Any new "defense" that claims to use adversarial perturbations to undermine GenAI training should have to explain why this paper does not apply to their technique: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.12027
The answer is, almost unfailingly, "this paper applies perfectly to our technique because we are just rehashing the same ideas on new modalities". If you believe it's unethical for GenAI models to train on people's music, isn't is also unethical to trick those people into posting their music online with a fake "defense" that won't actually protect them?
You are assuming input-transformation based defenses in the image domain transfer to the music recognition domain, when we know they don't automatically even transfer to the speech recognition domain.
But 'protection' of any one song isn't the entire point. It only takes less than a fraction of a percent of corpus data to have persistent long term effects in the final model, or increase costs and review requirements to those stealing their content.
As most training is unsupervised, because the cost and limited access to quality, human labeled data, it wouldn't take much if even some obscure, limited market, older genres which still have active fan bases, like Noise rock to start filtering into recommendation engines and impact user satisfaction.
Most of the speech protections, just force attacks to be in the perceptible audio range, with lo-fi portions like those of TripHop, that would be non-detectable without the false positive rate going way up. With bands like Arab On Radar, Shellac, or The Oxes, it wouldn't be detectable.
But it is also like WAFs/AV software/IDS. The fact that it can't help with future threats today is immaterial. Any win of these leaches has some value.
Obviously any company intentionally applying even the methods in your linked paper to harvest protected images would be showing willful intent to circumvent copyright protections and I am guessing most companies will just toss any file that it thinks has active protections just because how sensitive training is.
Most musicians also know that copyright only protects the rich.
I am ignorant here, this is a genuine question - is there any reason to assume that a paper solely about image mimicry can be blanket-applied, as OP is doing, to audio mimicry?
To add, all the new audio models (partially) use diffusion methods that are exactly the same methods as used on images - the audio generation can be thought of as an image generation of a spectrogram of an audio file.
For early experiments people literally took Stable Diffusion and fine tuned it on labelled spectrograms of music snippets, then used the fine tuned model to generate new images of spectrograms guided by text, and then took those images and turned them back into audio via re-synthesis of that spectral image to a .wav.
The more advanced music generators out now I believe have more of a 'stems' approach and a larger processing pipeline to increase fidelity and add tracking vocal capability but the underlying idea is the same.
Any adversarial attack to hide information in the spectrograph to fool the model into categorizing the track as something it is not isn't different than the image adversarial attacks which have been found to have ways to be mitigated.
Various forms of filtering for inaudible spectral information coupled with methods that destroy and re-synthesize/randomize phase information would likely break this poisoning attack.
The short answer is that they are applying the same defense to audio as to images, and so we should expect that the same attacks will work as well.
More specifically, there are a few moving parts here - the GenAI model they're trying to defeat, the defense applied to data items, and the data cleaning process that a GenAI company may use to remove the defense. So we can look at each and see if there's any reason to expect things to turn out differently than they did in the image domain. The GenAI models follow the same type of training, and while they of course have slightly different architectures to ingest audio instead of images, they still use the same basic operations. The defenses are exactly the same - find small perturbations that are undetectable to humans but produce a large change in model behavior. The cleaning processes are not particularly image-specific, and translate very naturally to audio. It's stuff like "add some noise and then run denoising".
Given all of this, it would be very surprising if the dynamics turned out to be fundamentally different just because we moved from images to audio, and the onus should be on the defense developers to justify why we should expect that to be the case.
>find small perturbations that are undetectable to humans but produce a large change in model behavior.
What artists don't realize by this they are just improving the models relative to human capabilities. The adversarial techniques like, for example making a stop sign look like something else, well likely be weeded out of the model by a convergence of model performance to average or above average human performance.
How long until somebody comes up with another reCAPTCHA type system that forces users to click on images to identify them but that data is then used to verify training data for LLMs? (assuming this isn't happening already)
Google’s captchas have always been used for AI training as far as I know. For example the early versions where you had to type in two displayed words were used for Google’s book scanning program.
Well, the original purpose was to do OCR for things like the NYTs archives and other libraries. The part where you identify road signs & traffic lights was supposedly to train self driving cars. Now, it's apparently just more analytics & tracking for Google to sell you things. [1]
But, since LLM is so error prone & AI companies don't seem to want to pay humans to verify either the data being input into LLM training is valid, or the output is accurate, something like a forced CAPTCHA to be used for verifying correct LLM data by unpaid labor.
It's just a dystopian thought I had. I probably shouldn't have said it outloud (it might give them ideas).
>Well, the original purpose was to do OCR for things like the NYTs archives and other libraries. The part where you identify road signs & traffic lights was supposedly to train self driving cars. Now, it's apparently just more analytics & tracking for Google to sell you things.
You seem hung up on the idea of the original purpose being one specific thing. The original purpose was to create a dataset to train AIs, the first adopters were OCR programs and such, but it's not like it was created to only be used for that one thing.
Some of the sibling comments had questions around purposefully releasing defenses which don’t work. I think Carlini’s (one of the paper authors) post can add some important context: https://nicholas.carlini.com/writing/2024/why-i-attack.html.
TLDR: Once these defenses are broken, all previously protected work is perpetually unprotected, so they are flawed at a foundational level.
Ignoring these arguments and pretending they don’t exist is pretty unethical.
>o it seems a logical leap to say they know it doesn't and are doing this as a scheme?
In some of the earlier image protection articles the people involved seemed rather shady about the capabilities. Would have to do some HN searching for those articles.
But everything at the end of the day will be a scheme if the end result is for humans to listen to it. You cannot make a subset of music that can be heard by humans (and actually sounds good) that cannot be prefiltered to be learned by AI. I've said the same thing about images, the same thing will be true about audio, movies, actions in real leave, et al.
These schemes will likely work for a few of the existing models, then fall apart quickly the moment a new model arrives. What is worse for defense is audio quality for humans is remaining the same while GPU speeds and algorithms increase in speeds over time meaning the time until a model beats the new defense will trend to unity.
Right, but that just makes it a failed defense, not a scheme to dupe artists into false confidence. Maybe the result will be similar but I don't think the intent here is a con, it sounds pretty genuine.
I think of it as a claim like "we almost have a machine that violates thermodynamics". To avoid confusing the layman that will automatically assume an unlimited energy has been created said claims must be well defined as to what has actually been accomplished.
While the artist in question can have the best intentions, conmen will swoop down on this and productize it, and then artists will be sad and confused when it has zero long term effect on machine learning. That is, except making machine learning more resilient to adversarial attacks.
I like Benn Jordan because he’s clearly got a grasp on a functional understanding of machine learning, but that’s not his primary background. He comes from a music production background, so his focus is more practical and results-oriented.
It will be really interesting as this knowledge percolates into more and more fields, what domain experts do with it. I see ML as more of a bag of tricks that can be applied to many fields.
>He comes from a music production background, so his focus is more practical and results-oriented
It's his art and his livelihood too, so it's also personal. These people want to steal his art and create a world full of soulless cheap muzak, while simultaneously putting him out of work.
They’ve been doing that since the recording studio process developed the model in the 1920s or so. They would hire songwriters to make generic pop music with generic lyrics, and keep it in the vault until you have some attractive young singer you want to use for marketing then you give them an album of these songs to sing. And they are sure to sell because you’ve been priming the american ear for these chord progressions for a long time, and you fill all the air in the room with your marketing for this singer leaving people little option but to hear the latest carefully crafted earworm. Still happens today maybe even more perfected with psychological studies intersecting with music and marketing. The best musicians have never and will never be a product of that machine. Seek out live music.
Are you sure you mean "stealing"? As in deprive him of his own recordings?
I am curious if anyone read Harry Potter in bootleg form from a LLM. I mean, LLMs are the worst tools for infringing - they are approximate, expensive and slow, while copying is instant, perfect and free. You can apply the same logic for other modalities.
Moreover, who's got the time to see someone else's AI shit when they can generate their own, perfectly customized to their liking? I personally generated a song about my cat and kid. It had zero commercial value but was fun for 2-3 people to listen.
The logic "gen AI is theft" is pretty careless. Let's say I use gen-AI to identify a skin sore, and seek appropriate treatment. Who's copyright was being violated? How about if I ask it to make a story where my kid is a protagonist? In fact the more I put into a prompt, the less it looks like anything in the training set, the longer the discussion, the greater the divergence.
I'm saying that training gen-AI on Benn Jordan's art against his will, without permission, and without remuneration, is theft. You can train on a suitably licensed database of medical images if you want.
It depends, is it a LoRa focused on Benn? Is it intended to replicate his style? Or is Benn one of the billion authors in the training set? In that case his impact will be minimal, and the generated images/texts will be very different from any training example, mostly reflecting the prompt.
If the impact is really so minimal that the appropriate compensation is zero, then surely your AI would also be just fine without training on those works?
I understand what you are saying, but there are different kinds of learning. If your model learns how many fingers are on a hand, it does not violate copyright in that regard. Every copyrighted work relies on facts, abstractions and styles they don't own. Models don't have the necessary capacity to remember exact expression from each source, only generalities are being learned and later recombined. Blocking AI from training on grounds of copyright is a maximalist take on what copyright protects.
Let's say we change copyright to cover abstractions, then any human creator would be in deep trouble. Incidental similarities would make the creative act too risky.
Copyright as a concept is prescriptive not descriptive. It doesn't appear from an observation of the laws of reality, it's law to produce certain outcomes, so what copyright applies to is a question of what will the legislative bodies decide to do.
It's entirely valid to consider the act of training via ML a right granted by the creator like reproduction or performing, simply on the basis of protecting human art. The comparison with human learning can be made irrelevant (and IMO it's not the same fundamentally).
This is currently a discussion about plagiarism (the ethics) and what the outcomes are from unrestricted GenAI. How copyright applies to GenAI is a question for later, informed by the discussion by society at large (and lobbyists).
Setting aside questions like why the AI company is entitled to use these materials for free to develop commercial products, why would you even want to use art to learn factual information like how many fingers are on a hand? And how can you claim that this is what they pull from that art, right after we've just been through a wave of unmistakable AI Studio Ghibli copies?
I am more fearful that Ghilibi will demand to own their style, forbidding anyone from using it without permission. If everyone stakes a claim on some style or abstraction, then we are in a situation where nothing new can be created without automatically becoming infringing.
Wait, what happened to "it's just learning hands have five fingers"? A few comments ago you seemed to be saying that copying one artist's style on purpose might be bad, but that with billions of training images, no one source will be recognizeable in the output, and under that condition the impact to the artist is minimal. (and yet...[1]). Now you're taking the position that even using their work without permission to train AI for the purpose of directly and unmistakably replicating that artist's signature style is OK? Which is it?
And are you not fearful of a world in which nobody ever develops a new Ghibli-tier art style, because they'd starve in the process while competing against low-cost AI interpolations of prior art and AI companies make a fortune selling their efforts?
I'm fearful of a world in which anyone can print "Huggies" on counterfeit diapers and pass them off on Amazon as the real deal, so I hope you at least have room in your philosophy for trademarks, if not trademark art styles.
But either way, the good news is that you yourself can put in the work to hand-paint 100,000 frames of imitation Ghibli-style artwork and then train an AI on your portfolio and give it to whoever you want, or even master a style of your own; the bad news is that this will take sixty years of your life and career, during which time you'll have to feed yourself and your staff, and when you're done you might not feel so generous about giving it away for other people to use to sell greeting cards on Etsy.
But there's more good news, which is that Miyazaki is at least generous enough to allow at least one other studio to use his art style with his blessing, as long as the result lives up to the following standard: "every film you make, you’ll have to realize that has to be a film that is worthy to show to children".[2]
And personally, I do think he's earned the right to ask that much.
Nothing happened. Judge by the outputs, if they are infringing, the model learned expression. If not, it learned abstractions and styles. Why do you think there were only 2-3 lawsuits focusing on output infringement? If regurgitation was a big issue copyright holders would raise hell. But they focus on training data instead, which means the outputs are ok.
Anyway, focusing on training data is misguided unless you also restrict in context learning by policing what users can paste into the model.
That's the entire issue and the point of his attempts to poison his music from AI training: you can't opt-out of having your work used to train GenAI. I'd encourage you to watch his video.
GP clearly understands this. The comment makes perfect sense in the context of the thread. It is directed not at the artist, but at those who believe that AI companies training on art without permission aren't stealing anything.
How about you write a story where your kid is the protagonist, instead? I'm sure they'll look back on it with far more appreciation than something an LLM shit out.
No, it isn't. It is a widely understood if not explicitly stated and frankly, so easy to understand concept that I'm forced to conclude people as yourself who refuse point blank to understand it are merely doing so out of sheer determination.
When you post things online, be it art, be it music, be it photographs, be it the idle thoughts of your mind: you do this to share it with other people. That's the point. Why you want to share it can certainly change and explanations range from desiring an online following/clout to making money to simply the fact that you are driven to create and share whatever it is you do. This is the entire basis of the proto-Internet, to a degree where it predates the whole notion of extracting wealth from others via the Internet, and to a large degree, also predates the notion of a following.
If you desire to counteract this premise, then I would suggest you must somehow explain the existence of BBSes, newsgroups, anonymous web forums, blogs, etc. that are some of the oldest, dustiest pillars of the Internet, that our modern Internet would not exist without, and moreover, tons of these existed when analytics, statistics, etc. were barely conceived of. Some websites had a guest book, and some had visitor counters, and that was literally it. If you published on a blog like I did in the 90's, you had no fucking clue if anyone at all was actually reading it.
Or to put it shortly: The Internet and it's constituent communities existed long before there was a financial motive to publish, and absent that, what possible explanation could there be to publish apart from have your thing seen by people?
Ergo, to then take those intellectual products, shared in good faith for the enjoyment of others, run them through an industrial shredder, identify the most common patterns in their underlying structure, and sell it back to the public to whom it's existence simply must be credited, is perverse. It is self-expression without the self; it is merely expression, for the sake of expression. Noise. And we all kind of know this, prior to LLMs, the most common experience of this phenomenon was spam. Because if you simply posted links to whatever thing you were hocking it would be deleted immediately, spammers had to get clever. They would write what were ostensibly "blog posts" but they were not sincere expressions of anything apart from avaricious greed and a desire to camouflage it. Websites rose that were nothing but endless pages of this shit, designed to be optimally crawled by Google and other engines, linking back to sites seeking favor in search engines. Web forums at that time had to regularly moderate away content not for being hateful, but for being openly fucking stupid, irrelevant to topic, and simply seeking to drive traffic to other sites. Anywhere there was an unprotected text input who's contents may, eventually, arrive at a page was, to a spammer, a perfectly valid place to park their shit that nobody wanted, and park it they did.
And this is exactly what LLMs make. Soulless nothing who's primary reason to exist is to occupy space. Image generators are the same; their outputs exist because an image, no matter how generic or mediocre, would look better in this spot than a blank color. Music, without motivation or drive behind it, as a convenient alternative to silence. Video because an image would be boring. Functional, purposeless, driveless, motivation-free content to occupy the otherwise empty void around whatever thing you're actually trying to get eyes on: Text to cloak your links, mediocre art to cloak your sales pitch, etc.
And the reason the business parasite class is so thrilled about it's existence is that it finally allows people who have not nurtured creativity within themselves for whatever reason you'd care to assign access to creative outputs. They have sneered derisively at people who feel the drive to create and learn the ability to do so because fundamentally they do not believe creative products have value, that the attention, the adoration, and more than anything the money that said creatives are given so freely by their fans would be far better in their pocket instead. You can hear this in the way they talk: "I'm making a movie with AI!" said as though it's a revolutionary statement, as though great directors announce "I've started production on my next picture using Red Digital Cameras" like anyone from the public would give an ounce of a shit how a thing was made. They don't even consider "will someone want to see this movie?" because other people seeing it isn't the point, their elevation is the point. The promotion of their brand is the point. They have nothing at all to say, and it will doom anything they make to abject failure.
AI permits capital to access skill without requiring at all that skill be permitted to access capital.
Yeah, but when money becomes information then everyone has money. When music becomes information then everyone has music. When food, medicine and narcotics become information with genetic engineering, then everyone has food, medicine and narcotics. When weapons become information, everyone has weapons. When skyscrapers become information, then everyone has skyscrapers.
Also information wants to be sorted and compressed. See for example personal wikis using org-roam, personal databases of text files using org-mode in emacs and so on.
What good is for me, 10 songs which each one has 10 seconds of a part i like, and i am indifferent to the rest of the song. I take these 100 seconds in total and compress them down to a new song which is totally to my liking.
> Yeah, but when money becomes information then everyone has money.
Categorically, no. When everyone has money, in fact, no one has money. If you don't believe me ask someone from Zimbabwe.
> When food, medicine and narcotics become information with genetic engineering, then everyone has food, medicine and narcotics.
The barrier to everyone having food, medicine and narcotics is not money, it's the restriction of those important goods to people who have money; because food is not grown because people are hungry, nor are medicines made because they are sick; both of these things are done for profit, and people without money are unprofitable to the producers and distributors of those goods.
We have enough food for everyone almost twice over. The problem is the majority of it is pumped to overweight westerners who have disposable income.
> What good is for me, 10 songs which each one has 10 seconds of a part i like, and i am indifferent to the rest of the song. I take these 100 seconds in total and compress them down to a new song which is totally to my liking.
Oh that's so nice for you. And all it took was the bankrupting of every music artist.
Your views on this are so myopic as I genuinely wonder if you're a parody account. I didn't think it was possible for someone to be this short-sighted and selfish but here we are.
Ok, let's focus on food then instead of being all over the place. I personally produce on average 1 ton of olive oil a year. A little bit less 800 kilos or something, but let's say it's 1 ton. I keep some for myself and the rest is sold for profit.
Let's say someone in Zimbabwe wants to buy olive oil. He has to buy from the top producers in the world, i.e. Spain, Italy and Greece. I will sell olive oil to Zimbabweans only for profit, if they don't have money they will not have olive oil.
But let's say a smart Zimbabwean figures out a way to genetically modify Chlorella or Spiroulina which only need sun and no particular climate or fertile land and he produces so much olive oil that it's price collapses to nothing. Not only that will bankrupt me, but such a new innovation in food production will put me at a disadvantage of even competing using the new innovation because the reason is simple, i don't have even half the sun Zimbabwe has.
But even if my income stream of olive oil goes to zero, i can sell something else, i can even learn to program computer code, and sell that. Or learn genetic engineering myself and create some new innovation. There is never any shortage of problems to solve, and things to produce.
> But let's say a smart Zimbabwean figures out a way to genetically modify Chlorella or Spiroulina which only need sun and no particular climate or fertile land and he produces so much olive oil that it's price collapses to nothing.
That's a hell of an industrious Zimbabwean, firstly.
Secondly though, while I understand where your metaphor is aiming, it just doesn't really work. There has never been a "business with a competitive advantage" on the scale of human creative output vs. AI. I would argue even this example you've cooked up which already strains belief on several points doesn't truly capture it.
AI in your example wouldn't be one person in one place that can make a product at unbelievable scale; I think it would be more analogous to everyone on Earth suddenly having a machine on their countertop that produces Olive Oil by itself, of low quality, for free, forever. And I think the effects would be similar: any producer of less than fantastic olive oil would go bankrupt, because they're effectively competing with a free product (not unlike the Netscape Navigator vs Internet Explorer problem) and most consumers who are fine with a low-grade oil have zero reason to buy more when they can just buy access to the infinite olive oil maker. You would also then have producers of food both industrial and restaurants who would begin advertising that they use real proper olive oil, many of which would doubtlessly be using the shitty stuff from our imaginary machine or perhaps a blend of both to cut costs, but nevertheless, this hurts the producers of the good stuff too, because again, they are competing with a free-at-point-of-use product.
And like, on balance, all of this is just a net negative for everyone:
* A lot of the olive oil is worse now, for everyone, seemingly permanently absent regulations
* People are now losing a lot of counter space to the machine
* We've obliterated an entire agricultural sector and farmers who have done nothing but this their entire lives have to retrain jobs and/or their land has to be used to grow something else
* One company that made the infinite olive oil machine now has billions and billions of dollars, that they have earned by making the other three things happen
And just... why? Why is this a good thing for humanity? Put aside the stupid game with the made up money and line go up and justify to me why we've now done this, because it seems like everyone has lost a little bit, some have lost a lot, and a vanishingly tiny minority have won big, explicitly at the expense of everyone else.
And before you start with "well the market chose-" no, it didn't. The market followed incentives established by the market and those who regulate it. That's not a choice anyone or anything made, any more than it's a choice if a river floods it's banks and destroys a bridge.
See the AI generated music channels on YouTube. They get lots of views and a significant part of them would be an actual song stream instead. So yeah, they're taking money away from the artists with content learned from the artists.
Not only that, but if you do have success "selling" songs you increasingly run the risk of litigating from the interest who already "own" the corpus of existing work.
I would encourage you guys to watch his video before going down the argument of saying that there's no money in music creation. There's also just enjoyment in the act of creation and even if you're doing it for free, why should GenAI companies then be able to take your artwork, incorporate that into their dataset and profit of the artist's unpaid labor?
I love making music. I haven't written a ton, and I haven't done it recently, but for a time in the early 2000's I participated in a fun Internet songwriting "competition"[0], played some live shows in various places around the country, and met a lot of cool people.
I hear enough incidental similarities in what I've written to make me wary of ever actually trying to make money from it. The Marvin Gaye lawsuit for "Blurred Lines" was ridiculous.
All the music and lyrics I've written (crap though it all is) has always been distributed as public domain (or as close as I can get away w/ Creative Commons CC0 for those asinine jurisdictions where you can't waive your rights). (I have a lyric "You can't own the beat and you can't own the rhyme" in one song, because I believe it very strongly.)
Benn is one of my fave subscriptions on YouTube--both for the (now more occasional) music gear stuff and for the in-depth music industry education. The fact that he has been hacking away at IP and AI stuff for ages is just icing on the cake.
All this stuff is snake oil, either already, or eventually.
There's new models showing up regularly. Civitai recognizes 33 image models at this point, and audio will also see multiple developments. Any successful attack on a model isn't guaranteed to apply to another one, not even yet invented. There's also a multitude of possible pre-processing methods and their combinations for any piece of media.
There's also the difficulty of attacking a system that's not well documented. Not every model out there is open source and available for deep analysis.
And it's hard to attack something that doesn't yet exist, which means countermeasures will come up only after a model was already successfully created. This is I'm sure of some academic interest, but the practical benefits seem approximately none.
Since information is trivially stored, anyone having any trouble could just download the file today and sit on it for a year or two not doing anything at all, just waiting for a new model to show up.
It seems some models ignore it and produce mostly clean images on the output (looking like the last image), while others just interpret is as a texture, the character is just wearing a funny patterned shirt. This is while the intended result is fooling the model to generate something other than the intended character.
> It seems some models ignore it and produce mostly clean images on the output (looking like the last image), while others just interpret is as a texture
This sounds like you’re talking about img2img generation based on a glazed image instead of training, which isn’t the intended purpose.
The problem is that copyright is the law of the land, and it demands our participation.
Because of that reality, every artist who wants to make money must either participate in it, or completely isolate themselves from it.
These models have become an incredible opportunity for giant corporations to circumvent the law. By training a model on a copyrighted work, you can launder that work into your own new work, and make money from it without sharing that money with the original artists. Obviously, this is an incredibly immoral end to copyright as we know it.
So what are we going to do about this situation? Are we really going to keep pretending that copyright can work? It wasn't even working before all the AI hype! Ever heard the words "starving artist"? Of course you have!
We need a better system than copyright. I'm convinced that no system at all (anarchy) would be a superior option at this point. If not now, then when?
> By training a model on a copyrighted work, you can launder that work into your own new work, and make money from it without sharing that money with the original artists.
Not sure if "you" refers to model developers, hosting company or end users. But let's see each one of them in turn
- model development is a cost center, there is no profit yet
- model deployment brings little profit, they make cents per million tokens
- applying the model to your own needs - that is where the benefit goes.
So my theory is that benefits follow the problem, it is in the application layer. Have a need, you can benefit from AI, don't need it, no benefit. Like Linux. You got to use it for something. And that usage, that problem - is personal. You can't sell your problems, they remain yours. It is hard to quantify how people benefit from AI, it could be for fun, for learning, professional use, or for therapy.
Most gen-AI usage is seen by one person exactly once. Think about that. It's not commercial, it's more like augmented imagination. Who's gonna pay for AI generated stuff when it is so easy to make your own.
My point is that this entire situation has to be framed in the narrative that copyright demands it be framed in. It's "you" the participant of copyright.
When someone creates art, copyright says that there is a countable result we can refer to as their "work". Copyright also says that that artist has a monopoly over the distribution and sale of that work. The implication is that the way for an artist to get paid for their labor is for them to leverage the monopoly they have been granted, and negotiate a distribution scheme that involves paying them.
When an artist chooses to work outside the copyright model, that means they must predetermine part of their distribution negotiation. That might be the libertarian option (gratis distribution with no demands), or it might be the copyleft option, where the price is demanded, but also set to 0. The artist may find payment for their labor by other means, but that's challenging to do in an economy where copyright participants dominate.
I don't know about copyright, since for most artists the royalty revenues are not enough to live on. It seems like a failed system if the intent was to get royalty revenues.
Indeed! I've definitely been a fan of his for a while, and I laud him for trying to make things work in a space where all the cards are stacked against him.
I do wish, though, that he would have introduced that perspective of the situation in this particular video. Leaving it out feels like making a video about learning to swim, set in the middle of the ocean.
adversarial noise is very popular in the media but imo is a complete dead end for the desired goals - representations do not transfer between different models this easily
IP is such a stupid concept. How does it make any sense of that an artist could own the right to let people learn from his music. The idea of an artist getting to choose who can and can't learn from their song is so patently absurd.
I hope that the adversarial attacks can be easily detected and circumvented, just like other IP protection measures have been subverted successfully.
Exclusive rights over their published work encourages artists and inventors to publish their work, which is a clear benefit to society at large. The period of time it should remain exclusive and the specific rights that are made exclusive can be debated, but the utility of IP rights in general is obvious.
And generative AI is not a person in the first place, so I don't think the appeal to learning makes much sense here.
It was obvious enough to the founders of the USA to bake it into our constitution.
US Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8:
> [the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
We don't have that. We have functionally unlimited times now. Publishing something new today puts you at risk of litigation from existing rights-holders.
I don't believe it's morally right to license music but, if I did, I'd look at the climate of lawsuits in the the last 10-15 years and conclude that the risks might outweigh the potential rewards.
I'm all in favor of reverting copyright terms to what they were before the Walt Disney Corporation was founded, but I think the idea of having a limited time to profit off of your creative works in order to incentivize their creation is still a sound concept.
The original agreement was fair to both creators and society and would never be remotely palatable to today's industry of middle-men and rights hoarders.
I wish we could have it back. I would feel a lot better about "intellectual property", morally, if we did.
That isn't a study? Even if it was a perfect idea at the time things have changed dramatically. I wouldn't want my ideas applied uncritically to some alien future. It also says "useful Arts", what it is suppose to be useful for?
People have been publishing their work for thousands of years before IP even existed. We don't know if the system we have is the best one we could have, I doubt it though.
Historically most artistic works, books, etc. were privately commissioned and one-of-a-kind. Publishing as we understand the idea came with the printing press and widespread literacy.
Publishing as we understand the idea came about at a time when physical scarcity was the limiting factor in dissemination of copies of works. That time has passed. We're in a completely different world now. The elevator operators and buggy whip manufacturers of the publishing industry would like things to remain the way they have been.
I don't think the issue is the scarcity of copies, but rather the scarcity of artists. Not just anyone can write a book that people want to copy, and we should encourage and reward those that can and do.
Filtering the crap is now orthogonal to the concern that, historically, information dissemination has been tied to physical scarcity. Those concerns ran together because it cost money to publish something. It doesn't now.
We can come up with new models that compensate creators more directly. We can also come up with models that don't involve effectively killing any ability to build upon existing culture in the time-scale of a human life.
What came before isn't how it has to be, except that the interest that profit from the current system want it to remain so.
Some of the earliest accounts of proto-IP laws date from Ancient Greece, with protections for new works (particularly recipes and plays?!?) being granted to their creators for a set period of time.
Then you have guilds, trade marks, potter's marks, royal warrants, etc... all "IP" protections of their days.
Would open-source license violations be possible to penalize if not for intellectual property laws?
This is such a radical take on IP rights and AI "learning" that I can only assume you're consciously choosing to misunderstand both.
On the off chance that you are not: IP-rights does not cover "learning from" a source. What ML does is not in any way akin to human learning in methodology. When we call it learning that's an analogy. You can not argue a legal case from analogy alone.
> You can not argue a legal case from analogy alone.
Yes they can because the analogy directly applies. The technical details of how a computer learns, vs a human learns doesn't really matter here, and is an irrelevant difference.
The reason why the analogy directly applies is because in both cases it is about how IP cannot really control how someone uses the IP.
Just like how IP laws cannot prevent you from listening to music while standing on your head, it also cannot prevent you from training your models on it (while also standing on your head, lets say!).
Instead, IP laws only prevents the publishing of copies of the IP.
I don't know what to tell you. You will find no judge willing to entertain your analogy without you justifying why it's useful in the particular case. You are going to have to explain the difference, and you are going to have to argue why those differences don't matter.
Do you have a case where a defendant tried to argue that being upside down protected him from a copyright claim? You claim that they have decided it, can you cite that decision?
You're taking a much more narrow view of this discussion than I am. When I say IP rights I'm not talking about copyright specifically (which does not just cover creating copies, but also performances, adaptations, and distribution) but rather about the broad class of property rights to intangible "ideas". Trademarks, patents and the like are usually, and in my argument specifically, also included under that umbrella.
Even if we limit our area of consideration to just Copyright, you're just wrong. As the world currently stands, you probably get your music from a streaming service. That streaming service doesn't grant you the right to copy, perform, or adapt the music you listen to, they extend you a limited license. If you are in violation of that license, they likely reserve the right to terminate your access to the music. If that license said you weren't allowed to be upside down then standing on your head would allow them to prevent you listening. It does not matter that Copyright doesn't explicitly mention "listening to music while upside down" because your use is not mediated by copyright, but by the contract you signed.
Copyright does not govern how those individual contracts are formulated. We have Freedom of Contract in most of the western world. It provides a framework by which that contract even makes sense (they have property you even care to license with a contract), and a remedies should you violate it.
Actually I am correct because if you don't sign any contracts then the copyright owner has no ability to prevent you from doing anything with the media, other than stopping the distribution of copies.
You are mistaken. If the work is distributed under a license, then you have no right to use the work except under the terms of the license. The license acts like a contract.
If the law did not work that way, then the GNU GPL would not be enforceable.
The GPL for example required that if I distribute a derivative of a GPLed work in binary form, then I must also distribute the same derivative as source code or at least provide the source code to any distributee who asks for it. This requirement of the GPL has been enforced by courts (e.g., in a lawsuit against Tivo) even though none of the defendants in these court cases signed a contract regarding the use of the software.
I am against corporations profiting from others people works, for free.
If that was not allowed, if people could only use my work for no profit purposes, I agree.
That's what CC (creative commons) is for, though.
I am also in favour of people "remixing" and even making money out of it, but the intent it's paramount to me.
As a long time copyleft activist, I do not understand what limiting authors rights brings to the table, in your opinion.
More than once I contacted the author of some work I liked and they gave me free license to use it, no questions asked (after explaining what I would use it for).
IMO basic cooperation between good willing people goes a long way, without stripping authors of their rights.
>As a long time copyleft activist, I do not understand what limiting authors rights brings to the table, in your opinion.
IP is nonsense. It is putting an ownership over an idea, but ideas aren't objects. You can not steal or destroy an idea, giving ownership rights to ideas is absurd.
If you think IP should not exist then creative output is free to use by everyone and of course corporations are also free to profit from it.
And I say copy because before the author made it in the form of an artifact, you didn't know it could be done, or you could have done it on your own.
I can draw ocean waves, nobody owns ocean waves
But if I cooy verbatim hokusai ocean waves, it's mehhhhhhhh
I'm a ripoff loser and should be punished for doing it
Edit: but I like your closing sentence.
Free for all to use it as they see fit is an interesting thought, however I think that imbalance of the means of production will always make the corporations the ultimate beneficiaries, so we should also rethink how our economic system works.
For example: if I could copy the avengers, people would say "it's a cheap copy of Disney's original" and I would hardly make any money out of it.
>But if I cooy verbatim hokusai ocean waves, it's mehhhhhhhh
>I'm a ripoff loser and should be punished for doing it
You are totally free to copy that painting in whatever way you want. There is literally zero intellectual property attached to it. This isn't a hypothetical, it is the law right now. Nobody can stop you painting a replica and selling it, as long as you disclose that it is a replica. It is in the public domain and there will be no punishment.
But I've never said you can't, I've said it's lame and you should be punished for doing it, punished meaning people will totally not attach any meaningful value to it, because it's a stupid replica
Value in art is not given by the content (and usually not the idea), but by the author's intent
The fact that you can legally copy something that is in public domain doesn't take away authors' rights to decide what you can and cannot do with their creation
The problem here is that corporations want to copy creations of authors that are still alive and never granted them rights to replicate them ad libitum, for free.
> IP is nonsense. It is putting an ownership over an idea, but ideas aren't objects. You can not steal or destroy an idea, giving ownership rights to ideas is absurd.
IP isn't ownership over an idea, it's ownership over a specific artifact.
You cannot copyright the idea of painting or the ideas contained within a specific painting, but you can copyright this specific painting because this specific painting is an artifact.
"no right to dictate what other people do with his creations" seems a little radical -- i.e., you don't believe copyright should exist?
Do you think a movie's creator can dictate that I'm not allowed to use a pirated version of a movie to display for 100% profit at my 10,000 AMC movie theaters? Or a book's creator can dictate that I'm not allowed to copy their book, put my name on it, and sell it on Amazon for half-price?
If you agree that a creator can do those things, then you're already in a gray area between "they can dictate everything" and "they have no rights." At that point, you're arguing over the precise location of the line.
Yes. It should not. I think that was very clear when I said I was against intellectual property, not for it being more limited.
>Do you think a movie's creator can dictate that I'm not allowed to use a pirated version of a movie to display for 100% profit at my 10,000 AMC movie theaters? Or a book's creator can dictate that I'm not allowed to copy their book, put my name on it, and sell it on Amazon for half-price?
I must be misreading this. Are you saying the following is/should be okay/ethically okay/perfectly legal:
Author A spends a year writing a fiction book. They are not well known in the industry. They publish the book, it sells very few copies (perhaps none at all).
Person B (a well known Instagram influencer with tens of thousands of followers) downloads a copy of your book. Replaces your name with their name as the author, and promotes it as a book they've finished writing. Goes on to sell at a very profitable rate.
If your answer is NO this should be illegal, what about if Person B searches/replaces all definite articles with indefinite articles, or changes all the proper nouns to begin with "schmla"? Where do we draw the line?
If your answer is YES, then my gut instinct tells me you are neither a writer, composer, or creator in any meaningful sense of the word.
I wrote a fiction book, which has sold virtually nothing (maybe $50 gross, against an out-of-pocket cost of ~$4k). Both of these would piss me off if they happened to me or my author friends; I also don't think they should be illegal.
I am an author, a digital artist, a programmer, and an extremely amateur musician. None of those things have demonstrated to me why copyright law is necessary, a net positive for the world, or ethical.
Why? You are holding a belief that works directly against your own self interest.
If it's a principles thing—I'd ask, what is good in this principle? What is the good in someone else taking credit for your work? What is the good in someone else divesting you of wages you could use to live or support further creative acts? What is the good in any of that whatsoever? What real harm is the protection afforded you by the IP causing? If you worry underprivileged people can't access your work, you can give it to them for free as the IP holder. I simply cannot fathom any reasonable abstract position in which not having IP would be good for you. Sure, if you hand over your IP to someone else, I could see wanting IP abolished, but that's on you. Thant's the same as the parent scenario only you actually got a say in the matter at least.
Not the OP, but I have some feelings about that. The limits on trademark law are much more fair, in terms of the balance afforded to the public and the limited monopoly granted to the rightsholder. Trademark law can be abused, for sure, but it hasn't been used in the same abusive way as copyright law, nor has it expanded to be functionally infinite and all-encompassing.
I think the creative part of trademarks should be free to use, e.g. a film can have Coca-Cola bottles or some corporate mascot. But if you are commiting fraud, e.g. by labeling a Coca-Cola bottle, not from the company, as such then this should be forbidden. Not on the basis that Coca-Cola has any right to be the only ones using their logo, but that customers have a right to not be defrauded and make choices from whom they buy. As long as the trademark is not used to defraud people it can be used however people want.
Someone's identity, e.g. their likeness and identification aren't just ideas. They actually physically exist. (I assume here that by identity you don't mean how they view themselves).
For identities I think it is very important to consider publication. If you publish something you have no right to tell others what to do with it. An actor in a movie has no right to tell someone that their fan cut of a movie is not allowed to exist.
On the other hand, as long as you do not publish some part of your identity you should have a right to it. If you are recognizable on a photo that you do not want to have published it should not be published.
To make it short I essentially agree with the GDPR, with the exception of being able to retract consent, but I do not believe it invalidates my stance on IP in any way. Your likeness is not an immaterial idea derived from a creative process, neither is your own house address. You should be allowed to publish it and by publishing it, that publication is no longer yours to own and control.
I'm glad I elaborated. A complete dismissal of all IP-rights is a very fringe very radical position. Most people have a more nuanced IP-rights view about which IP-rights ought to be protected and for how long.
You'll find many more people of the opinion that authors life+70 years is too long, than you will dismissing it entirely.
In other words, (for instance) you believe in the right of massive corporations who control the lion's share of consumer distribution channels to, on an ongoing basis, scrape all authored content that is made publicly available in any form (paid or not) and sell it in a heavily discounted form, without the permission of authors and other rights holders and with no compensation to them, while freezing out the "official" published versions from their distribution channels entirely. More generally, you believe that creators should create for free, and that massive moneyed and powerful interests should reap the profits, even while those same creators toil in the mines to support their passions which do evidently have real value, though it is denied to them.
You think this will make the world better? For whom? Or worse, for whom? Or you place the highest importance on having a maximalist viewpoint that simply cannot be argued with, because being unassailably right in an abstract rhetorical framing is most important to you? Or you crave the elegance of such a position, reality and utility notwithstanding? Or you feel the need to rationalize your otherwise unfounded "belief" that piracy and/or training AI on protected IP should be allowed because you like it and are involved with it yourself? Or you think ASI is going to completely transform the world tomorrow, and whether we get Culture-style luxury gay space communism or something far darker, none of this will matter so we should eat, drink, and be merry today? Or some hybrid of that and a belief that we should actively strive toward and enable such a transition, and IP law stands in its way?
What is it? I've seen some version of all of these and frankly they are all childish nonsense (usually espoused by actual children). Are you a new species?
Not the OP, but I believe very strongly that once an idea has been expressed it should be free for others to build upon and share. That's how ideas work, naturally.
All of human culture is derivative. The current legal regime stifles human expression and makes it impossible for creations to ever be shared in a reasonable human timescale.
To state it in an arguably hyperbolic manner: The "moneyed interests" you're railing against exist because of the current scheme of "intellectual property". They reap virtually all the benefits of human intellectual toil in the system already. Wiping away their stranglehold on the market would be a good thing for creators. Taking away the legal framework their existence is predicated upon would do that.
The copyright industry's influence on social norms, including the massive shift of the social contract in favor of their interests ( functionally infinite copyright terms, attacks of fair use, plundering the public domain to sell it back, works being lost forever because they are "orphaned", etc), all seems natural to you because they want it to be that way. The concept of someone "owning" an idea, which seems perfectly normal to you, was taught to you by people who want the world to be that way, not because it's some natural law. You've been conditioned to believe it your entire life.
I would prefer a fairer system to burning it all down, but the needle has moved so far away from fair that burning it all down seems pretty satisfying.
> Not the OP, but I believe very strongly that once an idea has been expressed it should be free for others to build upon and share. That's how ideas work, naturally.
> All of human culture is derivative. The current legal regime stifles human expression and makes it impossible for creations to ever be shared in a reasonable human timescale.
In the context of copyright law, this is absurd. Fair use exists and it generally isn't even required to "allow" artistic and cultural influence to propagate. If I want to write a sci-fi novel that is heavily influenced and arguably even derivative of my favorite work of some other author, I am completely free to do so---i just can't copy it wholesale. Established fair use doctrine is certainly subject to criticism and future reform, but in a much more nuanced scope than you are applying here.
If you're talking about patents, that's a different conversation. But based on context, that isn't the conversation we're having here.
> burning it all down
Generically, this is another common suggestion from people with naive viewpoints and little or no relevant experience and/or exposure. Notably, people said that about both of Trump's presidential terms to date. I will let you make up your own mind on how that is going for us.
edit: I should also mention that literally every working artist I've talked to about the prospect of abolishing IP law is vehemently opposed to it.
I wish I'd written "...derivative creations..." in that sentence, but heat-of-the-moment being what it was I did not. Having said that, I believe the scope of an infringing derivative work is a lot broader than you are suggesting.
Finding success defending a derivative work on the basis of fair use, particularly if the derivative work is itself financially successful and derivative of a work "owned" by a rights holder with deep pockets, doesn't seem to be very easy in today's legal climate. It certainly doesn't take "wholesale" copying to attract the attention of a rights holder, either. Heck, with the music industry it doesn't take any copying at all to end up losing a lawsuit.
I'll cite the Tolkien or Marvin Gaye estates as good examples among many. I, too, believe it's a ton more nuanced than how you're characterizing it.
> Generically, this is another common suggestion from people with naive viewpoints and little or no relevant experience and/or exposure.
I said "I would prefer a fairer system to burning it all down...". I even qualified my writing as hyperbolic. It seems disingenuous that you'd choose to belittle and make unfavorable comparisons, given both of those statements.
Characterize my viewpoint how you will, but my viewpoint isn't "burning it all down". I will admit that indulging in a little daydreaming about morally repugnant rights hoarders getting what they deserve is fun, but it isn't realistic or productive for society. A fairer system, enabled by shorter copyright terms and better handling of "orphan" works, would be the right thing and what I wish for. Just like I said.
> I should also mention that literally every working artist I've talked to about the prospect of abolishing IP law is vehemently opposed to it.
Well, yeah-- of course they would be opposed to such a vast, sweeping change. It would be madness if they weren't.
The interesting conversation to have with working artists would be about reducing copyright terms, and how that would both "cost" them in potential lost revenue but at the same time free them from the specter of potential litigation and, at the same time, open up vast tracts of public domain work they could build upon.
If you don't actually think IP law should be outright abolished, your viewpoint is of a totally different species than that of the person I originally replied to, and we probably agree on more than we disagree on---in particular that the system is arguably biased toward, and certainly heavily abused by, moneyed actors.
Believe it or not, there really are people who think literally deleting all of IP law is the right thing to do, and it is my honest belief that my first comment in this topic is in reply to one of those people. I appreciate your clarification of your viewpoint (and the appeal of a fantasy in which we Stick It To The Man by cutting off the hand that grips Mickey Mouse and other beloved IPs by the throat), but I hope you can see why I read your comment as I did, especially in the context of what I was replying to.
> The interesting conversation to have with working artists would be about reducing copyright terms, and how that would both "cost" them in potential lost revenue but at the same time free them from the specter of potential litigation and, at the same time, open up vast tracts of public domain work they could build upon.
I am 100% in favor of reducing copyright terms. I'm not sure I've ever talked to somebody who isn't—I suspect I'd have to talk to a corporation-as-person to find that viewpoint in the wild.
>In other words, (for instance) you believe in the right of massive corporations who control the lion's share of consumer distribution channels to, on an ongoing basis, scrape all authored content that is made publicly available in any form (paid or not) and sell it in a heavily discounted form, without the permission of authors and other rights holders and with no compensation to them, while freezing out the "official" published versions from their distribution channels entirely. More generally, you believe that creators should create for free, and that massive moneyed and powerful interests should reap the profits, even while those same creators toil in the mines to support their passions which do evidently have real value, though it is denied to them.
Yes.
(Obviously there is zero point in corporations doing this as costs are near zero and competition for this infinite. Right now almost all art is available for free, it is just illegal.)
>You think this will make the world better? For whom? Or worse, for whom? Or you place the highest importance on having a maximalist viewpoint that simply cannot be argued with, because being unassailably right in an abstract rhetorical framing is most important to you? Or you crave the elegance of such a position, reality and utility notwithstanding? Or you feel the need to rationalize your otherwise unfounded "belief" that piracy and/or training AI on protected IP should be allowed because you like it and are involved with it yourself? Or you think ASI is going to completely transform the world tomorrow, and whether we get Culture-style luxury gay space communism or something far darker, none of this will matter so we should eat, drink, and be merry today? Or some hybrid of that and a belief that we should actively strive toward and enable such a transition, and IP law stands in its way?
I think it will marginally improve the world. I am not training any AIs though.
Could you consider what abolishing IP laws would do to the average YouTuber. Exactly nothing. Their content is available for free, they support themselves without selling their art directly. Loosing rights to their art would have zero impact on them, as their monetization works without it. Sponsoring, direct support, advertisement is enough to make many of them wealthy.
> Obviously there is zero point in corporations doing this as costs are near zero and competition for this infinite. Right now almost all art is available for free, it is just illegal.
This is incredibly naive. You grossly underestimate the grip massive media corporations with essentially unlimited marketing budgets and total control over mainstream distribution channels have over how the vast majority of consumers consume media. And, to whatever extent you think piracy being legal will change that, either way you've completely destroyed individual creators' ability to even partially support themselves with their work, unless...
> Could you consider what abolishing IP laws would do to the average YouTuber. Exactly nothing. Their content is available for free, they support themselves without selling their art directly. Loosing rights to their art would have zero impact on them, as their monetization works without it. Sponsoring, direct support, advertisement is enough to make many of them wealthy.
...Unless you force them all to be social media personalities and marketers first. Unless you think YouTube and its ilk can carry art and culture forward alone (as "content", of course). Unless you want to live in a world where art of original substance is no longer produced, a hall of mirrors in which YouTubers endlessly inter-react and beef and soy face. You may very well think that sounds great, but I think it sounds fucking terrible.
>...Unless you force them all to be social media personalities and marketers first. Unless you think YouTube and its ilk can carry art and culture forward alone (as "content", of course).
How much do you think I am paying an artist hen listening to their songs on Spotify 1000 times? Every album they ever made, dozens of times. The answer will surprise you!
Already every single musician has to be a personality and marketer. There is no other way to make money. You can not finance yourself by the rights to your music, right now.
Only a very select group of artists has any kind of real revenue from the rights over their music. The rest is already using other channels to profit, which are not protected by IP.
As much as you might think cherrypicking examples like Spotify (and characterizing them poorly, besides) supports your point, I don't think it's going to be practical to enumerate every single source of sales, royalties, and other fees paid to artists in aggregate.
So maybe you'd like to state, for the record, that all those sales, royalties, and other fees—in aggregate—are so small as to be meaningless and insignificant to those who receive them? It's staggeringly wrong, but at least then we'll know where we stand.
> What ML does is not in any way akin to human learning in methodology. When we call it learning that's an analogy.
Of course it's different, but if we look closely, it is not copying. The model itself is smaller, sometimes 1000x smaller, than the training set. Being made of billions of examples, the impact of any one of them is very small (de minimis).
If you try to replicate something closely with AI it fails. If regurgitation was a huge problem we'd see lots of lawsuits on output, but we see most suits for input (training). That means authors can't identify cases of infringement in the outputs.
I'm not sure I agree that most suits are on input. Most of the ones I've read have been related to the output of a model. Early worried about CoPilot were about its tendency to regurgitate code verbatim. The WaPo suit was about verbatim output of segments of their articles.
> artist could own the right to let people learn from his music.
They don't, what's happening here is their music is being fed to a computer program in a for-profit venture.
This anthropomorphism of LLMs is concerning. What you're actually implying here is that you believe some computer programs should be awarded the same rights as humans. You can't just skip that like it's some kind of foregone conclusion. You have to defend it. And, it's not easy.
>They don't, what's happening here is their music is being fed to a computer program in a for-profit venture.
I believe that no artist has the right to tell anyone what to do with the art they have published. It does not matter what happens inside the algorithm with that art. Whether NNs (LLMs, by definition are about language) learn like humans or not is totally irrelevant to my point.
I had a client train an AI on images I created without extended usage and so added adversarial noise to the images next time around. The models I tested with misclassified the images and image generation seemed broken, so Im curious how it impacted their attempts, if they even attempted it again, I don't know. I don't expect them to come to me and ask why their model is so interested in ducks...
Companies put measures into place to make sure that their software only functions correctly with a paying customer. Some Video Games include intentional problem when the game believes IP laws are violated.
Benn Jordan is a musician who is probably one of the most critical of the current copyright regime in his space. For context, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJSTFzhs1O4
Copyright exists to enrich the interests of the publishers of a work, not the artists they funded. A long time ago, copyright was a sufficient legal tool to bring publishers to artists' heels, but no longer. Long copyright terms and the imbalance of power between different wealthy interests allowed publishers to usurp and alienate artists' ownership over their work. And the outsized amount of commercial interest in current generative AI tools comes down to the fact that publishers believe they can use them to strip what little ownership interest authors have left. What Benn is doing is looking for new tools to bring publishers to heel.
IP is fundamentally a social contract, subject to perpetual renegotiation through action and counter-action. If you told any game publisher in the early 2000s, during the height of the Napster Wars, that they'd be proudly allowing randos on the Internet to stream video of their games being played, they'd laugh in your face. But people did it anyway, and everyone in the games biz realized it's not worth fighting people who are adding to your game. Even Nintendo, notorious IP tightwads as they are, tried scraping micropennies off the top of streamers and realized it's a fool's errand.
The statement Benn is making is pretty clear. You can either...
- Negotiate royalties for, and purchase training data from, actual artists, who will then in exchange give you high-quality training data, or,
- Spend increasing amounts of time fighting to filter an increasingly polluted information ecosystem to have a model that only sorta kinda replicates the musical landscape of the late 2010s.
A lot of us are reflexively inclined to hate on anything "copyright-shaped" because of our experiences over the past few decades. Publishers wanted to go back to the days of copyright being a legal tool of arbitrary and capricious punishment. But that doesn't mean that everything that might fall afoul of copyright law is automatically good or that generative AI companies are trying to liberate creativity. They're trying to monopolize it, just like Web 2.0 "disintermediation" was turned into "here's five websites with screenshots of the other four". That's why so much money is being poured into these companies and why a surprisingly nonzero amount of copyright reformists also have deeply negative opinions of AI.
I am not against IP because it does or doesn't benefit artists. I am against the idea because it does not make sense. It gives ownership and control over imaginary things to people, a song you create and public isn't "yours". You do not get to decide what others do with it and how they use it.
I believe that artists see the current IP laws critically, of course they do as it directly impacts how they finance themselves and how they bargain. But I do not care how good/bad the bargain for the artist is. IP laws should be abolished regardless of what artists want.
Every kind of property is imaginary. Yes, physical property has an element of physical possession, but that's not enough legal infrastructure to, say, rent that property out for a recurring fee that must be paid on pain of eviction or repossession. All of that has to be enforced by violence dealt by the state, which renders it just as "imaginary" as the copyright laws that are also backed purely by the fact that the state allows authors to call down the full force of the US government on people that infringe their copyright.
What you are mad about is not imaginary-ness, but centralization[0]. Any critique of law should be done on this yardstick - i.e. is that law protecting the interests of the many, or the few?
In prior decades, ordinary people did not have to care about copyright law, which is why the bargain was tolerable then: copyright took money out of the pockets of the few (publishers) and gave it to the many (authors). But now that publishers figured out how to buy up all the valuable assets and you can practically enforce copyright on individuals, the system has changed to one that takes money from the people at-large and puts it in the pockets of about four publishers. On that basis alone you can argue for abolishing copyright[1] because it no longer serves the interests of the public.
Now, let's look at the business model of AI companies. AI compute is hideously expensive, and so every company involved is already a highly centralized tech monopoly. And with only a few exceptions the largest models are all jealously protected trade secrets you're only allowed to access through heavily monitored APIs. Models with published weights do exist, but they are invariably either too big to run on most hardware or lag in capability and performance. The practical fact of the matter is that most people will use AI - even open models - through inferencing servers ultimately owned by tech monopolies. This is a deeply, incredibly centralizing force.
And, unlike copyright, trade secrecy is one of those few IP laws[2] that aren't completely imaginary. It's rooted in possession, just like physical property rights are. The "no imaginary rights" argument still gets us horrible tech monopolies that can censor or marginalize you.
[0] aka "wealth inequality"
[1] What you replace it with is a separate question, but again, Benn Jordan wants socialized ownership.
[2] "Laws that allow you to dictate the conduct of your competitors"
But that's precisely the problem—while in theory the ideal is good, it is impractical unless you fundamentally change the economic model.
Artists rely on some form of IP to help secure payment for their creative works. They need this payment to be able to afford their own subsistence so that they can continue to live and create.
In an alternative system, maybe you could abolish all forms of IP outright, but how will you do that under capitalism while sustaining (already impoverished) artists?
If you are against the principle of IP, you are essentially saying that an entire segment of capital should be deactivated, and effectively the only jobs remaining would be those of active service/tangible goods. In the age of digital media, basically everything is instantly and infinitely replicable, so you are effectively asking for a world in which it becomes rapidly impossible to make money off of any kind of digital good (music, literature, film, software, etc.) This has an obvious material consequence of disincentivizing creation of these works simply because if the creators need to earn wages in tangible good/service markets they have strictly less time to devote to the creation of creative works.
>In the age of digital media, basically everything is instantly and infinitely replicable, so you are effectively asking for a world in which it becomes rapidly impossible to make money off of any kind of digital good (music, literature, film, software, etc.)
Plainly false. YouTube clearly proves this wrong. You can be funded by your fans.
Besides, if you are a musician and get just tens of thousands of plays on Spotify you are basically not making any money of it. Only extremely few artists make any kind of money of the copyright of their songs. Already distribution rights are near worthless.
Again. I am not opposed to IP rights because of what artists want or do not want.
I also pirate every single book I read. Sometimes I buy them though.
I also pirate every single show I watch. I never buy them.
Music is a bit difficult, but I pay for Spotify, but I wouldn't mind paying for the service if Spotify had no rights to the songs and wasn't compensating the artists.
So... do you want someone to present you with evidence that paying people for their work is a good thing? We're getting to the point of arguing the color of the sky here.
The world doesn't owe you a business model. It's not work if someone doesn't value it, just like a street performer isn't working just because they're putting on a show.
If people can't make money without the government enforcing artificial scarcity of their output, they can always chose another business model.
People with a conscience and an ounce of empathy will always value creative work if they themselves intend to make a profit with it in someway. If you take someone's work, and use it to make money, you should pay them for that work. Its really not that hard of a concept.
>If you take someone's work, and use it to make money, you should pay them for that work. Its really not that hard of a concept.
How many paid products are using foss software without paying the developers. 99%? I do not consider that being evil.
If there are no IP laws nobody will have the expectation to have control over what other people do with their creative output. If you are unwilling to accept that you do not get to make art, the same is true now for art as well. If you do not want someone to make a parody of your art your only option is to never publish it.
> People with a conscience and an ounce of empathy will always value creative work if they themselves intend to make a profit with it in someway.
Is that empathy, or just self interest / good business? If I need a product I can't produce for my business to make a profit I'd better be giving my supplier a cut, lest they stop supplying me. With intangibles it's more fluid than with good bound by scarcity, but novel expressions of creativity become not-novel pretty quickly and, inevitably, you're going to need to go back to the well.
> If people can't make money without the government enforcing artificial scarcity of their output, they can always chose another business model.
Okay, but this literally goes for every single good ever. Case in point: theft. If theft wasn't "arbitrarily" made illegal, then there exists no business models for anything, ever. Because you could just steal it for free.
The idea behind IP is that IP is a good but an ephemeral one, one without a physical manifestation. So, we need to translate a type of theft that works for that.
Or, we could not. But keep in mind IP doesn't just mean music. It means, like... everything that isn't physical. Including my job, and probably your job too.
I think I've spend more on street music than any other music.
Imagine I put up a ghetto blaster and a hat. I play the finest music ever made. Would you put money in the hat? Would the idea to put money in the hat ever cross your mind? Would one even understand they want you to put money in the hat for playing the music?
Moreover, technological progress shouldn't be stifled by attempts to create artificial scarcity by technical means (read: DRM, war on general purpose computing, "The Right to Read", etc).
A lack of IP protection would incentivise even more extreme DRM. DRM exists because copyright law alone is considered insufficient protection by rights holders. A lack of such laws would not get rid of DRM, it would do the opposite.
Research. Which really is an interesting case study. While patents exist, most research is distributed freely, except for a fee to an intermediary for doing absolutely nothing. My ideas are, after I published them, free to use and I have absolutely no right to tell orhers what to do or don't do with this.
Even corporate funded researchers, e.g. for AI, will publish and most of the published results are not protected by patents. Everyone is free to implement someone else's research paper and use it for their own commercial application. Science is also gravitating more to open access, e.g. with arxiv for mathematics and CS. Nobody owns "the right" to some mathematical proof or concept.
Citation is of course encouraged, but plagiarism is not a legal matter, much less a criminal matter.
They wouldn't exist in the way they do now. It would be different. They existed before intellectual property. There are other models.
You've been conditioned to believe the current model is the only one that works. I'd argue that this is, in large part, because a bunch of interests who aren't "creators" profit from this current regime.
I fully agree, but the vision is not practical unless you want to change the entire economy around the shift.
Yes, artists existed before IP but they also existed before the internet and digital works. Prior to the internet, creative works met real material limits and real scarcity due to the limitations of physical media. In the digital age, these limits are obliterated. You then have two options:
1. You instate something like IP to make digital markets roughly (and admittedly arbitrarily) like real material markets.
2. You establish no such system. No property rights exist in digital space.
I am a major fan of (2) myself, but history gave us (1). At this stage, too many people make a living off digital markets for us to just impose a radical shift—you're taking about reworking the entire global economy here. Without concomitant shifts toward socialism globally this would probably just result in digital space becoming sparse and people adopting "analog only" release models to try and sustain incomes off of creative work.
If you want to abolish IP, go the full mile and abolish the principle of property period. The distinction between IP and physical goods is just an accidental feature of digital technology. If you are against the idea of IP you are against property. Period. And I'm in full agreement, but I also don't think it's easy to achieve this at this historical juncture. Go read Proudhon.
Everything in my post is true. And I do not intend to be inflammatory.
>How can you possibly justify this?
Easy. I buy the books from authors I respect. Books are mostly passion projects anyway and most of the ones I read are from authors who absolutely do not make a living from them or are dead.
The other category of books are scientific publishers I hate all of them and they do not deserve a single cent from me. I would feel bad giving them any money at all. I also am already paying their authors with my taxes.
For shows. I hate most of them anyway and I wouldn't mind if corporate entertainment were gone.
For musicians. I see it the same as with books. I support the artists I like and I give them money for products they put out.
Nobody owes an artist his existence. Especially since most artists are commercial failures any way and somehow that does not threaten the art itself.
Also consider YouTube. Do you think YouTubers would care about IP laws being abolished? Their products are available for free anyways and they commercialize themselves in many different ways.
You aren't thinking far along enough in your arguments.
If you abolish IP youtubers will not be able to make money because if I rip someone's monetized video and host my own ad-free copy, people will prefer to watch that and seeing as there is no legal claim over their IP, the youtuber has no recourse to get me to take down the video. There you go, I just divested a youtuber of a potential revenue stream.
This is why people who favor IP argue that it stimulates the creation of creative works. Look, whether we like it or not, everyone needs to earn wages in our system. If you can earn wages solely on creative works, you are empowered to spend more time and energy on those works because they give you a direct return. If the return on creative works becomes effectively zero modulo charity of consumers, you will have way less resources to devote since now you need to spend them making wages in other ways.
I am all for an IP free world, but I think it requires a fundamentally different economic reality from the one we currently have.
>If you abolish IP youtubers will not be able to make money because if I rip someone's monetized video and host my own ad-free copy, people will prefer to watch that and seeing as there is no legal claim over their IP, the youtuber has no recourse to get me to take down the video. There you go, I just divested a youtuber of a potential revenue stream.
Haha. Do you think that isn't happen right now? Anyways it is irrelevant to the YouTuber, ad revenue is just a small part of it. As blockers are widely in use and YouTubers still exist. YouTube ad revenue is low anyways.
YouTubers make money through merchandise and sponsorships. Merchandise can not be replicated as people buy it to support the YouTuber (selling merchandise while lying that it is to support the creator is fraud, even without IP) and for sponsorships it is irrelevant who also watches the video.
If anything the YouTuber should upload to the ad free site himself to get more reach.
Current AI is stuck imitating what it’s exposed to. If they actually learned the material they would understand to reject incorrect information in their training data. LLM’s etc can’t do that under current methodology, simply sucking up more training data and tossing more processing power at the algorithm doesn’t solve that issue.
Leaning from music doesn’t mean imitating that music. People can for example learn from mistakes without imitating those mistakes.
If you actually rejected all forms of IP protection you’d insist AI companies freely share their source code, patroon can’t hide works behind a paywall, etc.
Is that your stance? Or do you have some more limited rejection of IP in mind.
>you’d insist AI companies freely share their source code
Myself I don't see those as being related at all. Keeping something secret is allowed. What is not allowed is something being 'not-secret' yet special. Once you share the source code to the world there would be no closing the barn door.
Trade secrets like source code are a core aspect of IP protection.
What and how you can keep a secret is very much under the term IP, if you want to describe something more specific
don’t use terms meant to describe something else. If you’re full on “information wants to be free” then the line doesn’t stop at a companies firewall.
Intellectual property is about someone having ownership over an idea. It does not mean that you have a right someone gives his idea to you. These are totally separate things.
I am free to write, paint, code or film whatever I want. I have zero obligation to share that with anyone.
More accurately: Intellectual property is about someone having ownership over information, as a photo for example isn’t an idea.
Remove it and you can’t retaliate against anyone buying or selling access to your company’s source code thus making it impossible to keep private. So all such source code ends up public at any reasonably large company effectively killing all AI startups etc. The same is true of any proprietary information thus quickly killing nvidia, AMD, etc. Medical R&D also dies outside of governments and non profits. It’s shocking just how many industries get gutted as there’s far less incentive to make accurate maps when anyone can copy them.
But hey, I respect your stance here.
PS: If you think contracts/DRM/whatever that’s the solution! Now you do have protection for info and thus IP again.
As long as you know what you’re arguing for I doubt you’ll get many takers, but hey it’s a free country dream whatever you want to dream. At least it’s healthier than dreaming about gunning people down.
It's been struggling since the internet became a thing. People got more content than they can consume. For any topic there are 1000 alternative sites, most of them free. Any new work competes against decades of backlog. Under this attention scarcity mode, artists devolve into enshittification because they hunt ad money, while royalties are a joke.
On the other hand, people stopped being passive consumers, we like to interact now. Online games, social networks, open source, wikipedia and scientific publication - they all run in a permissive mode. How could we do anything together if we all insisted on copyright protection?
We like to make most of our content ourselves, we don't need the old top-down model of content creation. We attach "reddit" to our searches because we value comments more than official sources. It's an interactive world where LLMs fit right in, being interactive and contextually adaptive.
They can work for their living like I do or get a following/sponsors which pays for their creative output. The later works quite well in the case of YouTube. YouTubers generally have proven that it is absolutely possible to commercialize an artistic output that is given out for free, removing IP laws would have essentially zero effect on them.
Nobody owes artists the ability to make a living just for being artists.
Unless you have a service industry job or construct material goods, by your own arguments, I see no reason I should pay you either if you work on anything remotely related to intangibles like software.
I'm getting the sense that your perspective is colored more by some personal bias on what art is, what art making entails, and what art is good, rather than any sound logical principles around labor and economics, which is what any reasonable approach to IP should actually be based on.
Art is labor. Just because the end result is an "idea" with no scarcity doesn't mean that time, energy, blood, sweat, and tears didn't go into making it. I consider profiting off someone else's art without compensating them for that work to basically be wage theft.
Almost all art is created without any compensation. Some failed rock band should not be given money because they "tried hard".
Nobody owes artists commercial success for the act of making art.
The idea that it is work theft not to compensate failed artist is ridiculous. Who is to pay, the state?
Of course many of the most successful creators in the world give their creations away for free. They do not charge a single cent from their watchers and still can make enormous amounts of money. YouTube proved that you do not need IP protection to become wealthy from your creations. YouTubers make money in other ways, totally independent from policing their IP.
Even if we completely toss out IP, isn't an artist free to release whatever version of their content they want? I find that AI poisoning seems to be a speed bump at best, but I don't see an issue with artists using it if they wish. If anything, it gives a fun challenge for machine learning developers to try.
Of course. Just like a company is allowed to release software which whatever copyright measures in place.
I also never said that artists should not be allowed to do this, just that I hoped their methods were defeated. The same way I hope copyright protections are defeated.
If you are against IP, you obviously are against artists policing which model is trained on their data and which isn't. As this very obviously assigns ownership to the creation of the artist, aka IP.
Maybe, but AI isn't people and doesn't do learning, it does "training" which we can roughly anthropomorphize as learning.
It doesn't really seem like an IP thing to me - it's like making music that's intentionally hard to classify in a particular genre on purpose or something. Maybe that defeats Spotifys recommendation algorithm but that's totally unrelated to any rights to stream it or so on.
You cannot both have an algorithm that stops AI and allows humans to listen in the long run.
Eventually encoders/classifiers will get an 'anthropomorphic' loop of human ear capabilities to use as a prefilter and identify when sounds differ from the expected human hearing and identify the noise.
I mean this is what adversarial reinforcement learning is, humans cannot beat AI on this in the end.
As someone both extremely left and extremely anti-IP, it's been ... Interesting for sure. But a lot of the "pro-IP" positions I've seen are more about the ability for artists to continue earning living wages, or about the sheer level of control we're giving to tech companies, than about IP itself. In other words, they're pro-IP positions only because it aligns with the other things they actually care about.
(This obviously doesn't cover every single person -- some are just legitimately pro-IP.)
Yes this is pretty much it and it's obvious to me.
There's a big corollary to FOSS and gpl, but a lot of people seem to miss it.
This future isn't for our culture, it's for business. And since our culture
requires making money to make things adjacent to art, less culture will be made.
A lot of generated music is good enough to wind up in playlists. Lots of live bands
already fake it, and lots of music venues have already replaced live music. That doesn't mean music will die, it just means it's harder to discover new music and go see a show.
I think there's some European countries that have some kind of basic income/stipend for artists. If this is the direction of the future we need to ensure something like this exists.
Sure, a Marxist might think IP is absurd on ideological grounds, but a Social Democrat? Maybe? A socially conscious neoliberal? They love IP. Someone may also hate Mickey Mouse's copyright extension and at the same time hate GenAI!
This type of vague posting is very popular in HN.
> X thing was originally universally leftist (it wasn't), now it's right wing only (it isn't), something something the real counterculture or grey tribe.
What are you on about? How is it "right wing" to believe that artists do not have the right to tell someone that he isn't allowed to train on his song?
Well, there is the small matter of a number of right-wing politicians in the US using musician's works without permission, not to mention those musicians not agreeing with said politician's extremist views.
What's particularly funny is when that extremist politician is too stupid to understand the meaning of the song they're playing. I think the most famous example would be a certain somebody who kept playing Fortunate Son at his rallies, both him and the crowd oblivious to the fact that nearly every verse's criticism directly applies to him. A rich kid who got out of serving in Vietnam, cheated on his taxes at every opportunity, and is screaming about how great the country is while vilifying a demographic that has always been one of the strengths of our society.
I'd say that "respecting the property rights of the creative class" is very much indeed a 'left wing' perspective, too. Not just on a moral issue of "stealing their work is wrong" but also because artists very often mock or satirize right-wing personalities and platforms - punching up. Right wing artists tend to just punch down at society's weakest.
simple, political stances do not exist in a vacuum. the same position taken in different contexts can be both "right wing" and "left wing". it depends on who's interests are being served. in this particular case, the being anti-IP serves the ruling billionaire class and is therefore a right wing position.
Any new "defense" that claims to use adversarial perturbations to undermine GenAI training should have to explain why this paper does not apply to their technique: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.12027
The answer is, almost unfailingly, "this paper applies perfectly to our technique because we are just rehashing the same ideas on new modalities". If you believe it's unethical for GenAI models to train on people's music, isn't is also unethical to trick those people into posting their music online with a fake "defense" that won't actually protect them?
You are assuming input-transformation based defenses in the image domain transfer to the music recognition domain, when we know they don't automatically even transfer to the speech recognition domain.
But 'protection' of any one song isn't the entire point. It only takes less than a fraction of a percent of corpus data to have persistent long term effects in the final model, or increase costs and review requirements to those stealing their content.
As most training is unsupervised, because the cost and limited access to quality, human labeled data, it wouldn't take much if even some obscure, limited market, older genres which still have active fan bases, like Noise rock to start filtering into recommendation engines and impact user satisfaction.
Most of the speech protections, just force attacks to be in the perceptible audio range, with lo-fi portions like those of TripHop, that would be non-detectable without the false positive rate going way up. With bands like Arab On Radar, Shellac, or The Oxes, it wouldn't be detectable.
But it is also like WAFs/AV software/IDS. The fact that it can't help with future threats today is immaterial. Any win of these leaches has some value.
Obviously any company intentionally applying even the methods in your linked paper to harvest protected images would be showing willful intent to circumvent copyright protections and I am guessing most companies will just toss any file that it thinks has active protections just because how sensitive training is.
Most musicians also know that copyright only protects the rich.
We talked to Nicholas Carlini about this attack (he's one of the authors) in what is one of my top 3 episodes of SCW:
https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2025/01/28/cryptana...
I am ignorant here, this is a genuine question - is there any reason to assume that a paper solely about image mimicry can be blanket-applied, as OP is doing, to audio mimicry?
To add, all the new audio models (partially) use diffusion methods that are exactly the same methods as used on images - the audio generation can be thought of as an image generation of a spectrogram of an audio file.
For early experiments people literally took Stable Diffusion and fine tuned it on labelled spectrograms of music snippets, then used the fine tuned model to generate new images of spectrograms guided by text, and then took those images and turned them back into audio via re-synthesis of that spectral image to a .wav.
Riffusion was one of the first to experiment with this, 2 years ago now: https://github.com/riffusion/riffusion-hobby
The more advanced music generators out now I believe have more of a 'stems' approach and a larger processing pipeline to increase fidelity and add tracking vocal capability but the underlying idea is the same.
Any adversarial attack to hide information in the spectrograph to fool the model into categorizing the track as something it is not isn't different than the image adversarial attacks which have been found to have ways to be mitigated.
Various forms of filtering for inaudible spectral information coupled with methods that destroy and re-synthesize/randomize phase information would likely break this poisoning attack.
The short answer is that they are applying the same defense to audio as to images, and so we should expect that the same attacks will work as well.
More specifically, there are a few moving parts here - the GenAI model they're trying to defeat, the defense applied to data items, and the data cleaning process that a GenAI company may use to remove the defense. So we can look at each and see if there's any reason to expect things to turn out differently than they did in the image domain. The GenAI models follow the same type of training, and while they of course have slightly different architectures to ingest audio instead of images, they still use the same basic operations. The defenses are exactly the same - find small perturbations that are undetectable to humans but produce a large change in model behavior. The cleaning processes are not particularly image-specific, and translate very naturally to audio. It's stuff like "add some noise and then run denoising".
Given all of this, it would be very surprising if the dynamics turned out to be fundamentally different just because we moved from images to audio, and the onus should be on the defense developers to justify why we should expect that to be the case.
>find small perturbations that are undetectable to humans but produce a large change in model behavior.
What artists don't realize by this they are just improving the models relative to human capabilities. The adversarial techniques like, for example making a stop sign look like something else, well likely be weeded out of the model by a convergence of model performance to average or above average human performance.
How long until somebody comes up with another reCAPTCHA type system that forces users to click on images to identify them but that data is then used to verify training data for LLMs? (assuming this isn't happening already)
Google’s captchas have always been used for AI training as far as I know. For example the early versions where you had to type in two displayed words were used for Google’s book scanning program.
Well, the original purpose was to do OCR for things like the NYTs archives and other libraries. The part where you identify road signs & traffic lights was supposedly to train self driving cars. Now, it's apparently just more analytics & tracking for Google to sell you things. [1]
But, since LLM is so error prone & AI companies don't seem to want to pay humans to verify either the data being input into LLM training is valid, or the output is accurate, something like a forced CAPTCHA to be used for verifying correct LLM data by unpaid labor.
It's just a dystopian thought I had. I probably shouldn't have said it outloud (it might give them ideas).
[1] https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/a-tracking-cookie-far...
>Well, the original purpose was to do OCR for things like the NYTs archives and other libraries. The part where you identify road signs & traffic lights was supposedly to train self driving cars. Now, it's apparently just more analytics & tracking for Google to sell you things.
You seem hung up on the idea of the original purpose being one specific thing. The original purpose was to create a dataset to train AIs, the first adopters were OCR programs and such, but it's not like it was created to only be used for that one thing.
Thanks!
Some of the sibling comments had questions around purposefully releasing defenses which don’t work. I think Carlini’s (one of the paper authors) post can add some important context: https://nicholas.carlini.com/writing/2024/why-i-attack.html.
TLDR: Once these defenses are broken, all previously protected work is perpetually unprotected, so they are flawed at a foundational level.
Ignoring these arguments and pretending they don’t exist is pretty unethical.
I'm sure everyone involved wants the defense to work, so it seems a logical leap to say they know it doesn't and are doing this as a scheme?
>o it seems a logical leap to say they know it doesn't and are doing this as a scheme?
In some of the earlier image protection articles the people involved seemed rather shady about the capabilities. Would have to do some HN searching for those articles.
But everything at the end of the day will be a scheme if the end result is for humans to listen to it. You cannot make a subset of music that can be heard by humans (and actually sounds good) that cannot be prefiltered to be learned by AI. I've said the same thing about images, the same thing will be true about audio, movies, actions in real leave, et al.
These schemes will likely work for a few of the existing models, then fall apart quickly the moment a new model arrives. What is worse for defense is audio quality for humans is remaining the same while GPU speeds and algorithms increase in speeds over time meaning the time until a model beats the new defense will trend to unity.
Right, but that just makes it a failed defense, not a scheme to dupe artists into false confidence. Maybe the result will be similar but I don't think the intent here is a con, it sounds pretty genuine.
I think of it as a claim like "we almost have a machine that violates thermodynamics". To avoid confusing the layman that will automatically assume an unlimited energy has been created said claims must be well defined as to what has actually been accomplished.
While the artist in question can have the best intentions, conmen will swoop down on this and productize it, and then artists will be sad and confused when it has zero long term effect on machine learning. That is, except making machine learning more resilient to adversarial attacks.
I like Benn Jordan because he’s clearly got a grasp on a functional understanding of machine learning, but that’s not his primary background. He comes from a music production background, so his focus is more practical and results-oriented.
It will be really interesting as this knowledge percolates into more and more fields, what domain experts do with it. I see ML as more of a bag of tricks that can be applied to many fields.
>He comes from a music production background, so his focus is more practical and results-oriented
It's his art and his livelihood too, so it's also personal. These people want to steal his art and create a world full of soulless cheap muzak, while simultaneously putting him out of work.
Get 'em, Benn! I should go buy one of his albums.
They’ve been doing that since the recording studio process developed the model in the 1920s or so. They would hire songwriters to make generic pop music with generic lyrics, and keep it in the vault until you have some attractive young singer you want to use for marketing then you give them an album of these songs to sing. And they are sure to sell because you’ve been priming the american ear for these chord progressions for a long time, and you fill all the air in the room with your marketing for this singer leaving people little option but to hear the latest carefully crafted earworm. Still happens today maybe even more perfected with psychological studies intersecting with music and marketing. The best musicians have never and will never be a product of that machine. Seek out live music.
Are you sure you mean "stealing"? As in deprive him of his own recordings?
I am curious if anyone read Harry Potter in bootleg form from a LLM. I mean, LLMs are the worst tools for infringing - they are approximate, expensive and slow, while copying is instant, perfect and free. You can apply the same logic for other modalities.
Moreover, who's got the time to see someone else's AI shit when they can generate their own, perfectly customized to their liking? I personally generated a song about my cat and kid. It had zero commercial value but was fun for 2-3 people to listen.
I can steal a company's codebase without depriving them of their code.
I can steal an invention without wiping the inventor's memory.
These are other kinds of stealing, which deprives the creator not of the art itself, but the other benefits of having created it.
The logic "gen AI is theft" is pretty careless. Let's say I use gen-AI to identify a skin sore, and seek appropriate treatment. Who's copyright was being violated? How about if I ask it to make a story where my kid is a protagonist? In fact the more I put into a prompt, the less it looks like anything in the training set, the longer the discussion, the greater the divergence.
I'm saying that training gen-AI on Benn Jordan's art against his will, without permission, and without remuneration, is theft. You can train on a suitably licensed database of medical images if you want.
It depends, is it a LoRa focused on Benn? Is it intended to replicate his style? Or is Benn one of the billion authors in the training set? In that case his impact will be minimal, and the generated images/texts will be very different from any training example, mostly reflecting the prompt.
If the impact is really so minimal that the appropriate compensation is zero, then surely your AI would also be just fine without training on those works?
I understand what you are saying, but there are different kinds of learning. If your model learns how many fingers are on a hand, it does not violate copyright in that regard. Every copyrighted work relies on facts, abstractions and styles they don't own. Models don't have the necessary capacity to remember exact expression from each source, only generalities are being learned and later recombined. Blocking AI from training on grounds of copyright is a maximalist take on what copyright protects.
Let's say we change copyright to cover abstractions, then any human creator would be in deep trouble. Incidental similarities would make the creative act too risky.
Copyright as a concept is prescriptive not descriptive. It doesn't appear from an observation of the laws of reality, it's law to produce certain outcomes, so what copyright applies to is a question of what will the legislative bodies decide to do.
It's entirely valid to consider the act of training via ML a right granted by the creator like reproduction or performing, simply on the basis of protecting human art. The comparison with human learning can be made irrelevant (and IMO it's not the same fundamentally).
This is currently a discussion about plagiarism (the ethics) and what the outcomes are from unrestricted GenAI. How copyright applies to GenAI is a question for later, informed by the discussion by society at large (and lobbyists).
Setting aside questions like why the AI company is entitled to use these materials for free to develop commercial products, why would you even want to use art to learn factual information like how many fingers are on a hand? And how can you claim that this is what they pull from that art, right after we've just been through a wave of unmistakable AI Studio Ghibli copies?
I am more fearful that Ghilibi will demand to own their style, forbidding anyone from using it without permission. If everyone stakes a claim on some style or abstraction, then we are in a situation where nothing new can be created without automatically becoming infringing.
Wait, what happened to "it's just learning hands have five fingers"? A few comments ago you seemed to be saying that copying one artist's style on purpose might be bad, but that with billions of training images, no one source will be recognizeable in the output, and under that condition the impact to the artist is minimal. (and yet...[1]). Now you're taking the position that even using their work without permission to train AI for the purpose of directly and unmistakably replicating that artist's signature style is OK? Which is it?
And are you not fearful of a world in which nobody ever develops a new Ghibli-tier art style, because they'd starve in the process while competing against low-cost AI interpolations of prior art and AI companies make a fortune selling their efforts?
I'm fearful of a world in which anyone can print "Huggies" on counterfeit diapers and pass them off on Amazon as the real deal, so I hope you at least have room in your philosophy for trademarks, if not trademark art styles.
But either way, the good news is that you yourself can put in the work to hand-paint 100,000 frames of imitation Ghibli-style artwork and then train an AI on your portfolio and give it to whoever you want, or even master a style of your own; the bad news is that this will take sixty years of your life and career, during which time you'll have to feed yourself and your staff, and when you're done you might not feel so generous about giving it away for other people to use to sell greeting cards on Etsy.
But there's more good news, which is that Miyazaki is at least generous enough to allow at least one other studio to use his art style with his blessing, as long as the result lives up to the following standard: "every film you make, you’ll have to realize that has to be a film that is worthy to show to children".[2]
And personally, I do think he's earned the right to ask that much.
[1] https://theaiunderwriter.substack.com/p/an-image-of-an-arche...
[2] https://www.themarysue.com/studio-ponoc-interview/
Nothing happened. Judge by the outputs, if they are infringing, the model learned expression. If not, it learned abstractions and styles. Why do you think there were only 2-3 lawsuits focusing on output infringement? If regurgitation was a big issue copyright holders would raise hell. But they focus on training data instead, which means the outputs are ok.
Anyway, focusing on training data is misguided unless you also restrict in context learning by policing what users can paste into the model.
So leave him out of the training set… the impact will be minimal
That's the entire issue and the point of his attempts to poison his music from AI training: you can't opt-out of having your work used to train GenAI. I'd encourage you to watch his video.
GP clearly understands this. The comment makes perfect sense in the context of the thread. It is directed not at the artist, but at those who believe that AI companies training on art without permission aren't stealing anything.
Excellent comment (seriously)
How about you write a story where your kid is the protagonist, instead? I'm sure they'll look back on it with far more appreciation than something an LLM shit out.
> The logic "gen AI is theft" is pretty careless.
No, it isn't. It is a widely understood if not explicitly stated and frankly, so easy to understand concept that I'm forced to conclude people as yourself who refuse point blank to understand it are merely doing so out of sheer determination.
When you post things online, be it art, be it music, be it photographs, be it the idle thoughts of your mind: you do this to share it with other people. That's the point. Why you want to share it can certainly change and explanations range from desiring an online following/clout to making money to simply the fact that you are driven to create and share whatever it is you do. This is the entire basis of the proto-Internet, to a degree where it predates the whole notion of extracting wealth from others via the Internet, and to a large degree, also predates the notion of a following.
If you desire to counteract this premise, then I would suggest you must somehow explain the existence of BBSes, newsgroups, anonymous web forums, blogs, etc. that are some of the oldest, dustiest pillars of the Internet, that our modern Internet would not exist without, and moreover, tons of these existed when analytics, statistics, etc. were barely conceived of. Some websites had a guest book, and some had visitor counters, and that was literally it. If you published on a blog like I did in the 90's, you had no fucking clue if anyone at all was actually reading it.
Or to put it shortly: The Internet and it's constituent communities existed long before there was a financial motive to publish, and absent that, what possible explanation could there be to publish apart from have your thing seen by people?
Ergo, to then take those intellectual products, shared in good faith for the enjoyment of others, run them through an industrial shredder, identify the most common patterns in their underlying structure, and sell it back to the public to whom it's existence simply must be credited, is perverse. It is self-expression without the self; it is merely expression, for the sake of expression. Noise. And we all kind of know this, prior to LLMs, the most common experience of this phenomenon was spam. Because if you simply posted links to whatever thing you were hocking it would be deleted immediately, spammers had to get clever. They would write what were ostensibly "blog posts" but they were not sincere expressions of anything apart from avaricious greed and a desire to camouflage it. Websites rose that were nothing but endless pages of this shit, designed to be optimally crawled by Google and other engines, linking back to sites seeking favor in search engines. Web forums at that time had to regularly moderate away content not for being hateful, but for being openly fucking stupid, irrelevant to topic, and simply seeking to drive traffic to other sites. Anywhere there was an unprotected text input who's contents may, eventually, arrive at a page was, to a spammer, a perfectly valid place to park their shit that nobody wanted, and park it they did.
And this is exactly what LLMs make. Soulless nothing who's primary reason to exist is to occupy space. Image generators are the same; their outputs exist because an image, no matter how generic or mediocre, would look better in this spot than a blank color. Music, without motivation or drive behind it, as a convenient alternative to silence. Video because an image would be boring. Functional, purposeless, driveless, motivation-free content to occupy the otherwise empty void around whatever thing you're actually trying to get eyes on: Text to cloak your links, mediocre art to cloak your sales pitch, etc.
And the reason the business parasite class is so thrilled about it's existence is that it finally allows people who have not nurtured creativity within themselves for whatever reason you'd care to assign access to creative outputs. They have sneered derisively at people who feel the drive to create and learn the ability to do so because fundamentally they do not believe creative products have value, that the attention, the adoration, and more than anything the money that said creatives are given so freely by their fans would be far better in their pocket instead. You can hear this in the way they talk: "I'm making a movie with AI!" said as though it's a revolutionary statement, as though great directors announce "I've started production on my next picture using Red Digital Cameras" like anyone from the public would give an ounce of a shit how a thing was made. They don't even consider "will someone want to see this movie?" because other people seeing it isn't the point, their elevation is the point. The promotion of their brand is the point. They have nothing at all to say, and it will doom anything they make to abject failure.
AI permits capital to access skill without requiring at all that skill be permitted to access capital.
Yeah, but when money becomes information then everyone has money. When music becomes information then everyone has music. When food, medicine and narcotics become information with genetic engineering, then everyone has food, medicine and narcotics. When weapons become information, everyone has weapons. When skyscrapers become information, then everyone has skyscrapers.
Also information wants to be sorted and compressed. See for example personal wikis using org-roam, personal databases of text files using org-mode in emacs and so on.
What good is for me, 10 songs which each one has 10 seconds of a part i like, and i am indifferent to the rest of the song. I take these 100 seconds in total and compress them down to a new song which is totally to my liking.
> Yeah, but when money becomes information then everyone has money.
Categorically, no. When everyone has money, in fact, no one has money. If you don't believe me ask someone from Zimbabwe.
> When food, medicine and narcotics become information with genetic engineering, then everyone has food, medicine and narcotics.
The barrier to everyone having food, medicine and narcotics is not money, it's the restriction of those important goods to people who have money; because food is not grown because people are hungry, nor are medicines made because they are sick; both of these things are done for profit, and people without money are unprofitable to the producers and distributors of those goods.
We have enough food for everyone almost twice over. The problem is the majority of it is pumped to overweight westerners who have disposable income.
> What good is for me, 10 songs which each one has 10 seconds of a part i like, and i am indifferent to the rest of the song. I take these 100 seconds in total and compress them down to a new song which is totally to my liking.
Oh that's so nice for you. And all it took was the bankrupting of every music artist.
Your views on this are so myopic as I genuinely wonder if you're a parody account. I didn't think it was possible for someone to be this short-sighted and selfish but here we are.
Ok, let's focus on food then instead of being all over the place. I personally produce on average 1 ton of olive oil a year. A little bit less 800 kilos or something, but let's say it's 1 ton. I keep some for myself and the rest is sold for profit.
Let's say someone in Zimbabwe wants to buy olive oil. He has to buy from the top producers in the world, i.e. Spain, Italy and Greece. I will sell olive oil to Zimbabweans only for profit, if they don't have money they will not have olive oil.
But let's say a smart Zimbabwean figures out a way to genetically modify Chlorella or Spiroulina which only need sun and no particular climate or fertile land and he produces so much olive oil that it's price collapses to nothing. Not only that will bankrupt me, but such a new innovation in food production will put me at a disadvantage of even competing using the new innovation because the reason is simple, i don't have even half the sun Zimbabwe has.
But even if my income stream of olive oil goes to zero, i can sell something else, i can even learn to program computer code, and sell that. Or learn genetic engineering myself and create some new innovation. There is never any shortage of problems to solve, and things to produce.
> But let's say a smart Zimbabwean figures out a way to genetically modify Chlorella or Spiroulina which only need sun and no particular climate or fertile land and he produces so much olive oil that it's price collapses to nothing.
That's a hell of an industrious Zimbabwean, firstly.
Secondly though, while I understand where your metaphor is aiming, it just doesn't really work. There has never been a "business with a competitive advantage" on the scale of human creative output vs. AI. I would argue even this example you've cooked up which already strains belief on several points doesn't truly capture it.
AI in your example wouldn't be one person in one place that can make a product at unbelievable scale; I think it would be more analogous to everyone on Earth suddenly having a machine on their countertop that produces Olive Oil by itself, of low quality, for free, forever. And I think the effects would be similar: any producer of less than fantastic olive oil would go bankrupt, because they're effectively competing with a free product (not unlike the Netscape Navigator vs Internet Explorer problem) and most consumers who are fine with a low-grade oil have zero reason to buy more when they can just buy access to the infinite olive oil maker. You would also then have producers of food both industrial and restaurants who would begin advertising that they use real proper olive oil, many of which would doubtlessly be using the shitty stuff from our imaginary machine or perhaps a blend of both to cut costs, but nevertheless, this hurts the producers of the good stuff too, because again, they are competing with a free-at-point-of-use product.
And like, on balance, all of this is just a net negative for everyone:
* A lot of the olive oil is worse now, for everyone, seemingly permanently absent regulations
* People are now losing a lot of counter space to the machine
* We've obliterated an entire agricultural sector and farmers who have done nothing but this their entire lives have to retrain jobs and/or their land has to be used to grow something else
* One company that made the infinite olive oil machine now has billions and billions of dollars, that they have earned by making the other three things happen
And just... why? Why is this a good thing for humanity? Put aside the stupid game with the made up money and line go up and justify to me why we've now done this, because it seems like everyone has lost a little bit, some have lost a lot, and a vanishingly tiny minority have won big, explicitly at the expense of everyone else.
And before you start with "well the market chose-" no, it didn't. The market followed incentives established by the market and those who regulate it. That's not a choice anyone or anything made, any more than it's a choice if a river floods it's banks and destroys a bridge.
See the AI generated music channels on YouTube. They get lots of views and a significant part of them would be an actual song stream instead. So yeah, they're taking money away from the artists with content learned from the artists.
Soulless cheap Muzak already exists and has for a long time.
Any musician these days that thinks there is money in music by selling songs is delusional. Sad but true.
Not only that, but if you do have success "selling" songs you increasingly run the risk of litigating from the interest who already "own" the corpus of existing work.
I would encourage you guys to watch his video before going down the argument of saying that there's no money in music creation. There's also just enjoyment in the act of creation and even if you're doing it for free, why should GenAI companies then be able to take your artwork, incorporate that into their dataset and profit of the artist's unpaid labor?
https://youtu.be/xMYm2d9bmEA
I love making music. I haven't written a ton, and I haven't done it recently, but for a time in the early 2000's I participated in a fun Internet songwriting "competition"[0], played some live shows in various places around the country, and met a lot of cool people.
I hear enough incidental similarities in what I've written to make me wary of ever actually trying to make money from it. The Marvin Gaye lawsuit for "Blurred Lines" was ridiculous.
All the music and lyrics I've written (crap though it all is) has always been distributed as public domain (or as close as I can get away w/ Creative Commons CC0 for those asinine jurisdictions where you can't waive your rights). (I have a lyric "You can't own the beat and you can't own the rhyme" in one song, because I believe it very strongly.)
[0] http://www.songfight.org/
Benn is one of my fave subscriptions on YouTube--both for the (now more occasional) music gear stuff and for the in-depth music industry education. The fact that he has been hacking away at IP and AI stuff for ages is just icing on the cake.
All this stuff is snake oil, either already, or eventually.
There's new models showing up regularly. Civitai recognizes 33 image models at this point, and audio will also see multiple developments. Any successful attack on a model isn't guaranteed to apply to another one, not even yet invented. There's also a multitude of possible pre-processing methods and their combinations for any piece of media.
There's also the difficulty of attacking a system that's not well documented. Not every model out there is open source and available for deep analysis.
And it's hard to attack something that doesn't yet exist, which means countermeasures will come up only after a model was already successfully created. This is I'm sure of some academic interest, but the practical benefits seem approximately none.
Since information is trivially stored, anyone having any trouble could just download the file today and sit on it for a year or two not doing anything at all, just waiting for a new model to show up.
To the extent that the people making the models feel unburdened by the data being explicitly watermarked "don't use me", you are correct.
Seems like an awful risk to deliberately strip such markings. It's a kind of DRM, and breaking DRM is illegal in many countries.
But it's not intended as a watermark, it's an attempt at disruption. And with some models it simply doesn't work.
For instance, I've seen somebody experiment with Glaze (the image AI version of this). Glaze at high levels produces visible artifacts (see middle image: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FrbJ9ZTacAAWQQn.jpg:large ).
It seems some models ignore it and produce mostly clean images on the output (looking like the last image), while others just interpret is as a texture, the character is just wearing a funny patterned shirt. This is while the intended result is fooling the model to generate something other than the intended character.
> It seems some models ignore it and produce mostly clean images on the output (looking like the last image), while others just interpret is as a texture
This sounds like you’re talking about img2img generation based on a glazed image instead of training, which isn’t the intended purpose.
Benn has been one of my favorite electronic composers for almost 20 years. Probably my favorite track of his:
The Flashbulb - Parkways: https://youtu.be/C6pzg7I61FI
The problem is that copyright is the law of the land, and it demands our participation.
Because of that reality, every artist who wants to make money must either participate in it, or completely isolate themselves from it.
These models have become an incredible opportunity for giant corporations to circumvent the law. By training a model on a copyrighted work, you can launder that work into your own new work, and make money from it without sharing that money with the original artists. Obviously, this is an incredibly immoral end to copyright as we know it.
So what are we going to do about this situation? Are we really going to keep pretending that copyright can work? It wasn't even working before all the AI hype! Ever heard the words "starving artist"? Of course you have!
We need a better system than copyright. I'm convinced that no system at all (anarchy) would be a superior option at this point. If not now, then when?
> By training a model on a copyrighted work, you can launder that work into your own new work, and make money from it without sharing that money with the original artists.
Not sure if "you" refers to model developers, hosting company or end users. But let's see each one of them in turn
- model development is a cost center, there is no profit yet
- model deployment brings little profit, they make cents per million tokens
- applying the model to your own needs - that is where the benefit goes.
So my theory is that benefits follow the problem, it is in the application layer. Have a need, you can benefit from AI, don't need it, no benefit. Like Linux. You got to use it for something. And that usage, that problem - is personal. You can't sell your problems, they remain yours. It is hard to quantify how people benefit from AI, it could be for fun, for learning, professional use, or for therapy.
Most gen-AI usage is seen by one person exactly once. Think about that. It's not commercial, it's more like augmented imagination. Who's gonna pay for AI generated stuff when it is so easy to make your own.
My point is that this entire situation has to be framed in the narrative that copyright demands it be framed in. It's "you" the participant of copyright.
When someone creates art, copyright says that there is a countable result we can refer to as their "work". Copyright also says that that artist has a monopoly over the distribution and sale of that work. The implication is that the way for an artist to get paid for their labor is for them to leverage the monopoly they have been granted, and negotiate a distribution scheme that involves paying them.
When an artist chooses to work outside the copyright model, that means they must predetermine part of their distribution negotiation. That might be the libertarian option (gratis distribution with no demands), or it might be the copyleft option, where the price is demanded, but also set to 0. The artist may find payment for their labor by other means, but that's challenging to do in an economy where copyright participants dominate.
I don't know about copyright, since for most artists the royalty revenues are not enough to live on. It seems like a failed system if the intent was to get royalty revenues.
Benn has a video about that too! His channel is pretty great.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJSTFzhs1O4
Indeed! I've definitely been a fan of his for a while, and I laud him for trying to make things work in a space where all the cards are stacked against him.
I do wish, though, that he would have introduced that perspective of the situation in this particular video. Leaving it out feels like making a video about learning to swim, set in the middle of the ocean.
Why did you link to blogspam and not the original video?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMYm2d9bmEA
Maybe because it would be the fourth dupe of my submission by then. ;D
OP probably is Peter Kirn himself.
adversarial noise is very popular in the media but imo is a complete dead end for the desired goals - representations do not transfer between different models this easily
adversarial noise [transferability] for image classification used to be very easy (no idea now, not been in the space for half a decade).
the [transferability] rates just drop off significantly for audio (always felt it was a similar vibe to RNN ‘vanishing gradients’)
edit — specifically mention transferability
IP is such a stupid concept. How does it make any sense of that an artist could own the right to let people learn from his music. The idea of an artist getting to choose who can and can't learn from their song is so patently absurd.
I hope that the adversarial attacks can be easily detected and circumvented, just like other IP protection measures have been subverted successfully.
Exclusive rights over their published work encourages artists and inventors to publish their work, which is a clear benefit to society at large. The period of time it should remain exclusive and the specific rights that are made exclusive can be debated, but the utility of IP rights in general is obvious.
And generative AI is not a person in the first place, so I don't think the appeal to learning makes much sense here.
> Exclusive rights over their published work encourages artists and inventors to publish their work
Do they? Please cite your studies.
It was obvious enough to the founders of the USA to bake it into our constitution.
US Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8:
> [the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
We don't have that. We have functionally unlimited times now. Publishing something new today puts you at risk of litigation from existing rights-holders.
I don't believe it's morally right to license music but, if I did, I'd look at the climate of lawsuits in the the last 10-15 years and conclude that the risks might outweigh the potential rewards.
I'm all in favor of reverting copyright terms to what they were before the Walt Disney Corporation was founded, but I think the idea of having a limited time to profit off of your creative works in order to incentivize their creation is still a sound concept.
The original agreement was fair to both creators and society and would never be remotely palatable to today's industry of middle-men and rights hoarders.
I wish we could have it back. I would feel a lot better about "intellectual property", morally, if we did.
That isn't a study? Even if it was a perfect idea at the time things have changed dramatically. I wouldn't want my ideas applied uncritically to some alien future. It also says "useful Arts", what it is suppose to be useful for?
People have been publishing their work for thousands of years before IP even existed. We don't know if the system we have is the best one we could have, I doubt it though.
Historically most artistic works, books, etc. were privately commissioned and one-of-a-kind. Publishing as we understand the idea came with the printing press and widespread literacy.
Publishing as we understand the idea came about at a time when physical scarcity was the limiting factor in dissemination of copies of works. That time has passed. We're in a completely different world now. The elevator operators and buggy whip manufacturers of the publishing industry would like things to remain the way they have been.
I don't think the issue is the scarcity of copies, but rather the scarcity of artists. Not just anyone can write a book that people want to copy, and we should encourage and reward those that can and do.
Filtering the crap is now orthogonal to the concern that, historically, information dissemination has been tied to physical scarcity. Those concerns ran together because it cost money to publish something. It doesn't now.
We can come up with new models that compensate creators more directly. We can also come up with models that don't involve effectively killing any ability to build upon existing culture in the time-scale of a human life.
What came before isn't how it has to be, except that the interest that profit from the current system want it to remain so.
Some of the earliest accounts of proto-IP laws date from Ancient Greece, with protections for new works (particularly recipes and plays?!?) being granted to their creators for a set period of time.
Then you have guilds, trade marks, potter's marks, royal warrants, etc... all "IP" protections of their days.
Would open-source license violations be possible to penalize if not for intellectual property laws?
This! Benn Jordan hasn't published anything in months because of scrapers for AI modeling.
This is such a radical take on IP rights and AI "learning" that I can only assume you're consciously choosing to misunderstand both.
On the off chance that you are not: IP-rights does not cover "learning from" a source. What ML does is not in any way akin to human learning in methodology. When we call it learning that's an analogy. You can not argue a legal case from analogy alone.
> You can not argue a legal case from analogy alone.
Yes they can because the analogy directly applies. The technical details of how a computer learns, vs a human learns doesn't really matter here, and is an irrelevant difference.
The reason why the analogy directly applies is because in both cases it is about how IP cannot really control how someone uses the IP.
Just like how IP laws cannot prevent you from listening to music while standing on your head, it also cannot prevent you from training your models on it (while also standing on your head, lets say!).
Instead, IP laws only prevents the publishing of copies of the IP.
So the point and the analogy stands.
I don't know what to tell you. You will find no judge willing to entertain your analogy without you justifying why it's useful in the particular case. You are going to have to explain the difference, and you are going to have to argue why those differences don't matter.
> You will find no judge willing to entertain your
Yes they will. Judges have already ruled that you can't just ban people from using your IP, like by standing on your head.
It is only publishing someone else's IP that is disallowed.
This is copyright law 101.
You can it seriously be arguing that an IP owner could ban someone from listening to their music while standing on one's head, for example.
Do you have a case where a defendant tried to argue that being upside down protected him from a copyright claim? You claim that they have decided it, can you cite that decision?
You don't understand. The point here is that a copyright holder does not have infinite ability to prevent other people from using their IP.
Instead, they can only prevent copies from being distributed.
You're taking a much more narrow view of this discussion than I am. When I say IP rights I'm not talking about copyright specifically (which does not just cover creating copies, but also performances, adaptations, and distribution) but rather about the broad class of property rights to intangible "ideas". Trademarks, patents and the like are usually, and in my argument specifically, also included under that umbrella.
Even if we limit our area of consideration to just Copyright, you're just wrong. As the world currently stands, you probably get your music from a streaming service. That streaming service doesn't grant you the right to copy, perform, or adapt the music you listen to, they extend you a limited license. If you are in violation of that license, they likely reserve the right to terminate your access to the music. If that license said you weren't allowed to be upside down then standing on your head would allow them to prevent you listening. It does not matter that Copyright doesn't explicitly mention "listening to music while upside down" because your use is not mediated by copyright, but by the contract you signed.
Copyright does not govern how those individual contracts are formulated. We have Freedom of Contract in most of the western world. It provides a framework by which that contract even makes sense (they have property you even care to license with a contract), and a remedies should you violate it.
Actually I am correct because if you don't sign any contracts then the copyright owner has no ability to prevent you from doing anything with the media, other than stopping the distribution of copies.
So, once again, the point stands.
You are mistaken. If the work is distributed under a license, then you have no right to use the work except under the terms of the license. The license acts like a contract.
If the law did not work that way, then the GNU GPL would not be enforceable.
The GPL for example required that if I distribute a derivative of a GPLed work in binary form, then I must also distribute the same derivative as source code or at least provide the source code to any distributee who asks for it. This requirement of the GPL has been enforced by courts (e.g., in a lawsuit against Tivo) even though none of the defendants in these court cases signed a contract regarding the use of the software.
It makes me so uncomfortable that the relatively informed people on HN seem to equate a human learning to AI learning.
Care to elaborate?
I believe that a creator has no right to dictate what other people do with his creations.
I thought this was the most common anti-IP sentiment.
Isn't it the opposite: the author is the only one who has the right to dictate what other people do with his creation?
An extreme example: I do not want my code to be used in weapons guidance systems. Am I not expressing my rights as an author?
I am against IP, so you should not have that right.
I am against corporations profiting from others people works, for free.
If that was not allowed, if people could only use my work for no profit purposes, I agree.
That's what CC (creative commons) is for, though.
I am also in favour of people "remixing" and even making money out of it, but the intent it's paramount to me.
As a long time copyleft activist, I do not understand what limiting authors rights brings to the table, in your opinion.
More than once I contacted the author of some work I liked and they gave me free license to use it, no questions asked (after explaining what I would use it for).
IMO basic cooperation between good willing people goes a long way, without stripping authors of their rights.
Edit: typos
>As a long time copyleft activist, I do not understand what limiting authors rights brings to the table, in your opinion.
IP is nonsense. It is putting an ownership over an idea, but ideas aren't objects. You can not steal or destroy an idea, giving ownership rights to ideas is absurd.
If you think IP should not exist then creative output is free to use by everyone and of course corporations are also free to profit from it.
> It is putting an ownership
over an artifact
You can copy the idea though
And I say copy because before the author made it in the form of an artifact, you didn't know it could be done, or you could have done it on your own.
I can draw ocean waves, nobody owns ocean waves
But if I cooy verbatim hokusai ocean waves, it's mehhhhhhhh
I'm a ripoff loser and should be punished for doing it
Edit: but I like your closing sentence.
Free for all to use it as they see fit is an interesting thought, however I think that imbalance of the means of production will always make the corporations the ultimate beneficiaries, so we should also rethink how our economic system works.
For example: if I could copy the avengers, people would say "it's a cheap copy of Disney's original" and I would hardly make any money out of it.
It's an interesting POV nonetheless.
>But if I cooy verbatim hokusai ocean waves, it's mehhhhhhhh >I'm a ripoff loser and should be punished for doing it
You are totally free to copy that painting in whatever way you want. There is literally zero intellectual property attached to it. This isn't a hypothetical, it is the law right now. Nobody can stop you painting a replica and selling it, as long as you disclose that it is a replica. It is in the public domain and there will be no punishment.
Of course
But I've never said you can't, I've said it's lame and you should be punished for doing it, punished meaning people will totally not attach any meaningful value to it, because it's a stupid replica
Value in art is not given by the content (and usually not the idea), but by the author's intent
The fact that you can legally copy something that is in public domain doesn't take away authors' rights to decide what you can and cannot do with their creation
The problem here is that corporations want to copy creations of authors that are still alive and never granted them rights to replicate them ad libitum, for free.
> IP is nonsense. It is putting an ownership over an idea, but ideas aren't objects. You can not steal or destroy an idea, giving ownership rights to ideas is absurd.
IP isn't ownership over an idea, it's ownership over a specific artifact.
You cannot copyright the idea of painting or the ideas contained within a specific painting, but you can copyright this specific painting because this specific painting is an artifact.
Or, even more extreme: I don't want anyone to view or read my work, at all.
"no right to dictate what other people do with his creations" seems a little radical -- i.e., you don't believe copyright should exist?
Do you think a movie's creator can dictate that I'm not allowed to use a pirated version of a movie to display for 100% profit at my 10,000 AMC movie theaters? Or a book's creator can dictate that I'm not allowed to copy their book, put my name on it, and sell it on Amazon for half-price?
If you agree that a creator can do those things, then you're already in a gray area between "they can dictate everything" and "they have no rights." At that point, you're arguing over the precise location of the line.
>you don't believe copyright should exist?
Yes. It should not. I think that was very clear when I said I was against intellectual property, not for it being more limited.
>Do you think a movie's creator can dictate that I'm not allowed to use a pirated version of a movie to display for 100% profit at my 10,000 AMC movie theaters? Or a book's creator can dictate that I'm not allowed to copy their book, put my name on it, and sell it on Amazon for half-price?
I do not care at all.
I must be misreading this. Are you saying the following is/should be okay/ethically okay/perfectly legal:
Author A spends a year writing a fiction book. They are not well known in the industry. They publish the book, it sells very few copies (perhaps none at all).
Person B (a well known Instagram influencer with tens of thousands of followers) downloads a copy of your book. Replaces your name with their name as the author, and promotes it as a book they've finished writing. Goes on to sell at a very profitable rate.
If your answer is NO this should be illegal, what about if Person B searches/replaces all definite articles with indefinite articles, or changes all the proper nouns to begin with "schmla"? Where do we draw the line?
If your answer is YES, then my gut instinct tells me you are neither a writer, composer, or creator in any meaningful sense of the word.
I wrote a fiction book, which has sold virtually nothing (maybe $50 gross, against an out-of-pocket cost of ~$4k). Both of these would piss me off if they happened to me or my author friends; I also don't think they should be illegal.
I am an author, a digital artist, a programmer, and an extremely amateur musician. None of those things have demonstrated to me why copyright law is necessary, a net positive for the world, or ethical.
Why? You are holding a belief that works directly against your own self interest.
If it's a principles thing—I'd ask, what is good in this principle? What is the good in someone else taking credit for your work? What is the good in someone else divesting you of wages you could use to live or support further creative acts? What is the good in any of that whatsoever? What real harm is the protection afforded you by the IP causing? If you worry underprivileged people can't access your work, you can give it to them for free as the IP holder. I simply cannot fathom any reasonable abstract position in which not having IP would be good for you. Sure, if you hand over your IP to someone else, I could see wanting IP abolished, but that's on you. Thant's the same as the parent scenario only you actually got a say in the matter at least.
Yes, I think it is okay.
I think a very interesting case study would be YouTube. This exact scenario happens there regularly, with various consequences for the creators.
What are your thoughts on peoples identity and trade marks?
Not the OP, but I have some feelings about that. The limits on trademark law are much more fair, in terms of the balance afforded to the public and the limited monopoly granted to the rightsholder. Trademark law can be abused, for sure, but it hasn't been used in the same abusive way as copyright law, nor has it expanded to be functionally infinite and all-encompassing.
I think the creative part of trademarks should be free to use, e.g. a film can have Coca-Cola bottles or some corporate mascot. But if you are commiting fraud, e.g. by labeling a Coca-Cola bottle, not from the company, as such then this should be forbidden. Not on the basis that Coca-Cola has any right to be the only ones using their logo, but that customers have a right to not be defrauded and make choices from whom they buy. As long as the trademark is not used to defraud people it can be used however people want.
Someone's identity, e.g. their likeness and identification aren't just ideas. They actually physically exist. (I assume here that by identity you don't mean how they view themselves). For identities I think it is very important to consider publication. If you publish something you have no right to tell others what to do with it. An actor in a movie has no right to tell someone that their fan cut of a movie is not allowed to exist. On the other hand, as long as you do not publish some part of your identity you should have a right to it. If you are recognizable on a photo that you do not want to have published it should not be published.
To make it short I essentially agree with the GDPR, with the exception of being able to retract consent, but I do not believe it invalidates my stance on IP in any way. Your likeness is not an immaterial idea derived from a creative process, neither is your own house address. You should be allowed to publish it and by publishing it, that publication is no longer yours to own and control.
I'm glad I elaborated. A complete dismissal of all IP-rights is a very fringe very radical position. Most people have a more nuanced IP-rights view about which IP-rights ought to be protected and for how long.
You'll find many more people of the opinion that authors life+70 years is too long, than you will dismissing it entirely.
In other words, (for instance) you believe in the right of massive corporations who control the lion's share of consumer distribution channels to, on an ongoing basis, scrape all authored content that is made publicly available in any form (paid or not) and sell it in a heavily discounted form, without the permission of authors and other rights holders and with no compensation to them, while freezing out the "official" published versions from their distribution channels entirely. More generally, you believe that creators should create for free, and that massive moneyed and powerful interests should reap the profits, even while those same creators toil in the mines to support their passions which do evidently have real value, though it is denied to them.
You think this will make the world better? For whom? Or worse, for whom? Or you place the highest importance on having a maximalist viewpoint that simply cannot be argued with, because being unassailably right in an abstract rhetorical framing is most important to you? Or you crave the elegance of such a position, reality and utility notwithstanding? Or you feel the need to rationalize your otherwise unfounded "belief" that piracy and/or training AI on protected IP should be allowed because you like it and are involved with it yourself? Or you think ASI is going to completely transform the world tomorrow, and whether we get Culture-style luxury gay space communism or something far darker, none of this will matter so we should eat, drink, and be merry today? Or some hybrid of that and a belief that we should actively strive toward and enable such a transition, and IP law stands in its way?
What is it? I've seen some version of all of these and frankly they are all childish nonsense (usually espoused by actual children). Are you a new species?
Not the OP, but I believe very strongly that once an idea has been expressed it should be free for others to build upon and share. That's how ideas work, naturally.
All of human culture is derivative. The current legal regime stifles human expression and makes it impossible for creations to ever be shared in a reasonable human timescale.
To state it in an arguably hyperbolic manner: The "moneyed interests" you're railing against exist because of the current scheme of "intellectual property". They reap virtually all the benefits of human intellectual toil in the system already. Wiping away their stranglehold on the market would be a good thing for creators. Taking away the legal framework their existence is predicated upon would do that.
The copyright industry's influence on social norms, including the massive shift of the social contract in favor of their interests ( functionally infinite copyright terms, attacks of fair use, plundering the public domain to sell it back, works being lost forever because they are "orphaned", etc), all seems natural to you because they want it to be that way. The concept of someone "owning" an idea, which seems perfectly normal to you, was taught to you by people who want the world to be that way, not because it's some natural law. You've been conditioned to believe it your entire life.
I would prefer a fairer system to burning it all down, but the needle has moved so far away from fair that burning it all down seems pretty satisfying.
> Not the OP, but I believe very strongly that once an idea has been expressed it should be free for others to build upon and share. That's how ideas work, naturally.
> All of human culture is derivative. The current legal regime stifles human expression and makes it impossible for creations to ever be shared in a reasonable human timescale.
In the context of copyright law, this is absurd. Fair use exists and it generally isn't even required to "allow" artistic and cultural influence to propagate. If I want to write a sci-fi novel that is heavily influenced and arguably even derivative of my favorite work of some other author, I am completely free to do so---i just can't copy it wholesale. Established fair use doctrine is certainly subject to criticism and future reform, but in a much more nuanced scope than you are applying here.
If you're talking about patents, that's a different conversation. But based on context, that isn't the conversation we're having here.
> burning it all down
Generically, this is another common suggestion from people with naive viewpoints and little or no relevant experience and/or exposure. Notably, people said that about both of Trump's presidential terms to date. I will let you make up your own mind on how that is going for us.
edit: I should also mention that literally every working artist I've talked to about the prospect of abolishing IP law is vehemently opposed to it.
I wish I'd written "...derivative creations..." in that sentence, but heat-of-the-moment being what it was I did not. Having said that, I believe the scope of an infringing derivative work is a lot broader than you are suggesting.
Finding success defending a derivative work on the basis of fair use, particularly if the derivative work is itself financially successful and derivative of a work "owned" by a rights holder with deep pockets, doesn't seem to be very easy in today's legal climate. It certainly doesn't take "wholesale" copying to attract the attention of a rights holder, either. Heck, with the music industry it doesn't take any copying at all to end up losing a lawsuit.
I'll cite the Tolkien or Marvin Gaye estates as good examples among many. I, too, believe it's a ton more nuanced than how you're characterizing it.
> Generically, this is another common suggestion from people with naive viewpoints and little or no relevant experience and/or exposure.
I said "I would prefer a fairer system to burning it all down...". I even qualified my writing as hyperbolic. It seems disingenuous that you'd choose to belittle and make unfavorable comparisons, given both of those statements.
Characterize my viewpoint how you will, but my viewpoint isn't "burning it all down". I will admit that indulging in a little daydreaming about morally repugnant rights hoarders getting what they deserve is fun, but it isn't realistic or productive for society. A fairer system, enabled by shorter copyright terms and better handling of "orphan" works, would be the right thing and what I wish for. Just like I said.
> I should also mention that literally every working artist I've talked to about the prospect of abolishing IP law is vehemently opposed to it.
Well, yeah-- of course they would be opposed to such a vast, sweeping change. It would be madness if they weren't.
The interesting conversation to have with working artists would be about reducing copyright terms, and how that would both "cost" them in potential lost revenue but at the same time free them from the specter of potential litigation and, at the same time, open up vast tracts of public domain work they could build upon.
If you don't actually think IP law should be outright abolished, your viewpoint is of a totally different species than that of the person I originally replied to, and we probably agree on more than we disagree on---in particular that the system is arguably biased toward, and certainly heavily abused by, moneyed actors.
Believe it or not, there really are people who think literally deleting all of IP law is the right thing to do, and it is my honest belief that my first comment in this topic is in reply to one of those people. I appreciate your clarification of your viewpoint (and the appeal of a fantasy in which we Stick It To The Man by cutting off the hand that grips Mickey Mouse and other beloved IPs by the throat), but I hope you can see why I read your comment as I did, especially in the context of what I was replying to.
> The interesting conversation to have with working artists would be about reducing copyright terms, and how that would both "cost" them in potential lost revenue but at the same time free them from the specter of potential litigation and, at the same time, open up vast tracts of public domain work they could build upon.
I am 100% in favor of reducing copyright terms. I'm not sure I've ever talked to somebody who isn't—I suspect I'd have to talk to a corporation-as-person to find that viewpoint in the wild.
>In other words, (for instance) you believe in the right of massive corporations who control the lion's share of consumer distribution channels to, on an ongoing basis, scrape all authored content that is made publicly available in any form (paid or not) and sell it in a heavily discounted form, without the permission of authors and other rights holders and with no compensation to them, while freezing out the "official" published versions from their distribution channels entirely. More generally, you believe that creators should create for free, and that massive moneyed and powerful interests should reap the profits, even while those same creators toil in the mines to support their passions which do evidently have real value, though it is denied to them.
Yes.
(Obviously there is zero point in corporations doing this as costs are near zero and competition for this infinite. Right now almost all art is available for free, it is just illegal.)
>You think this will make the world better? For whom? Or worse, for whom? Or you place the highest importance on having a maximalist viewpoint that simply cannot be argued with, because being unassailably right in an abstract rhetorical framing is most important to you? Or you crave the elegance of such a position, reality and utility notwithstanding? Or you feel the need to rationalize your otherwise unfounded "belief" that piracy and/or training AI on protected IP should be allowed because you like it and are involved with it yourself? Or you think ASI is going to completely transform the world tomorrow, and whether we get Culture-style luxury gay space communism or something far darker, none of this will matter so we should eat, drink, and be merry today? Or some hybrid of that and a belief that we should actively strive toward and enable such a transition, and IP law stands in its way?
I think it will marginally improve the world. I am not training any AIs though.
Could you consider what abolishing IP laws would do to the average YouTuber. Exactly nothing. Their content is available for free, they support themselves without selling their art directly. Loosing rights to their art would have zero impact on them, as their monetization works without it. Sponsoring, direct support, advertisement is enough to make many of them wealthy.
Thank you for affirming your position!
> Obviously there is zero point in corporations doing this as costs are near zero and competition for this infinite. Right now almost all art is available for free, it is just illegal.
This is incredibly naive. You grossly underestimate the grip massive media corporations with essentially unlimited marketing budgets and total control over mainstream distribution channels have over how the vast majority of consumers consume media. And, to whatever extent you think piracy being legal will change that, either way you've completely destroyed individual creators' ability to even partially support themselves with their work, unless...
> Could you consider what abolishing IP laws would do to the average YouTuber. Exactly nothing. Their content is available for free, they support themselves without selling their art directly. Loosing rights to their art would have zero impact on them, as their monetization works without it. Sponsoring, direct support, advertisement is enough to make many of them wealthy.
...Unless you force them all to be social media personalities and marketers first. Unless you think YouTube and its ilk can carry art and culture forward alone (as "content", of course). Unless you want to live in a world where art of original substance is no longer produced, a hall of mirrors in which YouTubers endlessly inter-react and beef and soy face. You may very well think that sounds great, but I think it sounds fucking terrible.
>...Unless you force them all to be social media personalities and marketers first. Unless you think YouTube and its ilk can carry art and culture forward alone (as "content", of course).
How much do you think I am paying an artist hen listening to their songs on Spotify 1000 times? Every album they ever made, dozens of times. The answer will surprise you!
Already every single musician has to be a personality and marketer. There is no other way to make money. You can not finance yourself by the rights to your music, right now.
Only a very select group of artists has any kind of real revenue from the rights over their music. The rest is already using other channels to profit, which are not protected by IP.
As much as you might think cherrypicking examples like Spotify (and characterizing them poorly, besides) supports your point, I don't think it's going to be practical to enumerate every single source of sales, royalties, and other fees paid to artists in aggregate.
So maybe you'd like to state, for the record, that all those sales, royalties, and other fees—in aggregate—are so small as to be meaningless and insignificant to those who receive them? It's staggeringly wrong, but at least then we'll know where we stand.
> What ML does is not in any way akin to human learning in methodology. When we call it learning that's an analogy.
Of course it's different, but if we look closely, it is not copying. The model itself is smaller, sometimes 1000x smaller, than the training set. Being made of billions of examples, the impact of any one of them is very small (de minimis).
If you try to replicate something closely with AI it fails. If regurgitation was a huge problem we'd see lots of lawsuits on output, but we see most suits for input (training). That means authors can't identify cases of infringement in the outputs.
I'm not sure I agree that most suits are on input. Most of the ones I've read have been related to the output of a model. Early worried about CoPilot were about its tendency to regurgitate code verbatim. The WaPo suit was about verbatim output of segments of their articles.
> artist could own the right to let people learn from his music.
They don't, what's happening here is their music is being fed to a computer program in a for-profit venture.
This anthropomorphism of LLMs is concerning. What you're actually implying here is that you believe some computer programs should be awarded the same rights as humans. You can't just skip that like it's some kind of foregone conclusion. You have to defend it. And, it's not easy.
>They don't, what's happening here is their music is being fed to a computer program in a for-profit venture.
I believe that no artist has the right to tell anyone what to do with the art they have published. It does not matter what happens inside the algorithm with that art. Whether NNs (LLMs, by definition are about language) learn like humans or not is totally irrelevant to my point.
It may be irrelevant to your point, but most people are not as radical as you.
Most people support copyrighting to some extent, and this argument against anthropomorphism does work on them.
I had a client train an AI on images I created without extended usage and so added adversarial noise to the images next time around. The models I tested with misclassified the images and image generation seemed broken, so Im curious how it impacted their attempts, if they even attempted it again, I don't know. I don't expect them to come to me and ask why their model is so interested in ducks...
Companies put measures into place to make sure that their software only functions correctly with a paying customer. Some Video Games include intentional problem when the game believes IP laws are violated.
If the client is sophisticated enough to realize that I don't believe it's difficult to prefilter to remove said noise.
For sure. It was a test to see what would happen. I heard nothing, but also didn't see my work appear again- who knows...
Benn Jordan is a musician who is probably one of the most critical of the current copyright regime in his space. For context, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJSTFzhs1O4
Copyright exists to enrich the interests of the publishers of a work, not the artists they funded. A long time ago, copyright was a sufficient legal tool to bring publishers to artists' heels, but no longer. Long copyright terms and the imbalance of power between different wealthy interests allowed publishers to usurp and alienate artists' ownership over their work. And the outsized amount of commercial interest in current generative AI tools comes down to the fact that publishers believe they can use them to strip what little ownership interest authors have left. What Benn is doing is looking for new tools to bring publishers to heel.
IP is fundamentally a social contract, subject to perpetual renegotiation through action and counter-action. If you told any game publisher in the early 2000s, during the height of the Napster Wars, that they'd be proudly allowing randos on the Internet to stream video of their games being played, they'd laugh in your face. But people did it anyway, and everyone in the games biz realized it's not worth fighting people who are adding to your game. Even Nintendo, notorious IP tightwads as they are, tried scraping micropennies off the top of streamers and realized it's a fool's errand.
The statement Benn is making is pretty clear. You can either...
- Negotiate royalties for, and purchase training data from, actual artists, who will then in exchange give you high-quality training data, or,
- Spend increasing amounts of time fighting to filter an increasingly polluted information ecosystem to have a model that only sorta kinda replicates the musical landscape of the late 2010s.
A lot of us are reflexively inclined to hate on anything "copyright-shaped" because of our experiences over the past few decades. Publishers wanted to go back to the days of copyright being a legal tool of arbitrary and capricious punishment. But that doesn't mean that everything that might fall afoul of copyright law is automatically good or that generative AI companies are trying to liberate creativity. They're trying to monopolize it, just like Web 2.0 "disintermediation" was turned into "here's five websites with screenshots of the other four". That's why so much money is being poured into these companies and why a surprisingly nonzero amount of copyright reformists also have deeply negative opinions of AI.
I am not against IP because it does or doesn't benefit artists. I am against the idea because it does not make sense. It gives ownership and control over imaginary things to people, a song you create and public isn't "yours". You do not get to decide what others do with it and how they use it.
I believe that artists see the current IP laws critically, of course they do as it directly impacts how they finance themselves and how they bargain. But I do not care how good/bad the bargain for the artist is. IP laws should be abolished regardless of what artists want.
Every kind of property is imaginary. Yes, physical property has an element of physical possession, but that's not enough legal infrastructure to, say, rent that property out for a recurring fee that must be paid on pain of eviction or repossession. All of that has to be enforced by violence dealt by the state, which renders it just as "imaginary" as the copyright laws that are also backed purely by the fact that the state allows authors to call down the full force of the US government on people that infringe their copyright.
What you are mad about is not imaginary-ness, but centralization[0]. Any critique of law should be done on this yardstick - i.e. is that law protecting the interests of the many, or the few?
In prior decades, ordinary people did not have to care about copyright law, which is why the bargain was tolerable then: copyright took money out of the pockets of the few (publishers) and gave it to the many (authors). But now that publishers figured out how to buy up all the valuable assets and you can practically enforce copyright on individuals, the system has changed to one that takes money from the people at-large and puts it in the pockets of about four publishers. On that basis alone you can argue for abolishing copyright[1] because it no longer serves the interests of the public.
Now, let's look at the business model of AI companies. AI compute is hideously expensive, and so every company involved is already a highly centralized tech monopoly. And with only a few exceptions the largest models are all jealously protected trade secrets you're only allowed to access through heavily monitored APIs. Models with published weights do exist, but they are invariably either too big to run on most hardware or lag in capability and performance. The practical fact of the matter is that most people will use AI - even open models - through inferencing servers ultimately owned by tech monopolies. This is a deeply, incredibly centralizing force.
And, unlike copyright, trade secrecy is one of those few IP laws[2] that aren't completely imaginary. It's rooted in possession, just like physical property rights are. The "no imaginary rights" argument still gets us horrible tech monopolies that can censor or marginalize you.
[0] aka "wealth inequality"
[1] What you replace it with is a separate question, but again, Benn Jordan wants socialized ownership.
[2] "Laws that allow you to dictate the conduct of your competitors"
But that's precisely the problem—while in theory the ideal is good, it is impractical unless you fundamentally change the economic model.
Artists rely on some form of IP to help secure payment for their creative works. They need this payment to be able to afford their own subsistence so that they can continue to live and create.
In an alternative system, maybe you could abolish all forms of IP outright, but how will you do that under capitalism while sustaining (already impoverished) artists?
If you are against the principle of IP, you are essentially saying that an entire segment of capital should be deactivated, and effectively the only jobs remaining would be those of active service/tangible goods. In the age of digital media, basically everything is instantly and infinitely replicable, so you are effectively asking for a world in which it becomes rapidly impossible to make money off of any kind of digital good (music, literature, film, software, etc.) This has an obvious material consequence of disincentivizing creation of these works simply because if the creators need to earn wages in tangible good/service markets they have strictly less time to devote to the creation of creative works.
>In the age of digital media, basically everything is instantly and infinitely replicable, so you are effectively asking for a world in which it becomes rapidly impossible to make money off of any kind of digital good (music, literature, film, software, etc.)
Plainly false. YouTube clearly proves this wrong. You can be funded by your fans.
Besides, if you are a musician and get just tens of thousands of plays on Spotify you are basically not making any money of it. Only extremely few artists make any kind of money of the copyright of their songs. Already distribution rights are near worthless.
Again. I am not opposed to IP rights because of what artists want or do not want.
So you are against paying artists and musicians for their work? You are just entitled to it since it exists?
Yes.
I also pirate every single book I read. Sometimes I buy them though.
I also pirate every single show I watch. I never buy them.
Music is a bit difficult, but I pay for Spotify, but I wouldn't mind paying for the service if Spotify had no rights to the songs and wasn't compensating the artists.
So... do you want someone to present you with evidence that paying people for their work is a good thing? We're getting to the point of arguing the color of the sky here.
The world doesn't owe you a business model. It's not work if someone doesn't value it, just like a street performer isn't working just because they're putting on a show.
If people can't make money without the government enforcing artificial scarcity of their output, they can always chose another business model.
People with a conscience and an ounce of empathy will always value creative work if they themselves intend to make a profit with it in someway. If you take someone's work, and use it to make money, you should pay them for that work. Its really not that hard of a concept.
>If you take someone's work, and use it to make money, you should pay them for that work. Its really not that hard of a concept.
How many paid products are using foss software without paying the developers. 99%? I do not consider that being evil.
If there are no IP laws nobody will have the expectation to have control over what other people do with their creative output. If you are unwilling to accept that you do not get to make art, the same is true now for art as well. If you do not want someone to make a parody of your art your only option is to never publish it.
> People with a conscience and an ounce of empathy will always value creative work if they themselves intend to make a profit with it in someway.
Is that empathy, or just self interest / good business? If I need a product I can't produce for my business to make a profit I'd better be giving my supplier a cut, lest they stop supplying me. With intangibles it's more fluid than with good bound by scarcity, but novel expressions of creativity become not-novel pretty quickly and, inevitably, you're going to need to go back to the well.
> If people can't make money without the government enforcing artificial scarcity of their output, they can always chose another business model.
Okay, but this literally goes for every single good ever. Case in point: theft. If theft wasn't "arbitrarily" made illegal, then there exists no business models for anything, ever. Because you could just steal it for free.
The idea behind IP is that IP is a good but an ephemeral one, one without a physical manifestation. So, we need to translate a type of theft that works for that.
Or, we could not. But keep in mind IP doesn't just mean music. It means, like... everything that isn't physical. Including my job, and probably your job too.
I think I've spend more on street music than any other music.
Imagine I put up a ghetto blaster and a hat. I play the finest music ever made. Would you put money in the hat? Would the idea to put money in the hat ever cross your mind? Would one even understand they want you to put money in the hat for playing the music?
Moreover, technological progress shouldn't be stifled by attempts to create artificial scarcity by technical means (read: DRM, war on general purpose computing, "The Right to Read", etc).
A lack of IP protection would incentivise even more extreme DRM. DRM exists because copyright law alone is considered insufficient protection by rights holders. A lack of such laws would not get rid of DRM, it would do the opposite.
FOH with that Calvinist nonsense
I do not mind if these artists do not get paid. I absolutely realize that much of corporate art would not exist without IP laws and I accept that.
For books, most of the ones I read are passion projects and if I like them I buy them as thanks to the author/publisher.
I also have absolutely no problem with paying people for their work, I just do not believe they have any rights to their so called "IP".
May I ask what you do for a living?
Research. Which really is an interesting case study. While patents exist, most research is distributed freely, except for a fee to an intermediary for doing absolutely nothing. My ideas are, after I published them, free to use and I have absolutely no right to tell orhers what to do or don't do with this.
Even corporate funded researchers, e.g. for AI, will publish and most of the published results are not protected by patents. Everyone is free to implement someone else's research paper and use it for their own commercial application. Science is also gravitating more to open access, e.g. with arxiv for mathematics and CS. Nobody owns "the right" to some mathematical proof or concept.
Citation is of course encouraged, but plagiarism is not a legal matter, much less a criminal matter.
This has to be bait.
How can you possibly justify this? Do you propose professional artists/authors/musicians just shouldn't exist?
They wouldn't exist in the way they do now. It would be different. They existed before intellectual property. There are other models.
You've been conditioned to believe the current model is the only one that works. I'd argue that this is, in large part, because a bunch of interests who aren't "creators" profit from this current regime.
I fully agree, but the vision is not practical unless you want to change the entire economy around the shift.
Yes, artists existed before IP but they also existed before the internet and digital works. Prior to the internet, creative works met real material limits and real scarcity due to the limitations of physical media. In the digital age, these limits are obliterated. You then have two options:
1. You instate something like IP to make digital markets roughly (and admittedly arbitrarily) like real material markets. 2. You establish no such system. No property rights exist in digital space.
I am a major fan of (2) myself, but history gave us (1). At this stage, too many people make a living off digital markets for us to just impose a radical shift—you're taking about reworking the entire global economy here. Without concomitant shifts toward socialism globally this would probably just result in digital space becoming sparse and people adopting "analog only" release models to try and sustain incomes off of creative work.
If you want to abolish IP, go the full mile and abolish the principle of property period. The distinction between IP and physical goods is just an accidental feature of digital technology. If you are against the idea of IP you are against property. Period. And I'm in full agreement, but I also don't think it's easy to achieve this at this historical juncture. Go read Proudhon.
They will exist regardless. The profit motive makes inferior art. Nothing of value is lost if one has to dance for the sake of dancing.
>This has to be bait.
Everything in my post is true. And I do not intend to be inflammatory.
>How can you possibly justify this?
Easy. I buy the books from authors I respect. Books are mostly passion projects anyway and most of the ones I read are from authors who absolutely do not make a living from them or are dead.
The other category of books are scientific publishers I hate all of them and they do not deserve a single cent from me. I would feel bad giving them any money at all. I also am already paying their authors with my taxes.
For shows. I hate most of them anyway and I wouldn't mind if corporate entertainment were gone.
For musicians. I see it the same as with books. I support the artists I like and I give them money for products they put out.
Nobody owes an artist his existence. Especially since most artists are commercial failures any way and somehow that does not threaten the art itself.
Also consider YouTube. Do you think YouTubers would care about IP laws being abolished? Their products are available for free anyways and they commercialize themselves in many different ways.
You aren't thinking far along enough in your arguments.
If you abolish IP youtubers will not be able to make money because if I rip someone's monetized video and host my own ad-free copy, people will prefer to watch that and seeing as there is no legal claim over their IP, the youtuber has no recourse to get me to take down the video. There you go, I just divested a youtuber of a potential revenue stream.
This is why people who favor IP argue that it stimulates the creation of creative works. Look, whether we like it or not, everyone needs to earn wages in our system. If you can earn wages solely on creative works, you are empowered to spend more time and energy on those works because they give you a direct return. If the return on creative works becomes effectively zero modulo charity of consumers, you will have way less resources to devote since now you need to spend them making wages in other ways.
I am all for an IP free world, but I think it requires a fundamentally different economic reality from the one we currently have.
>If you abolish IP youtubers will not be able to make money because if I rip someone's monetized video and host my own ad-free copy, people will prefer to watch that and seeing as there is no legal claim over their IP, the youtuber has no recourse to get me to take down the video. There you go, I just divested a youtuber of a potential revenue stream.
Haha. Do you think that isn't happen right now? Anyways it is irrelevant to the YouTuber, ad revenue is just a small part of it. As blockers are widely in use and YouTubers still exist. YouTube ad revenue is low anyways.
YouTubers make money through merchandise and sponsorships. Merchandise can not be replicated as people buy it to support the YouTuber (selling merchandise while lying that it is to support the creator is fraud, even without IP) and for sponsorships it is irrelevant who also watches the video.
If anything the YouTuber should upload to the ad free site himself to get more reach.
Not people, bots. He is not against people learning from his music.
Obviously. But it still a pretty strict form of IP protection.
Current AI is stuck imitating what it’s exposed to. If they actually learned the material they would understand to reject incorrect information in their training data. LLM’s etc can’t do that under current methodology, simply sucking up more training data and tossing more processing power at the algorithm doesn’t solve that issue.
Leaning from music doesn’t mean imitating that music. People can for example learn from mistakes without imitating those mistakes.
>LLM’s etc can’t do that under current methodology
I hate to give a smarmy result, but are you sure you know what RLHF is? Because this is one way to correct said data.
I am aware of RLHF, and no it doesn’t solve this problem.
There’s a great deal of lesions to be learned from X PB of training data that wouldn’t be covered.
I am against all IP. I do not care what algorithms are used or in what way it differs from human learning, it makes absolutely no difference to me.
If you actually rejected all forms of IP protection you’d insist AI companies freely share their source code, patroon can’t hide works behind a paywall, etc.
Is that your stance? Or do you have some more limited rejection of IP in mind.
>you’d insist AI companies freely share their source code
Myself I don't see those as being related at all. Keeping something secret is allowed. What is not allowed is something being 'not-secret' yet special. Once you share the source code to the world there would be no closing the barn door.
Trade secrets like source code are a core aspect of IP protection.
What and how you can keep a secret is very much under the term IP, if you want to describe something more specific don’t use terms meant to describe something else. If you’re full on “information wants to be free” then the line doesn’t stop at a companies firewall.
No. There is no duty to publish anything.
Intellectual property is about someone having ownership over an idea. It does not mean that you have a right someone gives his idea to you. These are totally separate things.
I am free to write, paint, code or film whatever I want. I have zero obligation to share that with anyone.
More accurately: Intellectual property is about someone having ownership over information, as a photo for example isn’t an idea.
Remove it and you can’t retaliate against anyone buying or selling access to your company’s source code thus making it impossible to keep private. So all such source code ends up public at any reasonably large company effectively killing all AI startups etc. The same is true of any proprietary information thus quickly killing nvidia, AMD, etc. Medical R&D also dies outside of governments and non profits. It’s shocking just how many industries get gutted as there’s far less incentive to make accurate maps when anyone can copy them.
But hey, I respect your stance here.
PS: If you think contracts/DRM/whatever that’s the solution! Now you do have protection for info and thus IP again.
Sounds fun.
As long as you know what you’re arguing for I doubt you’ll get many takers, but hey it’s a free country dream whatever you want to dream. At least it’s healthier than dreaming about gunning people down.
Use your ears to learn.
> IP is such a stupid concept
It's been struggling since the internet became a thing. People got more content than they can consume. For any topic there are 1000 alternative sites, most of them free. Any new work competes against decades of backlog. Under this attention scarcity mode, artists devolve into enshittification because they hunt ad money, while royalties are a joke.
On the other hand, people stopped being passive consumers, we like to interact now. Online games, social networks, open source, wikipedia and scientific publication - they all run in a permissive mode. How could we do anything together if we all insisted on copyright protection?
We like to make most of our content ourselves, we don't need the old top-down model of content creation. We attach "reddit" to our searches because we value comments more than official sources. It's an interactive world where LLMs fit right in, being interactive and contextually adaptive.
How do you propose that artists make a living?
They can work for their living like I do or get a following/sponsors which pays for their creative output. The later works quite well in the case of YouTube. YouTubers generally have proven that it is absolutely possible to commercialize an artistic output that is given out for free, removing IP laws would have essentially zero effect on them.
Nobody owes artists the ability to make a living just for being artists.
> They can work for their living like I do
Unless you have a service industry job or construct material goods, by your own arguments, I see no reason I should pay you either if you work on anything remotely related to intangibles like software.
I'm getting the sense that your perspective is colored more by some personal bias on what art is, what art making entails, and what art is good, rather than any sound logical principles around labor and economics, which is what any reasonable approach to IP should actually be based on.
Art is labor. Just because the end result is an "idea" with no scarcity doesn't mean that time, energy, blood, sweat, and tears didn't go into making it. I consider profiting off someone else's art without compensating them for that work to basically be wage theft.
Almost all art is created without any compensation. Some failed rock band should not be given money because they "tried hard".
Nobody owes artists commercial success for the act of making art.
The idea that it is work theft not to compensate failed artist is ridiculous. Who is to pay, the state?
Of course many of the most successful creators in the world give their creations away for free. They do not charge a single cent from their watchers and still can make enormous amounts of money. YouTube proved that you do not need IP protection to become wealthy from your creations. YouTubers make money in other ways, totally independent from policing their IP.
I don't know what you're arguing against but it's certainly not the point I was making.
I didn't say "artists should be given money because they tried hard." I said that if you're profiting off someone's work, you should pay them.
Haha. Do you think this applies to the FOSS world? What a cruel world you must think we live in.
FOSS licenses explicitly grant you some rights, exactly because the author(s) wanted to do so.
Most of what FOSS license do is explicitly denying the exploitation by someone or some entity wanting to profit from it, without giving anything back.
For example
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html
Seems irrelevant to the point.
I guess you don't understand the points you make then...
Even if we completely toss out IP, isn't an artist free to release whatever version of their content they want? I find that AI poisoning seems to be a speed bump at best, but I don't see an issue with artists using it if they wish. If anything, it gives a fun challenge for machine learning developers to try.
Of course. Just like a company is allowed to release software which whatever copyright measures in place.
I also never said that artists should not be allowed to do this, just that I hoped their methods were defeated. The same way I hope copyright protections are defeated.
This is about AI, not people.
Obviously. How does that make IP legitimate.
If you are against IP, you obviously are against artists policing which model is trained on their data and which isn't. As this very obviously assigns ownership to the creation of the artist, aka IP.
Are we talking about training AI models or about people learning? You are conflating those two as if they are the same.
I am against all IP. There is zero difference to me. Any use is acceptable to me.
I mean this poisoning doesn't stop people from learning from the music at all, does it?
It is designed to stop AI from learning from it. It is intended to work as another form of copy protection.
Maybe, but AI isn't people and doesn't do learning, it does "training" which we can roughly anthropomorphize as learning.
It doesn't really seem like an IP thing to me - it's like making music that's intentionally hard to classify in a particular genre on purpose or something. Maybe that defeats Spotifys recommendation algorithm but that's totally unrelated to any rights to stream it or so on.
I am against IP in general. It doesn't matter what the exact mechanism being used it. You should be able to use all data you can however you want.
You cannot both have an algorithm that stops AI and allows humans to listen in the long run.
Eventually encoders/classifiers will get an 'anthropomorphic' loop of human ear capabilities to use as a prefilter and identify when sounds differ from the expected human hearing and identify the noise.
I mean this is what adversarial reinforcement learning is, humans cannot beat AI on this in the end.
it’s interesting to see the cultural realignment of this in real time - being skeptical of IP becomes the right wing position
As someone both extremely left and extremely anti-IP, it's been ... Interesting for sure. But a lot of the "pro-IP" positions I've seen are more about the ability for artists to continue earning living wages, or about the sheer level of control we're giving to tech companies, than about IP itself. In other words, they're pro-IP positions only because it aligns with the other things they actually care about.
(This obviously doesn't cover every single person -- some are just legitimately pro-IP.)
Yes this is pretty much it and it's obvious to me.
There's a big corollary to FOSS and gpl, but a lot of people seem to miss it. This future isn't for our culture, it's for business. And since our culture requires making money to make things adjacent to art, less culture will be made.
A lot of generated music is good enough to wind up in playlists. Lots of live bands already fake it, and lots of music venues have already replaced live music. That doesn't mean music will die, it just means it's harder to discover new music and go see a show.
I think there's some European countries that have some kind of basic income/stipend for artists. If this is the direction of the future we need to ensure something like this exists.
Sure, a Marxist might think IP is absurd on ideological grounds, but a Social Democrat? Maybe? A socially conscious neoliberal? They love IP. Someone may also hate Mickey Mouse's copyright extension and at the same time hate GenAI!
This type of vague posting is very popular in HN.
> X thing was originally universally leftist (it wasn't), now it's right wing only (it isn't), something something the real counterculture or grey tribe.
What are you on about? How is it "right wing" to believe that artists do not have the right to tell someone that he isn't allowed to train on his song?
Well, there is the small matter of a number of right-wing politicians in the US using musician's works without permission, not to mention those musicians not agreeing with said politician's extremist views.
What's particularly funny is when that extremist politician is too stupid to understand the meaning of the song they're playing. I think the most famous example would be a certain somebody who kept playing Fortunate Son at his rallies, both him and the crowd oblivious to the fact that nearly every verse's criticism directly applies to him. A rich kid who got out of serving in Vietnam, cheated on his taxes at every opportunity, and is screaming about how great the country is while vilifying a demographic that has always been one of the strengths of our society.
I'd say that "respecting the property rights of the creative class" is very much indeed a 'left wing' perspective, too. Not just on a moral issue of "stealing their work is wrong" but also because artists very often mock or satirize right-wing personalities and platforms - punching up. Right wing artists tend to just punch down at society's weakest.
simple, political stances do not exist in a vacuum. the same position taken in different contexts can be both "right wing" and "left wing". it depends on who's interests are being served. in this particular case, the being anti-IP serves the ruling billionaire class and is therefore a right wing position.