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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • My bet is: it’s going to depend on a case by case basis.

    Almost certainly. Getty images has several exhibits in its suit against Stable Diffusion showing the Getty watermark popping up in its output as well as several images that are substantially the same as their sources. Other generative models don’t produce anything all that similar to the source material, so we’re probably going to wind up with lots of completely different and likely contradictory rulings on the matter before this gets anywhere near being sorted out legally.

    Copyright laws are not necessarily wrong; just remove the “until author’s death plus 70 years” coverage, go back to a more reasonable “4 years since publication”, and they make much more sense.

    The trouble with that line of thinking is that the laws are under no obligation to make sense. And the people who write and litigate those laws benefit from making them as complicated and irrational as they can get away with.



  • Clearly transformative only applies to the work a human has put in to the process. It isn’t at all clear that an LLM would pass muster for a fair use defense, but there are court cases in progress that may try to answer that question. Ultimately, I think what it’s going to come down to is whether the training process itself and the human effort involved in training the model on copyrighted data is considered transformative enough to be fair use, or doesn’t constitute copying at all. As far as I know, none of the big cases are trying the “not a copy” defense, so we’ll have to see how this all plays out.

    In any event, copyright laws are horrifically behind the times and it’s going to take new legislation sooner or later.



  • So if someone builds an atom-perfect artificial brain from scratch, sticks it in a body, and shows it around the world, should we expect the creator to pay licensing fees to the owners of everything it looks at?

    That’s unrelated to an LLM. An LLM is not a synthetic human brain. It’s a computer program and sets of statistical data points from large amounts of training data to generate outputs from prompts.

    If we get real general-purpose AI some day in the future, then we’ll need to answer those sorts of questions. But that’s not what we have today.