If I listen to 1000 pop songs and then write my own that's different from all of them, that's not copyright infringement. If I listen to 1000 pop songs and then write one that's nearly exactly the same as one of them, that absolutely is copyright infringement and I would most likely lose a lawsuit. The fact that I listened to 999 other songs does not absolve me of the infringement.
Most modern neural nets, and certainly LLMs, are overparameterized, which means they are completely capable of regurgitating exact training instances. They can and do repeat copyrighted training data verbatim. It's absolutely copyright infringement when that happens.
I anticipate AI researchers will soon come up with a way to ensure that outputs are a sufficient distance from all training inputs -- to essentially "block" direct regurgitation as valid output, with a tunable "max similarity" set to a safe distance. At that point we can start being more confident that our AI output is genuinely transformative and safe from (valid!) lawsuit.
> The bitching from writers and musicians reflects not that they're being ripped off, but that they're being out-produced.
This comes across as quite heartless. It will be interesting to see whether your view on this changes when AI starts making obsolete whatever you have spent your life specializing in.
I do not mind being made redundant by AI. I'll go become an electrician, general contractor, or something else you're not going to automate in my lifetime. The problem isn't the automation, its what happens if the usual Capital subjects capture all the gains vs them being distributed as excess across the populace.
EDIT: We should welcome automation and destruction of work where a machine can do it better. We fear it because of a broken socioeconomic system. Agree we should probably put breaks on anything so disruptive unless people impacted have some safeguards, because if you don't, what good is progress for progress' sake? It then becomes no different than bullshit jobs.
This. My full-time job is automating myself out of a job. Arguably, that's one of the indicators of a quality software engineer versus one who can follow directions but not decrease the problem space.
The problem is not automation... Automation is great. It frees up people's time to do more activities. The problem is how we distribute the spoils of that freed time.
This is a critical distinction. Like 'toomuchtodo, I can go pick up a nailer and build a house if the computery jobs go away. But I cannot effectively participate in the governance of the society of which I am in theory an equal member if the benefits of automation continue inexorably to accrue to a very small group.
Your suggestion to someone whose multi-decade career was ended by AI is to play career whack-a-mole, try to guess which careers won't be next to be killed off, go back to school for several years, and pray?
I guess we should get rid of bulldozers and give more people shovels.
While you're at it, take computers always from people. They automate way too much stuff.
Btw, I am in one of those careers that people think is at the risk of being automated away. I don't really care about it. If I become obsolete, maybe my skills were not that useful. I'll try working in something else.
And if all jobs are automated away, I'll just go starve with the rest of the peasantry. The last to starve will be the first to suffocate.
> 1000 pop songs and then write one that's nearly exactly the same as one of them
Alright, but how do you define this when talking about most of modern "pop" music (using a broad definition that also includes things like techno or rock sub-genres)?
Maybe even only consider what's commercially relevant.
Copyright is famously about authorship as an ulterior value, governing and including other values such as monetization.
What about this aspect?
Creativity is also often about subtlety, e.g. polished songwriting and sound design.
Already without AI, rent-seeking is prevalent in popular music, maybe it's even an integral part?
Or listen to the radio maybe. As a 90s and 2000s dance music lover, there's plenty of rehashing old content, sometimes licensed, other times it's just what music is.
> a lot of songs are incredibly similar to older songs (see ed sheeran v marvin gaye), and they're not infringing
They're really not that similar. The Marvin Gaye family lawsuits are absolutely frivolous and a stain on his legacy. Suing over the same chord progression (ignoring tons of small variations that actually matter) would be like suing an author because they also had a character who was an angsty teenager with overbearing parents. Suing over a mostly-kinda-similar riff is like suing an author because they also used the sentence "Terrified, he ran." The songs only sound similar when you ignore all elements of the whole song and focus exactly on a few ways in which they overlap out of context.
They're nothing like GitHub CoPilot literally outputting comments that include copyright notifications from their original author. It's much more like suing someone who directly samples your song as a core element of their own (the Vanilla Ice example in the other comment).
> Most modern neural nets, and certainly LLMs, are overparameterized, which means they are completely capable of regurgitating exact training instances.
No they're not.
GPT-3: Model size: 175 GB, training set size 300 billion tokens.
GPT-4: Not disclosed.
LLaMA: Model size: 65GB, training set size, 1 trillion tokens.
These things condense the data. They don't just index it, like a search engine.
> They can and do repeat copyrighted training data verbatim. It's absolutely copyright infringement when that happens.
My brain can do this too with music. In my 20's I used to be able to hear songs crystal clear in my head as if they were coming from the stereo itself.
Did my brain copy the song (yes!). Did it receive copyright approval from the artist (no!).
yeah, basically write an AI which would remove watermarks before training on data. Or after, if you've already trained (sarcasm).
Great programmatic solution indeed.
Most modern neural nets, and certainly LLMs, are overparameterized, which means they are completely capable of regurgitating exact training instances. They can and do repeat copyrighted training data verbatim. It's absolutely copyright infringement when that happens.
I anticipate AI researchers will soon come up with a way to ensure that outputs are a sufficient distance from all training inputs -- to essentially "block" direct regurgitation as valid output, with a tunable "max similarity" set to a safe distance. At that point we can start being more confident that our AI output is genuinely transformative and safe from (valid!) lawsuit.
> The bitching from writers and musicians reflects not that they're being ripped off, but that they're being out-produced.
This comes across as quite heartless. It will be interesting to see whether your view on this changes when AI starts making obsolete whatever you have spent your life specializing in.