Google says AI systems should be able to mine publishers’ work unless companies opt out, turning copyright law on its head

I agree with google, only I go a step further and say any AI model trained on public data should likewise be public for all and have its data sources public as well. Can't have it both ways Google.

To be fair, Google releases a lot of models as open source: https://huggingface.co/google
Using public content to create public models is also fine in my book.
But since it's Google I'm also sure they are doing a lot of shady stuff behind closed doors.
I hope that too, but I'm less optimistic. We live in a capitalistic world.

Copyright law already allows generative AI systems to scrape the internet. You need to change the law to forbid something, it isn't forbidden by default. Currently, if something is published publicly then it can be read and learned from by anyone (or anything) that can see it. Copyright law only prevents making copies of it, which a large language model does not do when trained on it.

A lot of licensing prevents or constrains creating derivative works and monetizing them. The question is for example if you train an AI on GPL code, does the output of the model constitute a derivative work?
If yes, Github Copilot is illegal as it produces code that should comply to multiple conflicting license requirements. If no, I can write some simple AI that is "trained" to regurgitate its output on a prompt, and run a leaked copy of Windows through it, then go around selling Binbows and MSFT can't do anything about it.
The truth is mostly between the two, this is just piracy, which always has been a gray area because of the difficulty of prosecuting it, previously because the perpetrators were many and hard to find, now it's because the perpetrators are billion dollar companies with expensive lawyer teams.
- The question is for example if you train an AI on GPL code, does the output of the model constitute a derivative work?
  This question is completely independent of whether the code was generated by an AI or a human. You compare code A with code B, and if the judge and jury agree that code A is a derivative work of code B then you win the case. If the two bodies of work don't have sufficient similarities then they aren't derivative.
  If no, I can write some simple AI that is “trained” to regurgitate its output on a prompt
  You've reinvented copy-and-paste, not an "AI." AIs are deliberately designed to not copy-and-paste. What would be the point of one that did? Nobody wants that.
  Filtering the code through something you call an AI isn't going to have any impact on whether you get sued. If the resulting code looks like copyrighted code, then you're in trouble. If it doesn't look like copyrighted code then you're fine.
- then go around selling Binbows and MSFT can't do anything about it
  I think this already happen. A very practical example, windows GUI has been copied by many Linus distros. And with windows 11 there's clearly a reference to Apple MacOS GUI with a sparkling of Google material design.
  Should apple and Google be able to sue Microsoft because it "copied" their work? Should Google be able to sue apple because they "copied" the notification drop-down in iOS?
  As you say it's really a grey area because the only reason we consider AI code to be "regurgitated" while human code to be "inspired" is only because we give humans more recognition of their intellectual abilities.
- You should read this.
An AI model is a derivative work of its training data and thus a copyright violation if the training data is copyrighted.
- A human is a derivative work of its training data, thus a copyright violation if the training data is copyrighted.
  The difference between a human and ai is getting much smaller all the time. The training process is essentially the same at this point, show them a bunch of examples and then have them practice and provide feedback.
  If that human is trained to draw on Disney art, then goes on to create similar style art for sale that isn't a copyright infringement. Nor should it be.
- Derivative works are only copyright violations when they replicate substantial portions of the original without changes.
  The entirety of human civilization is derivative works. Derivative works aren't infringement.
- It is not a derivative work, the model does not contain any recognizable part of the original material that it was trained on.

It’s not turning copyright law on its head, in fact asserting that copyright needs to be expanded to cover training a data set IS turning it on its head. This is not a reproduction of the original work, its learning about that work and and making a transformative use from it. An generative work using a trained dataset isn’t copying the original, its learning about the relationships that original has to the other pieces in the data set.

This is artificial pseudointelligence, not a person. It doesn't learn about or transform anything.
- Im not the one anthropomorphising the technology here.
- To take those statements seriously, you will need to:
  define and describe in detail the processes by which "a person" learns
  define and describe in detail how "a person" transforms anything
  define and describe in detail what is "intelligence"
  define and describe in detail what these "artificial paeudointelligences" are doing
  define and describe in detail the differences between the latter and the previous points
  Otherwise, I'll claim that "a person" is running exactly the same processes (neural networks, LLMs, hallucinations), and that calling these AIs "artificial paeudointelligences" is nothing else than dehumanizing a minority just because you feel threatened by them.
The lines between learning and copying are being blurred with AI. Imagine if you could replay a movie any time you like in your head just from watching it once. Current copyright law wasn’t written with that in mind. It’s going to be interesting how this goes.
- Imagine being able to recall the important parts of a movie, it's overall feel, and significant themes and attributes after only watching it one time.
  That's significantly closer to what current AI models do. It's not copyright infringement that there are significant chunks of some movies that I can play back in my head precisely. First because memory being owned by someone else is a horrifying thought, and second because it's not a distributable copy.
- Imagine if you could replay a movie any time you like in your head just from watching it once.
  Two points:
  These AIs can't do that; they need thousands or millions of repetitions to "learn" the movie, and every time they "replay" the movie it is different from the original.
  "learning by rote" is something fleshbags can do, and are actually required to by most education systems.
  So either humans have been breaking the copyright all this time, or the machines aren't breaking it either.
- So works derived from other works should not be copyrightable? Oh wait, that's specifically allowed. As long as it's not being reproduced 1:1 then it falls under fair use. The argument that one should get paid for that is absurd. You can't copyright the idea of something. If that were the case then you could never write another poem or novel or short story because someone already did that and to do so would be "stealing." It would be ridiculous.
- Bizarre amount of assumptions in your ignorant wall of text post. I’m an attorney that’s worked in copyright for small artists and creators. In my current job i fight back against the tech giants and try to reign in specifically Google Amazon and Meta with consumer protection regulations. The fuck are you?

To be honest I'm fine with it in isolation, copyright is bullshit and the internet is a quasi-socialist utopia where information (an infinitely-copyable resource which thus has infinite supply and 0 value under capitalist economics) is free and humanity can collaborate as a species. The problem becomes that companies like Google are parasites that take and don't give back, or even make life actively worse for everyone else. The demand for compensation isn't so much because people deserve compensation for IP per se, it's an implicit understanding of the inherent unfairness of Google claiming ownership of other people's information while hoarding it and the wealth it generates with no compensation for the people who actually made that wealth. "If you're going to steal from us, at least pay us a fraction of the wealth like a normal capitalist".

If they made the models open source then it'd at least be debatable, though still suss since there's a huge push for companies to replace all cognitive labor with AI whether or not it's even ready for that (which itself is only a problem insofar as people need to work to live, professionally created media is art insofar as humans make it for a purpose but corporations only care about it as media/content so AI fits the bill perfectly). Corporations are artificial metaintelligences with misaligned terminal goals so this is a match made in superhell. There's a nonzero chance corporations might actually replace all human employees and even shareholders and just become their own version of skynet.

Really what I'm saying is we should eat the rich, burn down the googleplex, and take back the means of production.

- That's fair, also congratulations. Idk if I would count that towards contributing to the internet though, since it's all within their walled garden on their own terms. It's helpful for people, but only insofar as it helps Google. 10 years ago I might be less critical since they were still in their "don't be evil" phase and creating open source projects like Android left and right, something they're evidently regretting now and trying to lock down using propriety core apps. It's also worth noting Google's AI employees authored "Attention is all you need", the paper which laid the groundwork for modern Transformer-based LLMs, though that's an architecture and not a full model or code.
Okay so I took back the means of production but it says it's a subscription basis now
- That's late-stage capitalism for you – even revolution comes with a subscription fee
Or, if it was some non-profit doing the work for the good of everyone :')
- If only there were some kind of open AI research lab lmao. In all seriousness Anthropic is pretty close to that, though it appears to be a public benefit corporation rather than a nonprofit. Luckily the open source community in general is really picking up the slack even without a centralized organization, I wouldn't be surprised if we get something like the Linux Foundation eventually.

Copyright law is gaslighting at this point. Piracy being extremely illegal but then this kind of shit being allowed by default is insane.

We really are living under the boot of the ruling classes.

If you want "this kind of stuff" (by which I assume you mean the training of AI) to not be allowed by default, then you are basically asking for a world in which the only legal generative AIs belong to giant well-established copyright holders like Adobe and Getty. That path leads deeper underneath the boots of those ruling classes, not out from under them.
- I don't think it should be allowed to be trained off any of this stuff for entertainment/art/etc. at all. Like the dream future of AI was all the shitty boring stuff handled for us so we could sit back, chill and focus on arts, real scientific research, general individual betterment etc.
  Instead we have these companies trying to get them doing all the art and interesting things whilst we all either have no job, money, or good standard of living, or the dangerous / shitty jobs.
The ruling class is seeing the end of capitalism. They're getting desperate and making it obvious.

Can we get some young politicians elected who has a degree in IT ? Boomers dont understand technology that's why these companies keeps screwing the people.

It's because they're corrupt and young people are just as susceptible to lobbyists bribes, unfortunately. The gerontocracy doesn't make things better though, that's for sure.
- True but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be better to have politicians who have a better understanding of the systems they're legislating. "People can be bribed" isn't a good excuse to not change anything.
- True. Human beings are the worst
This is more true than anything.

Personally I’d rather stop posting creative endeavours entirely than simply let it be stolen and regurgitated by every single company who’s built a thing on the internet.

I just take comfort in the fact that my art will never be good enough for a generative Ai to steal.
- If it's on any major platform, these companies will probably still use it since I doubt at that point if they were allowed to scrape the whole internet they'd have any human looking over the art used.
  It'll just be thrown in with everything else similar to how I always seem to find paper towels in the dryer after doing laundry.
I think the topic is more complex than that.
Otherwise you could say you'd rather stop posting creative endeavours entirely than simply let it be stolen and regurgitated by every single artist who use internet for references and inspiration.
There's not only the argument "but companies do so for profit" because many artist do the same, maybe they are designers, illustrators or other and you'll work will give them ideas for their commissions
Voluntary obscurity is always an option, I suppose.
We need to actively start sabotaging the data sources these LLMs are based on. Make AI worthless.
- Your comment right here provides useful training data for LLMs that might use Fediverse data as part of their training set. How would you propose "sabotaging" it?

Books will start needing to add a robots.txt page to the back of the book

Which will be ignored by search engines, as is tradition?
- … which was the style at the time.

OK, so I shall create a new thread, because I was harassed. Why bother publishing anything if it's original if it's just going to be subsumed by these corporations? Why bother being an original human being with thoughts to share that are significant to the world if, in the end, they're just something to be sucked up and exploited? I'm pretty smart. Keeping my thoughts to myself.

This is a tendency I've heard that I haven't been able to understand. What is the new risk of expressing your thoughts, prose, or poetry online that didn't exist before and currently exists with LLMs scraping them? How would the corporations exploit your work through data scraping that would demotivate you to express it at all? Because I know tone doesn't come accross well in text, I want to clarify that these are genuine questions because my answers to these questions seem to be very different than many and I'd like to understand where that difference in perspective comes from.
- I think this largely boils down to the time scales required. A person copying your work has a minimum amount of time it takes them to do that, even when it's just copy and paste. An LLM can copy thousands of different developer's code, for instance, and completely launder the license. That's not ok. Why would we allow machines to commit fraud when we don't allow people to?

With each day I hate the internet and these fucking companies even more.

Google can go suck on a lemon!

Lemons are delicious af though. Why reward them for their bs?

Worth considering that this is already the law in the EU. Specifically, the Directive (EU) 2019/790 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 April 2019 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market has exceptions for text and data mining.

Article 3 has a very broad exception for scientific research: "Member States shall provide for an exception to the rights provided for in Article 5(a) and Article 7(1) of Directive 96/9/EC, Article 2 of Directive 2001/29/EC, and Article 15(1) of this Directive for reproductions and extractions made by research organisations and cultural heritage institutions in order to carry out, for the purposes of scientific research, text and data mining of works or other subject matter to which they have lawful access." There is no opt-out clause to this.

Article 4 has a narrower exception for text and data mining in general: "Member States shall provide for an exception or limitation to the rights provided for in Article 5(a) and Article 7(1) of Directive 96/9/EC, Article 2 of Directive 2001/29/EC, Article 4(1)(a) and (b) of Directive 2009/24/EC and Article 15(1) of this Directive for reproductions and extractions of lawfully accessible works and other subject matter for the purposes of text and data mining." This one's narrower because it also provides that, "The exception or limitation provided for in paragraph 1 shall apply on condition that the use of works and other subject matter referred to in that paragraph has not been expressly reserved by their rightholders in an appropriate manner, such as machine-readable means in the case of content made publicly available online."

So, effectively, this means scientific research can data mine freely without rights' holders being able to opt out, and other uses for data mining such as commercial applications can data mine provided there has not been an opt out through machine-readable means.

I think the key problem with a lot of the models right now is that they were developed for "research", without the rights holders having the option to opt out when the models were switched to for-profit. The portfolio and gallery websites, from which the bulk of the artwork came from, didn't even have opt out options until a couple of months ago. Artists were therefore considered to have opted in to their work being used commercially because they were never presented with the option to opt out.
So at the bare minimum, a mechanism needs to be provided for retroactively removing works that would have been opted out of commercial usage if the option had been available and the rights holders had been informed about the commercial intentions of the project. I would favour a complete rebuild of the models that only draws from works that are either in the public domain or whose rights holders have explicitly opted in to their work being used for commercial models.
Basically, you can't deny rights' holders an ability to opt out, and then say "hey, it's not our fault that you didn't opt out, now we can use your stuff to profit ourselves".
- Common sense would surely say that becoming a for-profit company or whatever they did would mean they've breached that law. I assume they figured out a way around it or I've misunderstood something though.
- So at the bare minimum, a mechanism needs to be provided for retroactively removing works that would have been opted out of commercial usage if the option had been available and the rights holders had been informed about the commercial intentions of the project.
  If you do this, you limit access to AI tools exclusively to big companies. They already employ enough artists to create a useful AI generator, they'll simply add that the artist agrees for their work to be used in training to the employment contract. After a while, the only people who have access to reasonably good AI is are those major corporations, and they'll leverage that to depress wages and control employees.
  The WGA's idea that the direct output of an AI is uncopyrightable doesn't distort things so heavily in favor of Disney and Hasbro. It's also more legally actionable. You don't name Microsoft Word as the editor of a novel because you used spell check even if it corrected the spelling and grammar of every word. Naturally you don't name generative AI as an author or creator.
  Though the above argument only really applies when you have strong unions willing to fight for workers, and with how gutted they are in the US, I don't think that will be the standard.
- Practically you would have to separate model architecture from weights. Weights are licensed as research use only, while the architecture is the actual scientific contribution. Maybe some instructions on best train the model.
  Only problem is that you can't really prove if someone just retrained research weights or trained from scratch using randomized weights. Also certain alterations to the architecture are possible, so only the "headless" models are used.
  I think there's some research into detecting retraining, but I can imagine it's not fool proof.
The standard needs to be opt-in, not opt-out. You can't take people's stuff without their permission. Just because they didn't contact you and tell you directly that you're not allowed to take their lawn ornaments doesn't make them free.
- Why not? Copyright is a monopoly. Generally society benefits from having it as weak as possible.

This is like the beginning of a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where they put the responsibility on the main character to go to the department of transportation basement and see that they had posted a notice that they're going to destroy his house. No Google, you don't get to dictate that people come to your dark pattern website and tell you you're not allowed to use their content. Disapproval is implied until people OPT-IN! It's a good thing Google changed their motto from Don't Be Evil or we'd have quite the conundrum.

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: ::: spoiler Click here to see the summary The company has called for Australian policymakers to promote “copyright systems that enable appropriate and fair use of copyrighted content to enable the training of AI models in Australia on a broad and diverse range of data, while supporting workable opt-outs for entities that prefer their data not to be trained in using AI systems”.

The call for a fair use exception for AI systems is a view the company has expressed to the Australian government in the past, but the notion of an opt-out option for publishers is a new argument from Google.

Dr Kayleen Manwaring, a senior lecturer at UNSW Law and Justice, told Guardian Australia that copyright would be one of the big problems facing generative AI systems in the coming years.

“The general rule is that you need millions of data points to be able to produce useful outcomes … which means that there’s going to be copying, which is prima facie a breach of a whole lot of people’s copyright.”

“If you want to reproduce something that’s held by a copyright owner, you have to get their consent, not an opt out type of arrangement … what they’re suggesting is a wholesale revamp of the way that exceptions work.”

Toby Murray, associate professor at the University of Melbourne’s computing and information systems school, said Google’s proposal would put the onus on content creators to specify whether AI systems could absorb their content or not, but he indicated existing licensing schemes such as Creative Commons already allowed creators to mark how their works can be used. :::

Google is smoking that pack.

Me, twenty years ago: i wish the word web 2.0 could disappear forever

Me, like 8 years ago: i wish the word web 3.0 could disappear forever

Monkeys paw: 👆

AI, coming crashing through the window and blindsiding me upside the head: surprise bitch

If my data is worth scraping then it is worth Google paying me for it.

How exactly did books.google.com turn out ?