this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
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When a school professor "prompts" you to write an essay and you, the "tool" go consume copyrighted material and plagiarize it in the production of your essay is the infringement made by the professor?
If you quote the sources and write it with your own words I believe it isn't, AFAIK "AI" already do that.
Copilot lists its sources. The problem is half of them are completely made up and if you click on the links they take you to the wrong pages
It definitely does not cite sources and use it's own words in all cases - especially in visual media generation.
And in the proposed scenario I did write the student plagiarizes the copyrighted material.
So your question is "is plagiarism plagiarism"?
No, that is not the question nor a reasonable interpretation of it.
If you read a book or watch a movie and get inspired by it to create something new and different, it's plagiarism and copyright infringement?
If that were the case the majority of stuff nowadays it's plagiarism and copyright infringement, I mean generally people get inspired by someone or something.
There’s a long history of this and you might find some helpful information in looking at “transformative use” of copyrighted materials. Google Books is a famous case where the technology company won the lawsuit.
The real problem is that LLMs constantly spit out copyrighted material verbatim. That’s not transformative. And it’s a near-impossible problem to solve while maintaining the utility. Because these things aren’t actually AI, they’re just monstrous statistical correlation databases generated from an enormous data set.
Much of the utility from them will become targeted applications where the training comes from public/owned datasets. I don’t think the copyright case is going to end well for these companies…or at least they’re going to have to gradually chisel away parts of their training data, which will have an outsized impact as more and more AI generated material finds its way into the training data sets.
How constantly does it spit out copyrighted material? Is there data on that?
There's more and more research starting to happen on it, but I've seen anywhere from 20% to 60% of responses. Here's a recent study where they explicitly try to coerce LLMs to break copyright: https://www.patronus.ai/blog/introducing-copyright-catcher
I don't have the time to grab them right now, but in many of the lawsuits brought forward against companies developing LLMs, their openings contain some statistics gathered on how frequently they infringed by returning copyrighted material.
You do realize that AI is just a marketing term, right? None of these models learn, have intelligence or create truly original work. As a matter of fact, if people don't continue to create original content, these models would stagnate or enter a feedback loop that would poison themselves with their own erroneous responses.
AIs don't think. They copy with extra steps.
Except that the information it gives you is often objectively incorrect and it makes up sources (this happened to me a lot of times). And no, it can't do what a human can. It doesn't interpret the information it gets and it can't reach new conclusions based on what it "knows".
I honestly don't know how you can even begin to compare an LLM to the human brain.