OpenAI now tries to hide that ChatGPT was trained on copyrighted books, including J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series::A new research paper laid out ways in which AI developers should try and avoid showing LLMs have been trained on copyrighted material.
Vanilla Ice had it right all along. Nobody gives a shit about copyright until big money is involved.
Yep. Legally every word is copyrighted. Yes, law is THAT stupid.
People think it’s a broken system, but it actually works exactly how the rich want it to work.
So that explains the “problematic” responses.
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
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.
And does this apply equally to all artists who have seen any of my work? Can I start charging all artists born after 1990, for training their neural networks on my work?
Learning is not and has never been considered a financial transaction.
Actually, it has. The whole consept of copyright is relatively new, and corporations absolutely tried to have people who learned proprietary copyrighted information not be able to use it in other places.
It’s just that labor movements got such non-compete agreements thrown out of our society, or at least severely restricted on humanitarian grounds. The argument is that a human being has the right to seek happiness by learning and using the proprietary information they learned to better their station. By the way, this needed a lot of violent convincing that we have this.
So yes, knowledge and information learned is absolutely withing the scope of copyright as it stands, it’s only that the fundamental rights that humans have override copyright. LLMs (and companies for that matter) do not have such fundamental rights.
Copyright by the way is stupid in its current implementation, but OpenAI and ChatGPT does not get to get out of it IMO just because it’s “learning”. We humans ourselves are only getting out of copyright because of our special legal status.
You kind of do. Fair use protects reverse engineering, indexing for search engines, and other forms of analysis that create new knowledge about works or bodies of works. These models are meant to be used to create new works which is where the “generative” part of generative models comes in, and the fact that the models consist only of original analysis of the training data in comparison with one another means as your tool, they are protected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
Fair use only works if what you create is to reflect on the original and not to supercede it. For example if ChatGPT gobbled up a work on the reproduction of firefies, if you ask it a question about the topic and it just answers, that’s not fair use since you made the original material redundant. If it did what a search engine would do and just tell you that “here’s where you can find it, you might have to pay for it”, that’s fair use. This is of course US law, so it may be different everywhere, and US law is weird so the courts may say anything.
That’s the gist of it, fair use is fine as long as you are only creating new information and only use the copyrighted old work as is absolutely necessary for your new information to make sense, and even then, you can’t use so much of the copyrighted work that it takes away from the value of it.
Otherwise if I pirated a movie and put subtitles on it, I could argue it’s fair use since it’s new information and transformative. If I released the subtitles separately, that would be a strong argument for fair use. If I included a 10 sec clip in it to show my customers what the thing is like in action, then that may be argued. If it’s the pivotal 10 seconds that spoils the whole movie, that’s not fair use, since I took away from the value of the original.
ChatGPT ate up all of these authors’ works and for some, it may take away from the value they have created. It’s telling that OpenAI is trying to be shifty about it as well. If they had a strong argument, they’d want to settle it as soon as possibe as this is a big stormcloud on their company IP value. And yeah it sucks that people created something that may turn out to not be legal because some people have a right to profit from some pieces of capital assets, but that’s the story of the world the past 50 years.
First of all, fair use is not simple or as clear-cut a concept that can be applied uniformly to all cases than you make it out to be. It’s flexible and context-dependent on careful analysis of four factors: the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality of the portion used, and the effect of the use upon the potential market. No one factor is more important than the others, and it is possible to have a fair use defense even if you do not meet all the criteria of fair use.
Generative models create new and original works based on their weights, such as poems, stories, code, essays, songs, images, video, celebrity parodies, and more. These works may have their own artistic merit and value, and may be considered transformative uses that add new expression or meaning to the original works. Providing your own explanation on the reproduction of fireflies isn’t making the original redundant nor isn’t reproducing the original, so it’s likely fair use. Plenty of competing works explaining the same thing exist, and they’re not invalid because someone got to it first, or they’re based on the same sources.
Your example about subtitling a movie doesn’t meet the criteria for fair use because subtitling a movie isn’t a transformative use. It doesn’t add any expression or meaning, you doubly reproduce the original work in a different language, and it isn’t commentary, criticism, or parody. Subtitling a movie also involves using the entire work, which again weighs against fair use. The more of the original you use, the less likely it’s fair use. This might also have a negative effect on the potential market for the original, since it could reduce demand for the original or its authorized translations. Now, subtitling a short clip from a movie to illustrate a point in an educational video or a review would likely fly.
Finally, uses that can result in lost sales for already established markets tend to be determined as not fair use by the courts. This doesn’t mean that uses that affect the market are unfair. That would mean you wouldn’t be able to create a parody movie or use snippets of a work for a review. These can be considered a fair use because they comment on or criticize the original work, unlike uploading a full movie, song, or translated script. Though I could be getting the wrong read here, since you didn’t explain how you came to any of your conclusions.
I think you’re being too narrow and rigid with your interpretation of fair use, and I don’t think you understand the doctrine that well. I recommend reading this article by Kit Walsh, who’s a senior staff attorney at the EFF, a digital rights group, who recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone. I’d like to hear your thoughts.
I am not a lawyer by the way, I don’t even live in the US, so what I write is just my opinion.
But fair use seems a ridiculous defense when we talk about the Github Copilot case, which is the first tangible lawsuit about it that I know of. The plaintiffs lay out the case of a book for Javascript developers as their example. The objective of the book to give you excercises in Javascript development, I would get the book if I wanted to do Javascript excercises. The book is copyrighted under a share-alike attribution required licence. The defendants Github and OpenAI don’t honour the license with Copilot and Codex. They claim fair use.
So with the four factors:
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the purpose and character of your use: .Well, they present their Javascript excercises as original work while it’s obvious they are not, they are reproducing the task they want letter by letter. It is even missing critical context that makes it hard to understand without the book, so their work does not even stand on its own. Also, they do this for monetary compensation, while not respecting the original license, which if someone was giving a commentary or criticism covered by fair use, would be as trivial as providing a citation of the book. They are also not producing information beyond what’s available in the book. Quite funnily, the plaintiffs mention that the “derivative” work is also not quite valuable, as the model answered with an example from a “what’s wrong with this, can you fix it?” section for a question about how to determine if a number is even.
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the nature of the copyrighted work: It’s freely available, the licence only requires if you republish it, you should provide proper attribution. It is not impossible to provide use cases based on fair use while honouring the license. There is no monetary or other barrier.
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the amount and substantiality of the portion taken: All of it, and it is reproduced verbatim.
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the effect of the use upon the potential market: Github Copilot is in the same market as the original work and is competing with it, namely in showing people how to use Javascript.
And again, I feel this is one layer. Copyright enforcement has never been predictable, and US courts are not predictable either. I think anything can come of this now that it’s big tech that is on the defendant side, and they have the resources to fight, not like random Joe Schmoes caught with bootleg DVDs. Maybe they abolish copyright? Maybe they get an exception? Since US courts have such wide jurisdiction and can effectively make laws, it is still a toss-up. That said, the Github Copilot class action case is the one to watch, and so far, the judge denied orders to dismiss the case, so it may go either way.
Also by the way, the EU has no fair use protections, it only allows very specific exceptions for public criticism and such, none of which fits AI. Going by the example of Copilot, this would mean that EU users can’t use Copilot, and also that anything that was produced with the assistance of Copilot (or ChatGPT for that matter) is not marketable in the EU.
I am not a lawyer either or a programmer for that matter, but the Copilot case looks pretty fucked. We can’t really get a look at the plaintiff’s examples since they have to be kept anonymous. Generative models weights don’t copy and paste from their training data unless there’s been some kind of overfitting, and some cases of similar or identical code snippets, might be inevitable given the nature of programming languages and common tasks. If the model was trained correctly, it should only ever see infinitesimally tiny parts of its training data. We also can’t tell how much of the plaintiff’s code is being used for the same reasons. The same is true of the plaintiff’s claims about the “Suggestions matching public code”.
This case is still in discovery and mired in secrecy, we might not ever find out what’s going on even once the proceedings have concluded.
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Ehh, “learning” is doing a lot of lifting. These models “learn” in a way that is foreign to most artists. And that’s ignoring the fact the humans are not capital. When we learn we aren’t building a form a capital; when models learn they are only building a form of capital.
Artists, construction workers, administrative clerks, police and video game developers all develop their neural networks in the same way, a method simulated by ANNs.
This is not, “foreign to most artists,” it’s just that most artists have no idea what the mechanism of learning is.
The method by which you provide input to the network for training isn’t the same thing as learning.
Artists, construction workers, administrative clerks, police and video game developers all develop their neural networks in the same way, a method simulated by ANNs.
Do we know enough about how our brain functions and how neural networks functions to make this statement?
Do we know enough about how our brain functions and how neural networks functions to make this statement?
Yes, we do. Take a university level course on ML if you want the long answer.
My friends who took computer science told me that we don’t totally understand how machine learning algorithms work. Though this conversation was a few years ago in college. Will have to ask them again
ANNs are not the same as synapses, analogous yes, but different mathematically even when simulated.
This is orthogonal to the topic at hand. How does the chemistry of biological synapses alone result in a different type of learned model that therefore requires different types of legal treatment?
The overarching (and relevant) similarity between biological and artificial nets is the concept of connectionist distributed representations, and the projection of data onto lower dimensional manifolds. Whether the network achieves its final connectome through backpropagation or a more biologically plausible method is beside the point.
When we learn we aren’t building a form a capital; when models learn they are only building a form of capital.
What do you think education is? I went to university to acquire knowledge and train my skills so that I could later be paid for those skills. That was literally building my own human capital.
Humanities and Art majors are often criticized for not producing such capital.
You could run a paid training course using a paid-for book, that doesn’t mean you’re breaking copyright.
How is it any different from someone reading the books, being influenced by them and writing their own book with that inspiration? Should the author of the original book be paid for sales of the second book?
Again that is dependent on how similar the two books are. If I just change the names of the characters and change the grammatical structure and then try to sell the book as my own work, I am infringing the copyright. If my book has a different story but the themes are influenced by another book, then I don’t believe that is copyright infringement. Now where the line between infringement and no infringement lies is not something I can say and is a topic for another discussion
change the grammatical structure
I.e. change form. Copyright protect form, thus in coutries that judge either by spirit or letter of law instead of size of moneybags this is ok.
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.
Only in the same way that I could argue that if you’ve ever watched any of the classic Disney animated movies then anything you ever draw for the rest of your life infringes on Disney’s copyright, and if you draw anything for money then the Disney animated movies you have seen in your life have been used in a money making endeavor. This is of course ridiculous and no one would buy that argument, but when you replace a human doing it with a machine doing essentially the same thing (observing and digesting a bunch of examples of a given kind of work, and producing original works of the general kind that meet a given description) suddenly it’s different, for some nebulous reason that mostly amounts to creatives who believed their jobs could not at least in part be automated away trying to get explicit protection from their jobs being at least in part automated away.
But wouldn’t this training and the subsequent output be so transformative that being based on the copyrighted work makes no difference? If I read a Harry Potter book and then write a story about a boy wizard who becomes a great hero, anyone trying to copyright strike that would be laughed at.
Google AI search preview seems to brazenly steal text from search results. Frequently its answers are the same word for word as a one of the snippets lower on the page
What the article is explaining is cliff notes or snippets of a story. Isn’t that allowed in some respect? People post notes from school books all the time, and those notes show up in Google searches as well.
I totally don’t know if I’m right, but doesn’t copyright infringement involve plagiarism like copying the whole book or writing a similar story that has elements of someone else’s work?
I don’t know what’s considered fair use here. But the point is it’s taking words that aren’t theirs, which will deprive websites of traffic because then people won’t click through to the source article.
Ok I get now. I can definitely see both sides of the argument, and it’s not going to be easy to solve.
Copyright law needs to be updated to deal with all the new ways people and companies are using tech to access copyrighted material.
I hope OpenAI and JK Rowling take each other down
We have to distinguish between LLMs
- Trained on copyrighted material and
- Outputting copyrighted material
They are not one and the same
Yeah, this headline is trying to make it seem like training on copyrighted material is or should be wrong.
Legally the output of the training could be considered a derived work. We treat brains differently here, that’s all.
I think the current intellectual property system makes no sense and AI is revealing that fact.
Should we distinguish it though? Why shouldn’t (and didn’t) artists have a say if their art is used to train LLMs? Just like publicly displayed art doesn’t provide a permission to copy it and use it in other unspecified purposes, it would be reasonable that the same would apply to AI training.
Ah, but that’s the thing. Training isn’t copying. It’s pattern recognition. If you train a model “The dog says woof” and then ask a model “What does the dog say”, it’s not guaranteed to say “woof”.
Similarly, just because a model was trained on Harry Potter, all that means is it has a good corpus of how the sentences in that book go.
Thus the distinction. Can I train on a comment section discussing the book?
Output from an AI has just been recently considered as not copyrightable.
I think it stemmed from the actors strikes recently.
It was stated that only work originating from a human can be copyrighted.
Output from an AI has just been recently considered as not copyrightable.
Where can I read more about this? I’ve seen it mentioned a few times, but never with any links.
They clearly only read the headline If they’re talking about the ruling that came out this week, that whole thing was about trying to give an AI authorship of a work generated solely by a machine and having the copyright go to the owner of the machine through the work-for-hire doctrine. So an AI itself can’t be authors or hold a copyright, but humans using them can still be copyright holders of any qualifying works.
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.
Also this argument if replacing human workers has been made with every single industrial revolution.
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The point is fighting back against it is stupid. The point is people still have work. New technology opens up new was to work with new jobs.
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.
Lol, say that to the first (obscure) Harry Potter line I tried on ChatGPT.
Using Copyrighted Work as Art as example still influences the AI which their make Profit from.
If they use my Works then they need to pay thats it.
Still kinda blows my mind how like the most socialist people I know (fellow artists) turned super capitalist the second a tool showed like an inkling of potential to impact their bottom line.
Personally, I’m happy to have my work scraped and permutated by systems that are open to the public. My biggest enemy isn’t the existence of software scraping an open internet, it’s the huge companies who see it as a way to cut us out of the picture.
If we go all copyright crazy on the models for looking at stuff we’ve already posted openly on the internet, the only companies with access to the tools will be those who already control huge amounts of data.
I mean, for real, it’s just mind-blowing seeing the entire artistic community pretty much go full-blown “Metallica with the RIAA” after decades of making the “you wouldn’t download a car” joke.
I feel like a lot of internet people (not even just socialists) go from seeing copyright as at best a compromise that allows the arts to have value under capitalism to treating it like a holy doctrine when the subject of LLMs comes up.
Like, people who will say “piracy is always okay” will also say “ban AI, period” (and misrepresent organizations that want regulations on it’s use as wanting a full ban.)
Like, growing up with an internet full of technically illegal content (or grey area at best) like fangames and YouTube Poops made me a lifelong copyright skeptic. It’s outright confusing to me when people take copyright as seriously as this.
Fuckin preach! I feel like I’m surrounded by children that didn’t live through the many other technologies that have came along and changed things. People lost their shit when photoshop became mainstream, when music started using samples, etc. AI is here to stay. These same people are probably listening to autotuned music all day while they complain on the internet about AI looking at their art.
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As a Civilian Pirating is no Problem but if its a Company that behaves like they own their Neural Network to 100%.
Piracy is gonna live as long Services are Bad for Average Joe,but these US Corps can afford to pay for this.
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If it’s infringing on JK Rowling’s work, then it’s fine
Stupid. No it isn’t. Establishing legal precedent or, in countries that don’t work on precedent, a preponderance of legal cases, prohibiting this practice is what is needed.
It will be even worse if you must pay for all data to train an AI because it will make the systems even more exclusive. Copyright as a law is incompatible with AI and the change must be to require models trained on controlled works to be provided free.
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It’s honestly a good question. It’s perfectly legal for you to memorize a copyrighted work. In some contexts, you can recite it, too (particularly the perilous fair use). And even if you don’t recite a copyrighted work directly, you are most certainly allowed to learn to write from reading copyrighted books, then try to come up with your own writing based off what you’ve read. You’ll probably try your best to avoid copying anyone, but you might still make mistakes, simply by forgetting that some idea isn’t your own.
But can AI? If we want to view AI as basically an artificial brain, then shouldn’t it be able to do what humans can do? Though at the same time, it’s not actually a brain nor is it a human. Humans are pretty limited in what they can remember, whereas an AI could be virtually boundless.
If we’re looking at intent, the AI companies certainly aren’t trying to recreate copyrighted works. They’ve actively tried to stop it as we can see. And LLMs don’t directly store the copyrighted works, either. They’re basically just storing super hard to understand sets of weights, which are a challenge even for experienced researchers to explain. They’re not denying that they read copyrighted works (like all of us do), but arguably they aren’t trying to write copyrighted works.
No, because you paid for a single viewing of that content with your cinema ticket. And frankly, I think that the price of a cinema ticket (= a single viewing, which it was) should be what OpenAI should be made to pay.
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Your brain isn’t an AI model
OR IS IT?
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
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.
If Google took samples from millions of different songs that were under copyright and created a website that allowed users to mix them together into new songs, they would be sued into oblivion before you could say “unauthorized reproduction.”
You simply cannot compare one single person memorizing a book to corporations feeding literally millions of pieces of copyrighted material into a blender and acting like the resulting sausage is fine because “only a few rats fell into the vat, what’s the big deal”
Terrible analogy.
Which one? And why exactly?
The analogy talks about mixing samples of music together to make new music, but that’s not what is happening in real life.
The computers learn human language from the source material, but they are not referencing the source material when creating responses. They create new, original responses which do not appear in any of the source material.
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.
Well of course it was. It has to learn somehow.
