Technology

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.

We have to distinguish between LLMs

• Trained on copyrighted material and
• Outputting copyrighted material

They are not one and the same

Vanilla Ice had it right all along. Nobody gives a shit about copyright until big money is involved.

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 hope OpenAI and JK Rowling take each other down

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

So that explains the "problematic" responses.

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.

They made it read Harry Potter? No wonder its gonna kill us all one day.

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.

Well of course it was. It has to learn somehow.

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.

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 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.

I thought everyone knows that OpenAI has the same access to any books, knowledge that human beings have.