Sarah Silverman sues OpenAI, Meta for being “industrial-strength plagiarists”

seasonone@opidea.xyz to Technology@lemmy.world – 168 points –
Sarah Silverman sues OpenAI, Meta for being “industrial-strength plagiarists”
arstechnica.com
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Why is crap from 2 weeks ago being posted like it's new news yet again

Is this one of those bot accounts that aren't marked properly or is OP just after karma (which doesn't exist on this site).

I'm conflicted on a lot of this. At the end of the day it seems like these LLMs are simulating human behavior to an extent - exposure to content and generating similar content from that. Could Sarah Silverman be sued by comedians who influenced her comedy style and routines? generally no. I do understand the risk with letting these 'AI' run rampant to displace a huge portion of the creative space which is bad but where should the line be drawn? Is it only the fact they were trained material they dont own people are challenging? What recourse will they have when a LLM is trained on wholly owned IP?

She’s suing for copyright infringement, basically, not the LLM emulating her style.

The LLMs read books from her and many, many others that they didn’t buy, because unauthorized copies had been uploaded to the web (happens to every popular book).

Honestly, I don’t know if she has a case. Going after the people who illegally uploaded her book would be the proper route, but that’s always nearly impossible.

Long and short, LLMs benefited from illegal copies.

I see a lot of people claim the training model included copyrighted works particularly books because it can provide a summary of it. But it can provide a summary of visual media too, and no one is claiming it’s sitting there watching films.

If the argument is it has quite a detailed knowledge of the book, that’s not convincing either. All it needs is a summary and it can make up the blanks, and get it close enough we can’t tell the difference. Nothing is original.

If you upload an illegal copy of a book and I download it, not realizing or caring that it’s pirated, and then I re-upload it elsewhere, you and I have both committed copyright infringement. This feels like the same thing.

I suspect the case will depend largely on whether the ways that the models were trained using her works qualify as fair use.

Your example is faulty. If you upload an illegal copy of a book and I read it then tell people all about it, I am not committing copyright infringement

How did you read it?

Did you access it where it was illegally posted online?

And in so doing, copy it locally in order to read it?

Guess what? According to copyright laws in the US, you just committed copyright infringement.

There's two separate claims.

One, that training is infringement, will hopefully be found to be without merit or it's a slippery slope to the death of free use.

The other, that OpenAI committed copyright infringement by downloading pirated books, is not special in any way with the AI stuff. It doesn't matter how they used it. If they can be found to have downloaded it - even if they then never even opened the file - they are liable for civil damages that can be as high as $150,000 per work if they knew in advance that they were pirating it, and not less than $100 per work no matter if they knew or not.

This is the result of years of lobbying by the various digital rights owners over the past few decades. It's a very broad scope of law and OpenAI should rightfully be concerned if they didn't actually purchase the copyrighted material they used to train.

You can learn and share the knowledge from a book I might illegally upload, but if you are caught having made a copy of the pirated textbook I uploaded, you are liable for damages completely separate from what you did with the knowledge from the books.

If you use that illegal copy to create a work, then your copy infringes copyright (unless it falls under fair use). LLMs don’t count as people in any legal sense, and training them doesn’t have a legal status comparable to a real person reading books.

none of the LLMs are funny or outrageous so I doubt she was highly cited.

it would be nice if the end result of all of these cases was that publicly sourced models had to be public services

ha! as if.

I'm still waiting on proof for any of these allegations. So far it's just been people suing for the sake of suing and hoping they strike gold. If anyone can point to any evidence at all (read: not hearsay) then I'll gladly review it, but as it stands, its nothing.

I hope she loses.

No one should “own” words or concepts.

You don't think authors should get paid?

I don't think anyone should get paid.

That's ideologically cool and all, but in today's reality megacorps will be getting paid for the labor of others which get nothing in return and will further accelerate the divide of wealth.

Yeah, nah.

We need to weaken these copyright and ownership notions one fight at a time.

You won’t get to tomorrow if you settle for today.

Copyright protection helps "the little guy" make a living to begin with

And it helps the big guy own everything our culture has produced.

We’re not even entitled to use the culture of our age freely because it’s all held by a handful of companies.

So you hate the "Big Guy" but you also hate independent workers like Sarah for wanting to protect their IP? You're making no sense here and just contradicting yourself between posts

It’s pretty simple, I hate IP in any form.

Oh so settling for giant corporations using AI to plagiarize other's work without liability is getting us to a better tomorrow? Interesting

Accepting that we don’t own words or concepts is.

Oh sure I bet the corporations will get right on giving up their ip so that they're on the same page as the rest of us.

They will never give up anything, we’ll have to take it back.

So why are you ok with openai being paid for taking work from other people that you don’t think should be paid? If she loses, then that’s the situation.

So change the system that lets them be paid for, don’t paywall human culture and let that system continue.

You’re picking the wrong target here.

The system exists. We all have to live with it. Or change it, but this case won’t do that and you’re effectively siding with big tech over authors.

Then why are we banned from using certain words on social media?

Just because you can freely say something doesn’t mean I have to forced to listen to it.

And that means that the words cannot be used, which means they are not owned by you. If you could use them, you would own them right?

But the words can be used, just not in that specific space. If you're not allowed to bring a gun to a restaurant it doesn't mean the restaurant suddenly owns the bullets.

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That's a completely unrelated topic.

You're talking about censorship, I'm talking about ownership.

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