this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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Privacy

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[–] 0x0@programming.dev 5 points 2 hours ago

Oh no...
Anyway...

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 57 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

Okay, I can work with this. Hey Altman you can train on anything that's public domain, now go take those fuck ton of billions and fight the copyright laws to make public domain make sense again.

[–] melpomenesclevage@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

counterpoint: what if we just make an exception for tech companies and double fuck consumers?

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[–] meathappening@lemmy.ml 7 points 16 hours ago

This is the correct answer. Never forget that US copyright law originally allowed for a 14 year (renewable for 14 more years) term. Now copyright holders are able to:

  • reach consumers more quickly and easily using the internet
  • market on more fronts (merch didn't exist in 1710)
  • form other business types to better hold/manage IP

So much in the modern world exists to enable copyright holders, but terms are longer than ever. It's insane.

[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 41 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

This is a tough one

Open-ai is full of shit and should die but then again, so should copyright law as it currently is

[–] meathappening@lemmy.ml 28 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

That's fair, but OpenAI isn't fighting to reform copyright law for everyone. OpenAI wants you to be subject to the same restrictions you currently face, and them to be exempt. This isn't really an "enemy of my enemy" situation.

[–] PropaGandalf@lemmy.world 10 points 21 hours ago

yes, screw them both. let altman scrape all the copyright material and choke on it

[–] fartsparkles@lemmy.world 145 points 1 day ago (4 children)

If this passes, piracy websites can rebrand as AI training material websites and we can all run a crappy model locally to train on pirated material.

[–] underisk@lemmy.ml 61 points 1 day ago

That would work if you were rich and friends with government officials. I don’t like your chances otherwise.

[–] moreeni@lemm.ee 16 points 1 day ago

Another win for piracy community

[–] A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 13 points 1 day ago

You are a glass half full sort of person!

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[–] nothacking@discuss.tchncs.de 38 points 1 day ago (1 children)

But when China steals all their (arguably not copywrite-able) work...

[–] turnip@sh.itjust.works 10 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Sam Altman hasn't complained surprisingly, he just said there's competition and it will be harder for OpenAI to compete with open source. I think their small lead is essentially gone, and their plan is now to suckle Microsoft's teet.

[–] HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml 10 points 21 hours ago

it will be harder for OpenAI to compete with open source

Can we revoke the word open from their name? Please?

[–] A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 58 points 1 day ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (2 children)

Fuck Sam Altmann, the fartsniffer who convinced himself & a few other dumb people that his company really has the leverage to make such demands.

"Oh, but democracy!" - saying that in the US of 2025 is a whole 'nother kind of dumb.
Anyhow, you don't give a single fuck about democracy, you're just scared because a chinese company offers what you offer for a fraction of the price/resources.

Your scared for your government money and basically begging for one more handout "to save democracy".

Yes, I've been listening to Ed Zitron.

[–] JoeKrogan@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

Fartsniffer 🤣

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

gosh Ed Zitron is such an anodyne voice to hear, I felt like I was losing my mind until I listened to some of his stuff

[–] dylanmorgan@slrpnk.net 8 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah, he has the ability to articulate what I was already thinking about LLMs and bring in hard data to back up his thesis that it’s all bullshit. Dangerous and expensive bullshit, but bullshit nonetheless.

It’s really sad that his willingness to say the tech industry is full of shit is such an unusual attribute in the tech journalism world.

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

It’s really sad that his willingness to say the tech industry is full of shit is such an unusual attribute in the tech journalism world.

What is interesting is if he didn't pretty regularly say in so many words " why the fuck AM I the guy who is sounding the alarm here?? " I would be much more skeptical of his points. He isn't someone that is directly aligned with the industry, at least not in an "authoritative expert capable of doing a thorough takedown of a bubble/hype mirage" sense that you would expect someone sounding the alarm on a bubble to be. I mean I can tell the guy likes the attention (not in a bad sense really), but he seems utterly genuine in the attitude of " wtf, well ok I will do it... but like seriously I AM the guy who is sounding the alarm here? This isn't honestly my direct area of expertise? I will provide you a thorough explantion with proof.. but my argument really isn't complicated, it is just 'business doesn't make money why will no one acknowledge that' and it breaks my brain that people that are experts in directly adjacent/relevant things can't see this....? am I high? "

.... cus yeah Ed Zitron, that is how a lot of us fucking feel right now.

(these aren't direct quotes, I was summarizing, go watch/listen to some of Ed Zitron's stuff, none of his arguments hinge on anything unreasonable or especially complicated, which is the worrying part..)

[–] Zink@programming.dev 18 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

What I’m hearing between the lines here is the origin of a legal “argument.”

If a person’s mind is allowed to read copyrighted works, remember them, be inspired by them, and describe them to others, then surely a different type of “person’s” different type of “mind” must be allowed to do the same thing!

After all, corporations are people, right? Especially any worth trillions of dollars! They are more worthy as people than meatbags worth mere billions!

[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (1 children)

I don't think it's actually such a bad argument because to reject it you basically have to say that style should fall under copyright protections, at least conditionally, which is absurd and has obvious dystopian implications. This isn't what copyright was meant for. People want AI banned or inhibited for separate reasons and hope the copyright argument is a path to that, but even if successful wouldn't actually change much except to make the other large corporations that own most copyright stakeholders of AI systems. That's not really a better circumstance.

[–] tacobellhop@midwest.social 3 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (1 children)

Actually I would just make the guard rails such that if the input can’t be copyrighted then the ai output can’t be copyrighted either. Making anything it touches public domain would reel in the corporations enthusiasm for its replacing humans.

[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

I think they would still try to go for it but yeah that option sounds good to me tbh

[–] ArtificialHoldings@lemmy.world 6 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (2 children)

This has been the legal basis of all AI training sets since they began collecting datasets. The US copyright office heard these arguments in 2023: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/listening-sessions.html

MR. LEVEY: Hi there. I'm Curt Levey, President of the Committee for Justice. We're a nonprofit that focuses on a variety of legal and policy issues, including intellectual property, AI, tech policy. There certainly are a number of very interesting questions about AI and copyright. I'd like to focus on one of them, which is the intersection of AI and copyright infringement, which some of the other panelists have already alluded to.

That issue is at the forefront given recent high-profile lawsuits claiming that generative AI, such as DALL-E 2 or Stable Diffusion, are infringing by training their AI models on a set of copyrighted images, such as those owned by Getty Images, one of the plaintiffs in these suits. And I must admit there's some tension in what I think about the issue at the heart of these lawsuits. I and the Committee for Justice favor strong protection for creatives because that's the best way to encourage creativity and innovation.

But, at the same time, I was an AI scientist long ago in the 1990s before I was an attorney, and I have a lot of experience in how AI, that is, the neural networks at the heart of AI, learn from very large numbers of examples, and at a deep level, it's analogous to how human creators learn from a lifetime of examples. And we don't call that infringement when a human does it, so it's hard for me to conclude that it's infringement when done by AI.

Now some might say, why should we analogize to humans? And I would say, for one, we should be intellectually consistent about how we analyze copyright. And number two, I think it's better to borrow from precedents we know that assumed human authorship than to invent the wheel over again for AI. And, look, neither human nor machine learning depends on retaining specific examples that they learn from.

So the lawsuits that I'm alluding to argue that infringement springs from temporary copies made during learning. And I think my number one takeaway would be, like it or not, a distinction between man and machine based on temporary storage will ultimately fail maybe not now but in the near future. Not only are there relatively weak legal arguments in terms of temporary copies, the precedent on that, more importantly, temporary storage of training examples is the easiest way to train an AI model, but it's not fundamentally required and it's not fundamentally different from what humans do, and I'll get into that more later if time permits.

The "temporary storage" idea is pretty central for visual models like Midjourney or DALL-E, whose training sets are full of copyrighted works lol. There is a legal basis for temporary storage too:

The "Ephemeral Copy" Exception (17 U.S.C. § 112 & § 117)

U.S. copyright law recognizes temporary, incidental, and transitory copies as necessary for technological processes.
Section 117 allows temporary copies for software operation.
Section 112 permits temporary copies for broadcasting and streaming.
[–] tacobellhop@midwest.social 2 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Based on this, can I use chat gpt to recreate a Coca Cola recipe

[–] ArtificialHoldings@lemmy.world 2 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

Copyright law doesn't cover recipes - it's just a "trade secret". But the approximate recipe for coca cola is well known and can be googled.

[–] ArtificialHoldings@lemmy.world 3 points 18 hours ago

BTW, if anyone was interested - many visual models use the same training set, collected by a German non-profit: https://laion.ai/

It's "technically not copyright infringement" because the set is just a link to an image, paired with a text description of each image. Because they're just pointing to the image, they don't really have to respect any copyright.

[–] Creosm@lemmy.world 73 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Oh it's "over"? Fine for me

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[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 80 points 1 day ago (5 children)
[–] B1naryB0t@lemmy.dbzer0.com 39 points 1 day ago (3 children)

When a corporation does it to get a competitive edge, it is.

[–] pennomi@lemmy.world 27 points 1 day ago

It’s only theft if they support laws preventing their competitors from doing it too. Which is kind of what OpenAI did, and now they’re walking that idea back because they’re losing again.

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 21 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

No it's not.

It can be problematic behaviour, you can make it illegal if you want, but at a fundamental level, making a copy of something is not the same thing as stealing something.

[–] pyre@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (6 children)

it uses the result of your labor without compensation. it's not theft of the copyrighted material. it's theft of the payment.

it's different from piracy in that piracy doesn't equate to lost sales. someone who pirates a song or game probably does so because they wouldn't buy it otherwise. either they can't afford or they don't find it worth doing so. so if they couldn't pirate it, they still wouldn't buy it.

but this is a company using labor without paying you, something that they otherwise definitely have to do. he literally says it would be over if they couldn't get this data. they just don't want to pay for it.

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[–] kibiz0r@midwest.social 20 points 1 day ago (7 children)

What OpenAI is doing is not piracy.

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[–] misunderstooddemon@reddthat.com 6 points 20 hours ago

Too bad, so sad

[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 15 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] Niquarl@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Of course it is if you copy to monetise which is what they do.

[–] droplet6585@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 day ago

They monetize it, erase authorship and bastardize the work.

Like if copyright was to protect against anything, it would be this.

[–] SplashJackson@lemmy.ca 7 points 23 hours ago

OpenAI can open their asses and go fuck themselves!

[–] some_guy 15 points 1 day ago

Sam Altman is a lying hype-man. He deserves to see his company fail.

[–] RandomVideos@programming.dev 4 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

I feel like it would be ok if AI generated images/text would be clearly marked(but i dont think its possible in the case of text)

Who would support something made stealing the hard work of other people if they could tell instantly

[–] Dengalicious@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Stealing means the initial item is no longer there

[–] RandomVideos@programming.dev 1 points 10 hours ago

If someone is profiting off someone elses work, i would argue its stealing

[–] kn0wmad1c@programming.dev 7 points 1 day ago
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