1y ago

Authors Are Furious After Finding Their Works on List of Books Used To Train AI

www.themarysue.com Authors Are Furious After Finding Their Works on List of Books Used To Train AI

Authors using a new tool to search a list of 183,000 books used to train AI are furious to find their works on the list.

You're viewing a single thread.

146 comments

Does this fall under fair-use part of copyright?
- It hasn't been tested in court yet but I don't see why it shouldn't.
  
  Fair use is any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and "transformative" purpose, such as to comment upon, criticize, or parody a copyrighted work.
  I don't see why it should.
  
  The creation of the AI model is transformative. The AI's model does not contain a literal copy of the copyrighted work.
  
  No, but the training data does contain a copy. And making a model is not criticising, commenting upon, or creating a parody of it.
  
  That list is not exclusive, it's just a list of examples of fair use.
  The training data is not distributed with the AI model.
  
  it's just a list of examples of fair use.
  Yes, it's a list of quite similar ways of commenting upon a work. Please explain how training an LLM is like any of those things, and thus, how Fair use would apply.
  
  I'm not saying that training an LLM is like any of those things. I'm saying it doesn't have to be like those things in order for it to still be fair use.
  
  Pay for every bit of information you've read and regurgitated on exams.
  
  AI is not human and should not be treated like a human
  
  It's not. The humans that trained it (assumably) purchased the material used to train it. What's the problem?
  
  The use of the material to create a commercial product as well as the reality being that the humans training it never buy the data on an individual level.
- The training argument is probably going to come up dry by the time the court works its way through expert testimony, as the underlying argument for training as infringement is insane.
  But where OpenAI is probably in hot water is that torrenting 100k books in the first place runs afoul of existing copyright legislation.
  Everyone is debating the training in these suits, but the real meat and potatoes is going to be the initial infringement of obtaining the books, not how they were subsequently used.
- Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. decided that it is fair use to scan books and make large parts of them available verbatim on the net. What AI does is far more transformative than that, as very little of a book can be reproduced verbatim with AI (e.g. popular quotes), you really just get "knowledge" from the books. The sources are however lost in the process, unlike with Google, which by itself however also makes it difficult to argue for copyright violation, since you can't point at what was actually copied.

146 comments