Why not two licences?

Posted Oct 28, 2024 20:00 UTC (Mon) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
In reply to: Why not two licences? by neggles
Parent article: OSI readies controversial Open AI definition

> This obsession with making AI/ML model creators publish datasets honestly feels very disingenuous. It feels like the subset of society which has decided that ML model training constitutes copyright infringement are attempting to manipulate supporters of open source software - many of whom aggressively disagree with the concept of copyright in the first place - into indirectly helping them bring expensive copyright claims against AI companies, regardless of whether those claims hold any merit.
>
> I'm not making any judgement as to whether those claims hold merit - it's irrelevant to my point - but I *will* point out that this particular group of people have made their judgement long before the courts have made theirs, and in general leave no quarter for discussion or room for reassessment of that view - despite often having little to know domain-specific knowledge or understanding of how this technology works.

I generally agree that the anti-AI artists are on the wrong side here (or at least, they have not demonstrated to my satisfaction that their absolutist position holds water in every possible circumstance).

But I think it would be helpful to take a step back and avoid vilifying a group of people whose industry is currently undergoing a serious level of tech-induced upheaval. People are scared and worried for their economic future, and I think they do have a right to be upset and to advocate for their self interest, even as I disagree with them.

IMHO the most likely outcome is that the public gets bored of this debate long before it progresses to the point of actually affecting policy decisions of major western governments, at which point it will be up to the courts to clarify how and whether the existing "derivative work" right applies to AI training. It is most plausible to me that that will end up being a fact-specific inquiry which requires individualized analysis of both the model and the specific training work whose copyright is allegedly infringed.* Frankly, I'm not entirely convinced that any version of open source AI would be viable in such a regime - but the point is that artists posting angry messages on Xitter are probably not going to change that outcome one way or the other.

Disclaimer: I work for Google, which does some GenAI stuff that I'm not involved with. Opinions are my own, speculation about the future is quite possibly wrong.

* For example, The New York Times provided evidence (in their lawsuit against OpenAI) that ChatGPT can sometimes produce verbatim or near-verbatim copies of their columns. I could imagine courts wanting to see evidence similar to that before entering a finding of infringement.

Civil vs Common law

Posted Oct 29, 2024 10:03 UTC (Tue) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link]

> IMHO the most likely outcome is that the public gets bored of this debate long before it progresses to the point of actually affecting policy decisions of major western governments, at which point it will be up to the courts to clarify how and whether the existing "derivative work" right applies to AI training.

That might work for Common Law systems like the US, but in Civil Law systems (most of Europe at least) the courts generally can't make these kinds of major policy changes and will punt the problem to the legislature to sort out. The EU AI Act 2024 covers all the stuff that everyone could agree on already (e.g. training for non-commercial use is fine). The question of what to do about training data for commercial use is subject of much political debate. The EU executive/legislature is currently in a look and see mode to see if businesses can work out an agreement amongst themselves and are only likely to step in if it looks like someone is using their market power illegitimately, or we start seeing serious negative public policy impacts.