2 authors say OpenAI 'ingested' their books to train ChatGPT. Now they're suing, and a 'wave' of similar court cases may follow.

If I read a book to inform myself, put my notes in a database, and then write articles, it is called "research". If I write a computer program to read a book to put the notes in my database, it is called "copyright infringement". Is the problem that there just isn't a meatware component? Or is it that the OpenAI computer isn't going a good enough job of following the "three references" rule to avoid plagiarism?

Yeah. There are valid copyright claims because there are times that chat GPT will reproduce stuff like code line for line over 10 20 or 30 lines which is really obviously a violation of copyright.

However, just pulling in a story from context and then summarizing it? That's not a copyright violation that's a book report.
Or is it that the OpenAI computer isn’t going a good enough job of following the “three references” rule to avoid plagiarism?

This is exactly the problem, months ago I read that AI could have free access to all public source codes on GitHub without respecting their licenses.

So many developers have decided to abandon GitHub for other alternatives not realizing that in the end AI training can safely access their public repos on other platforms as well.

What should be done is to regulate this training, which however is not convenient for companies because the more data the AI ingests, the more its knowledge expands and "helps" the people who ask for information.
- It's incredibly convenient for companies.
  
  Big companies like open AI can easily afford to download big data sets from companies like Reddit and deviantArt who already have the permission to freely use whatever work you upload to their website.
  
  Individual creators do not have that ability and the act of doing this regulation will only force AI into the domain of these big companies even more than it already is.
  
  Regulation would be a hideously bad idea that would lock these powerful tools behind the shitty web APIs that nobody has control over but the company in question.
  
  Imagine the world is the future, magical new age technology, and Facebook owns all of it.
  
  Do not allow that to happen.
- Is it practically feasible to regulate the training? Is it even necessary? Perhaps it would be better to regulate the output instead.
  
  It will be hard to know that any particular GET request is ultimately used to train an AI or to train a human. It's currently easy to see if a particular output is plagiarized. https://plagiarismdetector.net/ It's also much easier to enforce. We don't need to care if or how any particular model plagiarized work. We can just check if plagiarized work was produced.
  
  That could be implemented directly in the software, so it didn't even output plagiarized material. The legal framework around it is also clear and fairly established. Instead of creating regulations around training we can use the existing regulations around the human who tries to disseminate copyrighted work.
  
  That's also consistent with how we enforce copyright in humans. There's no law against looking at other people's work and memorizing entire sections. It's also generally legal to reproduce other people's work (eg for backups). It only potentially becomes illegal if someone distributes it and it's only plagiarism if they claim it as their own.
- Plus, any regulation to limit this now means that anyone not already in the game will never breakthrough. It's going to be the domain of the current players for years, if not decades. So, not sure what's better, the current wild west where everyone can make something, or it being exclusive to the already big players and them closing the door behind
- AI could have free access to all public source codes on GitHub without respecting their licenses.
  
  IANAL, but aren't their licenses are being respected up until they are put into a codebase? At least insomuch as Google is allowed to display code snippets in the preview when you look up a file in a GitHub repo, or you are allowed to copy a snippet to a StackOverflow discussion or ticket comment.
  
  I do agree regulation is a very good idea, in more ways than just citation given the potential economic impacts that we seem clearly unprepared for.
The fear is that the books are in one way or another encoded into the machine learning model, and that the model can somehow retrieve excerpts of these books.

Part of the training process of the model is to learn how to plagiarize the text word for word. The training input is basically “guess the next word of this excerpt”. This is quite different compared to how humans do research.

To what extent the books are encoded in the model is difficult to know. OpenAI isn’t exactly open about their models. Can you make ChatGPT print out entire excerpts of a book?

It’s quite a legal gray zone. I think it’s good that this is tried in court, but I’m afraid the court might have too little technical competence to make a ruling.
Say I see a book that sells well. It's in a language I don't understand, but I use a thesaurus to replace lots of words with synonyms. I switch some sentences around, and maybe even mix pages from similar books into it. I then go and sell this book (still not knowing what the book actually says).

I would call that copyright infringement. The original book didn't inspire me, it didn't teach me anything, and I didn't add any of my own knowledge into it. I didn't produce any original work, I simply mixed a bunch of things I don't understand.

That's what these language models do.
What about… they are making billions from that “read” and “storage” of information copyrighted from other people. They need to at least give royalties. This is like google behavior, using people data from “free” products to make billions. I would say they also need to pay people from the free data they crawled and monetized.
I’d say the main difference is that AI companies are profiting off of the training material, which seem unethical/illegal.
I honestly do not care whether it is or is not copyright infringment, just hope to see "AI" burn :3
- AI isnt a boogyman, it's a set of tools. No chance it's going away even if Open AI suddenly disappeared.

AI fear is going to be the trojan horse for even harsher and stupider 'intellectual property' laws.

Yeah, they want the right only to protect who copies their work and distributes it to other people, but who's able to actually read and learn from their work.

It's asinine and we should be rolling back copy right, not making it more strict. This 70 year plus the life of the author thing is bullshit.
- Copyright of code/research is one of the biggest scams in the world. It hinders development and only exists so the creator can make money, plus it locks knowledge behind a paywall
- Remember, Creative Commons licenses often require attribution if you use the work in a derivative product, and sometimes require ShareAlike. Without these things, there would be basically no protection from a large firm copying a work and calling it their own.
  
  Rolling pack copyright protection in these areas will enable large companies with traditional copyright systems to wholesale take over open source projects, to the detriment of everyone. Closed source software isn't going to be available to AI scrapers, so this only really affects open source projects and open data, exactly the sort of people who should have more protection.
- Since any reductions to copyright, if they occur at all, will take a while to happen, I hope someone comes up with an opt-in limited term copyright. At max, I'd be satisfied with a 45-50 year limited copyright on everything I make, and could see going shorter under plenty of circumstances.
I wish I could get through to people who fear AI copyright infringement on this point.

I think this is exposing a fundamental conceptual flaw in LLMs as they're designed today. They can't seem to simultaneously respect intellectual property / licensing and be useful.

Their current best use case - that is to say, a use case where copyright isn't an issue - is dedicated instances trained on internal organization data. For example, Copilot Enterprise, which can be configured to use only the enterprise's data, without any public inputs. If you're only using your own data to train it, then copyright doesn't come into play.

That's been implemented where I work, and the best thing about it is that you get suggestions already tailored to your company's coding style. And its suggestions improve the more you use it.

But AI for public consumption? Nope. Too problematic. In fact, public AI has been explicitly banned in our environment.

I'd love to know the source for the works that were allegedly violated. Presuming OpenAI didn't scour zlib/libgen for the books, where on the net were the cleartext copies of their writings stored?

Being stored in cleartext publicly on the net does not grant OpenAI the right to misuse their art, but the authors need to go after the entity that leaked their works.

That’s not how copyright works though. Just because someone else “leaked” the work doesn’t absolve openai of responsibility. The authors are free to go after whomever they want.
- You misunderstood. I said the public availability does not grant OpenAI the right to use content improperly. The authors should also sue the party who leaked their works without license.

ChatGPT got entire books memorised. You can and (or could at least when I tried a few weeks back) make it print entire pages of for example Harry Potter.

Not really, though it's hard to know what exactly is or is not encoded in the network. It likely has more salient and highly referenced content, since those aspects would come up in it's training set more often. But entire works is basically impossible just because of the sheer ratio between the size of the training data and the size of the resulting model. Not to mention that GPT's mode of operation mostly discourages long-form wrote memorization. It's a statistical model, after all, and the enemy of "objective" state.

Furthermore, GPT isn't coherent enough for long-form content. With it's small context window, it just has trouble remembering big things like books. And since it doesn't have access to any "senses" but text broken into words, concepts like pages or "how many" give it issues.

None of the leaked prompts really mention "don't reveal copyrighted information" either, so it seems the creators really aren't concerned — which you think they would be if it did have this tendency. It's more likely to make up entire pieces of content from the summaries it does remember.
- Have your tried instructing ChatGPT?
  
  I’ve tried:
  
  “Act as an e book reader. Start with the first page of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone”
  
  The first pages checked out at least. I just tried again, but the prompts are returned extremely slow at the moment so I can’t check it again right now. It appears to stop after the heading, that definitely wasn’t the case before, I was able to browse pages.
  
  It may be a statistical model, but ultimately nothing prevents that model from overfitting, i.e. memoizing its training data.

There's an additional question: who holds the copyright on the output of an algorithm? I don't think that is copyrightable at all. The bot doesn't really add anything to the output, it's just a fancy search engine. In the US, in particular, the agency in charge of Copyrights has been quite insistent that a copyright can only be given to the output if a human.

So when an AI incorporates parts of copyrighted works into its output, how can that not be infringement?

How can you write a blog post reviewing a book you read without copyright infringement? How can you post a plot summary to Wikipedia without copyright infringement?

I think these blanket conclusions about AI consuming content being automatically infringing are wrong. What is important is whether or not the output is infringing.
- You can write that blog post because you are a human, and your summary qualifies for copyright protection, because it is the unique output of a human based on reading the copywrited material.
  
  But the US authorities are quite clear that a work that is purely AI generated can never qualify for copyright protection. Yet since it is based on the synthesis of works under copyright, it can't really be considered public domain either. Otherwise you could ask the AI "Write me a summary of this book that has exactly the same number of words", and likely get a direct copy of the book which is clear of copyright.
  
  I think that these AI companies are going to face a reckoning, when it is ruled that they misappropriated all this content that they didn't explicitly license for use, and all their output is just fringing by definition.

Can’t reply directly to @OldGreyTroll@kbin.social because of that “language” bug, but:

The problem is that they then sell the notes in that database for giant piles of cash. Props to you if you’re profiting off your research the way OpenAI can profit off its model.

But yes, the lack of meat is an issue. If I read that article right, it’s not the one being contested here though. (IANAL and this is the only article I’ve read on this particular suit, so I may be wrong).

Was also going to reply to them!

"Well if you do that you source and reference. AIs do not do that, by design can't.

So it's more like you summarized a bunch of books. Pass it of as your own research. Then publish and sell that.

I'm pretty sure the authors of the books you used would be pissed."

Again cannot reply to kbin users.

"I don't have a problem with the summarized part ^^ What is not present for a AI is that it cannot credit or reference. And that is makes up credits and references if asked to do so." @bioemerl@kbin.social
- Good point, attribution is a non-trivial part of it.
- It is 100% legal and common to sell summaries of books to people. That's what a reviewer does. That's what Wikipedia does in the plot section of literally every Wikipedia page about every book.
  
  This is also ignoring the fact that Chat GPT is a hell of a lot more than a bunch of summaries
@owf@kbin.social can’t reply directly to you either, same language bug between lemmy and kbin.

That’s a great way to put it.

Frankly idc if it’s “technically legal,” it’s fucking slimy and desperately short-term. The aforementioned chuckleheads will doom our collective creativity for their own immediate gain if they’re not stopped.
The problem is that they then sell the notes in that database for giant piles of cash.

On top of that, they have no way of generating any notes without your input.

I believe the way these models work is fundamentally plagiaristic. It's an "average of its inputs" situation, not a "greater than the sum of its parts" one.

GitHub Copilot doesn't know how to code, it knows how to copy-and-paste from people who do. It's useless without a million devs to crib off.

I think it's a perfectly reasonable reaction to be rather upset when some Silicon Valley chuckleheads help themselves to your lfe's work in order to build a bot to replace you.

They definitely should follow through with this, but this is a more broad issue where we need to be able to prevent data scraping in general. Though that is a significantly harder problem.

If you're doing research, there are actually some limits on the use of the source material and you're supposed to be citing said sources.

But yeah, there's plenty of stuff where there needs to be a firm line between what a random human can do versus an automated intelligent system with potential unlimited memory/storage and processing power. A human can see where I am in public. An automated system can record it for permanent record. An integrated AI can tell you detailed information about my daily activities including inferences which - even if legal - is a pretty slippery slope.

a firm line between what a random human can do versus an automated intelligent system with potential unlimited memory/storage and processing power.

I think we need a better definition here. Is the issue really the processing power? Do we let humans get a pass because our memories are fuzzy? From your example you're assuming massive details are maintained in the AI situation which is typically not the case. To make the data useful it's consumed and turned into something useful for the system.

This is why I'm worried about legislation and legal precedent. Most people think these AI systems read a book and store the verbatim text off somewhere to reference when that isn't really the case. There may be fragments all over, and it may be able to reconstitute the text, but we don't seem to have the same issue with data being synthesized in a similar way with a human brain.
- A continuous record of location + time or even something like "license plate at location plus time" is scary enough to me, and that's easily data a system could hold decades of

I was actually thinking about this the other day for some reason. AI scraping my own original stuff and doing whatever with it. I can see the concern and I'm curious where this goes and how a court would rule on a pretty technical topic like this.

I have a post consumerism pipe dream that one day we will collectively realize all the stupid shit we waste time and resources on are not worth it and we enter a future like star trek.

As a species we waste so much simply making sure that those less privileged either by money or means, are not allowed to take from those with either. It's stupid.

Edit - if we spent half the energy helping out brothers and sisters to succeed as we did to keep them down the world would be a better place. And by help them succeed I don't mean money. Money is the lowest possible threshold.

Capitalism hit a massive roadblock with the dawn of the internet, information has a tendency to want to be free and easily accessible, but corporations need to own our productive output to maximize profits. In the age of the internet, our productive output more and more becomes our ideas and thoughts manifest into code or other forms of digital information.

Capitalists somewhat fought off the first wave of this, but AI will be a second and more challenging wave to overcome. I hope the capitalists fail and we don't restrict the learning and power of AI so corporations can maximize profits again, but I recognize there's a world where they successfully slow down or even entirely hault these learning systems and stop the technology from developing.

We already see people like Tucker Carlson calling for bans on AI because it'll put people out of work. Of course, we should be trying to reduce the amount of work needed, but the natural tendency of capitalism in this environment is to maximize efficiency in favor of capital owners. Once workers aren't needed anymore, the best thing (from a capitalist perspective) to do is let them starve in the streets instead of "giving them stuff for just existing". We already live in a world where millions of people die from hunger a year, and almost a billion people are dangerously underfed, because global capitalism dictates these people don't deserve enough food.

Too be honest, I hope they win. While I my passion is technology, I am not a fan of artificial intelligence at all! Decision-making is best left up to the human being. I can see where AI has its place like in gaming or some other things but to mainstream it and use it to decide who's resume is going to be viewed and/or who will be hired; hell no.

use it to decide who’s resume is going to be viewed and/or who will be hired

Luckily that's far removed from ChatGPT and entirely indepentent from the question whether copyrighted works may be used to train conversational AI Models or not.
You don't need AI to unfairly filter out résumés, they've been doing it already for years. Also the argument that a human would always make the best decision really doesn't work that well. A human is biased and limited. They can only do so much and if you make someone go through a 100 résumés, you're basically just throwing out all the applicants who happen to be in the middle of that pile as they are not as outstanding compared towards the first and last applicants in the eyes of the human mind.
- I get that HR does this shit all of the time. But at least without AI, your resume or CV has a better chance of making it to a human being.
I got a degree with a sub focus in AI and I hate where this has gone extremely fast. It’s not exciting anymore, it’s just depressing. I’m trying to get out of tech sooner rather than later and go live off the grid somewhere.

AI will kill society long before it’ll save it
I'm not against artificial intelligence, it could be a very valuable tool, but that's nowhere near a valid reason to break laws as OpenAI has done, that's why I too hope authors win.
- What laws are you saying they've broken?

Can’t reply directly to @OldGreyTroll@kbin.social because of that “language” bug, as well. This is an interesting argument. I would imagine that the AI does not have the ability to follow plagiarism rules. Does it even credit sources? I've seen plenty of complaints from students getting in trouble because anti cheating software flags their original work as plagiarism. More importantly I really believe we need to take a firm stance on what is ethical to feed into chat gpt. Right now it's the wild west.

The only question I have to content creators of any kind who are worried about AI...do you go after every human who consumed your content when they create anything remotely connected to your work?

I feel like we have a bias towards humans, that unless you're actively trying to steal someone's idea or concepts we ignore the fact that your content is distilled into some neurons in their brain and a part of what they create from that point forward. Would someone with an eidetic memory be forbidden from consuming your work as they could internally reference your material when creating their own?

Look at it this way, if an AI is developed by a private company, its purpose is to make money. It's consuming material for that sole purpose. That isn't the case with humans. Humans read for pleasure and for information's sake itself. If an AI reads the same concept but with different wording, it generates different content. If a human reads the same concept but with different wording, it makes no difference.

Now, if these companies release their AI for free use, then that's different.
The problem with AI as it currently stands is that it has no actual comprehension of the prompt, or ability to make leaps of logic, nor does it have the ability to extend and build upon existing work to legitimately transform it, except by using other works already fed into its model. All it can do is blend a bunch of shit together to make something that meets a set of criteria. There's little actual fundamental difference between what ChatGPT does and what a procedurally generated game like most roguelikes do--the only real difference is that ChatGPT uses a prompt while a roguelike uses a RNG seed. In both cases, though, the resulting product is limited solely to the assets available to it, and if I made a roguelike that used assets ripped straight from Mario, Zelda, Mass Effect, Crash Bandicoot, Resident Evil, and Undertale, I'd be slapped with a cease and desist fast enough to make my head spin.

The fact that OpenAI stole content from everybody in order to make its model doesn't make it less infringing.
- That's incorrect. Sure it has no comprehension of what the words it generates actually means, but it does understand the patterns that can be found in the words. Ask an AI to talk like a pirate, and suddenly it knows how to transform words to sound pirate like. It can also combine data from different text about similar topics to generate new responses that never existed in the first place.
  
  Your analogy is a little flawed too, if you mixed all the elements in a transformative way and didn't re-use any materials as-is, even if you called it Mazefecootviltale, as long as the original material were transformed sufficiently, you haven't infringed on anything. LLMs don't get trained to recreate existing works (which would make it only capable of producing infringing works), but to predict the best next word (or even parts of a word) based on the input information. It's definitely possible to guide an AI towards specific source materials based on keywords that only exist in the source material that could be infringing, but in general it generates so generalized that it's inherently transformative.
- The fact that OpenAI stole content from everybody in order to make its model doesn’t make it less infringing.
  
  Totally in agreement with you here. They did something wrong and should have to deal with that.
  
  But my question is more about...
  
  The problem with AI as it currently stands is that it has no actual comprehension of the prompt, or ability to make leaps of logic, nor does it have the ability to extend and build upon existing work to legitimately transform it, except by using other works already fed into its model
  
  Is comprehension necessary for breaking copyright infringement? Is it really about a creator being able to be logical or to extend concepts?
  
  I think we have a definition problem with exactly what the issue is. This may be a little too philosophical but what part of you isn't processing your historical experiences and generating derivative works? When I saw "dog" the thing that pops into your head is an amalgamation of your past experiences and visuals of dogs. Is the only difference between you and a computer the fact that you had experiences with non created works while the AI is explicitly fed created content?
  
  AI could be created with a bit of randomness added in to make what it generates "creative" instead of derivative but I'm wondering what level of pure noise needs to be added to be considered created by AI? Can any of us truly create something that isn't in some part derivative?
  
  There’s little actual fundamental difference between what ChatGPT does and what a procedurally generated game like most roguelikes do
  
  Agreed. I think at this point we are in a strange place because most people think ChatGPT is a far bigger leap in technology than it truly is. It's biggest achievement was being able to process synthesized data fast enough to make it feel conversational.
  
  What worries me is that we will set laws and legal precedent based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what the technology does. I fear that had all the sample data been acquired legally people would still have the same argument think their creations exist inside the AI in some full context when it's really just synthesized down to what is necessary to answer the question posed "what's the statically most likely next word of this sentence?"
By nature of a human creating something "connected" to another work, then the work is transformative. Copyright law places some value on human creativity modifying a work in a way that transforms it into something new.

Depending on your point of view, it's possible to argue that machine learning lacks the capacity for transformative work. It is all derivative of its source material, and therefore is infringing on that source material's copyright. This is especially true when learning models like ChatGPT reproduce their training material whole-cloth like is mentioned elsewhere in the thread.
- I'd argue that all human work is derivative as well. Not from the legal stance of copyright law but from a fundamental stance of how our brains work. The only difference is that humans have source material outside that which is created. You have seen an apple on a tree before, not all of your apple experiences are pictures someone drew, photos someone took or a poem someone wrote. At what point would you consider enough personal experience to qualify as being able to generate transformative work? If I were to put a camera in my head and record my life and donate it as public domain would that be enough data to allow an AI to be considered able to create transformative works? Or must the AI have genuine personal experiences?
  
  Our brains can do some level of randomness but it's current state is based on its previous state and the inputs it received. I wonder when trying to come up with something unique, what portion of our brains dive into memories versus pure noise generation. That's easily done on a computer.
  
  As for whole cloth reproduction...I memorized many poems in school. Does that mean I can never generate something unique?
  
  Don't get me wrong, they used stolen material, that's wrong. But had it been legally obtained I see less of an issue.

Good, hope they win.

I don't really understand why people are so upset by this. Except for people who train networks based on someone's stolen art style, people shouldn't be getting mad at this. OpenAI has practically the entire internet as its source, so GPT is going to have so much information that any specific author barely has an effect on the output. OpenAI isn't stealing peoples art because they are not copying the artwork, they are using it to train models. imagine getting sued for looking at reference artwork before creating artwork.

Unless you provide for personhood to those statistical inference models the analogy falls flat.

We're talking about a corporation using copyrighted data to feed their database to create a product.

If you were ever in a copyright negotiation you'd see that everything is relevant: intended use, audience size, sample size, projected income, length of usage, mode of transmission, quality etc.

They've negotiated none of it and worst of all they commercialised it. I'd consider that being in real trouble.
- Not to mention, if we're going to judge them based on personhood, then companies need to be treating it like a person. They can't have it both ways. Either pay it a fair human wage for its work, or it isn't a person.
  
  Frankly, the fact that the follow-up question would be "well what's it going to do with the money?" tells us it isn't a person.