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submitted 1 year ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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.

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[-] Technoguyfication@lemmy.ml 32 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] abbotsbury@lemmy.world 17 points 1 year ago

but on mega steroids with a nearly limitless capacity for information retention.

That sounds like redistributing copyrighted books

[-] hup@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Nope people are just acting like ChatGPT is making commercial use of the content. Knowing a quote from a book isn't copyright infringement. Selling that quote is. Also it doesn't need to be content stored 1:1 somewhere to be infringement. That misses the point. If you're making money of a synopsis you wrote based on imperfect memory and in your own words it's still copyright infringment until you sign a licensing agreement with JK. Even transforming what you read into a different medium like a painting or poetry cam infinge the original authors copyrights.

Now mull that over and tell us what you think about modern copyright laws.

[-] Ronath@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Just adding, that, outside of Rowling, who I believe has a different contract than most authors due to the expanded Wizarding World and Pottermore, most authors themselves cannot quote their own novels online because that would be publishing part of the novel digitally and that's a right they've sold to their publisher. The publisher usually ignores this as it creates hype for the work, but authors are careful not to abuse it.

[-] Teritz@feddit.de 9 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] coheedcollapse@lemmy.world 38 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] Sir_Kevin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] angstylittlecatboy@reddthat.com 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[-] Draedron@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 year ago

I say piracy is always okay but also am a big fan of AI. I had chat GPT write my last cover letter and got the job

[-] dx1@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Nobody would defend copyright if it wasn't already in place, it's a sick idea. They ask us to cut the field of human knowledge for private benefit. Now they want to destroy a new technology in its name. Greed knows no bounds.

[-] Hildegarde@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

I defend the idea of copyright. The first copyright law was in 1710, to protect authors from the printing press. Without copyright, whoever owned the printing press would sell copies of books with no obligation to pay the author. When copying art is trivial, the artist needs copyright protection in order to make a living creating art.

There are major problems with modern copyrights. Like all things in capitalism it has been subverted to benefit the rich, but the core idea behind copyright is sound.

These lawsuits are not to stop the development if generative AI. These lawsuits are to stop the unlicensed use of copyrighted works as AI training data.

There are AI models that are only trained with licensed data. This doesn't stop the development of AI.

Artists should have the right to choose whether their work is used as training data. And they should be compensated fairly for it. That will be the case if these lawsuits succeed.

[-] dx1@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Ultimately it's a propertarian scheme of ownership imposed onto the realm of concepts and ideas. The first person to successfully lay claim to an idea is given a monopoly on that idea for some number of years. A book, an invention, a melody. To secure profit for that individual, the entire rest of humanity is prevented access to the idea except under his terms, and the naturally free exchange of information is curtailed by statute to accomplish this, via the imposition of punishments for anyone who goes against this scheme. I do not think that's defensible. That is to say, I don't think humanity sees a net benefit from this way of doing things. Even some hypothetical 20-30% reduction in the generation of different kinds of creative works would be well offset by the benefit humanity sees from being able to access them, and the funds that would be going to the artist still could if people saw fit.

Is this being used to stop the development of generative AI? Yes, literally the imprint on an AI of having parsed the works and understood them in some symbolic capacity, they want to curtail that. And the existing models that have already done that would likely be rendered illegal, setting the entire technology back a year or two.

[-] Sentau@lemmy.one 4 points 1 year ago

In an ideal world without greed, you are right in saying that copyright is not beneficial for the human race as a whole. Unfortunately we don't live in such a world. Look at what happened with insulin. The person invented it placed a ludicrously low priced patent of one dollar because he felt that it should be available cheaply to all who need and yet today in the US, insulin is a ridiculously expensive drug which many people struggle to afford. This is because while the inventor was not greedy and thought about the greater good, the pharmaceutical industry did not. They saw an opportunity to make money and are screwing people in the process

[-] dx1@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Insulin is ridiculously expensive because of monopoly status over methods on how to produce it (on top of any other laws restricting supply). I personally contributed to a project to create an open source method to make insulin.

[-] voluble@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

Nobody would defend copyright if it wasn’t already in place

I don't know about that. Say you take a few years to write a handful of poems, and it turns out people in your neighborhood really like them. You compile the poems into a book, and sell it for $5, and it sells well. Seeing this, your neighbor buys one, copies it, and starts selling it one neighborhood over for $2, and representing themself as the author. I would think most people in that situation would want to say, 'hey, that's not fair'. I don't think that's sick or rooted in greed, copyright can be a check on greed.

[-] dx1@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

So thanks to copyright, we're now living in a world where artists are fairly compensated and not exploited by large corporations acting as middlemen that have seized control of their creative works and used it for their own profit?

[-] BURN@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

More so than we would be without copyright at all

Copyright needs to be extended for individuals and cut back for corporations. People should be allowed to own rights to their ip, but corps should have much higher levels of restrictions and how some knowledge must be shared.

[-] assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

So the people who generate and curate that knowledge don't deserve to be compensated? Are you going to be a full time wikipedia editor then? Or does your "greed know no bounds"?

[-] BURN@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

I defend copyright. The original intent was to protect creators in order to foster more creativity. Most artists will have no incentive to create if their work can be reappropriated by a larger group to leverage it for monetary gain, which is directly being taken from the original creator.

I’m a photographer. I’ve removed all my pictures from the internet and plan to never post more. I don’t want my work being used to train AI. Right now we have no choice in that matter, so the only option is to no longer share our work.

[-] Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 year ago

Lol, say that to the first (obscure) Harry Potter line I tried on ChatGPT.

https://sh.itjust.works/comment/2509413

this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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