oscarhocklee t1_j6i3ohl wrote on January 30, 2023 at 2:24 PM

Reply to comment by poo2thegeek in Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI ask court to throw out AI copyright lawsuit by Tooskee

See, that's the thing. When humans copy work, we have laws that step in and allow the owner of the work to say "No, you can't do that". Humans could copy anything they see, but there are legal consequences if they copy the wrong thing - especially if they gain financially by doing so. This is very much an argument about whether what these tools are doing is sufficiently like what a human could do for the laws that apply to humans to apply.

If copilot for instance generates code that (were a human to write it) would be legally considered (likely after a long and damaging lawsuit) to be a derived work of something licensed under the GPL, then that derived work must also legally be licensed undrr the GPL.

What's more, there is no clear authorial provenance. Say you find a github repo that contains what looks like a near-perfect copy of some code you own and which you released under a license of your choice. If a human wrote it, that's a legal issue.

Fundamentally, we're arguing here if it's okay in a situation like this to say "Oh, no, it's legal because software did it for me". And remember, there's no way to prove how much of a text file was written by a human and how much by software once it's saved.

poo2thegeek t1_j6i59po wrote on January 30, 2023 at 2:36 PM

So, while this is certainly true, for something to come under copy right it had to be pretty similar to whatever its copying.

For example, if I want to write a book about wizards in the UK fighting some big bad guy, that doesn't mean I'm infringing on the copy right of Harry Potter.

Similarly, I can write a pop song that discusses, idk, how much I like girls with big asses, and that doesn't infringe on the copyright of the (hundreds) of songs on the same topic.

Now, I do think that if an AI model output something that was too similar to some of its training material, and the company that owned that said AI went ahead and published it, then yeah the company should be sued for copyright infringement.

But, it is certainly possible for AI to output completely new things. Just look at the AI art that has been generated in recent month - it's certainly making new images based off what its learnt a good image should look like.

Also, on top of all this, its perfectly possible to ensure (or at lest, massively decrease probability of) outputting something similar to its inputs, by 'punishing' the model if it ever outputs something too similar to training inputs.

All this means that I don't think this issue is anywhere near as clear cut as a lot of the internet makes it out to be.