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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • There were similar debates about photographs and copyright. It was decided photographs can be copyrighted even though the camera does most of the work.

    Even when you have copyright on something you don’t have protection from fair use. Creativity and being transformative are the two biggest things that give a work greater copyright protection from fair use. They at are also what can give you the greatest protection when claiming fair use.

    See the Obama hope poster vs the photograph it was based on. It’s to bad they came to an settlement on that one. I’d have loved to see the courts decision.

    As far as training data that is clearly a question of fair use. There are a ton of lawsuits about this right now so we will start to see how the courts decide things in the coming years.

    I think what is clear is some amount of training and the resulting models fall under fair use. There is also some level of training that probably exceeds fair use.

    To determine fair use 4 things are considered. https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/

    1 Purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.

    This is going to vary a lot from training model to training model.

    Nature of the copyrighted work.

    Creative works have more protection. So training on a data set of a broad set of photographs is more likely to be fair use than training on a collection of paintings. Factual information is completly protected.

    -> Amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole.

    I think ai training is safe here. Once trained the ai data set usually doesn’t contain the copyrighted works or reproduce them.

    Effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

    Here is where ai training presumably has the weakest fair use argument.

    Courts have to look at all 4 factors and decide on the balance between them. It’s going to take years for this to be decided.

    Even without ai there are still lots of questions about what is and isn’t fair use.




  • Where I worked we had a very important time sensitive project. The server had to do a lot of calculations on a terrain dataset that covered the entire planet.

    The server had a huge amount of RAM and each calculation block took about a week. It could not be saved until the end of the calculation and only that server had the RAM to do the work. So if it went down we could lose almost a weeks work.

    Project was due in 6 months and calculation time was estimated to be about 5 1/2 months. So we couldn’t afford any interruptions.

    We had bought a huge UPS meant for a whole server rack. For this one server. It could keep the server up for three days. That way even if wet lost power over the weekend it would keep going and we would have time to buy a generator.

    One Friday afternoon the building losses power and I go check on the server room. Sure enough the big UPS with a sign saying only for project xyz has a bunch of other servers plugged into it.

    I quickly unplug all but ours. I tell my boss and we go home at 5. Latter that day the power comes back on.

    On Monday there are a ton of departments bitching that they came in an their servers were unplugged. Lots of people wanted me fired. My boss backed me and nothing happened but it was stressful.










  • The solution for this is usually counter training. Granted my experience is on the opposite end training ai vision systems to id real objects.

    So you train up your detector ai on hand tagged images. When it gets good you use it to train a generator ai until the generator is good at fooling the detector.

    Then you train the detector on new tagged real data and the new ai generated data. Once it’s good at detection again you train the generator ai on the new detector.

    Repeate several times and you usually get a solid detector and a good generator as a side effect.

    The thing is you need new real human tagged data for each new generation. None of the companies want to generate new human tagged data sets as it’s expensive.