In its submission to the Australian government’s review of the regulatory framework around AI, Google said that copyright law should be altered to allow for generative AI systems to scrape the internet.
Worth considering that this is already the law in the EU. Specifically, the Directive (EU) 2019/790 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 April 2019 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market has exceptions for text and data mining.
Article 3 has a very broad exception for scientific research: “Member States shall provide for an exception to the rights provided for in Article 5(a) and Article 7(1) of Directive 96/9/EC, Article 2 of Directive 2001/29/EC, and Article 15(1) of this Directive for reproductions and extractions made by research organisations and cultural heritage institutions in order to carry out, for the purposes of scientific research, text and data mining of works or other subject matter to which they have lawful access.” There is no opt-out clause to this.
Article 4 has a narrower exception for text and data mining in general: “Member States shall provide for an exception or limitation to the rights provided for in Article 5(a) and Article 7(1) of Directive 96/9/EC, Article 2 of Directive 2001/29/EC, Article 4(1)(a) and (b) of Directive 2009/24/EC and Article 15(1) of this Directive for reproductions and extractions of lawfully accessible works and other subject matter for the purposes of text and data mining.” This one’s narrower because it also provides that, “The exception or limitation provided for in paragraph 1 shall apply on condition that the use of works and other subject matter referred to in that paragraph has not been expressly reserved by their rightholders in an appropriate manner, such as machine-readable means in the case of content made publicly available online.”
So, effectively, this means scientific research can data mine freely without rights’ holders being able to opt out, and other uses for data mining such as commercial applications can data mine provided there has not been an opt out through machine-readable means.
I think the key problem with a lot of the models right now is that they were developed for “research”, without the rights holders having the option to opt out when the models were switched to for-profit. The portfolio and gallery websites, from which the bulk of the artwork came from, didn’t even have opt out options until a couple of months ago. Artists were therefore considered to have opted in to their work being used commercially because they were never presented with the option to opt out.
So at the bare minimum, a mechanism needs to be provided for retroactively removing works that would have been opted out of commercial usage if the option had been available and the rights holders had been informed about the commercial intentions of the project. I would favour a complete rebuild of the models that only draws from works that are either in the public domain or whose rights holders have explicitly opted in to their work being used for commercial models.
Basically, you can’t deny rights’ holders an ability to opt out, and then say “hey, it’s not our fault that you didn’t opt out, now we can use your stuff to profit ourselves”.
Practically you would have to separate model architecture from weights. Weights are licensed as research use only, while the architecture is the actual scientific contribution. Maybe some instructions on best train the model.
Only problem is that you can’t really prove if someone just retrained research weights or trained from scratch using randomized weights. Also certain alterations to the architecture are possible, so only the “headless” models are used.
I think there’s some research into detecting retraining, but I can imagine it’s not fool proof.
Books will start needing to add a robots.txt page to the back of the book
Which will be ignored by search engines, as is tradition?