Reminder that this is made by Ben Zhao, the University of Chicago professor who stole open source code for his last data poisoning scheme.

You should read this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF. The EFF is a digital rights group that recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone.

The article does a very good job at show how it isn’t stealing. Particularlly this part:

Fair use protects reverse engineering, indexing for search engines, and other forms of analysis that create new knowledge about works or bodies of works. Here, the fact that the model is used to create new works weighs in favor of fair use as does the fact that the model consists of original analysis of the training images in comparison with one another.

This isn’t a new way of “stealing” it’s just a way to analyze and reverse engineer images so you can make your own original works. In the US, the first major case that established reverse engineering as fair use was Sega Enterprises Ltd. v. Accolade, Inc in 1992, and then affirmed in Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corporation in 2000. So this is not new at all.

I understand that you are passionate about this topic, and that you have strong opinions on the legal and ethical issues involved. However, using profanity, insults, and exaggerations isn’t helping this discussion. It only creates hostility and resentment, and undermines your credibility. If you’re interested, we can have a discussion in good faith, but if your next comment is like this one, I won’t be replying.

You should read this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF if you haven’t already. The EFF is a digital rights group that recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone.

You should cite this article instead. It’s more up-to-date.

It’ls less like a bear and more like a camera that that can navigate the multidimensional latent space filled with concepts that can give rise to novel art. In the real world you can up, down, left, right, in or out, but in a latent space not only can you go those places, you can go to where Muppets meets impasto.

There’s also a spectrum depending on what tool you’re using and your level of involvement, but most people tend to assume and lump everything together into the same category. I know with web based interfaces wit can be slow and cumbersome to iterate, but with open source models based on Stable Diffusion you get a lot of freedom. That’s mostly what I base my knowledge off.

Here are some videos of what I mean:

https://youtu.be/-JQDtzSaAuA?t=97

https://youtu.be/1d_jns4W1cM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtbEuERXSqk

As long as there’s a human to set parameters, iterate, correct, generate, and evaluate, I don’t think there’s any question as to who made it. Just like an image from nature doesn’t need to be a creator, only someone there to capture it.

Reminder that this is made by Ben Zhao, the University of Chicago professor who illegally stole open source code for his last data poisoning scheme.

Cool, the plausible answers are always the most dangerous.

I bet I lost that part of the explanation when I asked for layman’s terms.

I just wanted a short explanation.

Is this even right?

I thought this was the other comment thread.

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What if you don’t need to change the model to accomplish that?

In the US, fair use lets you use copyrighted material without permission for criticism, research, artistic expression like literature, art, music, satire, and parody. It balances the interests of copyright holders with the public’s right to access and use information. There are rights people can maintain over their work, and there are rights they do not maintain. We are allowed to analyze people’s publically published works, and that’s always been to the benefit of artistic expression. It would be awful for everyone if IP holders could take down any criticism, reverse engineering, or indexes they don’t like. That would be the dream of every corporation, bully, troll, or wannabe autocrat.

The consultation angle is interesting, but I’m not sure applies here. Consultation usually involves a direct and intentional exchange of information and expertise, whereas this is an original analysis of data that doesn’t emulate any specific intellectual property.

I also don’t think this is a new way to pirate, as long as you don’t reproduce the source material. If you wanted to do that, you could just right-click and “save as”. What this does is lower the bar for entry to let people more easily exercise their rights. Like print media vs. internet publication and TV/Radio vs. online content, there will be winners and losers, but if done right, I think this will all be in service of a more decentralized and open media landscape.

AI training isn’t only for mega-corporations. We can already train our own open source models, so we shouldn’t applaud someone trying to erode our rights and let people put up barriers that will keep out all but the ultra-wealthy. We need to be careful not weaken fair use and hand corporations a monopoly of a public technology by making it prohibitively expensive to for regular people to keep developing our own models. Mega corporations already have their own datasets, and the money to buy more. They can also make users sign predatory ToS allowing them exclusive access to user data, effectively selling our own data back to us. Regular people, who could have had access to a corporate-independent tool for creativity, education, entertainment, and social mobility, would instead be left worse off with fewer rights than where they started.

It’s not exactly the same thing, but here’s an article by Kit Walsh, who’s a senior staff attorney at the EFF explains how image generators work within the law. The two aren’t exactly the same, but you can see how the same ideas would apply. The EFF is a digital rights group who most recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone.

Here are some excerpts:

First, copyright law doesn’t prevent you from making factual observations about a work or copying the facts embodied in a work (this is called the “idea/expression distinction”). Rather, copyright forbids you from copying the work’s creative expression in a way that could substitute for the original, and from making “derivative works” when those works copy too much creative expression from the original.

Second, even if a person makes a copy or a derivative work, the use is not infringing if it is a “fair use.” Whether a use is fair depends on a number of factors, including the purpose of the use, the nature of the original work, how much is used, and potential harm to the market for the original work.

And:

…When an act potentially implicates copyright but is a necessary step in enabling noninfringing uses, it frequently qualifies as a fair use itself. After all, the right to make a noninfringing use of a work is only meaningful if you are also permitted to perform the steps that lead up to that use. Thus, as both an intermediate use and an analytical use, scraping is not likely to violate copyright law.

I’d like to hear your thoughts.

It has different rules from OpenAI’s GPT-4, so it might require a slightly different approach.

People have had similar success with Bing Chat, and it’s free and uses GPT-4.

Imagine one of those puck speakers rolling far away, or somewhere you can’t reach.