Nvidia is sued by authors over AI use of copyrighted works

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• halva@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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  • Zarxrax@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Everyone here seems to be missing the point and haven’t read the article. Nvidia isn’t being targeted because they make the hardware that enables training ai. They are being sued because they trained an ai using the authors books.

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    • Dkarma@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      There’s no difference. There’s also no infringement. Show me the copy.

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  • JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Why do you hate AI? It’s a useful tool to allow humans to work less? Or have you bought into the capitalist lie that we must work 9-5 5 days a week for an employer to have purpose?

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    • homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I hate it because it’s 80% hype garbage and 10% suck. The remaining 10% varies between “instant code check” and “might be cool someday”, so it’s in the “we’ll see” column. Not worth the garbage though.

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    • thepaperpilot@incremental.social ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      You've set up a false dichotomy. There are reasons to dislike AI besides capitalist propaganda. For example, moral concerns with training on data without explicit approval

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  • Dkarma@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    They may as well sue bic for all of those copyright infringement enabling pens the company made

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    • nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Except the pens weren’t covered in snippets of copyrighted text.

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  • Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    My analogy was suing the company that makes the glass for photocopiers.

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• Kinglink@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  the authors said the takedown reflects Nvidia’s having “admitted” it trained NeMo on the dataset

  Oooh so they’re fucked.

  THOUGH… let’s say I bought a book, why am I not allowed to learn from that book, and write in a similar style to that book. I am? Well why can’t I train an AI to use that book and have it write in a similar style? I’m not sold on “I must give you permission to use my book to train an AI.” Maybe if I agreed to those terms BEFORE buying the book, but it seems odd that someone can bar me from doing that AFTER buying the book. And just because “we never thought about that” isn’t really a good excuse to change the rights for someone who bought the book.

  Though if anything this basically proves the old adage. “Don’t tell anyone what’s in your AI’s training data”

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  • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Because if a human does it, it’s a huge, labour-intensive task, and that difficulty serves as a very effective filter to stop the world being flooded by copied crap derived from the hard work of a person.

    If we let AIs do it, we’d be able to churn out so much of it. Just a never ending torrent of machine-generated copycat garbage, constantly being spewed out, flooding the market, stamping out the actual people that wrote the content in the first place.

    Funny enough, the printing press also led to changes for a similar reason - there was very little protection in place for writers before the printing press, because copying their work was such a painstaking task that few people bothered and it wasn’t much of an issue. Once there was the technology to quickly and trivially rip off their work and print it mass-scale, IP protections were granted to authors.

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    • BreakDecks@lemmy.ml ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      While I agree that AI generated content is annoying and of poor quality, those are hardly reasons to disallow the creation of AI generated content. If we want to expand IP protections to protect avainst AI plagerism, we need to draw a better line than just calling it garbage.

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    • General_Effort@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      That’s all wrong. It’s propaganda.

      The rulers of old were brutal, theocratic tyrants. Forget all that Disney shit. Think witch burnings. Think medieval torture. Of course, they sought to control the printing press. They cracked down on blasphemy and regime criticism. Maybe they only allowed trusted individuals to operate presses. That also funneled money to cronies. Or maybe they even forbade the printing of anything that had not been approved.

      Freedom of the press originally means that this is not done anymore.

      The first copyright was created over a quarter millennium after the printing press came into use in Europe. It lasted 14 years.

      Here’s a question: If we were to ban free, open source software, would that protect programmers? Of course not. They have the choice to make their products a gift or not. In the same sense, copyright does not protect authors. Without copyright, there would be only the public domain. People would have a choice to make a gift to the public or not to publish.

      Copyright does not protect authors. It was supposed to give the public a tool to support authors. The US Constitution gives that as the only acceptable purpose of copyrights and patents. Unfortunately, current copyright derives from a different source. It was created by the tyrannical empires of Europe in the 19th century. Americans like to blame Disney, but all they did was lobby for the US to adopt it.

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    • federatingIsTooHard@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Once there was the technology to quickly and trivially rip off their work and print it mass-scale, IP protections were granted to authors.

      the statute of ann had nothing to do with protecting authors. it was about which london printers were allowed to print shakespeare’s work long after he was dead.

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  • patatahooligan@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Humans are not generally allowed to do what AI is doing! You talk about copying someone else’s “style” because you know that “style” is not protected by copyright, but that is a false equivalence. An AI is not copying “style”, but rather every discernible pattern of its input. It is just as likely to copy Walt Disney’s drawing style as it is to copy the design of Mickey Mouse. We’ve seen countless examples of AI’s copying characters, verbatim passages of texts and snippets of code. Imagine if a person copied Mickey Mouse’s character design and they got sued for copyright infringement. Then they go to court and their defense was that they downloaded copies of the original works without permission and studied them for the sole purpose of imitating them. They would be admitting that every perceived similarity is intentional. Do you think they would not be found guilty of copyright infringement? And AI is this example taken to the extreme. It’s not just creating something similar, it is by design trying to maximize the similarity of its output to its training data. It is being the least creative that is mathematically possible. The AI’s only trick is that it threw so many stuff into its mixer of training data that you can’t generally trace the output to a specific input. But the math is clear. And while its obvious that no sane person will use a copy of Mickey Mouse just because an AI produced it, the same cannot be said for characters of lesser known works, passages from obscure books, and code snippets from small free software projects.

    In addition to the above, we allow humans to engage in potentially harmful behavior for various reasons that do not apply to AIs.

    • “Innocent until proven guilty” is fundamental to our justice systems. The same does not apply to inanimate objects. Eg a firearm is restricted because of the danger it poses even if it has not been used to shoot someone. A person is only liable for the damage they have caused, never their potential to cause it.
    • We care about peoples’ well-being. We would not ban people from enjoying art just because they might copy it because that would be sacrificing too much. However, no harm is done to an AI when it is prevented from being trained, because an AI is not a person with feelings.
    • Human behavior is complex and hard to control. A person might unintentionally copy protected elements of works when being influenced by them, but that’s hard to tell in most cases. An AI has the sole purpose of copying patterns with no other input.

    For all of the above reasons, we choose to err on the side of caution when restricting human behavior, but we have no reason to do the same for AIs, or anything inanimate.

    In summary, we do not allow humans to do what AIs are doing now and even if we did, that would not be a good argument against AI regulation.

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    • BreakDecks@lemmy.ml ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Mickey Mouse is public domain…

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• Deello@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This feels like suing gun manufacturers over murder. They made the tool but they’re not the ones responsible for the crime.

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  • dominiquec@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Mexico is suing U.S. gun makers for selling high-powered weapons that fuel drug cartel violence.

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    • Cheems@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      theguardian.com/…/gun-lawsuits-manufacturer-selle…

      “That led to the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), which effectively granted gun manufacturers and sellers immunity from lawsuits related to harm “resulting from the criminal or unlawful misuse” of guns.

      Unlike other industries, the gun industry was now largely free to act as it chose.”

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  • abhibeckert@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It’s more like charging the iron ore mining companies over gun murders.

    NVIDIA doesn’t have any say over how their GPUs are used.

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    • locknessmeownster@lemmynsfw.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      No offense, but the article is not about Nvidia GPUs, but their own AI model NeMo. Literally in the first line of the report. In this case, they definitely have the say on what training data to be used in the model.

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  • tabular@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Creating material that is copyright infridgement is not a desired output, the purpose of guns is to kill (when used). AI manufacturers depend on copyrighted material to “train” the AI, the method of creation makes it more likely to infridge.

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    • Deello@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Creating material that is copyright infridgement is not a desired output

      Agreed.

      the purpose of guns is to kill (when used).

      Guns is a term with varied definitions of which not all are intended to kill. There are rubber bullets, air soft, small caliber, and even paint ball guns. These MAY be lethal but were made with other goals in mind.

      Nvidia on the other hand made GPUs for applications that revolve around video, the G literally stands for graphics. Some people found out that they are also efficient at other tasks so Nvidia made a new line of products for that workload because it was more lucrative. Gamers usually only buy 1 graphics card per machine, a few years ago some would even buy up to 3. In contrast, AI researchers/architects/programmers buy as many as they can afford and constantly buy more. This has made Nvidia change their product stack to cater to the more lucrative customer.

      AI manufacturers depend on copyrighted material to “train” the AI

      With everything I said, these AI creators CHOOSE what to feed into these new tools. They can choose to input things in the public domain or even paid-licensed-content but instead using copyrighted and pirated content is the norm. That is because this is a new field and we are collectively learning where the boundaries are and what is considered acceptable and legal.

      Reddit recently signed a deal to license it’s data (user generated content like posts and comments) for use with AI generation. Other companies are using internal data to tailor their AIs to solve field-specific problems. The problem is that AI, just like guns, is a broad term.

      the method of creation makes it more likely to infridge.

      Nvidia has given us the tools but until we define what is considered acceptable, these kinds of things will be inevitable. I do believe that the authors had their copyrights infringed but they are also going after the wrong people. There have been reports of AI spitting out full books on command, clearly proving that those works were used to train. The authors should be going after the creators of those specific AIs, not Nvidia.

      There is a long and bumpy road ahead.

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  • yokonzo@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I think it’s more like the gun manufacturers themselves sueing the US army

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• threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Since some folks in this thread can’t be bothered to click on the article, here is the first sentence:

  Nvidia, whose chips power artificial intelligence, has been sued by three authors who said it used their copyrighted books without permission to train its NeMo AI platform.

  In this case, “it” is Nvidia. They are training their own model, not just selling chips.

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  • XTornado@lemmy.ml ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I didn’t even knew they had a model themselves.

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    • Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      of course they have trained models in house. they had ai write a song during a meme conference last year

      they also use ai to train a model for DLSS image upscaling in house.

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• FrostKing@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Found in NeMo Guys! He found him!

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• saddlebag@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Several comments making the some gun manufacturer analogy didn’t bother to read 3 sentences from article.

  Lemmings showing their Redditage (Reddit heritage)

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• AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Seems to me like a reasonable criterion would be to demonstrate that the trained model can output copyright-infringing text based on a non-infringing prompt.

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  • ryathal@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The ability to create a copy of a copyrighted work from ai shouldn’t be any more relevant than with a copy machine.

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• CaptainBasculin@lemmy.ml ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Not in a million chance this goes through. Can you sue Intel/AMD for making processors that could be used to develop malware? No.

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  • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    You should read the article.

    They’re not being sued for making hardware that can be used nefariously; they’re being sued because the AI model that they themselves run uses data they had no permission to use.

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  • homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Intel/AMD created a bunch of malware to test their processors that infringed on copyright? I mean. . . yeah if they did then sure.

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  • tal@lemmy.today ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    They did have those people trying lawsuits against firearm manufacturers for any misuse of their firearms, until Congress blocked that in 2005.

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    • locuester@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Ah, the wonderful “Child Safety Lock Act of 2005” lol. Love politician names for this shit.

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• homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Good

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