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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by cypherpunks@lemmy.ml to c/technology@beehaw.org
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[-] ag_roberston_author@beehaw.org 43 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm actually surprised by the comments in here. This technology is incredibly disruptive to authors, if they are correct that their intellectual property has been misused by these companies to train LLMs, then they absolutely should have the right to prevent that.

You can both be pro AI and advancement, and still respect creators intellectual rights and the right to not have all content stolen by megacorporations and used by them to create profits while decimating entire industries.

[-] SinJab0n@mujico.org 8 points 1 year ago

Exactly this, this is the equivalent of me taking a movie, making a function, charge for it, and then be displeased when the creators demand an explanation about it.

[-] Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 year ago

It's more like reading a book and then charging people to ask you questions about it.

AI training isn't only for mega-corporations. We can already train our own open source models, so we should let people put up barriers that will keep out all but the ultra-wealthy.

[-] ag_roberston_author@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago

It’s more like reading a book and then charging people to ask you questions about it.

No, it's really nothing like reading at all. Your example requires a human element. This is just the consumption of data, not reading.

[-] Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 year ago

Humans are the ones making these models. It's not entirely the same thing, but you should read this article by the EFF.

[-] ag_roberston_author@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

I don't think that it is even remotely close to being the same thing. I'm sorry but we shouldn't be affording companies the ability to profit off other people's creations without their consent, regardless of how current copyright law works.

Acting as though a human writing a summary is the same thing as a vast network of computers processing data at a speed that is hundreds if not thousands times faster than a human is foolish. Perhaps it is also foolish to try and apply our current copyright laws (which already favour large corporations and not individual creators) to this slew of new technology, but just ignoring the fundamental difference between the two is no way of going about it. We need copyright reform, we need protections for creators, and we need to stop acting as though machine learning algorithms are remotely comparable to humans both in their capabilities, responsibilities and rights.

There is a perfectly reasonable way of doing this ethically, and that is using content that people have provided to the model of their own volition with their consent either volunteered or paid for, but not scraped from an epub, regardless of if you bought it or downloaded it from libgen.

There are already companies training machine learning models ethically in this manner, and if creators do not want their content used as training data, it should not be.

[-] Pips@lemmy.film 4 points 1 year ago

But when the answers aren't original thoughts but regurgitations of other peoples' thoughts about the book, then it's plagiarism. LLMs can't provide original output, only variations on what people have made available (whether legally or not). The answer might not even be correct or make any sense. It's just predictive text to a crazy degree.

When you copy someone's work without attribution, that's plagiarism. When your output is only possible because of someone else's work over which they own copyright and the output replicated the copyrighted material, that's copyright infringement.

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[-] SafiScarlett@sffa.community 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I agree. This technology doesn't exist in a vacuum. This isn't some utopia where a Human artist can just solely focus on creating their art and not worry about financial gain because their survival needs are always guaranteed to be met or whatever.

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[-] juliebean@lemm.ee 35 points 1 year ago

'Reading my book infringes on my copyright.' say confused writers.

[-] ag_roberston_author@beehaw.org 43 points 1 year ago

This is a strawman.

You cannot act as though feeding LLMs data is remotely comparable to reading.

[-] Gatsby@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago
[-] ag_roberston_author@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago

Because reading is an inherently human activity.

An LLM consuming data from a training model is not.

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[-] Pips@lemmy.film 2 points 1 year ago

Because the LLM is also outputting the copyrighted material.

[-] HughJanus@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 year ago

This is what I never understood about the whole training on AI thing.

When a human creates an artwork, they don't do it out of a vacuum. They've had a lifetime of inspiration from artwork they've discovered that inspires then to create something wholly new. AI does the same thing

[-] luciole@beehaw.org 16 points 1 year ago

The AIs we are talking about are large language models. They take human work as input and produce facsimiles. They are owned by individuals or companies that have no permission to exploit in this way intellectual property tied to other people's livelihoods to copy them.

LLMs are not sentient, they don't have inspiration, they are not creative and therefore do not create in the sense an artist would. They are an elaborate mathematical equation.

"Training" an AI has nothing to do with training an actual living being. It's just tuning: adjusting an algorithm incrementally until the operator is satisfied with the result. I think it's defendable to amount this form of extraction to plagiarism.

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[-] kaizervonmaanen@reddthat.com 5 points 1 year ago

Yeah, people are just trying to cash in on AI by suing companies that train AI.

[-] luciole@beehaw.org 10 points 1 year ago

It's the AI companies cashing in with other people's work so far.

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[-] SinJab0n@mujico.org 5 points 1 year ago

Dude, tell me, why do u think they have being doing this only with books and art but no music?

Thats because music really has people protecting their assets. U can have ur opinion about it, but that's the only reason they haven't ABUSED companies and people's work in music.

It's not reading, it's the equivalent of me taking a movie, making a function, charge for it, and then be displeased when the creators demand an explanation.

[-] Dominic@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There are a few reasons why music models haven't exploded the way that large-language models and generative image models have. Maybe the strength of the copyright-holders is part of it, but I think that the technical issues are a bigger obstacle right now.

  • Generative models are extremely data-inefficient. The Internet is loaded with text and images, but there isn't as much music.

  • Language and vision are the two problems that machine learning researchers have been obsessed with for decades. They built up "good" datasets for these problems and "good" benchmarks for models. They also did a lot of work on figuring out how to encode these types of data to make them easier for machine learning models. (I'm particularly thinking of all of the research done on word embeddings, which are still pivotal to large language models.)

Even still, there are fairly impressive models for generative music.

Example of music generation: MusicLM. The abstract mentions having to create a new dataset to get these results.

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[-] SpaceToast@mander.xyz 27 points 1 year ago

In other news, old man yells at clouds.

[-] PixelPassport@chat.maiion.com 11 points 1 year ago

Yeah I'll be very surprised if this goes anywhere, are they going to sue cliffsnotes as well?

“If a user prompts ChatGPT to summarize a copyrighted book, it will do so,” the suit claims.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bedwetter

Time to add wikipedia to the suit!

[-] RotaryKeyboard@lemmy.ninja 19 points 1 year ago

OP, I just wanted to say thank you for writing such a good title. It's rare to get such an informative, clickbait-free title these days.

[-] nothacking@discuss.tchncs.de 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

if asked by a user prompts chatGPT to summarize a copyrighted book, it will do so.

So will a human. Let's stop extending copyright law. Also, how you know it read the book, and not a summary of it, of which there are loads on the internet?

[-] SpaceToast@mander.xyz 11 points 1 year ago

This is why I am pro AI art. It’s no different than a human taking inspiration from other work.

Nobody comes up with anything truly original. It’s all inspired by someone before them.

[-] AndrewZabar@beehaw.org 16 points 1 year ago

I don’t know how anyone is pro AI anything other than the pigs making money from it. Only bad can result of it. And will.

[-] SpaceToast@mander.xyz 6 points 1 year ago

I don’t know how anyone can be anti AI.

It’s just a tool. To say that only bad can result of it is a bold claim that doesn’t make any sense.

Can you provide an example?

[-] AndrewZabar@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago

Just wait and see.

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[-] SinJab0n@mujico.org 5 points 1 year ago

I'm not anti AI, I'm against companies making profit out of other peoples work without paying them.

[-] can@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago
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[-] Dominic@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

Also, how you know it read the book, and not a summary of it, of which there are loads on the internet?

In the case of ChatGPT, it's hard to tell. OpenAI won't even reveal what their training dataset was.

Researchers have done some tests to tease this out, and they're pretty confident that it has read quite a few books and memorized them verbatim. See one of my favorite papers in a while, Speak, Memory: An Archaeology of Books Known to ChatGPT/GPT-4.

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[-] Sibbo@sopuli.xyz 16 points 1 year ago

Now that's interesting. I really have been waiting for something like this. Wonder if the LLM companies now actually have to explain where their models get the detailed information about the book from. Or if they can get away with stating that they have no idea how their own system works

[-] Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 1 year ago

It is legal to create new knowledge about works or bodies of works. They don't have a leg to stand on.

[-] AnotherPerson@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

"The Library."

[-] world_hopper@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 year ago

A lot of these comments are missing a large point which is that, if the claim is true, the books are being pirated and then effectively used for a commercial application.

So the authors are losing money through this process and did not give their permission for their work to be used in a commercial way.

The decision of this case will be wildly important for the development of AI.

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[-] Sigma@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

I guess she found a way to make money on a book nobody is buying after all.

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[-] CreativeTensors@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago

My pie in the sky hope is that copyright somehow becomes less stringent after all of this.

Don't get me wrong I want protections for creators and support reasonable copyright (life of the author +25 years with the possibility of a 15 year extension) but letting a company lord over an IP for damn near a century isn't ideal for anyone.

[-] EvilColeslaw@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago

The major scenario that I at least hope holds true out of this is that the AI "creations" aren't eligible for copyright themselves. If the powers that be allow all this AI created stuff copyright protection it's going to be a gigantic mess.

[-] CreativeTensors@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

Pure "prompt → image" with nothing in between I absolutely agree. It's lazy and ripe for abuse by copyright trolls. That being said there's a lot more in the world of AI assisted art than what most people are aware of.

Determining where the legal lines will be drawn is going to be a monumental task but I think there's value in allowing authors to retain copyright on AI assisted works. I also can't see the free open source models not going the way of restricting training data to public domain works like Adobe did with Firefly if that becomes a legal issue.

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[-] storksforlegs@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

People keep taking issue with this articles use of "summarizing" and linking to wikipedia... Summaries of copyrighted work are obviously not illegal.

This article is oversimplified and does a crummy job of explaining the problem. Ars Technica does a much better job explaining.

The fact that the ai can summarize these works in detail is proof that they were trained using copyrighted material without permission, (which is not fair use) Sarah Silverman is obviously not going to be hurt financially by this, but there are hundreds of thousands of authors who definitely will be affected. They have every right to sue.

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[-] Moonrise2473@feddit.it 4 points 1 year ago

Seems very improbable that they scraped a pirate website with forced registration and tight daily download limits (10 books a day max?) to get content that's often mislabeled and not presented in an homogeneous way.

Probably it's just using the excerpt from Amazon (which instead with paid API access is much more easy to access) as a prompt and build on it

[-] luciole@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

There's been ongoing suspicions that pirated content was used to train popular LLMs simply because popular datasets used for training LLMs do include such content. The Washington Post did an article about it.

Google's C4 dataset used for research included illegal websites. What remains to be seen is if it was cleaned up before training Bard as we know it today. OpenAI as revealed nothing on its dataset.

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this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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