691
OpenAI now tries to hide that ChatGPT was trained on copyrighted books, including J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
691 points (95.9% liked)
Technology
59402 readers
4015 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If I memorize the text of Harry Potter, my brain does not thereby become a copyright infringement.
A copyright infringement only occurs if I then reproduce that text, e.g. by writing it down or reciting it in a public performance.
Training an LLM from a corpus that includes a piece of copyrighted material does not necessarily produce a work that is legally a derivative work of that copyrighted material. The copyright status of that LLM's "brain" has not yet been adjudicated by any court anywhere.
If the developers have taken steps to ensure that the LLM cannot recite copyrighted material, that should count in their favor, not against them. Calling it "hiding" is backwards.
If Google took samples from millions of different songs that were under copyright and created a website that allowed users to mix them together into new songs, they would be sued into oblivion before you could say "unauthorized reproduction."
You simply cannot compare one single person memorizing a book to corporations feeding literally millions of pieces of copyrighted material into a blender and acting like the resulting sausage is fine because "only a few rats fell into the vat, what's the big deal"
Terrible analogy.
Which one? And why exactly?
The analogy talks about mixing samples of music together to make new music, but that's not what is happening in real life.
The computers learn human language from the source material, but they are not referencing the source material when creating responses. They create new, original responses which do not appear in any of the source material.
"Learn" is debatable in this usage. It is trained on data and the model creates a set of values that you can apply that produce an output similar to human speach. It's just doing math though. It's not like a human learns. It doesn't care about context or meaning or anything else.
Okay, but in the context of this conversation about copyright I don't think the learning part is as important as the reproduction part.