity of making money using someone else work or data, without their consent or giving compensation? If the tech was just tech, it wouldn't need any non consenting human input for it to work properly. This are just companies feeding on various types of data, if justice doesn't protects an author, what do you think it would happen if these same models started feeding of user data instead? Tech is good, ethics are not

  • What name do you have for the activity of making money using someone else work or data, without their consent or giving compensation? If the tech was just tech, it wouldn't need any non consenting human input for it to work properly. This are just companies feeding on various types of data, if justice doesn't protects an author, what do you think it would happen if these same models started feeding of user data instead? Tech is good, ethics are not

    How do you think you're making money with your work? Did your knowledge appear from a vacuum? Ethically speaking nothing is "original creation of your own merit only" - everything we make is transformative by nature.

    Either way, the talks are moot as we'll never agree on what is transformative enough to be harmful to our society unless its a direct 1:1 copy with direct goal to displace the original. But thats clearly not the case with LLMs.

  • In an ideal world, there would be something like a universal basic income, which would reduce the pressure on artists that they have to generate enough income with their art, this would allow artists to make art less for mainstream but more unique and thus would, in my opinion, allow to weaken copyright laws

    Well, that would be the way I would try to start change.

    I would go a step further and have creative grants to people. It would work in a way similar to the BBC and similar broadcasters, where a body gets government money and then picks creative projects it thinks are worthwhile, with a remit that goes beyond the lowest common denominator. UBI ensures that this system doesn't have a monopoly on creative output.

  • I would go a step further and have creative grants to people. It would work in a way similar to the BBC and similar broadcasters, where a body gets government money and then picks creative projects it thinks are worthwhile, with a remit that goes beyond the lowest common denominator. UBI ensures that this system doesn't have a monopoly on creative output.

    Agree 100%!

    We need more Kulturförderung!

  • Except that breaking copyright is not stealing and never was. Hard to believe that you'd ever see Copyright advocates on foss and decentralized networks like Lemmy - its like people had their minds hijacked because "big tech is bad".

    Ingesting all the artwork you ever created by obtaining it illegally and feeding it into my plagarism remix machine is theft of your work, because I did not pay for it.

    Separately, keeping a copy of this work so I can do this repeatedly is also stealing your work.

    The judge ruled the first was okay but the second was not because the first is "transformative", which sadly means to me that the judge despite best efforts does not understand how a weighted matrix of tokens works and that while they may have some prevention steps in place now, early models showed the tech for what it was as it regurgitated text with only minor differences in word choice here and there.

    Current models have layers on top to try and prevent this user input, but escaping those safeguards is common, and it's also only masking the fact that the entire model is built off of the theft of other's work.

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    Dude, what is this book. Who writes like this? I fucking adore it
  • 71 Stimmen
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    I almost agree with you, but I completely support your opinion that AI is crap.
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    eightbitblood@lemmy.worldE
    Incredibly well said. And couldn't agree more! Especially after working as a game dev for Apple Arcade. We spent months proving to them their saving architecture was faulty and would lead to people losing their save file for each Apple Arcade game they play. We were ignored, and then told it was a dev problem. Cut to the launch of Arcade: every single game has several 1 star reviews about players losing their save files. This cannot be fixed by devs as it's an Apple problem, so devs have to figure out novel ways to prevent the issue from happening using their own time and resources. 1.5 years later, Apple finishes restructuring the entire backend of Arcade, fixing the problem. They tell all their devs to reimplement the saving architecture of their games to be compliant with Apples new backend or get booted from Arcade. This costs devs months of time to complete for literally zero return (Apple Arcade deals are upfront - little to no revenue is seen after launch). Apple used their trillions of dollars to ignore a massive backend issue that affected every player and developer on Apple Arcade. They then forced every dev to make an update to their game at their own expense just to keep it listed on Arcade. All while directing user frustration over the issue towards developers instead of taking accountability for launching a faulty product. Literally, these companies are run by sociopaths that have egos bigger than their paychecks. Issues like this are ignored as it's easier to place the blame on someone down the line. People like your manager end up getting promoted to the top of an office heirachy of bullshit, and everything the company makes just gets worse until whatever corpse is left is sold for parts to whatever bigger dumb company hasn't collapsed yet. It's really painful to watch, and even more painful to work with these idiots.
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    ulrich@feddit.orgU
    You're using a messaging app that was built with the express intent of being private and encrypted. Yes. You're asking why you can't have a right to privacy when you use your real name as your display handle in order to hide your phone number. I didn't ask anything. I stated it definitively. If you then use personal details as your screen name, you can't get mad at the app for not hiding your personal details. I've already explained this. I am not mad. I am telling you why it's a bad product for activism. Chatting with your friends and clients isn't what this app is for. That's...exactly what it's for. And I don't know where you got the idea that it's not. It's absurd. Certainly Snowden never said anything of the sort. Signal themselves never said anything of the sort. There are other apps for that. Of course there are. They're varying degrees of not private, secure, or easy to use.
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    D
    theyll only stop selling politicians and block that
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    rob_t_firefly@lemmy.worldR
    I have been chuckling like a dork at this particular patent since such things first became searchable online, and have never found any evidence of it being manufactured and marketed at all. The "non-adhesive adherence" is illustrated in the diagrams on the patent which you can see at the link. The inventor proposes "a facing of fluffy fibrous material" to provide the filtration and the adherence; basically this thing is the softer side of a velcro strip, bent in half with the fluff facing outward so it sticks to the inside of your buttcrack to hold itself in place in front of your anus and filter your farts through it.
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    Even if they're wrong. It's too late. You're already on the list. .... The only option is to destroy the list and those who will use it
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    Small progress is still progress. Kick management in the dick, friends.