OpenAI now tries to hide that ChatGPT was trained on copyrighted books, including J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series

Ai isn't interpreting anything. This isn't the sci-fi style of ai that people think of, that's general ai. This is narrow AI, which is really just an advanced algorithm. It can't create new things with intent and design, it can only regurgitate a mix of pre-existing stuff based on narrow guidelines programmed into it to try and keep it coherent, with no actual thought or interpretation involved in the result. The issue isn't that it's derivative, the issue is that it can only ever be inherently derivative without any intentional interpretation or creativity, and nothing else.

Even collage art has to qualify as fair use to avoid copyright infringement if it's being done for profit, and fair use requires it to provide commentary, criticism, or parody of the original work used (which requires intent). Even if it's transformative enough to make the original unrecognizable, if the majority of the work is not your own art, then you need to get permission to use it otherwise you aren't automatically safe from getting in trouble over copyright. Even using images for photoshop involves creative commons and commercial use licenses. Fanart and fanfic is also considered a grey area and the only reason more of a stink isn't kicked up over it regarding copyright is because it's generally beneficial to the original creators, and credit is naturally provided by the nature of fan works so long as someone doesn't try to claim the characters or IP as their own. So most creators turn a blind eye to the copyright aspect of the genre, but if any ever did want to kick up a stink, they could, and have in the past like with Anne Rice. And as a result most fanfiction sites do not allow writers to profit off of fanfics, or advertise fanfic commissions. And those are cases with actual humans being the ones to produce the works based on something that inspired them or that they are interpreting. So even human made derivative works have rules and laws applied to them as well. Ai isn't a creative force with thoughts and ideas and intent, it's just a pattern recognition and replication tool, and it doesn't benefit creators when it's used to replace them entirely, like Hollywood is attempting to do (among other corporate entities). Viewing AI at least as critically as actual human beings is the very least we can do, as well as establishing protection for human creators so that they can't be taken advantage of because of AI.

I'm not inherently against AI as a concept and as a tool for creators to use, but I am against AI works with no human input being used to replace creators entirely, and I am against using works to train it without the permission of the original creators. Even in the artist/writer/etc communities it's considered to be a common courtesy to credit other people/works that you based a work on or took inspiration from, even if what you made would be safe under copyright law regardless. Sure, humans get some leeway in this because we are imperfect meat creatures with imperfect memories and may not be aware of all our influences, but a coded algorithm doesn't have that excuse. If the current AIs in circulation can't function without being fed stolen works without credit or permission, then they're simply not ready for commercial use yet as far as I'm concerned. If it's never going to be possible, which I just simply don't believe, then it should never be used commercially period. And it should be used by creators to assist in their work, not used to replace them entirely. If it takes longer to develop, fine. If it takes more effort and manpower, fine. That's the price I'm willing to pay for it to be ethical. If it can't be done ethically, then imo it shouldn't be done at all.

Well, I'd consider agreeing if the LLMs were considered as a generic knowledge database. However I had the impression that the whole response from OpenAI & cie. to this copyright issue is "they build original content", both for LLMs and stable diffusion models. Now that they started this line of defence I think that they are stuck with proving that their "original content" is not derivated from copyrighted content 🤷

Copyright definitely needs to be stripped back severely. Artists need time to use their own work, but after a certain time everything needs to enter the public space for the sake of creativity.

To add to that, Harry Potter is the worst example to use here. There is no extra billion that JK Rowling needs to allow her to spend time writing more books.

Copyright was meant to encourage authors to invest in their work in the same way that patents do. If you were going to argue about the issue of lifting content from books, you should be using books that need the protection of copyright, not ones that don't.

You are a human, you are allowed to create derivative works under the law. Copyright law as it relates to machines regurgitating what humans have created is fundamentally different. Future legislation will have to address a lot of the nuance of this issue.

Another sensationalist title. The article makes it clear that the problem is users reconstructing large portions of a copyrighted work word for word. OpenAI is trying to implement a solution that prevents ChatGPT from regurgitating entire copyrighted works using "maliciously designed" prompts. OpenAI doesn't hide the fact that these tools were trained using copyrighted works and legally it probably isn't an issue.

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"

you bought the book to memorize from, anyway.

Let's not pretend that LLMs are like people where you'd read a bunch of books and draw inspiration from them. An LLM does not think nor does it have an actual creative process like we do. It should still be a breach of copyright.

Yeah, this headline is trying to make it seem like training on copyrighted material is or should be wrong.

Output from an AI has just been recently considered as not copyrightable.

I think it stemmed from the actors strikes recently.

It was stated that only work originating from a human can be copyrighted.

Should we distinguish it though? Why shouldn't (and didn't) artists have a say if their art is used to train LLMs? Just like publicly displayed art doesn't provide a permission to copy it and use it in other unspecified purposes, it would be reasonable that the same would apply to AI training.

Yep. Legally every word is copyrighted. Yes, law is THAT stupid.

AI/LLMs can train on whatever they want but when then these LLMs are used for commercial reasons to make money, an argument can be made that the copyrighted material has been used in a money making endeavour.

And does this apply equally to all artists who have seen any of my work? Can I start charging all artists born after 1990, for training their neural networks on my work?

Learning is not and has never been considered a financial transaction.

But wouldn't this training and the subsequent output be so transformative that being based on the copyrighted work makes no difference? If I read a Harry Potter book and then write a story about a boy wizard who becomes a great hero, anyone trying to copyright strike that would be laughed at.

How is it any different from someone reading the books, being influenced by them and writing their own book with that inspiration? Should the author of the original book be paid for sales of the second book?

using copyrighted clips in a monetized video can make you get a strike against your channel

Much of the time, the use of very brief clips is clearly fair use, but the people who issue DMCA claims don't care.

You could run a paid training course using a paid-for book, that doesn't mean you're breaking copyright.

I think a lot of people are not getting it. AI/LLMs can train on whatever they want but when then these LLMs are used for commercial reasons to make money, an argument can be made that the copyrighted material has been used in a money making endeavour.

Only in the same way that I could argue that if you've ever watched any of the classic Disney animated movies then anything you ever draw for the rest of your life infringes on Disney's copyright, and if you draw anything for money then the Disney animated movies you have seen in your life have been used in a money making endeavor. This is of course ridiculous and no one would buy that argument, but when you replace a human doing it with a machine doing essentially the same thing (observing and digesting a bunch of examples of a given kind of work, and producing original works of the general kind that meet a given description) suddenly it's different, for some nebulous reason that mostly amounts to creatives who believed their jobs could not at least in part be automated away trying to get explicit protection from their jobs being at least in part automated away.

Sticky this comment

What's the issue against openAI?

Mostly because fuck corporations trying to milk their copyright. I have no particular love for OpenAI (though I do like their product), but I do have great distain for already-successful corporations that would hold back the progress of humanity because they didn't get paid (again).

Because ultimately, it's about the truth of things, and not what team is winning or losing.

The dream would be that they manage to make their own glorious free & open source version, so that after a brief spike in corporate profit as they fire all their writers and artists, suddenly nobody needs those corps anymore because EVERYONE gets access to the same tools - if everyone has the ability to churn out massive content without hiring anyone, that theoretically favors those who never had the capital to hire people to begin with, far more than those who did the hiring.

Of course, this stance doesn't really have an answer for any of the other problems involved in the tech, not the least of which is that there's bigger issues at play than just "content".

Because everyone learns from books, it's stupid.

Leftists hating on AI while dreaming of post-scarcity will never not be funny

AI is the new fan boy following since it became official that nfts are all fucking scams. They need a new technological God to push to feel superior to everyone else...

Also this argument if replacing human workers has been made with every single industrial revolution.

Not knowing something is a crime doesn't stop you from being prosecuted for committing it.

It doesn't matter if someone else is sharing copyright works and you don't know it and use it in ways that infringes on that copyright.

"I didn't know that was copyrighted" is not a valid defence.

That's why this whole argument is worthless, and why I think that, at its core, it is disingenuous. I would be willing to be a steak dinner that a lot of these lawsuits are just fishing for money, and the rest are set up by competition trying to slow the market down because they are lagging behind. AI is an arms race, and it's growing so fast that if you got in too late, you are just out of luck. So, companies that want in are trying to slow down the leaders, at best, and at worst they are trying to make them publish their training material so they can just copy it. AI training models should be considered IP, and should be protected as such. It's like trying to get the Colonel's secret recipe by saying that all the spices that were used have been used in other recipes before, so it should be fair game.

but on mega steroids with a nearly limitless capacity for information retention.

That sounds like redistributing copyrighted books

Nope people are just acting like ChatGPT is making commercial use of the content. Knowing a quote from a book isn't copyright infringement. Selling that quote is. Also it doesn't need to be content stored 1:1 somewhere to be infringement. That misses the point. If you're making money of a synopsis you wrote based on imperfect memory and in your own words it's still copyright infringment until you sign a licensing agreement with JK. Even transforming what you read into a different medium like a painting or poetry cam infinge the original authors copyrights.

Now mull that over and tell us what you think about modern copyright laws.

Lol, say that to the first (obscure) Harry Potter line I tried on ChatGPT.

https://sh.itjust.works/comment/2509413

Using Copyrighted Work as Art as example still influences the AI which their make Profit from.

If they use my Works then they need to pay thats it.

A copyright holder has the right to control who has the right to create derivative works based on their copyright. If you want to take someone's copyright and use it to create something else, you need permission from the copyright holder.

The one major exception is Fair Use. It is unlikely that AI training is a fair use. However this point has not been adjudicated in a court as far as I am aware.

Yeah, it refuses to give you the first sentence from Harry Potter now.

Which is kinda lame, you can find that on thousands of webpages. Many of which the system indexed.

If someone was looking to pirate the book there are way easier ways than issuing thousands of queries to ChatGPT. Type "Harry Potter torrent" into Google and you will have them all in 30 seconds.

If you're talking about the ruling that came out this week, that whole thing was about trying to give an AI authorship of a work generated solely by a machine and having the copyright go to the owner of the machine through the work-for-hire doctrine. So an AI itself can’t be authors or hold a copyright, but humans using them can still be copyright holders of any qualifying works.

How are they going to prove if something was written by an AI? Also, you can take the AI's output and then modify it.

How do you tell if a piece of work contains AI generated content or not?

It's not hard to generate a piece of AI content, put in some hours to round out AI's signatures / common mistakes, and pass it off as your own. So in practise it's still easy to benefit from AI systems by masking generate content as largely your own.

That's not how copyright works. I'm embarrassed for you, and all the people who blindly upvoted you. Like... Yikes. What's happening to this world?

You can't publish copyrighted work as your own just because you're legally not able to publish copyrighted work. That's a open and shut case of copyright infringement. Why do I have to say this? Am I on candid camera?

Yes, but it's what it is doing with it that is the murky grey area. Anyone can read a book, but you can't use those books for your own commercial stuff. Rowling and other writers are making the case their works are being used in an inappropriate way commercially. Whether they have a case iunno ianal but I could see the argument at least.

What the article is explaining is cliff notes or snippets of a story. Isn't that allowed in some respect? People post notes from school books all the time, and those notes show up in Google searches as well.

I totally don't know if I'm right, but doesn't copyright infringement involve plagiarism like copying the whole book or writing a similar story that has elements of someone else's work?

Yeah, but if you wanna act out the contents of the book and sell it as a movie, you need to buy the rights.

Mods remove this comment as this instance no longer tolerates discussions of piracy. We went through this last week

It’s a complicated answer I’m unqualified to answer but essentially there exists some sort of baseline either for people or for how gpt responds usually and then they can figure out which way the text “leans”

Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=PJSTFzhs1O4

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.

Kopimi

(edit 4 minutes in - hey I have this guy's album already ("Red Extensions of Me"))

I'm basically on the same page as this guy except I don't think the government has to manage a royalties system. People can handle that freely, no? Plus you can pretty immediately envision they're gonna have some kind of asinine censorship policy for what content is acceptable and what content isn't.

There is enough non-copywrited Harry Potter fan fiction out there that it would not need to be trained on the actual books to know all the characters. While I agree they are full of shit, your anecdote proves nothing.

Stupid. No it isn't. Establishing legal precedent or, in countries that don't work on precedent, a preponderance of legal cases, prohibiting this practice is what is needed.

Stop comparing AI to a person. It’s not a person, it doesn’t do the things a person does, and it doesn’t have the rights of a person.

And yes the laws are antiquated. We need new laws that will protect authors.

Finally, no, you can’t just throw out all other considerations because you think AI is useful.