Stephen King: My Books Were Used to Train AI
literature.cafe
One prominent author responds to the revelation that his writing is being used to coach artificial intelligence.
By Stephen King
Non-paywalled link: https://archive.li/8QMmu
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Any source for this? I have never seen that.
I'm highly skeptical about GPT4 having been directly trained on copyrighted material by Stephen King. Simply by all the sheer information about his works, including summaries, themes, characters, and critical analyses that are publicly available, a good LLM can appear to be able to plagiarize these works, while it doesn't. If I'm right, there is no leverage for creators to complain. Just accept that that's the world we're living in now. I don't see why this world will stop the sales of books or movie rights on books, etc.
Especially since copyright only protects human authored works. Meaning anything created by an LLM is in the public domain, and the publisher using it loses control of the work.
Of course, this has the potential to be a significant issue, as I can take a copyrighted work, train an LLM using it, and then get it to generate a similar but unique work that is in the public domain. This new work will likely impact the original author’s ability to profit off their original work, thus decreasing supply of human created works in the long run.
But it’s currently all legal and above board.
I had heard some mentions of this before too, but didn't recall the exact references. I went searching and found this recent study.
Sure, it can plagiarize works it has been trained on. They didn't show in the study, however, that this has occurred for copyright protected material like fiction books.
I saw a comment, probably on Mastodon, from an author saying that (I believe) ChatGPT had plagiarized some of his work verbatim. I don't recall if it was a work of fiction or not, although for the purpose of copyright it doesn't matter.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's trained on works of fiction just as much as non-fiction though. I think that from what I've heard, you can ask ChatGPT to write something in the style of particular writers? If it's possible to give a very specific prompt for it to write something with the same plot points as a Stephen King story in the style of Stephen King, I wonder just how close it would look like the original?