Wow you mean the state serves capital? I thought for sure it would once again fight for the rights of artists and their extremely profitable IP. \s \s \s
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2025
177 points (98.4% liked)
Technology
71986 readers
3824 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
The tinternet is getting like the Wild West again, circa early 200s and Napster and all that... This will pass, dunno when or how but it will pass, or perhaps we will start getting everything paywalled so LLMs can't just scrape data without some sort of payment. I don't actually know many people that like AI nowadays
It's sort of like that... Except instead of a bunch of regular people sharing music, it's a bunch of capitalists stealing all art for profit. Ofc the major difference is that's it's legal for capital.
That's probably your social bubble. My company is currently deepthroating everything that has AI in its name. I jokingly mentioned they should rename the company to Jira&AI, the joke was not well received.
Anyway, most people I know (including me) are somewhere in the middle - not quite fans in the traditional sense, but definitely not disliking AI.
It is, but as many are artists in some ways it is that they dislike the most
I’d feel better about this if meta actually produced anything of value and I was able to also violate their copyright, but they’re just fucking leeches bro
All I'm hearing is that pirating is A-OK as long as you claim it's for model training
The ruling explicitly does not allow pirating. It only lets you run ML training on legally acquired media.
They still haven't ruled on copyright infringement from pirating the media used to train, and they haven't ruled on copyright status of outputs (what it takes to be considered transformative).
This is judge Alsup, same guy who ruled in Oracle vs Google
Sorry, but no. That's just the paper-thin excuse.
Pirating, like pretty much anything else that's sometimes a crime in the current US, is A-OK if you can buy enough judges and politicians.
I just put a thin blue line sticker on my case and full send that bitch.
I'm torrenting movies in order to develop my own AI, your honor. I rest my case. 😎
The judge explicitly did not allow piracy here. Only legally acquired media can be used for training.
American law has become a literal fucking joke (IAAL). I could’ve guessed the could get the outcome of this case without any facts: the huge corporation wins over authors. American law is no longer capable of holding major corporations to account, so we need a new legal system—one that’s actually functional.
But the actual process of an AI system distilling from thousands of written works to be able to produce its own passages of text qualified as “fair use” under U.S. copyright law because it was “quintessentially transformative,” Alsup wrote.
Thats the actual argument and the judge is right here. LLMs are transformative in every sense of the word. The technology is even called "transformers".
Fallacious argument.
Something that can't generate wine glass full to the brim without a band-aid fix is far from "transformative." Even if it were:
More like obfuscated plagiarism.
Nope I'm literally a data programmer working in this field. Any sufficiently transformed data even coming from hard copyright is transformative work and currently LLMs meet this criteria and will continue to do so. Wanna bet?
It depends on your definition of "is". In reality it depends on the original art and how it's transformed. But legally it's whatever benefits capital (aka your boss). I wouldn't bet against your boss paying off the courts, lawyers, etc.
Ok so if I don't generate capital from it theres no crime? You can see how the original argument that all copying is copyright breach. Then you can infinitely dig into this - is my monitor copying pixels on my screen copying? What about the browser cache? So copyright can only be argued from the pov that breach has to be capital generating or direct damage creating like using that data for libel or something.
I think there's a blurry line here where you can easily train an LLM to just regurgitate the source material by overfitting, and at what point is it "transformative enough"? I think there's little doubt that current flagship models usually are transformative enough, but that doesn't apply to everything using the same technology - even though this case will be used as precedence for all of that.
There's also another issue in that while safeguards are generally in place, without them llms would be very capable of quoting entire pages at least of popular books. And jailbreaking llms isn't exactly unheard of. They also at least used to really like just verbatim repeating news articles on obscure topics.
What I'm mainly getting at is that LLMs can be transformative, but they also can plagiarize. Much like any human could. The question is then, if training LLMs on copyrighted data is allowed, will the company be held accountable when their LLM does plagiarize, the same way a person would be? Or would the better decision be to prohibit training on copyrighted data because actually transforming it meaningfully can not be guaranteed, and copyright holders actually finding these violations is very hard?
Though idk the case details, if the argument was purely focused on using the material to produce the model, rather than including the ultimate step of outputting text to anyone who asks, it was probably doomed to fail from the start and the decision makes perfect sense. And that doesn't seem too unlikely to have happened because realizing this would require the lawyer making the case to actually understand what training an LLM does.
You are agreeing with the post you responded to. This ruling is only about training a model on legally obtained training data. It does not say it is ok to pirate works--if you pirate a work, no matter what you do with the infringing copy you've made, you've committed copyright infringement. It does not talk about model outputs, which is a very nuanced issue and likely to fall along similar analyses as music copyright imo. It only talks about whether training a model is intrinsically an infringement of copyright. And it isn't because anything else is insane and be functionally impossible to differentiate from learning a writing technique by reading a book you bought from an author. Even a model that has overfit training data, it is in no way recognizable to any particular training datum. It's hyperdimensioned matrix of numbers defining relationships between features and relationships between relationships.
This case didn't cover the copyright status of outputs. The ruling so far is just about the process of training itself.
IMHO the generative ML companies should be required to build a process tracking the influence of distinct samples on the outputs, and inform users of potential licensing status
Division of liability / licensing responsibility should depend on who contributes what to the prompt / generation. The less it takes for the user to trigger the model to generate an output clearly derived from a protected work, the more liability lies on the model operator. If the user couldn't have known, they shouldn't be liable. If the user deliberately used jailbreaks, etc, the user is clearly liable.
But you get a weird edge case when users unknowingly copy prompts containing jailbreaks, though
Yeah, well, I could call my dick the Magnum Opus but that wouldn't make it two feet long.
Do you want a new constitution in the United States?
If a pact between enslavers is a complete failure, why not just make another one? \s
Could start with a guillotine for corporations and see how that goes.