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OpenAI now tries to hide that ChatGPT was trained on copyrighted books, including J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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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.
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.
*could