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

Two authors sued OpenAI, accusing the company of violating copyright law. They say OpenAI used their work to train ChatGPT without their consent.

115 comments

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Can’t reply directly to @[email protected] 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.

115 comments