Sarah Silverman Sues Maker Of ChatGPT For Copyright Infringement

DL :)@lemmy.ml to Technology@lemmy.ml – 418 points –
Sarah Silverman Sues Maker Of ChatGPT For Copyright Infringement
huffpost.com
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You are treating publicly available information as free from copyright, which is not the case. Wikipedia content is covered by the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 4.0. Images might be covered by different licenses. Online articles about the book are also covered by copyright unless explicitly stated otherwise.

My understanding is that the copyright applies to reproductions of the work, which this is not. If I provide a summary of a copyrighted summary of a copyrighted work, am I in violation of either copyright because I created a new derivative summary?

Not a lawyer so I can't be sure. To my understanding a summary of a work is not a violation of copyright because the summary is transformative (serves a completely different purpose to the original work). But you probably can't copy someone else's summary, because now you are making a derivative that serves the same purpose as the original.

So here are the issues with LLMs in this regard:

  • LLMs have been shown to produce verbatim or almost-verbatim copies of their training data
  • LLMs can't figure out where their output came from so they can't tell their user whether the output closely matches any existing work, and if it does what license it is distributed under
  • You can argue that by its nature, an LLM is only ever producing derivative works of its training data, even if they are not the verbatim or almost-verbatim copies I already mentioned

LLMs have been shown to produce verbatim or almost-verbatim copies of their training data

That's either overfitting and means the training went wrong, or plain chance. Gazillions of bonkers court cases over "did the artist at some point in their life hear a particular melody" come to mind. Great. Now that's flanked with allegations of eidetic memory we have reached peak capitalism.

Aren't summaries and reviews covered under fair use? Otherwise Newspapers have been violating copyrights for hundreds of years.