At least Microsoft copilot has been caught reproducing large sections of code verbatim. Try selling a book that contains copies of Disney products and see how that turns out.

Commercial software is not a person

> If A.I. can't use others copyrighted work to learn and train, why can people?

But it is allowed to use copyrighted works to train an AI - as long as it constitutes fair use. What's probably not fair use though, is to sell or flood the market with cheap works produced by a machine, if it negatively impacts the market for the original works it's trained on. Copyright laws make a distinction between humans and machines, because they're not the same thing. For example, works created solely by non-humans, whether a machine or a monkey, can't be copyrighted. According to the US copyright office, it requires "the nexus between the human mind and creative expression".

One reason is that AI training is done by copying the training data to hundreds or even thousands of training nodes. It’s near to creating a book of every painting and giving that book to every person learning art without compensating or even crediting the artists who have art in that book.

Another reason is trained AIs have inhuman memories and their models spit out the original art, in some cases near verbatim. You can look at it as compressing the data. Usually highly lossy compression but not always. And courts have shown it is clearly piracy to copy differently compressed movies/music/etc.

This is the debate of human vs computational divid at the very beginning. There are few ways to have this debate without it being philosophical.

There is not a human that is able to analyze and retain data the same way a computer can. Human memory is flawed and made efficient. When we view something, we don’t download it or literally transfer data to ourselves. Every part of the experience is an interpretation from external to internal.

As of this point a copy of an image, that would fall under copyright, has to be transferred to a system, to then be interpreted with a process that dictates how many samples to take of an object.

These systems can’t accept usage terms itself to view a file or an artwork and isn’t being brought to a gallery with the approval of the owners to view and scan the images itself. If people were paid to create images with the style of someone else, they are pulling from their brains interpretation and flawed, by nature, memory storage to interpret that.

This copyright case is honestly one of the first major stepping stones and will be a reference to how we classify AI in the future and a precedent for how we legally allow it’s use. Which is something we will have to face one day, just like every SciFi novel has warned us. But how and when that determination and at what stage we decide that is going to be important. At this stage I would say if the system cannot be legally accept the usage terms to an image, then it isn’t allowed to use those images in any manner.

From a current legal standpoint, we have currently decided that AI does not have any right to claim copyright on what it creates, and the AI creator has no right to claim the output. Then following that thought, it is not in a position to be able to use copyright covered material as the owner cannot accept the terms on the AI’s behalf and the AI cannot accept them in its own. This has been decided in reverse already.

Further it’s my opinion that AI should be restricted to single tasks and segmented. If an AI creates writing prompts, then that’s all it can do and all it can be fed with, it an AI writes code, then that’s all it should return and all it can be trained on.

For a point of future reference. It’s not about what determination gets made for AI in the long run, but how we are prepared to use an understand it now. AI created now is purely a tool for operator and consumer use.

The art isn't invalid. It may, however, infringe copyright and make the artist subject to damages.

In that specific case, no. Fair use laws cover that, and Google vs author guild had solved that specific case in court. Using your work falls under fair use, just like human reading your work and incorporating ideas in his/her own work.

That said, if you wrote shit in internet, let me assure you, it is almost useless for training writing AI. Believe me, I tried to do it on dataset of /r/writingprompts, the thing is that most writing there just sucks, which is not bad, as the only way of learning to write is by writing, thus putting bad work on the internet. It doesn't change the fact that it objectively sucks.

If I wanted to write an actual writing AI I would use a collection of classical works, works that stood the test of time, and frankly, the difference between those and what is put on internet is often in how scenes and characters are flushed out.

Humans get inspired by their own perception and imperfect memories of other artists and experiences in their life, AI models literally take the art and add it to their model.

Regardless, you seem to be proposing we treat AI models as if they are human beings and not products. We aren’t going to do that. It’s a nice philosophical game maybe, but if you just look at the facts of the matter you’re dealing with a case of a company taking unlicensed artwork and adding it into their product.

See, that's the thing. When humans copy work, we have laws that step in and allow the owner of the work to say "No, you can't do that". Humans could copy anything they see, but there are legal consequences if they copy the wrong thing - especially if they gain financially by doing so. This is very much an argument about whether what these tools are doing is sufficiently like what a human could do for the laws that apply to humans to apply.

If copilot for instance generates code that (were a human to write it) would be legally considered (likely after a long and damaging lawsuit) to be a derived work of something licensed under the GPL, then that derived work must also legally be licensed undrr the GPL.

What's more, there is no clear authorial provenance. Say you find a github repo that contains what looks like a near-perfect copy of some code you own and which you released under a license of your choice. If a human wrote it, that's a legal issue.

Fundamentally, we're arguing here if it's okay in a situation like this to say "Oh, no, it's legal because software did it for me". And remember, there's no way to prove how much of a text file was written by a human and how much by software once it's saved.

The AI model, presumably machine learning, is not even remotely close to being "like a human". It's called "artificial intelligence" for a reason. The "training" data heavily influences the output.

If you made a machine learning model on a very small scale, such as putting 10 images from artists as its training data, the produced work would very obviously be just portions of the images you fed it. This is no different than what we are seeing now, just on a bigger scale. The output for the source code generation, or art generation, is quite literally using stolen portions of code/images.

I feel people are looking at the final outcome rather than how it got there.

This is the equivalent of hiring one guy to just copy and paste code from the internet for every feature, etc. for a piece of software to be developed (with a lot of imperfections, mind you) and giving the guy a raise because the outcome works.