OpenAI now tries to hide that ChatGPT was trained on copyrighted books, including J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series
businessinsider.com
OpenAI now tries to hide that ChatGPT was trained on copyrighted books, including J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series::A new research paper laid out ways in which AI developers should try and avoid showing LLMs have been trained on copyrighted material.
Its a bit pedantic, but I'm not really sure I support this kind of extremist view of copyright and the scale of whats being interpreted as 'possessed' under the idea of copyright. Once an idea is communicated, it becomes a part of the collective consciousness. Different people interpret and build upon that idea in various ways, making it a dynamic entity that evolves beyond the original creator's intention. Its like issues with sampling beats or records in the early days of hiphop. Its like the very principal of an idea goes against this vision, more that, once you put something out into the commons, its irretrievable. Its not really yours any more once its been communicated. I think if you want to keep an idea truly yours, then you should keep it to yourself. Otherwise you are participating in a shared vision of the idea. You don't control how the idea is interpreted so its not really yours any more.
If thats ChatGPT or Public Enemy is neither here nor there to me. The idea that a work like Peter Pan is still possessed is such a very real but very silly obvious malady of this weirdly accepted but very extreme view of the ability to possess an idea.
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.
Your broader point would be stronger if it weren't framed around what seems like a misunderstanding of modern AI. To be clear, you don't need to believe that AI is "just" a "coded algorithm" to believe it's wrong for humans to exploit other humans with it. But to say that modern AI is "just an advanced algorithm" is technically correct in exactly the same way that a blender is "just a deterministic shuffling algorithm." We understand that the blender chops up food by spinning a blade, and we understand that it turns solid food into liquid. The precise way in which it rearranges the matter of the food is both incomprehensible and irrelevant. In the same way, we understand the basic algorithms of model training and evaluation, and we understand the basic domain task that a model performs. The "rules" governing this behavior at a fine level are incomprehensible and irrelevant-- and certainly not dictated by humans. They are an emergent property of a simple algorithm applied to billions-to-trillions of numerical parameters, in which all the interesting behavior is encoded in some incomprehensible way.
I disagree with your interpretation of how an AI works, but I think the way that AI works is pretty much irrelevant to the discussion in the first place. I think your argument stands completely the same regardless. Even if AI worked much like a human mind and was very intelligent and creative, I would still say that usage of an idea by AI without the consent of the original artist is fundamentally exploitative.
You can easily train an AI (with next to no human labor) to launder an artist's works, by using the artist's own works as reference. There's no human input or hard work involved, which is a factor in what dictates whether a work is transformative. I'd argue that if you can put a work into a machine, type in a prompt, and get a new work out, then you still haven't really transformed it. No matter how creative or novel the work is, the reality is that no human really put any effort into it, and it was built off the backs of unpaid and uncredited artists.
You could probably make an argument for being able to sell works made by an AI trained only on the public domain, but it still should not be copyrightable IMO, cause it's not a human creation.
TL;DR - No matter how creative an AI is, its works should not be considered transformative in a copyright sense, as no human did the transformation.
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 🤷
Yeah I suppose that's on them.
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.
If I memorize the text of Harry Potter, my brain does not thereby become a copyright infringement.
A copyright infringement only occurs if I then reproduce that text, e.g. by writing it down or reciting it in a public performance.
Training an LLM from a corpus that includes a piece of copyrighted material does not necessarily produce a work that is legally a derivative work of that copyrighted material. The copyright status of that LLM's "brain" has not yet been adjudicated by any court anywhere.
If the developers have taken steps to ensure that the LLM cannot recite copyrighted material, that should count in their favor, not against them. Calling it "hiding" is backwards.
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.
And allowed get sued anyway
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"
Terrible analogy.
Which one? And why exactly?
The analogy talks about mixing samples of music together to make new music, but that's not what is happening in real life.
The computers learn human language from the source material, but they are not referencing the source material when creating responses. They create new, original responses which do not appear in any of the source material.
"Learn" is debatable in this usage. It is trained on data and the model creates a set of values that you can apply that produce an output similar to human speach. It's just doing math though. It's not like a human learns. It doesn't care about context or meaning or anything else.
you bought the book to memorize from, anyway.
No, I shoplifted it from an Aldi
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.
... you're getting into philosophical territory here. The plain fact is that LLMs generate cohesive text that is original and doesn't occur in their training sets, and it's very hard if not impossible to get them to quote back copyrighted source material to you verbatim. Whether you want to call that "creativity" or not is up to you, but it certainly seems to disqualify the notion that LLMs commit copyright infringement.
This topic is fascinating.
I really do think i understand both sides here and want to find the hard line that seperates man from machine.
But it feels, to me, that some philosophical discussion may be required. Art is not something that is just manufactured. "Created" is the word to use without quotation marks. Or maybe not, i don't know...
I wasn't referring to whether the LLM commits copyright infringement when creating a text (though that's an interesting topic as well), but rather the act of feeding it the texts. My point was that it is not like us in a sense that we read and draw inspiration from it. It's just taking texts and digesting them. And also, from a privacy standpoint, I feel kind of disgusted at the thought of LLMs having used comments such as these ones (not exactly these, but you get it), for this purpose as well, without any sort of permission on our part.
That's mainly my issue, the fact that they have done so the usual capitalistic way: it's easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.
I think you're putting too much faith in humans here. As best we can tell the only difference between how we compute and what these models do is scale and complexity. Your brain often lies to you and makes up reasoning behind your actions after the fact. We're just complex networks doing math.
Unless you are going to argue the act of feeding it the texts is distributing the original text or doing some kind of public performance of the text, I don't see how.
*could
We have to distinguish between LLMs
They are not one and the same
Yeah, this headline is trying to make it seem like training on copyrighted material is or should be wrong.
Legally the output of the training could be considered a derived work. We treat brains differently here, that's all.
I think the current intellectual property system makes no sense and AI is revealing that fact.
I think this brings up broader questions about the currently quite extreme interpretation of copyright. Personally I don't think its wrong to sample from or create derivative works from something that is accessible. If its not behind lock and key, its free to use. If you have a problem with that, then put it behind lock and key. No one is forcing you to share your art with the world.
Most books are actually locked behind paywalls and not free to use? Or maybe I don't understand what you meant?
Following that, if a sailor is the sea were to put a copy of a protected book on the internet and ChatGPT was trained on it, how that argument would go? The copyright owner didn't place it there, so it's not "their decision". And savvy people can make sure it's accessible if they want to.
My belief is, if they can use all non locked data for free, then the model should be shared for free too and it's outputs shouldn't be subject to copyright. Just for context
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.
But it kinda does. If I see a van Gogh painting, I can be inspired to make a painting in the same style.
When "ai" "learns" from an image, it doesn't copy the image or even parts of the image directly. It learns the patterns involved instead, over many pictures. Then it uses those patterns to make new images.
Good news, they already do! Artists can license their work under a permissive license like the Creative Commons CC0 license. If not specified, rights are reserved to the creator.
I know, but one of the biggest conflicts between artists and AI developers is that they didn't seek a license to use them for training. They just did it. So even if the end result is not an exact reproduction, it still relied on unauthorized use.
Unfortunately AI training sets don’t tend to respect those licenses. Since it’s near impossible to prove they used it without permission they’re SoL
Ah, but that's the thing. Training isn't copying. It's pattern recognition. If you train a model "The dog says woof" and then ask a model "What does the dog say", it's not guaranteed to say "woof".
Similarly, just because a model was trained on Harry Potter, all that means is it has a good corpus of how the sentences in that book go.
Thus the distinction. Can I train on a comment section discussing the book?
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.
Where can I read more about this? I've seen it mentioned a few times, but never with any links.
They clearly only read the headline If they'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.
Vanilla Ice had it right all along. Nobody gives a shit about copyright until big money is involved.
Yep. Legally every word is copyrighted. Yes, law is THAT stupid.
People think it's a broken system, but it actually works exactly how the rich want it to work.
The powers that be have done a great job convincing the layperson that copyright is about protecting artists and not publishers. It's historically inaccurate and you can discover that copyright law was pushed by publishers who did not want authors keeping second hand manuscripts of works they sold to publishing companies.
Additional reading: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne
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. Similar to how using copyrighted clips in a monetized video can make you get a strike against your channel but if the video is not monetized, the chances of YouTube taking action against you is lower.
Edit - If this was an open source model available for use by the general public at no cost, I would be far less bothered by claims of copyright infringement by the model
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.
Actually, it has. The whole consept of copyright is relatively new, and corporations absolutely tried to have people who learned proprietary copyrighted information not be able to use it in other places.
It's just that labor movements got such non-compete agreements thrown out of our society, or at least severely restricted on humanitarian grounds. The argument is that a human being has the right to seek happiness by learning and using the proprietary information they learned to better their station. By the way, this needed a lot of violent convincing that we have this.
So yes, knowledge and information learned is absolutely withing the scope of copyright as it stands, it's only that the fundamental rights that humans have override copyright. LLMs (and companies for that matter) do not have such fundamental rights.
Copyright by the way is stupid in its current implementation, but OpenAI and ChatGPT does not get to get out of it IMO just because it's "learning". We humans ourselves are only getting out of copyright because of our special legal status.
You kind of do. Fair use protects reverse engineering, indexing for search engines, and other forms of analysis that create new knowledge about works or bodies of works. These models are meant to be used to create new works which is where the "generative" part of generative models comes in, and the fact that the models consist only of original analysis of the training data in comparison with one another means as your tool, they are protected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
Fair use only works if what you create is to reflect on the original and not to supercede it. For example if ChatGPT gobbled up a work on the reproduction of firefies, if you ask it a question about the topic and it just answers, that's not fair use since you made the original material redundant. If it did what a search engine would do and just tell you that "here's where you can find it, you might have to pay for it", that's fair use. This is of course US law, so it may be different everywhere, and US law is weird so the courts may say anything.
That's the gist of it, fair use is fine as long as you are only creating new information and only use the copyrighted old work as is absolutely necessary for your new information to make sense, and even then, you can't use so much of the copyrighted work that it takes away from the value of it.
Otherwise if I pirated a movie and put subtitles on it, I could argue it's fair use since it's new information and transformative. If I released the subtitles separately, that would be a strong argument for fair use. If I included a 10 sec clip in it to show my customers what the thing is like in action, then that may be argued. If it's the pivotal 10 seconds that spoils the whole movie, that's not fair use, since I took away from the value of the original.
ChatGPT ate up all of these authors' works and for some, it may take away from the value they have created. It's telling that OpenAI is trying to be shifty about it as well. If they had a strong argument, they'd want to settle it as soon as possibe as this is a big stormcloud on their company IP value. And yeah it sucks that people created something that may turn out to not be legal because some people have a right to profit from some pieces of capital assets, but that's the story of the world the past 50 years.
First of all, fair use is not simple or as clear-cut a concept that can be applied uniformly to all cases than you make it out to be. It's flexible and context-dependent on careful analysis of four factors: the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality of the portion used, and the effect of the use upon the potential market. No one factor is more important than the others, and it is possible to have a fair use defense even if you do not meet all the criteria of fair use.
Generative models create new and original works based on their weights, such as poems, stories, code, essays, songs, images, video, celebrity parodies, and more. These works may have their own artistic merit and value, and may be considered transformative uses that add new expression or meaning to the original works. Providing your own explanation on the reproduction of fireflies isn't making the original redundant nor isn't reproducing the original, so it's likely fair use. Plenty of competing works explaining the same thing exist, and they're not invalid because someone got to it first, or they're based on the same sources.
Your example about subtitling a movie doesn't meet the criteria for fair use because subtitling a movie isn't a transformative use. It doesn't add any expression or meaning, you doubly reproduce the original work in a different language, and it isn't commentary, criticism, or parody. Subtitling a movie also involves using the entire work, which again weighs against fair use. The more of the original you use, the less likely it's fair use. This might also have a negative effect on the potential market for the original, since it could reduce demand for the original or its authorized translations. Now, subtitling a short clip from a movie to illustrate a point in an educational video or a review would likely fly.
Finally, uses that can result in lost sales for already established markets tend to be determined as not fair use by the courts. This doesn't mean that uses that affect the market are unfair. That would mean you wouldn't be able to create a parody movie or use snippets of a work for a review. These can be considered a fair use because they comment on or criticize the original work, unlike uploading a full movie, song, or translated script. Though I could be getting the wrong read here, since you didn't explain how you came to any of your conclusions.
I think you're being too narrow and rigid with your interpretation of fair use, and I don't think you understand the doctrine that well. I recommend reading this article by Kit Walsh, who’s a senior staff attorney at the EFF, a digital rights group, who recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone. I'd like to hear your thoughts.
I am not a lawyer by the way, I don't even live in the US, so what I write is just my opinion.
But fair use seems a ridiculous defense when we talk about the Github Copilot case, which is the first tangible lawsuit about it that I know of. The plaintiffs lay out the case of a book for Javascript developers as their example. The objective of the book to give you excercises in Javascript development, I would get the book if I wanted to do Javascript excercises. The book is copyrighted under a share-alike attribution required licence. The defendants Github and OpenAI don't honour the license with Copilot and Codex. They claim fair use.
So with the four factors:
the purpose and character of your use: .Well, they present their Javascript excercises as original work while it's obvious they are not, they are reproducing the task they want letter by letter. It is even missing critical context that makes it hard to understand without the book, so their work does not even stand on its own. Also, they do this for monetary compensation, while not respecting the original license, which if someone was giving a commentary or criticism covered by fair use, would be as trivial as providing a citation of the book. They are also not producing information beyond what's available in the book. Quite funnily, the plaintiffs mention that the "derivative" work is also not quite valuable, as the model answered with an example from a "what's wrong with this, can you fix it?" section for a question about how to determine if a number is even.
the nature of the copyrighted work: It's freely available, the licence only requires if you republish it, you should provide proper attribution. It is not impossible to provide use cases based on fair use while honouring the license. There is no monetary or other barrier.
the amount and substantiality of the portion taken: All of it, and it is reproduced verbatim.
the effect of the use upon the potential market: Github Copilot is in the same market as the original work and is competing with it, namely in showing people how to use Javascript.
And again, I feel this is one layer. Copyright enforcement has never been predictable, and US courts are not predictable either. I think anything can come of this now that it's big tech that is on the defendant side, and they have the resources to fight, not like random Joe Schmoes caught with bootleg DVDs. Maybe they abolish copyright? Maybe they get an exception? Since US courts have such wide jurisdiction and can effectively make laws, it is still a toss-up. That said, the Github Copilot class action case is the one to watch, and so far, the judge denied orders to dismiss the case, so it may go either way.
Also by the way, the EU has no fair use protections, it only allows very specific exceptions for public criticism and such, none of which fits AI. Going by the example of Copilot, this would mean that EU users can't use Copilot, and also that anything that was produced with the assistance of Copilot (or ChatGPT for that matter) is not marketable in the EU.
I am not a lawyer either or a programmer for that matter, but the Copilot case looks pretty fucked. We can't really get a look at the plaintiff's examples since they have to be kept anonymous. Generative models weights don't copy and paste from their training data unless there's been some kind of overfitting, and some cases of similar or identical code snippets, might be inevitable given the nature of programming languages and common tasks. If the model was trained correctly, it should only ever see infinitesimally tiny parts of its training data. We also can't tell how much of the plaintiff's code is being used for the same reasons. The same is true of the plaintiff's claims about the "Suggestions matching public code".
This case is still in discovery and mired in secrecy, we might not ever find out what's going on even once the proceedings have concluded.
Ehh, "learning" is doing a lot of lifting. These models "learn" in a way that is foreign to most artists. And that's ignoring the fact the humans are not capital. When we learn we aren't building a form a capital; when models learn they are only building a form of capital.
Artists, construction workers, administrative clerks, police and video game developers all develop their neural networks in the same way, a method simulated by ANNs.
This is not, "foreign to most artists," it's just that most artists have no idea what the mechanism of learning is.
The method by which you provide input to the network for training isn't the same thing as learning.
Do we know enough about how our brain functions and how neural networks functions to make this statement?
Yes, we do. Take a university level course on ML if you want the long answer.
My friends who took computer science told me that we don't totally understand how machine learning algorithms work. Though this conversation was a few years ago in college. Will have to ask them again
ANNs are not the same as synapses, analogous yes, but different mathematically even when simulated.
This is orthogonal to the topic at hand. How does the chemistry of biological synapses alone result in a different type of learned model that therefore requires different types of legal treatment?
The overarching (and relevant) similarity between biological and artificial nets is the concept of connectionist distributed representations, and the projection of data onto lower dimensional manifolds. Whether the network achieves its final connectome through backpropagation or a more biologically plausible method is beside the point.
What do you think education is? I went to university to acquire knowledge and train my skills so that I could later be paid for those skills. That was literally building my own human capital.
Humanities and Art majors are often criticized for not producing such capital.
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.
Your probability of getting copyright strike depends on two major factors -
• How similar your story is to Harry Potter.
• If you are making money of that story.
It doesn't matter how similar. Copyright doesn't protect meaning, copyright protect form. If you read HP and then draw a picture of it, said picture becomes its separate work, not even derivative.
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?
Again that is dependent on how similar the two books are. If I just change the names of the characters and change the grammatical structure and then try to sell the book as my own work, I am infringing the copyright. If my book has a different story but the themes are influenced by another book, then I don't believe that is copyright infringement. Now where the line between infringement and no infringement lies is not something I can say and is a topic for another discussion
I.e. change form. Copyright protect form, thus in coutries that judge either by spirit or letter of law instead of size of moneybags this is ok.
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.
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.
I hope OpenAI and JK Rowling take each other down
Sticky this comment
What's the issue against openAI?
They used to be a non profit, that immediately turned it into a for profit when their product was refined. They took a bunch of people's effort whether it be training materials or training Monkeys using the product and then slapped a huge price tag on it.
They’re stealing a ridiculous amount of copyrighted works to use to train their model without the consent of the copyright holders.
This includes the single person operations creating art that’s being used to feed the models that will take their jobs.
OpenAI should not be allowed to train on copyrighted material without paying a licensing fee at minimum.
Also Sam Altman is a grifter who gives people in need small amounts of monopoly money to get their biometric data
So hypothetical here. If Dreddit did launch a system that made it so users could trade Karma in for real currency or some alternative, does that mean that all fan fictions and all other fan boy account created material would become copyright infringement as they are now making money off the original works?
Why are people defending a massive corporation that admits it is attempting to create something that will give them unparalleled power if they are successful?
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).
But OpenAI will do the same?
Perhaps, and when that happens I would be equally disdainful towards them.
In the United States there was a judgement made the other day saying that works created soley by AI are not copyright-able. So that that would put a speed bumb there.
I may have misunderstood what you though.
Yeah, they might not copyright it, but after it becomes the 'one true AI', it will be at the hands of Microsoft, so please do not act friendly towards them.
It will turn on you just like every private company has.
(don't mean specifically you, but everyone generally)
There's a massive difference though between corporations milking copyright and authors/musicians/artists wanting their copyright respected. All I see here is a corporation milking copyrighted works by creative individuals.
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.
An LLM is not a person, it is a product. It doesn't matter that it "learns" like a human - at the end of the day, it is a product created by a corporation that used other people's work, with the capacity to disrupt the market that those folks' work competes in.
And it should be able to freely use anything that's available to it. These massive corporations and entities have exploited all the free spaces to advertise and sell us their own products and are now sour.
If they had their way they are going to lock up much more of the net behind paywalls. Everybody should be with the LLMs on this.
You are somehow conflating "massive corporation" with "independent creator," while also not recognizing that successful LLM implementations are and will be run by massive corporations, and eventually plagued with ads and paywalls.
People that make things should be allowed payment for their time and the value they provide their customer.
People are paid. But they're greedy and expect far more compensation then they deserve. In this case they should not be compensated for having an LLM ingest their work work if that work was legally owned or obtained
Except the massive corporations and entities are the ones getting rich on this. They're seeking to exploit the work of authors and musicians and artists.
Respecting the intellectual property of creative workers is the anti corporate position here.
Except corporations have infinitely more resources(money, lawyers) compared to people who create. Take Jarek Duda(mathematician from Poland) and Microsoft as an example. He created new compression algorythm, and Microsoft came few years later and patented it in Britain AFAIK. To file patent contest and prior art he needs 100kÂŁ.
I think there's an important distinction to make here between patents and copyright. Patents are the issue with corporations, and I couldn't care less if AI consumed all that.
And for copyright there is no possible way to contest it. Also when copyright expires there is no guarantee it will be accessable by humanity. Patents are bad, copyright even worse.
This!
When the Internet was first a thing corpos tried to put everything behind paywalls, and we pushed back and won.
Now, the next generation is advocating to put everything behind a paywall again?
Its always weird to me how the old values from early internet days sort of vanished. Is it by design there aren't any more Richard Stallmans or is it the natural progression on an internet that was taken over
Not to inject politics into this, but the Internet started off way more socialist than it is today.
Capitalism creeping in taking over slowly. And it's being done in a slow boiling the toad in a pot sort of way.
This is just OpenAI covering their ass by attempting to block the most egregious and obvious outputs in legal gray areas, something they've been doing for a while, hence why their AI models are known to be massively censored. I wouldn't call that 'hiding'. It's kind of hard to hide it was trained on copyrighted material, since that's common knowledge, really.
Training AI on copyrighted material is no more illegal or unethical than training human beings on copyrighted material (from library books or borrowed books, nonetheless!). And trying to challenge the veracity of generative AI systems on the notion that it was trained on copyrighted material only raises the specter that IP law has lost its validity as a public good.
The only valid concern about generative AI is that it could displace human workers (or swap out skilled jobs for menial ones) which is a problem because our society recognizes the value of human beings only in their capacity to provide a compensation-worthy service to people with money.
The problem is this is a shitty, unethical way to determine who gets to survive and who doesn't. All the current controversy about generative AI does is kick this can down the road a bit. But we're going to have to address soon that our monied elites will be glad to dispose of the rest of us as soon as they can.
Also, amateur creators are as good as professionals, given the same resources. Maybe we should look at creating content by other means than for-profit companies.
Also this argument if replacing human workers has been made with every single industrial revolution.
what if they scraped a whole lot of the internet, and those excerpts were in random blogs and posts and quotes and memes etc etc all over the place? They didnt injest the material directly, or knowingly.
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.
Is reading a passage from a book actually a crime though?
Sure, you could try to regenerate the full text from quotes you read online, much like you could open a lot of video reviews and recreate larger portions of the original text, but you would not blame the video editing program for that, you would blame the one who did it and decided to post it online.
I don't get why this is an issue. Assuming they purchased a legal copy that it was trained on then what's the problem? Like really. What does it matter that it knows a certain book from cover to cover or is able to imitate art styles etc. That's exactly what people do too. We're just not quite as good at 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.
It is not a derivative it is transformative work. Just like human artists "synthesise" art they see around them and make new art, so do LLMs.
LLMs don’t create anything new. They have limited access to what they can be based on, and all assumptions made by it are based on that data. They do not learn new things or present new ideas. Only ideas that have been already done and are present in their training.
Transformative works are not a thing.
If you copy the copyrightable elements of another work, you have created a derivative work. That work needs to be transformative in order to be eligible for its own copyright, but being transformative alone is not enough to make it non-infringing.
There are four fair use factors. Transformativeness is only considered by one of them. That is not enough to make a fair use.
Somebody better let YouTube content creators know that. /s
this is so fucking stupid though. almost everyone reads books and/or watches movies, and their speech is developed from that. the way we speak is modeled after characters and dialogue in books. the way we think is often from books. do we track down what percentage of each sentence comes from what book every time we think or talk?
Aye, but I'm thinking the whole notion of copyright is banking on the fact that human beings are inherently lazy and not everyone will start churning out books in the same universe or style. And if they do, it takes quite some time to get the finished product and they just get sued for it. It's easy, because there's a single target.
So there's an extra deterrent to people writing and publishing a new harry potter novel, unaffiliated with the current owner of the copyright. Invest all that time and resources just to be sued? Nah...
Issue with generating stuff with 'puters is that you invest way less time, so the same issue pops up for the copyright owner, they're just DDoS-ed on their possible attack routes. Will they really sue thousands or hundreds of thoudands of internet randos generating harry potter erotica using a LLM? Would you even know who they are? People can hide money away in Switzerland from entite governments, I'm sure there are ways to hide your identity from a book publisher.
It was never about the content, it's about the opportunities the technology provides to halt the gears of the system that works to enforce questionable laws. So they're nipping it in the bud.
They made it read Harry Potter? No wonder its gonna kill us all one day.
So that explains the "problematic" responses.
Well of course it was. It has to learn somehow.
People are acting like ChatGPT is storing the entire Harry Potter series in its neural net somewhere. It’s not storing or reproducing text in a 1:1 manner from the original material. Certain material, like very popular books, has likely been interpreted tens of thousands of times due to how many times it was reposted online (and therefore how many times it appeared in the training data).
Just because it can recite certain passages almost perfectly doesn’t mean it’s redistributing copyrighted books. How many quotes do you know perfectly from books you’ve read before? I would guess quite a few. LLMs are doing the same thing, 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.
Just adding, that, outside of Rowling, who I believe has a different contract than most authors due to the expanded Wizarding World and Pottermore, most authors themselves cannot quote their own novels online because that would be publishing part of the novel digitally and that's a right they've sold to their publisher. The publisher usually ignores this as it creates hype for the work, but authors are careful not to abuse it.
If I'm not mistaken AI work was just recently considered as NOT copyrightable.
So I find interesting that an AI learning from copyrighted work is an issue even though what will be generated will NOT be copyrightable.
So even if you generated some copy of Harry Potter you would not be able to copyright it. So in no way could you really compete with the original art.
I'm not saying that it makes it ok to train AIs on copyrighted art but I think it's still an interesting aspect of this topic.
As others probably have stated, the AI may be creating content that is transformative and therefore under fair use. But even if that work is transformative it cannot be copyrighted because it wasn't created by a human.
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.
That's definitely an issue. At what point does copyright applies if you are just helped by an AI ?
I guess the courts will have to decide that...
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.
I mean, this is the exact way the U.S. Copyright Office's guidance says they think you should use it.
Sure, but even under this guidance copyright owners of the training data are still shafted, based on how the data is scraped pretty much freely. Can an opportunist generate an unofficial sequel to Harry Potter, do the minimum to ensure they get copyright and reap the reward from it?
That's how copyright has always worked. Fair use is complex, but as long as you're not straight up copying someone's work you're fine. 50 Shades of Grey started out as Twilight fanfiction. So yeah, you could.
Yes fair use has its stipulations but AI is breaking new grounds here. We are no longer dealing with the reaction videos but in an era where literally dozen of pages of content can be generated in a matter of minutes, with relatively little human involvement. Perhaps it's time to revisit if the law still holds in light of these new technology and tools.
You should read this article by Kit Walsh, who’s a senior staff attorney at the EFF.
Interesting read! Definitely a useful breakdown and I see the reasoning. Thanks for sharing.
Fair use has never been seriously challenged. I’m betting it might happen soon though. We have to remember Fair Use isn’t a law, it’s a set of guidelines under the law that has never been clearly defined.
First of all, fair use is not a set of guidelines, it's a legal doctrine that allows us limited use of copyrighted material without permission from the owner. It is a part of the U.S. Copyright Act, which is a law enacted by Congress.
Second, fair use has been seriously challenged plenty of times, just to name a few:
Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc.
Authors Guild v. Google, Inc.
Lenz v. Universal Music Corp.
I recommend reading this article by Kit Walsh, who’s a senior staff attorney at the EFF, a digital rights group who recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone.
Fair use protects creativity, innovation, and our freedom of expression, but You almost sound like you want it weakened.
I am sure they have patched it by now but at one point I was able to get chatgpt to give me copyright text from books by asking for ever large quotations. It seemed more willing to do this with books out of print.
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.
ChatGPT has a ton of extra query qualifiers added behind the scenes to ensure that specific outputs can’t happen
I thought everyone knows that OpenAI has the same access to any books, knowledge that human beings have.
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.
Harry potter uses so many tropes and inspiration from other works that came before. How is that different? wizards of the coast should sue her into the ground.
Because its not literally using the same stuff, you can be inspired by something ala Starcraft from Warhammer 40k, but you can't use literally the same things. Also you can't copyright as far as I understand it, broad subject matter. So no one can just copyright "wizard" but can copyright "Harry Potter the Wizard". You also can tell the OpenAI company knows it may be doing something wrong because their latest leak includes passages on how to hide the fact the LLMs trained on copyrighted materials.
I would hide stuff too. Copyright laws are out of control. That doesn't mean they did something wrong. Its CYA.
copyrights are for reproducing and selling others work not ingesting them. If they found it online it should be legal to ingest it. If they bought the works they should also be legally able to train off it
No it does matter where they got the materials. If they illegally downloaded a copy off a website "just cause its on the internet" its still against the law.
Shouldn't be illegal. Give them a letter how angry they are and call it a day
Yeah...about that...
https://www.google.com/search?q=woman+sued+for+13+songs+on+napster&sca_esv=559711199&source=hp&ei=hFXnZPutG-Hg0PEPndKmwAI&oq=woman+sued+for+13+songs+on+napster&gs_lp=EhFtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1ocCIid29tYW4gc3VlZCBmb3IgMTMgc29uZ3Mgb24gbmFwc3RlcjIFECEYoAEyBRAhGKABMgUQIRigATIFECEYoAFIpUxQnghY3EtwA3gAkAEAmAG0AaABhBqqAQUyNC4xMbgBA8gBAPgBAagCD8ICEBAAGAMYjwEY6gIYjAMY5QLCAgsQABiABBixAxiDAcICCxAuGIAEGLEDGIMBwgIREC4YgAQYsQMYgwEYxwEY0QPCAggQABiABBixA8ICCxAuGIAEGMcBGK8BwgILEAAYigUYsQMYgwHCAgUQABiABMICBRAuGIAEwgIIEC4YgAQYsQPCAggQLhixAxiABMICBBAAGAPCAgcQABiABBgKwgIIEAAYgAQYyQPCAgYQABgWGB7CAgUQIRirAsICCBAhGBYYHhgd&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-hp
There's clearly legal precedence.
Couple things. That was wrong then as it is wrong today. Training data isn't file sharing. Too many of you are ushering in a new era of spying and erosion of the internet on behalf of corporations under the guise of " protecting artists" like they did in Napster days.
Not at all, I simply recognize that the argument may have merit as I said. I never said which side of the isle I personally fall on. Also they are a company so theoretically the scrutiny on the methods they use to acquire data is deserved. Data has a price whether you think it should or shouldn't.
And my opinion is if it has a price don't give it away free online where anyone or anything can I ingest it. Should webcrawlers be paying websites for indexing them?
I also believe in private property. If I buy a book I can do what I want with it. Like use it to train AI. It is my property.
Which are 2 contradictory philosophies, how can one simultaneously supposedly not care if someone's private property is stolen yet believes in private property rights? The argument would indeed be if they stole the book off the internet versus bought a copy themselves.
Google AI search preview seems to brazenly steal text from search results. Frequently its answers are the same word for word as a one of the snippets lower on the page
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?
I don't know what's considered fair use here. But the point is it's taking words that aren't theirs, which will deprive websites of traffic because then people won't click through to the source article.
Ok I get now. I can definitely see both sides of the argument, and it's not going to be easy to solve.
Copyright law needs to be updated to deal with all the new ways people and companies are using tech to access copyrighted material.
That's really the biggest problem, IMO. I don't really care whether it's trained on copyrighted material or not, but I do want it to "cite its sources", so to speak.
Which would also be handy in understanding in what ways the model might be biased.
are we no longer allowed to borrow books from friends?
Yeah, but if you wanna act out the contents of the book and sell it as a movie, you need to buy the rights.
Yes but there's a threshold of how much you need to copy before it's an IP violation.
Copying a single word is usually only enough if it's a neologism.
Two matching words in a row usually isn't enough either.
At some point it is enough though and it's not clear what that point is.
On the other hand it can still be considered an IP violation if there are no exact word matches but it seems sufficiently similar.
Until now we've basically asked courts to step in and decide where the line should be on a case by case basis.
We never set the level of allowable copying to 0, we set it to "reasonable". In theory it's supposed to be at a level that's sufficient to, "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." (US Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8).
Why is it that with AI we take the extreme position of thinking that an AI that makes use of any information from humans should automatically be considered to be in violation of IP law?
Making use of the information is not a violation -- making use of that violation to turn a profit is a violation. AI software that is completely free for the masses without any paid upgrades can look at whatever it wants. As soon as a corporation is making money on it though, it's in violation and needs to pay up.
Is that intended as a legal or moral position?
As far as I know, the law doesn't care much if you make money off of IP violations. There are many cases of individuals getting hefty fines for both the personal use and free distribution of IP. I think if there is commercial use of IP the profits are forfeit to the IP holder. I'm not a lawyer though, so don't bank on that.
There's still the initial question too. At present, we let the courts decide if the usage, whether profitable or not, meets the standard of IP violation. Artists routinely take inspiration from one another and sometimes they take it too far. Why should we assume that AI automatically takes it too far and always meets the standard of IP violation?
It's also just not fair, unless your going to rule that nothing an AI produces can be copyrighted. Otherwise some billionaire could just flood the office with copyrighted requests and copyrighted everything... hell if they really did that they would probably convince the government to let them hire outside contractors for free to speed up the process...
Luddites throwing their sabots into the machinery.
Not if your stories are transformative of the original work.
One of the first things I ever did with ChatGPT was ask it to write some Harry Potter fan fiction. It wrote a short story about Ron and Harry getting into trouble. I never said the word McGonagal and yet she appeared in the story.
So yeah, case closed. They are full of shit.
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.
Lol:
Content industry: It can reproduce our stuff OpenAI: Content industry: They are hiding that it can reproduce us
How are they going to prove if something was written by an AI?
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”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJSTFzhs1O4
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=PJSTFzhs1O4
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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.
the government in its current form would have that flaw in the content distribution system, yes, but his main idea is that it would be like open-source ran in the sense of "government of the people"
That's optimistic.