Who truly owns the tales of Snow White and Cinderella?

These stories didn't originate with Disney; they are part of a rich tapestry of folklore passed down through generations. Disney's success was partly built on adapting these existing narratives, which were once shared and reshaped by communities over centuries.

This conversation shouldn't just be about the technicalities of AI or the legalities of copyright; it should be about understanding the deep roots of our shared culture.

At its core, culture is a communal property, evolving and growing through collective storytelling and reinterpretation.

The current debate around AI and copyright infringement seems to overlook this fundamental aspect of cultural evolution. The algorithms might be new, but the practice of reimagining and repurposing stories is as old as humanity itself.

By focusing solely on the legal implications and ignoring the historical context of cultural storytelling, we risk overlooking the essence of what it means to be a creative society.

As a large human model, (no really I could probably lose some weight) I think it's just silly how we're all sort of glossing over the fact that Disney built their house of mouse on existing culture, on existing stories, and now the idea that we might actually limit the tools of cultural expression to comply with some weird outdated copyright thing is just...bonkers.

If you want to make your point, you need to choose something that isn't already public domain. Disney already only owns their own interpretations, and, arguably, whatever penumbric emanation they can convince a court is stealing from them, but it still certainly isn't the entire space of Snow White and Cinderella stories. There is some fairly recent stuff being used in the images in the article and there isn't even any question whether or not it's Mario or Coca Cola; if Nintendo and Coca Cola did a cross promotion I could believe the exact images that popped out.

If they were trying to claim the entire concepts of dumpy plumbers dressed in any manner vaguely like Mario that would be one thing... but that's Mario and Luigi, full stop. That's Robocop. That's C3PO. It's not even subtle. If we can AI-wash those trademarks away then we can AI-wash absolutely anything.

> "the rest of us don’t care as long as the work is of good quality"

Copyright protects Disney.

But it also protects every creative author, no matter how disadvantaged, from mass shareholder driven behemoths.

Today "Disney likes your work" is ear music. Without copyright it would be a death nell.

If you're thinking the former I could agree with that on some level and would say that what I'm asking in my original comment is merely aspirational, but if you're suggesting the latter I'd merely point to the former and say that this is the status quo.

Copyright is a monetization scheme, but it's not the only one.

In this imagined world, cinemas would have no movies to show, so they'd have to pay people like Lucas to create the films such that there'd be something to put on the screen. If many cinemas got together, and maybe got loans, they could pay for bigger budget films, too

From https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/01/06/why-is-the-for...

> Lucas’s most significant business decision—one that seemed laughable to the Fox executives at the time—was to forgo his option to receive an additional five-hundred-thousand-dollar fee from Fox for directing “Star Wars” and to take the merchandising and sequel rights instead.

Doesn't copyright stop other people from making billions in merchandising revenue off of George Lucas' ideas without his consent?

> We don’t really need Nth Star Wars sequel powered by those extra profits.

Without a copyrighted C3PO, he could start turning up in just about anyone's derivative works. There could be horrible Star wars sequels forever, or TV ads with C3PO selling household cleaning products.

...followed by a semi-hallucinated list containing at least a few being marketed by C3PO.

What you can't do is use those recreations for commercials purposes. You can't sell your paintings of Mario. You can't decorate your business with Mario drawings.

That's why I've always felt like the idea that AI should be blocked from creating these things is generally not the right place to look at copyright. Rather, the issue should be if someone uses AI to create a picture of Mario and then does something commercial with it, you should be able to go after the person engaging in the commercial behavior with the copyrighted image.

With you until here for several reasons:

1. It's not possible for you as an individual consumer to know whether or not the AI result is a violation, given an AI that has been trained on copyrighted works.

2. Before you, the AI consumer, uses the generated result, a company (in this case OpenAI) is already charging for it. I'm currently paying OpenAI. That AI is currently able and willing to sell me copyrighted images as part of my subscription. Frankly that should be illegal, full stop.

I look forward to AI enhanced workflows and I'm experimenting with them today. But it's morally indefensible to enable giant corporate AIs to slurp up copyrighted images/code/writing and then vomit it back out for profit.

I see what you're saying in some cases, but in the cases where the user is explicitly attempting to create images of copyrighted characters (e.g. the Mario example), they would definitely know. I honestly don't see this as a practical issue - as far as I'm aware (and like most on HN I follow these things more than the average person), there aren't a lot of concerns about inadvertent generation of copyrighted material. It's certainly not at issue in the NYT lawsuit.

2. Before you, the AI consumer, uses the generated result, a company (in this case OpenAI) is already charging for it. I'm currently paying OpenAI. That AI is currently able and willing to sell me copyrighted images as part of my subscription. Frankly that should be illegal, full stop.

Totally fair, but I feel like it's a bit more of a gray area. If I use Photoshop to create or modify an image of Mario for personal use, we'd call that fine. I grant you that here OpenAI is doing more of the "creating" than in the Photoshop example, but we still do generally allow people to use paid tools to create copyrighted images for personal use.

I'd also pose a question to you - what if OpenAI weren't charging? Is it acceptable to train an open source model on copyrighted images and have it produce those for personal use?

I guess I just understand the law to revolve more around what the end product is used for, as opposed to whether a paid tool can be used to create that end product.

If people had to pay for the AI equivalent of that image library (ie the costs of training the model), I doubt many would. It’s phenomenally expensive. Costs for a creative tool and a copy of whatever IP you personally want to play with are negligible by comparison.

It’s never been the case before that a toolmaker could ship their tools with copyrighted materials because they’ve no control over the end product. The answer doesn’t change whether they charge or not, and there no reason why AI should change that either.

People tend to “feel like it’s a bit more of a gray area” when there is cool free stuff at stake, and I’m no exception. It would be a more convincing question if it was “what if we had to pay our fair share of the costs involved?”, rather than “what if we could just have it all at no charge?”.

Two of my attempts:

https://chat.openai.com/share/5cd17ff3-e142-4a7d-91c2-0b2479...

https://chat.openai.com/share/04fd722b-8b3c-469b-a1a2-d58e64...

Probably not for anything commercial, not for any exhibitions or public viewing etc. You'd have to check the actual trademarks etc.

So, it’s not actually a corporate narrative, it’s actually the law that the narrative stems from, right or wrong. Maybe corporations had a huge role in shaping the law (I’d note copyright benefits individuals as well, though), but it is not mere propaganda or shaping of a shared reality through corporate narrative. It’s enforced by the guys with the guns and jails, as arbitrated by a judge.

It absolutely must be about the technicalities of the law as it’s at the basis a legal issue. By hand waving it away and claiming the social narrative is the right discussion you ignore the material consequences and reality in favor of a fantasy. We absolutely should -also- discuss the stifling nature of copyright and intellectual property, but you can’t ignore what’s actually happening here at the same time.

Public domain / communal property is also part of copyright, so it's not as if this is some forgotten concept that needs to be restored to the discourse.

Georgism is underconsidered, though.

> By focusing solely on the legal implications and ignoring the historical context of cultural storytelling

The legal implications are human implications and as much a part of culture as anything else. They have to do with what's fair and how rewards for effort are recognized and distributed. Formalizing this is less important in cultures that aren't oriented around market economies, which seems to be what much of this "rich tapestry of folklore" discourse wants to evoke and have us hearken back to, but that doesn't describe any society that's figuring out how to handle AI.

> we might actually limit the tools of cultural expression to comply with some weird outdated copyright thing is just...bonkers.

What's bonkers is the life in the literally backwards idea copyright is (or should be) mooted or outdated by novel reproduction capabilities.

Copyright became compelling because of novel reproduction capabilities.

The specific capabilities at the time were industrialized printing. People apparently much smarter than the typical software professional realized that meant some badly aligned incentives between (a) those holding these new reproduction capabilities and (b) those who created the works on which the value of those new reproduction capabilities relied. The heart of the copyright bargain is in aligning those incentives.

Specific novel reproduction techniques can change the details of what's prohibited or restricted or remitted and how and on what basis and powers/limits of enforcement, etc etc. But the they don't change the wisdom in the bargain. The only thing that would change that is a better way of organizing and rewarding the productive capacity of society.

The value still remains with the people who own the reproduction capabilities, and only scraps go to the artists. Artists can get scraps without selling copyright too, just look at patreon

The idea that we should dispense with it to let generative AI companies make even more money seems totally bizarre.

How's that bizarre, if as you state copyright has always been based on "money makes right" not some moral stance?

The idea is that we should remove abuses of copyright to allow our society to move forward, and thereby continue to exist.

Imagine if there was a law at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution that said when non-human labor was used, the Animal Welfare Office had veto power. Then imagine that the Animal Welfare Office declared steam engines to be immoral, and so steam engines were never used in industry, at least not in the Wester World. The Orient would eventually rise as the world's only industrial power.

In the same way, if we let the copyright industry veto generative AI, it will destroy the Western World.

Our students are already at a huge disadvantage compared to Chinese students who get every book ever translated into Chinese for free (except a few immoral works that they would not want to see anyway.)

Those who pose an existential threat to our civilization are rent seekers who abuse copyright in the US to go beyond protecting "science and the useful arts," who seek infinite copyright terms, who grab every creative work We The People create and register lying paperwork to ensure they can steal our creative genius to enrich their cabal.

If this was only a for-profit scheme, it would not be so bad. Do you remember when they Hollyweird degenerates sued a Christian company that wanted to put our G-rated versions of the movies aimed at children? The Christian company never suggested they not pay for the movies. No matter what the Christian company was willing to pay, they were not allowed to publish child-friendly versions of the movies. This proves Hollyweird's goal is to push degeneracy.

The battle against abuses of copyright is a fight for Western Civilization. The fight against abuses of copyright if a fight for our souls.

Why stop there? There's a ton of child labour in China and other part of the world that yield economic advantages. Should we let that happen in the western world too?

AI is wonderful in so many ways. But we should not throw out our entire way of life to adapt to a new technology.

If anyone is curious, this is what is being semi-accuratly referenced: https://www.crosswalk.com/culture/features/editing-companies...

Whole I disagree that the motivation is "degeneracy" and I doubt that there isn't a sum large enough to get studios on board, it is a pretty interesting example to bring up when discussing how much control we should give copyright holders.

Notably, it is legal to have a filter that changes playback not legal to provide a modified version of the original, even if you paid for that original.

Instead, we came up with a system where you can actually derive fairly steady revenue by creating new works and sharing them with the world. And critically, I think you misinterpret it as calling dibs on shared culture or on stories. Copyright is usually interpreted fairly narrowly, and doesn't prevent you from creating inspired works, or retelling the same story in your own words.

Generative AI is a problem largely because it destroys these revenue streams for millions of people. Yeah, it will be litigated by wealthy corporations with top-notch lawyers, for self-interested reasons. But if we end up with a framework that maintains financial incentives to artistic expression, it's probably a good thing.

> Copyright is a fairly ancient concept

The idea is fairly old, but it's current implementation in law is not nearly that old.

> that benefits normal people as much as it benefits big corporations

Clearly false if you measure that benefit in monetary terms.

> Copyright is usually interpreted fairly narrowly, and doesn't prevent you from creating inspired works, or retelling the same story in your own words.

Absolutely false. You can absolutely be stopped from retelling copyrighted fictional stories. You can even be stopped from telling new stories with derivative characters or settings.

> Generative AI is a problem largely because it destroys these revenue streams for millions of people.

How? The restrictions on selling images of Mickey Mouse exist regarless of if they were created with or without AI assistance.

> But if we end up with a framework that maintains financial incentives to artistic expression, it's probably a good thing.

We already have that framework and arguably it is already far more restrictive than it needs to be to maintain incentives for artistic creation. Indeed, these rules now often limit new artistic expression or prevent artists from monetizing their creations.

The types of art that are helped the most today by the copyright laws of tosay are the kinds that require large budgets to produce. The types of art that are most hurt are those produced by fans who want to build new things upon the narratives in our shared culture.

We need to shorten copyright durations and expand fair use protections and monetization options for derivative works. We don't need to make copyright even more powerful than it already is.

Edit: If you disagree, I'd be curious to hear your answer to this question. A character like Harry Potter is so widely known that it is now a ubiquitous part of our culture. To incentive new novels, what is the minimum duration we need to give J K Rowling control of who is allowed to write stories about this cultural touchstone?

Scale.

GenAI automates creation of things that are derived from but strictly aren't the same as the original content; as it's (currently) not possible to automate the detection of derivative works (which is something copyright is supposed to be about), this means actual humans have to look at each case, and that's expensive and time consuming and O(n*m) on n new works that have to be compared against m existing in-copyright works for infringement.

I also think copyright is too long, FWIW; but the way most people discuss arts, I think humans can be grouped into "I just want nice stuff" and "I want to show off how cultured I am", and the latter will never accept GenAI even if it's an upload of the brain of their favourite artist, simply because when it becomes easy it loses value. I'm in camp "nice stuff".

For that matter, Photoshop has made art creation so easy, that we dont need GenAI to be swiming in more copyright infringement than we know what to do with.

There is absurd amounts of content being created, no human will ever be able to see it all.

Copyright will continue to work - if someone creates a rip off so popular that it becomes an issue for copyright holders, the DMCA and the rest of the tools they forced into the fabric of the net still exist.

A few steps furhter down this argument, you get back to deep packet inspection, and the rest of the copyright wars which ended up making life worse.

Arm those million fans with GenAI instead of pen and paper and MS Paint, and it gets more extreme.

But I disagree WRT Photoshop; that takes much more effort to get anything close to what GenAI can do, and (sans piracy) is too expensive for amateurs. Even the cheaper alternatives take a lot of effort to get passable results that take tens of seconds with GenAI.

"More extreme" is not an explanation of how the change in scale matters here.

Indeed, what I would argue is there is no fundamental change in scale. Digital reproduction plus the internet already caused the change in scale. We already had the capacity for anyone to produce fan art and publish it or reproduce existing work and publish that. What has changed is not a question on quantity, but one of quality. Those fan artists now have tools so thay even the lower skilled artists can produce higher quality work.

Indeed, this is the real threat to artists from generative AI. Narrowing that skill gap is understandably threatening to those who make money with their artistic skills. I think trying to restrict the development of this technology is a losing battle. I think trying to do so by expanding the powers granted by copyright will exentuate the existing flaws with our modern copyright laws.

Instead, I'd prefer to solve that problem by reducing the strength of copyright. If we make AI generated or derived works un-copyrightable than companies that want to own copyright on their content will have to keep paying people to create it.

That scale already exists. The amount of community generated derivative works already dwarfs the capacity of copyright holders to review each piece. The ease of publishing reproductions already makes endorcement a question of priorizing the larger infringers and ignoring those with no reach.

Indeed, prohibitions of training on copyrighted work without a special license seem like they make it harder to develop the sorts of AI can detect derivitave works.

As case law makes clear that people running the prompts and picking the output to keep are liable for infrinent then there will be demand for tools to detect derivitave works and either filter or warn the user.

As I'm not a lawyer I don't want to embarrass myself by opining whether or not Nintendo has any claim over photographs of cosplays or other fan art, especially given quite how close two of the "video game plumber" images seemed to be to what they do own. The other two images, being a lot more fan-art-like, are examples where I think it would be an interesting question rather than incredibly obviously too close to Nintendo, although even there "interesting" means I wouldn't be surprised by an actual lawyer saying either of "this is obviously fine" or "this is obviously trademark infringement regardless of what it was trained on".

Now I'm wondering if there even are any videogame plumbers besides Marion and Luigi…

I don't see why we need to give Nintendo the exclusive right control the use of Mario for the next 65 years. That duration of control is absolutely not necessary for society to function.

Society would function just fine of the copyright on mario had expired two decades ago.

It’s not derivative work. We’re way past that. NYT has an exceptionally strong case here and anyone arguing about the merits of copyright is way off the mark. This court case is not going single-handedly to undo copyright. OpenAI has very little going for them other than “this is new, how were we to know it could do this”. So knowing that, the currently trained models are in a very sticky situation.

Further, I don’t see NYT settling. The implications are too large, and if they settle with OpenAI, they will have a similar case pop up with every other model. And every other publisher of digital content with have a similarly merited case. This is an inflection point for generative AI, and it’s looking like it will be either much more expensive or much more limited than we originally thought.

A side effect of this: I am predicting that we will start to see a rise in “pirate” models. Models who eschew all legality, who are trained in a distributed fashion, and whose weights are published not by corporations but by collectives (e.g. torrent models). There is a good chance we see these surpass the official “well behaved” models in effectiveness. It will be an interesting next few years to see this play out.

Essentially, if you don't have a massive corp behind a copyright it doesn't mean anything, if a corp is behind something it can be locked forever, regardless of any limits said copyrights are supposed to have.

The NYT list nothing from OpenAI using old news - they still lose nothing if openai can reproduce those articles verbatim.

If the NYT wins - we lose lots. I think it's time revisit copyright, we can do that you know, it's rather dated, could use an update regardless.

Stable Diffusion, when used to its fullest with thing like Control Net and LoRAs, blows the pants off of other proprietary models.

Summary by Wolters Kluwer: […] Everyone else (including commercial ML developers) can only use works that are lawfully accessible and where the rightholders have not explicitly reserved use for text and data mining purposes.

AFAIK they are discussing something like a robot.txt to flag stuff as „not for training“. You will probably be expected to implement some safeguards and of course the end user will have to be careful in his use of the generated things.

Source at Kluwers: https://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2023/02/20/protecting-...

EU Legal Text: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/790/oj

A Do Not Track flag being legally binding would force small websites, e.g. a local restaurant website, to implement something they likely are not aware of and secondly do not technically understand.

A company that is mass scraping data for their AI model is much more likely to understand and respect that scraping the data has legal implications, and would be technically capable in implementing a scraping solutions that accounts for a robots.txt.

Claiming ignorance here would be just a little bit disingenuous.

That is a weird (wishful?) interpretation. Doesn't article 4 give the exception to everybody for the purposes of text and data mining, including commercial ML developers?

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/790/oj

> The exception or limitation provided for in paragraph 1 shall apply on condition that the use of works and other subject matter referred to in that paragraph has not been expressly reserved by their rightholders in an appropriate manner, such as machine-readable means in the case of content made publicly available online.

Everyone knew it was trained on copyrighted material and capable of eerily similar outputs.

But it’s already done. At scale. Large corps committing fully. There is no chance of that toothpaste going back in the tube.

It’s a bit like when big tech built on aggressive user data harvesting. Whether it’s right, ethical or even legal is academic at this stage. They just did it - effectively without any real informed consent by society. Same thing here - 9 out of 10 people on street won’t be able to tell you how AI is made let alone comment on copyright.

So the right question here is what now. And I suspect much like tracking the answer will be - not much.

I disagree - we've been here before. The same could be said of many technologies, like cheap music recording/manufacture. You can record an artist once and make records at scale. However no one would think you could record Taylor Swift once and make unlimited copies without paying her.

You should read up on the musicians strike of 1942. [0]

[0[ https://jacobin.com/2022/03/1940s-musicians-strike-american-...

It happened with Napster, then Apple Music, now streaming services

There is no widespread file sharing in the general public, instead we have devices that we don’t own, and streaming subscriptions

Apple didn’t just copy all the music onto iPods and sell it — it took them a decade of deal making and lots of money to acquire the rights to the content

I’m not saying what’s right or wrong, just saying that this comment has very little understanding of these battles

This is one of the substantial jumps, I refuse to be cut out of this innovation.

Seriously, use Bing, try your free Photos built in generation system, they are rolling out GPT built into Word. Microsoft is easily the advanced tech company right now, as far what services can be provided to a consumer at scale. This is still like the alpha phase of all this. Apparently I talk to Copilot soon - that levels that up so much and it's already the best assistant I've ever had.

This is equivalent to trying to keep us all off smartphones and stuck on dumb phones I guess - I think you get what mean.

The NYT decided for all of us, the new smartphone equivalent thing is bad and we can't have it... that is something I'll riot over.

I recaly iPod being a hard drive that I could connect to a computer and just copy music directly to.

It was an integrated system, not an open one.

Definitely is today. It's difficult to copy mp3 files directly to an iPhone and play them. Even from a Mac, but even more so from a PC or Linux.

I bet less than 1% of iPhone and iPad users do that. They mostly pay for streaming. (Again, not saying that's better, but just that the general public doesn't do Napster-like file sharing.)

Then you need to recalibrate your certainty assessment. Not only did I do this personally with both music and videos, it is incredibly easy to find documentation of the steps. First google result: https://www.alphr.com/add-music-to-ipod-without-itunes/

Apple's ipod sales absolutely benefited significantly from music piracy. Especially early on when nobody hard large itunes collections yet and music torrents were much more common.

The genius of the ipod / itunes play is that they got to do both. They benefited from the demand from people with non-itunes libraries, while also offering a low friction sales platform that was easier than piracy.

I guess I'll just say "meh" -- it doesn't negate the main point, which is that Apple spent a lot of money and time to acquire rights, and they have a music store.

It is gated by iTunes, just not 100%

I know some people side load stuff on devices -- there's no device where that's impossible.

The ipod was launched two years before the itunes store. Even after the itunes store launched, you could just still load your other music into itunes if you wanted. All music was sideloaded (i.e transfered directly over USB) onto ipods at this point

You don't seem to know any of this history and are just making things up. I don't think Apple had to pay any money for the right to sell music via the iTunes store. What they did do was add DRM to music sold through the store, at least until they were big enough to renegotiate in 2009.

I for one think that indeed there are many cases like this where the only feasible way out is forward. The film GATTACA expressed this very human sentiment well:

> You want to know how I did it? This is how I did it, Anton: I never saved anything for the swim back.

It's an observation & prediction, not a problem solving attempt...

"Generative AI" is obviously copyright infringement, so owners of the copyright will win in court. Either Microsoft will have to fight a mass of legal cases, some with very deep pockets themselves, or ChatGPT will be crippled for public use.

The un-crippled models will exist if you know where to look (and have the hardware), but using them for anything apart from hobby projects would be a legal risk.

Certain specific tools may be easier to deal with from a legal standpoint, like code completion maybe. Or models for a specific purpose, like training on a law firm's case history.

It looks like Adobe has the right idea with their image generation that is trained on images which they know they have the rights to use.

Definitely, but that's not because as society we managed to put an end to piracy. It's because people are just not as interested as they were before. Piracy networks for media are alive and well, I'd even say that some are in the best shape they've ever been.

> It looks like Adobe has the right idea with their image generation that is trained on images which they know they have the rights to use.

The C2PA includes Microsoft as one of the alliance members [0]. Microsoft knows that there is a way of tracing the outputs of the generated source images which is with the C2PA standard.

The fact that many AI proponents and their companies don't do this tells us that they are uncooperative and not very transparent in how they train their own AI systems despite having the experts to do so.

It's not that hard to disclose the training data. What else are they hiding?

[0] https://c2pa.org/

You're saying this as a matter of fact when it's not clear at all. We'll see what happens with the NYT case because it touches on all the major points.

It's gonna call into question all web scraping and indexing because they're also distillations of copyrighted content in the same manner.

But businesses do like it, and profits are what drive these legal decisions. This will always be the case as long as money is more important than humans in politics.

I say, good riddance. I never believed in any such thing as "intellectual property" anyway, I say, get rid of it all, patents, copyright, and the whole pile of imaginary "rights". More than half the world (i.e. the Global South) don't recognize these rights anyway, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to enforce it without draconian legal overreach and monopolistic centralization.

When's the last time you phoned an operator to book a taxi? If taxis are doing better, it's only because they learned from Uber (and the likes) what the job-to-be-done actually is.

Perhaps.

The media industries have been quite successful in going after kids torrenting movies.

I suspect they'll have less luck going after big tech & an industry drowning in money inflows.

Keep in mind various large techs have already issued blanket indemnities on infringement to their customers. They're absolutely committed & are gonna throw enough lawyers at this to keep everyone busy until 2030.

>They can afford to be responsible members of society here

oh absolutely agree, but they're not going to do that. This is an industry built on questionable practices like tracking after all

I always felt that we already had a solution - I can already get all those images from a web search. Where the law currently intervenes is when I try and distribute works based on close copies of them. Why is this insufficient?

The existence of widespread illegal means to procure something doesn't mean that we don't and shouldn't require legitimate businesses to abide by the law or require them to make amends for their current transgressions.

and yes, while open source models might be harder to regulate, those big corporations that currently use those things without distinction, exist as pretty established entities, and profit from services they offer in millions of dollars. there's more of a substantial existence, and more of a substantial scale of money they actually move. and they don't just "make a tool available", or have users do unambiguous actions where it would be the users that are infringing on anything, but do indeed use questionably sourced data and turn that into a model and offer that as a service. dirty data is very much a part of the deal with those.

Torrents are not better at sharing mp3s.

Why does anyone assume that ChatGPT or other tools would NOT produce previously-copyrighted content?

I can see a naive assumption that since it is “generated” it’s original. However that assumption falls apart as soon as you replace “ChatGPT” with “junior artist”. Tell them to draw a droid from a sci-fi movie, don’t mention anything else. Don’t say anything about copyrights. Don’t tell them that they have to be original. What would you expect them to produce?

Its game over folks. And this is going to happen with or without our approval and any government that limits the potential use of this is only giving nations that dont a large economic advantage.

Interesting times ahead.

It’s once you start monetizing and publishing on bigger scale, without appropriating, it gets interesting.

Sometimes it hallucinates.

Sometimes it draws weird looking hands.

Sometimes it generates copyrighted materials.

Check the work it produces.

“Buyer beware” has been a motto since ancient times.

The junior artist in your hypothetical would have as much liability, if not more.

I think the real question is whether OpenAI should be allowed to charge for generating infringing content. Even though the unit cost of the Mario drawing is negligible, the sum total of their infringing outputs may be making them a lot of money.

Well, are they really doing that?

If I rent a server to host a minecraft instance, is the company "charging for a minecraft server"? It is not clear to me that by charging users for AI usage they are complicit for whatever is generated. We don't require Adobe to prevent people from drawing Mickey either.

but "making money = infringement" is folk wisdom. you could certainly say making money attracts attention and increases likelihood of legal action

Going with this line of reasoning, if a company uses ChatGPT to generate work, and it produces copyrighted work, the company can stop using ChatGPT.

The point I was trying to make was that occupying mindspace, providing inspiration, being culturally influencal etc. are idealistic, non-monitary rewards that should be part of the equation when discussing alleged IP-theft, remixing, attribution and so on.

I'm not saying their shouldn't be any rules. All I'm saying is that there should be a discussion of how we want to handle these things going forward. This train ain't stopping.

Maybe your avg DeviantArt painter needs more IP-protection and -rights than Damien Hurst? Maybe an unknown, independent blogger doing important original research should be attributed more prominently than an article by The Times? Idk.

That's an answer we have. To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.

If we have to squint hard to make our justification align with copyright's purpose or have to follow a long logic-chain to get back to it's purpose - that's a strong indicator we have lost our way.

Not all my effort turned into dinners tho. And some types of work once paid for dinners but can't any more.

My #4 son is an artist/content creator. He eats based on what his non-art employment will buy. Perhaps one day people will find his art desirable and he could eat from that. It'll be a case where he worked long and hard on a project, was paid once for it and that's it for that.

That's what reality looks like for all artists - excepting a small percentage.

All that said, I really wouldn't want his dinner to come at the expense of everyone else being restrained by massive system of corrupt, draconian law that rigidly controls everyone's behavior for 150 years, primarily benefits wealthy and powerful rent-seeking corporations, is readily applied to censorship and is more likely to knee-cap other artists than to provide them anything like a living wage.

That seems indistinguishable from evil.

Once they hit the tipping point of broad cultural absorbtion (think Banksy) AND/OR raking in absurd amounts of cash, move their IP into the public domain more aggressively (think Disney, NYT, etc.). How exactly this would work should be debated.

They'd still own the IP and have all the rights to use it commercially, but other's would be able to use it as inspiration, remix and maybe even resell it if attributed (or cheaply licensed).

In other words: "IP-Tax" the unproportionally successful.

This is an unsophisticated view because it looks at a risk/reward scenario and assigns zero value to the risk.

The risk has value - regardless of the success, or reward.

Put another way: you don't get to discount the risk to zero when it results in a large reward.

Entities that took no risks and received enormous rewards (like President George W. Bush involvement in the Texas Rangers[1]) are probably quite pleased that you ignore them and focus on artists that sacrifice traditional life scripts (an enormous risk) and, very rarely, achieve great success.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_life_of_George_W....

Likewise, how difficult is it to just use descriptive tools to describe Mario-like images [1] and then remove these results from anyone prompting for "video game plumber"?

1. The describe command can describe an image in Midjourney. I imagine other AI tools have similar features: https://docs.midjourney.com/docs/describe

This reminds me of the early days of the internet where people wanted to remove free fanfiction for violations of copyright laws. Trying to apply copyright laws to personal use cases where the creator isn't trying to sell the material is pretty terrible, in my view.

Imagine a scenario 50 years from now - "Robot, can you cut out this picture I drew for a school diorama." "Certainly." "And this one as well." "Error: Your picture seems like it might contain some copyrighted materials, and as such I am unable to interact with it."

YouTube does this. I have many friends that perform classical piano in their spare time. They record themselves playing a piece that's 200+ years old then put it on YouTube where it gets flagged saying some big record label owns the copyright for it because it's similar to a recording they put out.

This is reinforcing my suspicion that there's gross misunderstanding between creator adjacents and non-creators: Takedowns on free fanfictions never stopped.

It's just many IP holders started incorporating fanfics/parodies as part of their advertisement strategies and started enforcing often unspoken guidelines. There is now a ecosystem or a mental co-dependence between IP holders and creators, and both sides are fine with it. So there be fan contents.

But free fan contents were never "legalized" in the content world, as some seem to assume.

Like many things, I suspect this will end up getting worse before there's a chance for it to get better.

There is no fair or private use of hyper-realistic fake money.

There are fair uses of copyrighted materials unless you want to start suing children for copyright infringement when they draw a character.

What about every movie ever made where two people trade a briefcase full of cash?

I am not sure how far Photoshop takes their filters but those bills aren't actually replicas nor can they be mistaken on reasonable examination (a cashier glancing at them)

Typically their texts read "For movie use only" over the seals in the middle or other things that make it clearly distinguishable as fake money that isn't legal tender. I think some of them flip the heads backwards or do other things so it immediately fails the sniff test.

Adam Savage actually has multiple videos on how it is made, super fascinating stuff! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drLzVcgnBfI

(Thank you for asking this, I was dying to gush about how cool movie money is)

In some movies those are actual real money. Just the top layer.

Dealing with legislation, lawyers and legal compliance is soo expensive, they would rather use a few thousand real dollars for couple of hours.

Also keep in mind that the Mario examples from the article are perhaps not the best guide here. Mario is sufficiently pervasive in our culture that you can't reasonably claim unknowing infringement. It's the somewhat more obscure cases that I'd be worried about.

Photoshop does this already, but only if it detects that you're trying to print/create counterfeit money:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation

it's just ai companies using dirty data and hoping they get away with it - and they do, for the time being, it is a bit trickier to show that 'yep, well that's there', and people don't seem to realize that just using a copyrighted image, at all (downloading, accessing in itself, let alone using for something else), or creating an image that would just "look like" a trademarked character - not "make a 1 to 1 copy" but just "look like" - would be enough for it to possibly be an infringement.

there can be a sufficient fix - taking out potentially infringing images from a dataset, and making an effort to make an actually clean dataset. it's really just a matter of "do you actually have rights to use that content? at all, and in that way". and ai companies continually say 'no...but what if we use it anyway".

and it's kind of a sloppy analogy, because with text to image generators (where you just interact with a model that's offered to you), well - people aren't "uploading copyrighted material into an editor". the copyrighted material is already there in the model, it was used in making of it. and if there was no such copyrighted material that'd fit the prompt, it wouldn't be able to generate something. the infringement lies with the service that uses copyrighted material for a model, and then offers it.

fan fiction and fan works continuously being in a murky area with copyright/trademark is not just a thing of "early days" of internet, it's been there all along and is still very much present. companies could crack down if they wanted, but there is too much of stuff out there, it might be hard to nail down exact people, and it might be plainly not too nice to the fandom. but it is not "impossible", and it is very much not a conversation that ever 'went away' or become "kinda solved" - it isn't.

again, with image editors, text editors, etc. - user is making all the actions with content, and the user would be doing the infringement, in editing and further if they were to choose to publish.

with generative ai - copyright infringement is built into the models. copyrighted works were accessed and used to turn into a model. user is just asking, "is it there". and it is. in some of those demonstrated examples, user is not even asking for a model to infringe on anything but it just does.

Another issue for generative AI is mentioned in the article: "Systems like DALL-E and ChatGPT are essentially black boxes." What happens when an AI is used to make decisions where the user/victim is entitled to know exactly why the AI did what it did? From a business and legal perspective I think the current AI solutions are dangerous and should be used very sparsely, exactly because even the creators can't point to the exact pieces of information that caused the AI to make the choices it did.

I think it will be easy to prevent the obvious copyrighted stuff via the method I mentioned. People going around those restrictions are subject to the same rules as someone drawing the copyrighted image from scratch.

Arguably that might actually be a very small issue, but what happens when it happens on a larger scale? Disney might not care, they can easily fight you in court if your DALL-E generated comics looks like Mickey Mouse and Nintendo will make sure that your video game about a electrician named Marvin from the Bronx, but who looks a lot like Mario is never going to get featured on Steam. The issue is the smaller artists that might not have the resources to fight AI content in court.

There's also the issue with using LLMs to "white-wash" articles and books. There will be people who will just run articles through ChatGPT and claim that it's AI generated content that was in no way stolen from The Barents Observer. The absolute massive volume, lose in revenue and cost to fight this in court could make running an investigating newspaper impossible and leave us without any actual reporting.

Not thinking ahead and having a plan for copyrighted material was an oversight by the current AI companies, but they are arrogant and just assumed that it would be a detail and anyway "disruption" so screw it. There has been zero consideration to the fact that their product is useless without the previous work of millions of people. My concern is that AI takes over content generation to the point where we actually run out of human generated content to train future AIs on. We need to be incredibly careful about implementing AI and ensure that we do not pollute future training data, but people don't care, because they want profit now.

Aren't LLMs giant coefficient matrices like, a punched out croissant dough, made of all training data plyed over? How can you say you can remove one specific ply out of dough and declare that ever potential effect that the offending ply had created is now completely removed?

Barring some major breakthrough, the actual answer is to train a new model without the infringing data.

I think some of the people saying "remove it from your model" are aware of this and are simply being glib and needling; "you've created this infringement monstrosity, so surely you made sure to include a way to deal with this problem without throwing away all of your work, right?"

My guess is that this is much easier to attack from the user end.

[0] https://chat.openai.com/share/e8256470-8e45-4f36-9c84-026be1...

  What happens when an AI is used to make decisions where the user/victim is entitled to know exactly why the AI did what it did? From a business and legal perspective I think the current AI solutions are dangerous and should be used very sparsely, exactly because even the creators can't point to the exact pieces of information that caused the AI to make the choices it did.

Both answers mean you did something wrong in creating the machine. The fault will always lie with the creator.

1. Generative AI systems are fully capable of producing materials that infringe on copyright.

2. They do not inform users when they do so.

So potentially any output could be infringing copyright source material, even from some obscure but still protected corner of the web, and anyone using that output could be exposed to lawsuit risk without warning.

This is very hard to fix.

Any artist can privately draw a picture of Mario, what's so different about having an LLM generate that image?

What I am also wondering is, if for some things copyrighted material could be somehow dominant in the output (beyond prompting more or less for it).

You don't have to pay 20 bucks a month for a private company to reproduce Mario manually at home for a start... you also can't reproduce Mario in many poses at an industrial scale solo. The list can go on, and we have seen OpenAI change their license agreement, so the risk can change over time.

I think the main concern here is with the top 1,000 or so brands/copyrights which seem fairly straightforward to deal with using the method I described.

It's not the same situation. You can't possibly expect someone to be exposed to the entirety of the internet like ChatGPT is. It is a matter of scale. If you still think they are the same thing, the industrial revolution was about scale and had transformative impacts in the society.

It's the user's responsibility to ensure they aren't infringing on copyright. If you are producing creatives for pay, you absolutely shouldn't be right-click saving images and using directly off the web whether you got it from DALL-E or a Google search.

Who cares about plagarism? Plagarism is a made up boogeyman created by high school English teachers.

If the work is sufficiently composed of your own thoughts, the fact you used someone else's structure for part of it is not a problem as long as it isn't your entire work or entirely derivative of one work.

If I use a Coca-Cola bottle cap as structure in a sculpture, that doesn't mean I am infringing on Coca-Cola's copyright. I still had to mold my original work to work with it.

I think it's just unfixable as far as fixing goes. The "best" way is to nuke all GPTs and DALL-Es and bury the technology, and the next best is to mark them all un-copyrightable and un-publishable as a compromise. This second option should be an all-around win that also encourages edge and on-prem deployments, IMO.

This approaches impossibility at scale.

Not to mention that the cost and scale of checking every query against that entire database is … not approachable.

I hire a session musician to play on my new single, paying him $100. I record the whole session.

I ask him to play the opening to "Stairway to Heaven" and he does so.

"Well, I can't use that as a sample without paying"

"Ok play something like Jimmy Page"

"Hmm, still sounds like Stairway to Heaven"

"Ok, try and sound less like Stairway to Heaven but in that style"

"Great, I'll use that one"

and I release my song and get $5,000 in royalties.

Should I be sued for infringement, or the guitarist?

The problem, I suppose, is that if I had said "play something like 70s prog rock" and he played "Stairway to Heaven" and I didn't know what it was and said "great, I'll use that".

Should I be sued for infringement, or the guitarist?

I still think people who are concerned that art related copyright will stifle generative AI should fight copyright laws directly. But that’s a harder pill to swallow since it will cause multi-industry wide havoc.

That's something which, IMHO, should be acknowledged by the law.

Asking your session musician for something "melancholy" and having them pass off Stairway to Heaven as original would be unreasonable.

Arguably, the LLM generating the image isn’t infringement, you using it would be.

The model isn't doing anything deliberately evil. It's doing exactly what it has been asked.

The problem is people are expecting it to have detailed knowledge of trademark law and avoid infringing trademarks, which it hasn't been even asked to do.

IMO that's why there will be but few effective legal restrictions placed on AI.

Once you can reliably ask AIs to draft you terms of service in all applicable jurisdictions and languages, ask it to consult you on how to incorporate in country X or ask it to draft a contract between your and another company based on the negotiation results, lawyers will end up in a huge existential crisis.

Especially because currently, as long as lawyers just barely meet their legal deadlines, it is basically impossible to hold them accountable for however badly they screw you over. A decent AI model could turn out to be a much safer bet than whatever lawyers are available on the jobmarket.

Well, I say that but there is John, a plumber, in the adult romantic comedy game Plumbers Don't Wear Ties [0]. Named by PC Gamer as number one on its "Must NOT Buy" list in May 2007.

[0] https://limitedrungames.com/collections/plumbers-dont-wear-t...

It’s like a software engineering contractor. The contractor gets paid, the IP of their work is owned by the company.

It could be argued ChatGPT is a publisher too.

For whoever owns the output also owns the liability of the output. You yourself might separately be able to pursue a claim against the guitarist for breech of contract. In the process of that, it might get discovered that you deliberately instructed the guitarist to copy the work, or they copied despite your instructions not to.

But that doesn't change the fact that the final work is infringing. It just allows you to pursue damages that could potentially offset any damages you're liable for from the infringement.

But this also isn't exactly the same situation as OpenAI. OpenAI isn't an individual creator working on contact for you. Even if their ToS ultimately assigns copyright of output to you, there is a matter of scale involved that I think changes things. It's one thing if your guitarist damages you by doing shoddy work, it's another of the guitarist systematizes and scales their shoddy work to damage large numbers of people. Perhaps that would then become a class action issue.

> You may not use the Service to try to violate the intellectual property rights of others, including copyright, patent, or trademark rights. Doing so may subject you to penalties including legal action or a permanent ban from the Service.

Perplexity's

> Intellectual Property Rights

> Perplexity AI acknowledges and respects the intellectual property rights of all individuals and entities, and expects all users of the Service to do the same. As a user of the Service, you are granted access for your own personal, non-commercial use only.

And that's just their interpretation of the tool. There is another interpretation that their tool itself is a violation.

You are right, how am I to know that is an image from a movie or passage from the NYT?

Ask George Harrison about "My Sweet Lord" which cost him $587,000 for his unconcious infringement.

Another example would be the 2013 hit "Blurred Lines" by Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams. It was found to have copied the "feel" and "sound" of Marvin Gaye's 1977 song "Got to Give It Up." The court awarded Gaye's estate $7.4 million in damages, later reduced to $5.3 million.

Personally, I think generative AI should be able to provide links to similar source material in the training data.. This would be the barest way to compensate those who have contributed to training the AI. I don't think generative AI is sustainable in the long term if it ends up killing all the websites/artists that created the original material. Plus I think having sources adds a layer of transparency and aids users in understanding when content is hallucinated vs. not. People should be able to opt out of having their content used for training and be able to confirm that it has been removed for future iterations. Let's be honest that AI companies are just trying to avoid lawsuits by keeping it secret. These are areas where I think regulation can help rather than worrying about doomsday scenarios.

Journalists [1] and Getty Images [2] did in the past

[1]: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/03/07/14/025216/web-caching-g... [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/27/getty-ima...

This is the elephant in the room. Every tech wave has had its way of cajoling creators into investing time & money to make original material, then the rules changed.

Google, promised reach and new markets for content, it worked. Then they introduced snippets, ads and whole lot of other things to keep visitors on their freeway, while avoiding sending visitors to the original site.

Reddit, Stack Overflow and others, started with gamification (points, badges) & community to incentivize users to contribute original content.

Now AI is shaking up all these approaches. But with each one, the incentive to create original material appears to dwindle, since the returns are becoming less and less.

Like what's the incentive for any professional now, if AI is going to regurgitate their original content, without any upside (i.e. no potential for reach, no gamification, no community, no recognition, etc).

Afterward came bots that saturated search results with useless SEO barf that pushed content (original and duplicated) so far down that we're coming back to where we started. Content is increasingly unfindable on the web.

Except these aren't databases, so that's generally not possible, in the same way that it's not possible for your provide links to the source material it took to write your reply. How much learning led to the weights on your neurons that allowed you to generate that? Where did you learn about using italics and it's effect on how the words would be interpreted? Where did you learn the tone that would be appropriate in this particular forum?

> People should be able to opt out of having their content used for training

Okay... but then, if I write a book should I be able to opt out of you being allowed to read it? What conditions should I be able to put on who can read my work? Religion? Skin colour? People that aren't good at memorizing?

Hopefully the idea of putting limits on who can acquire knowledge sounds absurd to you. Why are those same limits okay if they're on 'what' rather than 'who'?

> AI companies are just trying to avoid lawsuits by keeping it secret

Which has created a barrier to further research. Instead of me and Joe being able to collaborate on research and papers using the same datasets, we now hide our training data lest the luddites come to smash the machines because learning is only okay if not done too well.

Not directly and not in every case, but it IS possible to use embeddings to link to similar material. People are doing it pretty commonly using the RAG approach and Bard is already providing sources, etc. It may not be perfect, but the onus is on the AI companies to figure out how to do it right not just claim helplessness.

> Okay... but then, if I write a book should I be able to opt out of you being allowed to read it? What conditions should I be able to put on who can read my work?

Sites that don't want to appear in search results or have sensitive info they don't want to get into search engines can use the Robots.txt which is as old as the internet. There are many valid reasons to have mechanisms to prevent something from being included in training data, and I would also argue this is a core feature that is necessary to spur adoption by businesses as we've already seen. Otherwise, I am not sure I understand your reasoning.. people can publish websites and opt to have them excluded from search, the same should apply to AI.

This is a power grab by publishers.

I agree that it should be possible to implement that for generative AI, although the training may become significantly more expensive in order to maintain that information, and the AI companies have little interest in doing so. They’ll probably rather try to heuristically assess possible copyright issues after the fact in a post-processing step.

The more interesting question is if copyright holders can claim unauthorized use of their works beyond the case of near-verbatim reproduction, because the works collectively inform the AI in a more general manner.

What if I asked you to list all our source material that led you to use that particular contraction. Heuristics will not do, you must list each.

Can you do it? Do you believe AI should.

> I agree that it should be possible to implement

Those exact words appear in another forum post from 2006:

https://discourse.igniterealtime.org/t/cm-3beta-compression-...

Should you have quoted that as a source for your reply? What if we knew you'd read that post back in 2006, affecting your neurons, then should you?

It might not be too hard to imagine a simple case of a specific topic where you might have some more prominent sources, but even in those cases I believe if you think it through you'll find there was a ton of other sources that led to the weights that allowed you to 'know' the topic.

> I believe they should be able to, to the degree that their output can constitute copyright infringement.

But not you? The inference behind the AI-violates-copyright movement is that machine obligations should be brought to a parity with our obligations - that AI and you be fully subject to the same copyright overlordship.

I would independently agree that having AI divulge sources could be a good thing.

I do not agree with this attempt to twist copyright into yet another misshapen hammer, so copyright holders can bludgeon out some result they want.

Cliff Notes contain quotes, and citations.

Does the cliff note company, when producing Cliff Notes for "Into The Wild", pay royalties to the publisher?

For that matter, does any paper, article, etc.. that may contain a quote from another, have to pay royalties to the source of the quotes?