Eccitaze

FFS, the issue is not that the AI model "copies" the copyrighted works when it trains on them--I agree that after an AI model is trained, it does not meaningfully retain the copyrighted work. The problem is that the reproduction of the copyrighted work--i.e. downloading the work to the computer, and then using that reproduction as part of AI model training--is being done for a commercial purpose that infringes copyright.

If I went to DeviantArt and downloaded a random piece of art to my hard drive for my own personal enjoyment, that is a non-infringing reproduction. If I then took that same piece of art, and uploaded it to a service that prints it on a T-shirt, the act of uploading it to the T-shirt printing service's server would be infringing, since it is no longer being reproduced for personal enjoyment, but the unlawful reproduction of copyrighted material for commercial purpose. Similarly, if I downloaded a piece of art and used it to print my own T-shirts for sale, using all my own computers and equipment, that would also be infringing. This is straightforward, non-controversial copyright law.

The exact same logic applies to AI training. You can try to camouflage the infringement with flowery language like "mere extraction of relationships between components," but the purpose and intent behind AI companies reproducing copyrighted works via web scraping and downloading copyrighted data to their servers is to build and provide a commercial, for-profit service that is designed to replace the people whose work is being infringed. Full stop.

They literally do not pass the criteria. LLMs use the entirety of a copyrighted work for their training, which fails the "amount and substantiality" factor. By their very nature, LLMs would significantly devalue the work of every artist, author, journalist, and publishing organization, on an industry-wide scale, which fails the "Effect upon work's value" factor.

Those two alone would be enough for any sane judge to rule that training LLMs would not qualify as fair use, but then you also have OpenAI and other commercial AI companies offering the use of these models for commercial, for-profit purposes, which also fails the "Purpose and character of the use" factor. You could maybe argue that training LLMs is transformative, but the commercial, widespread nature of this infringement would weigh heavily against that. So that's at least two, and arguably three out of four factors where it falls short.

Spoiler alert, but Rosebud was his sled all along.

unique

"unique new IP right?" Bruh you're talking about basic fucking intellectual property law. Just because someone posts something publicly on the internet doesn't mean that it can be used for whatever anybody likes. This is so well-established, that every major art gallery and social media website has a clause in their terms of service stating that you are granting them a license to redistribute that content. And most websites also explicitly state that when you upload your work to their site that you still retain your copyright of that work.

For example (emphasis mine):

FurAffinity:

4.1 When you upload content to Fur Affinity via our services, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, transferable right and license to use, host, store, cache, reproduce, publish, display (publicly or otherwise), perform (publicly or otherwise), distribute, transmit, modify, adapt, and create derivative works of, that content. These permissions are purely for the limited purposes of allowing us to provide our services in accordance with their functionality (hosting and display), improve them, and develop new services. These permissions do not transfer the rights of your content or allow us to create any deviations of that content outside the aforementioned purposes.

Inkbunny:

Posting Content

You keep copyright of any content posted to Inkbunny. For us to provide these services to you, you grant Inkbunny non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use and archive your artwork in accordance with this agreement.

When you submit artwork or other content to Inkbunny, you represent and warrant that:

* you own copyright to the content, or that you have permission to use the content, and that you have the right to display, reproduce and sell the content. You license Inkbunny to use the content in accordance with this agreement;

DeviantArt:

16. Copyright in Your Content

DeviantArt does not claim ownership rights in Your Content. For the sole purpose of enabling us to make your Content available through the Service, you grant DeviantArt a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, distribute, re-format, store, prepare derivative works based on, and publicly display and perform Your Content. Please note that when you upload Content, third parties will be able to copy, distribute and display your Content using readily available tools on their computers for this purpose although other than by linking to your Content on DeviantArt any use by a third party of your Content could violate paragraph 4 of these Terms and Conditions unless the third party receives permission from you by license.

e621:

When you upload content to e621 via our services, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, transferable right and license to use, host, store, cache, reproduce, publish, display (publicly or otherwise), perform (publicly or otherwise), distribute, transmit, downsample, convert, adapt, and create derivative works of, that content. These permissions are purely for the limited purposes of allowing us to provide our services in accordance with their functionality (hosting and display), improve them, and develop new services. These permissions do not transfer the rights of your content or allow us to create any deviations of that content outside the aforementioned purposes.

Xitter:

Your Rights and Grant of Rights in the Content

You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. What’s yours is yours — you own your Content (and your incorporated audio, photos and videos are considered part of the Content).

By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods now known or later developed (for clarity, these rights include, for example, curating, transforming, and translating). This license authorizes us to make your Content available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same.

Facebook:

The permissions you give us We need certain permissions from you to provide our services:

• Permission to use content you create and share: Some content that you share or upload, such as photos or videos, may be protected by intellectual property laws.

• You retain ownership of the intellectual property rights (things like copyright or trademarks) in any such content that you create and share on Facebook and other Meta Company Products you use. Nothing in these Terms takes away the rights you have to your own content. You are free to share your content with anyone else, wherever you want.

• However, to provide our services we need you to give us some legal permissions (known as a "license") to use this content. This is solely for the purposes of providing and improving our Products and services as described in Section 1 above.

• Specifically, when you share, post, or upload content that is covered by intellectual property rights on or in connection with our Products, you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, and worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content (consistent with your privacy and application settings). This means, for example, that if you share a photo on Facebook, you give us permission to store, copy, and share it with others (again, consistent with your settings) such as Meta Products or service providers that support those products and services. This license will end when your content is deleted from our systems.

I could go on, but I think I've made my point very clear: Every social media website and art gallery is built on an assumption that the person uploading art A) retains the copyright over the items they upload, B) that other people and organizations have NO rights to copyrighted works unless explicitly stated otherwise, and C) that 3rd parties accessing this material do not have any rights to uploaded works, since they never negotiated a license to use these works.

Bear in mind that training AI does not involve copying content into its database, so copyright is not an issue.

Wrong. The infringement is in obtaining the data and presenting it to the AI model during the training process. It makes no difference that the original work is not retained in the model's weights afterwards.

You can train AI in a book and it will give you information from the book - information is not copyrightable. You can read a book a talk about its contents on TV - not illegal if you’re a human, should it be illegal if you’re a machine?

Yes, because copyright law is intended to benefit human creativity.

If you try to outlaw Automating this process by computers, there will be side effects such as search engines will no longer be able to index data.

Wrong. Search engines retain a minimal amount of the indexed website's data, and the purpose of the search engine is to generate traffic to the website, providing benefit for both the engine and the website (increased visibility, the opportunity to show ads to make money). Banning the use of copyrighted content for AI training (which uses the entire copyrighted work and whose purpose is to replace the organizations whose work is being used) will have no effect.

Not just that, but to sell a product that by its very nature threatens the livelihoods of the same people whose labor and creativity is being used without permission.

This process is akin to how humans learn by reading widely and absorbing styles and techniques, rather than memorizing and reproducing exact passages.

Like fuck it is. An LLM "learns" by memorization and by breaking down training data into their component tokens, then calculating the weight between these tokens. This allows it to produce an output that resembles (but may or may not perfectly replicate) its training dataset, but produces no actual understanding or meaning--in other words, there's no actual intelligence, just really, really fancy fuzzy math.

Meanwhile, a human learns by memorizing training data, but also by parsing the underlying meaning and breaking it down into the underlying concepts, and then by applying and testing those concepts, and mastering them through practice and repetition. Where an LLM would learn "2+2 = 4" by ingesting tens or hundreds of thousands of instances of the string "2+2 = 4" and calculating a strong relationship between the tokens "2+2," "=," and "4," a human child would learn 2+2 = 4 by being given two apple slices, putting them down to another pair of apple slices, and counting the total number of apple slices to see that they now have 4 slices. (And then being given a treat of delicious apple slices.)

Similarly, a human learns to draw by starting with basic shapes, then moving on to anatomy, studying light and shadow, shading, and color theory, all the while applying each new concept to their work, and developing muscle memory to allow them to more easily draw the lines and shapes that they combine to form a whole picture. A human may learn off other peoples' drawings during the process, but at most they may process a few thousand images. Meanwhile, an LLM learns to "draw" by ingesting millions of images--without obtaining the permission of the person or organization that created those images--and then breaking those images down to their component tokens, and calculating weights between those tokens. There's about as much similarity between how an LLM "learns" compared to human learning as there is between my cat and my refrigerator.

And YET FUCKING AGAIN, here's the fucking Google Books argument. To repeat: Google Books used a minimal portion of the copyrighted works, and was not building a service to compete with book publishers. Generative AI is using the ENTIRE COPYRIGHTED WORK for its training set, and is building a service TO DIRECTLY COMPETE WITH THE ORGANIZATIONS WHOSE WORKS THEY ARE USING. They have zero fucking relevance to one another as far as claims of fair use. I am sick and fucking tired of hearing about Google Books.

EDIT: I want to make another point: I've commissioned artists for work multiple times, featuring characters that I designed myself. And pretty much every time I have, the art they make for me comes with multiple restrictions: for example, they grant me a license to post it on my own art gallery, and they grant me permission to use portions of the art for non-commercial uses (e.g. cropping a portion out to use as a profile pic or avatar). But they all explicitly forbid me from using the work I commissioned for commercial purposes--in other words, I cannot slap the art I commissioned on a T-shirt and sell it at a convention, or make a mug out of it. If I did so, that artist would be well within their rights to sue the crap out of me, and artists charge several times as much to grant a license for commercial use.

In other words, there is already well-established precedent that even if something is publicly available on the Internet and free to download, there are acceptable and unacceptable use cases, and it's broadly accepted that using other peoples' work for commercial use without compensating them is not permitted, even if I directly paid someone to create that work myself.

And to the argument itself: Just because AI is better at learning from existing works, faster, more complete, better memory, doesn’t meant that it’s fundamentally different than humans learning from artwork. Almost EVERY artist arguing for this is stealing themselves since they learned and was inspired by existing works.

Tell me you're not an artist without telling me you're not an artist

Fucking Christ I am so sick of people referencing the Google books lawsuit in any discussion about AI

The publishers lost that case because the judge ruled that Google Books was copying a minimal portion of the books, and that Google Books was not competing against the publishers, thus the infringement was ruled as fair use.

AI training does not fall under this umbrella, because it's using the entirety of the copyrighted work, and the purpose of this infringement is to build a direct competitor to the people and companies whose works were infringed. You may as well talk about OJ Simpson's criminal trial, it's about as relevant.

Do you drop trou and stand in front of a toilet every time you need to toot the flesh whistle?

A McDonald's burger from the 80s when they still used tallow for their fries and higher quality ingredients? No contest, it was better than the TrumpDonalds that got served in 2017-2020

Shit, there's roughly even odds that the records of her employment no longer exist because the franchise she worked at shut down, or destroyed them because they were 40 years old.

I used to work at a Sprint call center in the early '10s, but if you asked me to prove it I literally couldn't, because the staffing agency I was hired through, the call center, and Sprint itself no longer exist. Doesn't change that I worked there.