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

They aren't reselling their information, they're linking you to the source which then the website decides what to do with your traffic. Which they usually want your traffic, that's the point of a public site.

That's like trying to say it's bad to point to where a book store is so someone can buy from it. Whereas the LLM is stealing from that bookstore and selling it to you in a back alley.

First: There are mechanisms to opt out (robots.txt and meta noindex)

Second: There is some foreknowledge on the part of the web author. Even in the early days of the web — before you could’ve predicted the concept of search engines — in order to distribute anything you had to understand the basics of hypermedia, among which is the idea that anything can link to anything else and clients can be users or machines alike.

Third: Even though you are correct that search engines are tokenizing text and doing statistical analysis to recombine the tokens into novel forms in order to rank against queries, those novel forms are never presented to the user. Only direct quotes. So a user never gets a false reference to the supposed content of a page (unless the page itself lies to crawler requests).

Fourth: All of the technical points above are pretty much meaningless, because we are social creatures and our norms don't stem from a mechanical flow chart divorced from real-world context.

Creators are generally okay with their content being copied into search DBs, because they know it's going to lead to users finding the true author of those words, which will advance their creative pursuits either through collaboration or monetary support.

Creators are complaining about content being copied into LLMs, because their work will be presented out of context, often cited incorrectly, keep people away from the author of those words, and undermine the lifeblood of their creative pursuits -- be it attracting new collaborators or making sales.

Whether it technically counts as IP infringement or not under current law? Who really cares? Current IP law is a fucking scam, designed to bully creators out of their own creations and assign full control to holding companies who see culture as nothing more than a financial instrument to be optimized. We desperately need to change IP law anyway -- something that I think even many strident "AI" supporters agree with -- so using it as a justification for the ethics of LLMs reveals just how weak the group's position truly is.

LLM vendors see an opportunity for profit, if they can get away with it. They are offering consumers a utopian vision of infinite access to content while creating an IP chokepoint that they can enshittify once it blows past critical mass. It's the same tactics the social media companies used 15 years ago, and it weighs heavy on my heart that so many Lemmy users are falling for it once again while the lesson is still so fresh.

More to the point: they replicate patterns of words.

just reinforcement learning models

...like the naturally occuring neural networks are.

Well, now you know; software can be inspired by other people's works. That's what AIs are instructed to do during their training phase.

They weren't given data. They were shown data then the company spent tens of millions of dollars on cpu time to do statistical analysis of the data shown.

And here I thought software just did exactly as it’s instructed to do.

AI isn't software. Everything the AI knows is from the books. There is no human instructing the AI what to do. All the human does is build the scaffolding to let the AI learn, everything else is in the data.

Machines that aren't reproducing or distributing works

I don't think anyone is faulting the machines for this, just the people who instruct the machines to do it.

Did you write a comment on Reddit before 2015? If so, your copyrighted content was used without your permission to train today's LLMs, so you absolutely get to feel one way or another about it.

The idea that these authors were somehow the backbone of the models when any individual contribution was like spitting in the ocean and model weights would have considered 100 pages of Twilight fan fiction equivalent to 100 pages from Twilight is honestly one of the negative impacts of the extensive coverage these suits are getting.

Pretty much everyone who has ever written anything indexed online is a tiny part of today's LLMs.

But terminator said neural networks

These are machines, though, not human beings.

What's the difference? On the most fundamental level it's all the same.

Clearly not. He's saying that other authors have done the same as the software does. The software creators implemented the same principle into their llm. You are being daft on purpose.

I have to assume that openAI also paid for the books. if yes then i consider it the same as me reciting passages from memory or coming up with derivative text.

if no, then by all means, go after them and any model trainer for the cost of one book.

Asking an LLM to recite an entire novel isn't even vaguely a thing yet.

God that Aaron/jstor thing makes me see red every time. Swartz was scraping jstor to publish it for the benefit of everyone, openai is doing it to make billions of dollars. Don't forget who the bad guys are (and donate to sci-hub)

Did you ever comment on Reddit before 2015? If so, your copyrighted material was used to train the modern LLMs even if your published book wasn't used at all.

The database is here. You'll have to sign up for a free trial if you're not a subscriber to The Atlantic already. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/books3-database-generative-ai-training-copyright-infringement/675363/

That's the thing -- they weren't.

The case has two prongs.

One is that training the AI on copyrighted material is somehow infringement, which is total BS and a dangerous path for the world to go down.

The other is that copyrighted material was illegally downloaded by OpenAI, which is pretty much an open and shut case, as they didn't buy up copies of 100k books, they basically torrented them.

And because of ridiculous IP laws bought by industry lobbyists in the dawn of the digital age, the damages are more like $250,000 per book if willful infringement, not $24.95.

Had they purchased them, these cases would very likely be headed for the dumpster heap.

That said, there's a certain irony to Lemmy having pirate subs as one of the most popular while also generally being aggressively pro-enforcement on IP infringement.

Good point. I guess this aspect is much different from the AI Art scene, where the producers of the dataset are usually not compensated for their drawings.

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.

Yes. People wouldn't be able to pirate my story through an AI, it wouldn't spit it out verbatim. They'd still need to buy or pirate it other ways.