Technology

Why does "fair use" even fall into it? I'm not familiar with their specific license, but the general definition of copyright is:

A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time.

Nothing was copied, or distributed (in a form that anybody can consider "The Work"), or displayed, or performed. The only possible legal argument they have is adapting as a derivative work. And anybody who is familiar with how an LLM works knows that the form that results from reading in content is completely different from the source.

LLMs/LDMs are not taking in billions of books and putting them into a database. It is a very lossy process. Out of all of the billions of images trained from the Stable Diffusion database, the resulting model is 4 GBs. There is no universe where you can store billions of images into a mere 4 GBs. Stable Diffusion cannot and will not, pixel-by-pixel, reproduce a Van Gogh. It can make something that kind of looks like a Van Gogh, but styles are not copyrightable.

The same applies to an LLM like ChatGPT. It cannot reproduce entire books, or anywhere close to that. If you ask it to recreate Page 25 of Silverman's book, it can't do it. If it doesn't even contain a minor portion of the original material, it can't even be considered a derivative work.

They don't have a case. They have a lot of publicity and noise, but they will lose to inevitability.

Dude, tell me, why do u think they have being doing this only with books and art but no music?

Thats because music really has people protecting their assets. U can have ur opinion about it, but that's the only reason they haven't ABUSED companies and people's work in music.

It's not reading, it's the equivalent of me taking a movie, making a function, charge for it, and then be displeased when the creators demand an explanation.

This is what I never understood about the whole training on AI thing.

When a human creates an artwork, they don't do it out of a vacuum. They've had a lifetime of inspiration from artwork they've discovered that inspires then to create something wholly new. AI does the same thing

Yeah I'll be very surprised if this goes anywhere, are they going to sue cliffsnotes as well?

This is why I am pro AI art. It’s no different than a human taking inspiration from other work.

Nobody comes up with anything truly original. It’s all inspired by someone before them.

Beyond that, it'll try to summarize a book, but it often can't do so successfully, although it will act like it has. Give it a try on something that is even a little bit obscure and it can't really give you good information. I tried with Blindsight, which is not something that's in the popular culture, but also a Hugo nominee, so not completely obscure. It knew who the characters were, and had a general sense of the tone, but it completely fabricated every major plot point that I asked about. Did the same with A Head Full of Ghosts, which is more well known but still not something everyone has read, and it did the same thing.

One thing I found that's really fun is to ask it a question and then follow up with something like "Are you sure about that?" It'll almost always correct itself and make up something else. It'll go one step further and incorporate details you ask about. Give it a prompt like "Are you sure this character died of natural causes? I thought they were killed by Bob" and it will very frequently say you're right and make up a story along those lines that's plausible within the text. It doesn't work on really popular stuff; you can't convince it that Optimus Prime saves Luke Skywalker in RotJ, but anything even a little less well known and it'll tell you details that it's making up whole cloth with complete confidence.

Also, how you know it read the book, and not a summary of it, of which there are loads on the internet?

In the case of ChatGPT, it's hard to tell. OpenAI won't even reveal what their training dataset was.

Researchers have done some tests to tease this out, and they're pretty confident that it has read quite a few books and memorized them verbatim. See one of my favorite papers in a while, Speak, Memory: An Archaeology of Books Known to ChatGPT/GPT-4.

LLMs compress data, there’s no way ChatGPT could remember every detail of the book alongside all the other information it stores in its encodings. The issue isn’t whether the entire text of the book is contained within the encodings, it’s whether it was trained on the book in the first place.

The major scenario that I at least hope holds true out of this is that the AI "creations" aren't eligible for copyright themselves. If the powers that be allow all this AI created stuff copyright protection it's going to be a gigantic mess.

They made a musical out of it so I'm sure it sold just fine. The pointless disparaging based on no facts isn't very useful to this topic.

There's been ongoing suspicions that pirated content was used to train popular LLMs simply because popular datasets used for training LLMs do include such content. The Washington Post did an article about it.

Google's C4 dataset used for research included illegal websites. What remains to be seen is if it was cleaned up before training Bard as we know it today. OpenAI as revealed nothing on its dataset.

The sources for those websites are all being archived as a huge torrent. You don't have to download every single book one by one, if you are interested in all of them...