good, then I can just ignore Disney instead of EVERYTHING else.

They have 0.2T in assets the world has around 660T in assets which as I said before is a tiny fraction. Obviously both hold a lot of assets that aren’t worthwhile to AI training such as theme parks but when you consider a single movie that might be worth millions or billions has the same benefit for AI training as another movie worth thousands. the amount of assets Disney owned is not nearly as relevant as you are making it out to be

I remember that X-Files episode!

Too late. The systems we are building as a species will soon become sentient. We'll have aliens right here, no UFOs required. Where the music comes from will no longer be relevant.

Damn, what did you watch those masterpieces on? What kind of smoke were you sitting on then? Although I don't know what secret materials you're talking about. Maybe I watched something wrong... And what an episode?

Ahhh, it makes more sense now. Thank you!

No. But going after LLMs wont make the situation for IA any worse, not directly anyway.

Ok perfect so since AGI is right around the corner and this is all irrelevant, then I'm sure the AI companies won't mind paying up.

This issue is not so cut and dry. The AI companies are stealing from other companies more than ftom individual people. Publishing companies are owned by some very rich people. And they want thier cut.

This case may have started out with authors, but it is mentioned that it could turn into publishing companies vs AI companies.

if the courts decide that scraping is illegal, IA can close up shop.

That's not the way it works. Do you think the Roman Empire just picked a particular Tuesday to collapse? It's a process and will take a while.

People cheering for this have no idea of the consequence of their copyright-maximalist position.

If using images, text, etc to train a model is copyright infringement then there will NO open models because open source model creators could not possibly obtain all of the licensing for every piece of written or visual media in the Common Crawl dataset, which is what most of these things are trained on.

As it stands now, corporations don't have a monopoly on AI specifically because copyright doesn't apply to AI training. Everyone has access to Common Crawl and the other large, public, datasets made from crawling the public Internet and so anyone can train a model on their own without worrying about obtaining billions of different licenses from every single individual who has ever written a word or drawn a picture.

If there is a ruling that training violates copyright then the only entities that could possibly afford to train LLMs or diffusion models are companies that own a large amount of copyrighted materials. Sure, one company will lose a lot of money and/or be destroyed, but the legal president would be set so that it is impossible for anyone that doesn't have billions of dollars to train AI.

People are shortsightedly seeing this as a victory for artists or some other nonsense. It's not. This is a fight where large copyright holders (Disney and other large publishing companies) want to completely own the ability to train AI because they own most of the large stores of copyrighted material.

If the copyright holders win this then the open source training material, like Common Crawl, would be completely unusable to train models in the US/the West because any person who has ever posted anything to the Internet in the last 25 years could simply sue for copyright infringement.

Shouldn't it?

Say I train an LLM directly on Marvel movies, and then sell movies (or maybe movie scripts) that are almost identical to existing Marvel movies (maybe with a few key names and features altered). I don’t think anyone would argue that is not a derivative work, or that falls under “fair use.”

I think you're failing to differentiate between a work, which is protected by copyright, vs a tool which is not affected by copyright.

Say I use Photoshop and Adobe Premiere to create a script and movie which are almost identical to existing Marvel movies. I don't think anyone would argue that is not a derivative work, or that falls under "fair use".

The important part here is that the subject of this sentence is 'a work which has been created which is substantially similar to an existing copyrighted work'. This situation is already covered by copyright law. If a person draws a Mickey Mouse and tries to sell it then Disney will sue them, not their pencil.

Specific works are copyrighted and copyright laws create a civil liability for a person who creates works that are substantially similar to a copyrighted work.

Copyright doesn't allow publishers to go after Adobe because a person used Photoshop to make a fake Disney poster. This is why things like Bittorrent can legally exist despite being used primarily for copyright violation. Copyright laws apply to people and the works that they create.

A generated Marvel movie is substantially similar to a copyrighted Marvel movie and so copyright law protects it. A diffusion model is not substantially similar to any copyrighted work by Disney and so copyright laws don't apply here.

The law applies to everybody, but the law-makers change the laws to benefit certain people. And then trump pardons the rest lol.

Would really love to see IP law get taken down a notch out of this.

@FauxLiving @Jason2357

I take a bold stand on the whole topic:

I think AI is a big Scam ( pattern matching has nothing to do with !!! intelligence !!! ).

And this Scam might end as Dot-Com bubble in the late 90s ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble ) including the huge economic impact cause to many people have invested in an "idea" not in an proofen technology.

And as the Dot-Com bubble once the AI bubble has been cleaned up Machine Learning and Vector Databases will stay forever ( maybe some other part of the tech ).

Both don't need copyright changes cause they will never try to be one solution for everything. Like a small model to transform text to speech ... like a small model to translate ... like a full text search using a vector db to index all local documents ...

Like a small tool to sumarize text.

In theory sure, but in practice who has the resources to do large scale model training on huge datasets other than large corporations?

i say move it out of the us

Distributed computing projects, large non-profits, people in the near future with much more powerful and cheaper hardware, governments which are interested in providing public services to their citizens, etc.

Look at other large technology projects. The Human Genome Project spent $3 billion to sequence the first genome but now you can have it done for around $500. This cost reduction is due to the massive, combined effort of tens of thousands of independent scientists working on the same problem. It isn't something that would have happened if Purdue Pharma owned the sequencing process and required every scientist to purchase a license from them in order to do research.

LLM and diffusion models are trained on the works of everyone who's ever been online. This work, generated by billions of human-hours, is stored in the Common Crawl datasets and is freely available to anyone who wants it. This data is both priceless and owned by everyone. We should not be cheering for a world where it is illegal to use this dataset that we all created and, instead, we are forced to license massive datasets from publishing companies.

The amount of progress on these types of models would immediately stop, there would be 3-4 corporations would could afford the licenses. They would have a de facto monopoly on LLMs and could enshittify them without worry of competition.