Is it free software? [LWN.net]

Is it free software?

Posted Feb 23, 2026 11:31 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Is it free software? by draco
Parent article: The Book of Remind

There's also a philosophical question about whether the current round of AIs should be responsible for obeying copyright law on their own, or whether they should be treated as tools like text editors and Napster.

If they're responsible for obeying copyright law, then it becomes a requirement on AI vendors to make them intelligent enough to obey copyright law on their own. That is obviously something that AI vendors will push back on.

If they're a tool, like a text editor or Napster, then it comes down to how it's used; if it's "clearly" intended to permit copyright infringement (as the courts in the USA found that Napster was), then the vendor is liable. Otherwise, the user is liable for the resulting infringement - and the first time there's an AI user who loses a large sum of money to a court judgement of infringement, the AI vendors face scary press.

The third option is the one the AI vendors want, because it's good for them: AI can't obey copyright law by itself, so isn't responsible for doing so, but also is sufficiently transformative of the input that the output of an AI tool is a new work, not a derivative of any past work and thus the AI user cannot lose a large sum of money to a court judgement.

Note, too, that if you're not able to pursue copyright infringement claims, you effectively don't have copyright protection - there's no practical difference between "farnz copied your work in full, and you didn't pursue" and "farnz copied you work in full, and you lost when you pursued".

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Is it free software?

Posted Feb 23, 2026 11:41 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (6 responses)

This may be one of the biggest impacts ABNI has on society - making the carefully constructed walled-gardens of copyright cartels (yes, copyright also gave some protection to "the little guys" - though, ability to access justice was limited for those without deep pockets, and overall the large and powerful built systems around copyright that protected themselves and punished others) obsolete, by using the slice-and-dice ABNI machines to get around copyright. (Whether ABNI in principle /really/ does get copyright or does not may not be relevant - what matters is there are very large, well resourced, well connected entities who /want/ ABNI to get around copyright, and so it probably will).

Is it free software?

Posted Feb 23, 2026 15:01 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (3 responses)

Could you expand "ABNI" please? I'm not finding anything it stands for that matches the conversation here.

Is it free software?

Posted Feb 23, 2026 16:05 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

ABNI -> "Artificial But Not Intelligent".

ABI -> "Anything But Intelligent" another contender, but has a predefined meaning, least amongst the kinds of technical people who read LWN.

Is it free software?

Posted Feb 23, 2026 16:28 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

My favourite - Artificial Idiocy :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Is it free software?

Posted Feb 23, 2026 17:14 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

I've also seen PI ("Pseudo Intelligence") used in science fiction. It seems like a good term because it gets the idea that it's an attempt to create intelligence but doesn't respect it as actually intelligent. Unfortunately, those initials have other established meanings and might trip people up.

Possible impacts of AI vendors

Posted Feb 23, 2026 15:38 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

There is a much more likely outcome on that path - AI is deemed a tool capable of being used for infringement, but not automatically infringing (so it's case-by-case "did this output infringe"), and the big AI vendors get round this by paying the cartels a "permission fee" for "minor" infringement, while the big companies continue to sue over blatant infringement, and "the little guys" get steamrollered because they aren't big enough to threaten the AI vendors' income streams.

As long as the AI vendors can buy their way out of trouble for reasonable money, they will do so. And there's a route to that where the AI vendors pay to cover "accidental" infringement (e.g. a very Star Wars looking "robot flying a spacecraft"), but not infringement where it's "obvious" from the prompt that the user wanted the output to infringe (e.g. "an R2 series astromech droid flying an X-wing starfighter"), where the AI vendor instead forwards prompt, user details, and output to the big copyright holders so that they can pursue the users for infringement.

And that's a situation where the "little guys" get steamrollered. If you can prove that something is infringing on your copyright, then the fact it was made with Google Gemini using Nano Banana doesn't protect the person who used it from legal consequences, but you first have to find out that this is happening, and then take action. Meanwhile, the owners of the Star Wars copyrights (currently Disney) get a fast track to discovering that people are creating infringing material that's derived from their copyrighted material, and all the information they need to sue people on a platter, plus an income stream to cover cases where the AI vendors didn't notice that they were infringing, where the AI vendor is indemnified.

Possible impacts of AI vendors

Posted Feb 23, 2026 16:16 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Yes, that seems likely.

The "big guys" in the AI and content fields will continue to find ways to have their interests protected. I do think the AI players will have more influence, and there will be some tilting of how copyright works in favour of the interests of the pushers of the ABNI slice-and-dice machines. There may will be a private arrangement of a truce between the major players in those 2 arenas - by blanket licenses (which will of course indenmify the ABNI slice-and-dicers fully, but not necessarily the users - agreed) - agreed.

The "little guys" will be screwed by both though.

The major content cartels will use ABNI to minimise need for digital artists, re-using all the little bits of stuff that was fed in to the slice-and-dicers and recombined - some of which came from smaller content creators. The major ABNI pushers will make money selling their slice-and-dice machines, and their recombination of humanities prior work to all.

It will be interesting to see how the next generation navigate this world.

Is it free software?

Posted Feb 23, 2026 16:42 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (1 responses)

The third option is the one the AI vendors want, because it's good for them: AI can't obey copyright law by itself, so isn't responsible for doing so, but also is sufficiently transformative of the input that the output of an AI tool is a new work, not a derivative of any past work and thus the AI user cannot lose a large sum of money to a court judgement.

I don't think that's going to work out. There are really two separate question: is the AI itself a derivative work, and is the output of the AI a derivative work. This is how considering the parallel situation of a human being doing the same thing is instructive. A human being is allowed to learn from existing copyrighted works without problems, but there are standard legal tests to determine if their work is infringing. The same thing should be true of AI. The AI itself is almost certainly sufficiently transformative that it isn't a derivative of its training corpus, but individual outputs can infringe copyright depending on any of the standard tests. One minor wrinkle is that some of the standard tests are easier to prove if the alleged copier had access to the work they're accused of infringing, and that's probably going to be easier to prove with AI than a human. I wouldn't be surprised if AI companies just stipulate their AI had access to avoid having to divulge all their training material.

Is it free software?

Posted Feb 23, 2026 16:49 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

I agree that it's the least likely to work out - that's why it's a non-answer to the question I posed of "whether the current round of AIs should be responsible for obeying copyright law on their own, or whether they should be treated as tools like text editors and Napster".

It's instead an option that they'd like, but that basically says "the question doesn't need answering, because it's neither a tool nor responsible for obeying the law". In practice, I think the models and weights will be deemed non-infringing (by legislative fiat if needed), but the outputs will be potentially infringing, and the law will have to find an equilibrium.