Thousands of authors demand payment from AI companies for use of copyrighted works::Thousands of published authors are requesting payment from tech companies for the use of their copyrighted works in training artificial intelligence tools, marking the latest intellectual property critique to target AI development.
There is already a business model for compensating authors: it is called buying the book. If the AI trainers are pirating books, then yeah - sue them.
There are plagiarism and copyright laws to protect the output of these tools: if the output is infringing, then sue them. However, if the output of an AI would not be considered infringing for a human, then it isn’t infringement.
When you sell a book, you don’t get to control how that book is used. You can’t tell me that I can’t quote your book (within fair use restrictions). You can’t tell me that I can’t refer to your book in a blog post. You can’t dictate who may and may not read a book. You can’t tell me that I can’t give a book to a friend. Or an enemy. Or an anarchist.
Folks, this isn’t a new problem, and it doesn’t need new laws.
When you sell a book, you don’t get to control how that book is used.
This is demonstrably wrong. You cannot buy a book, and then go use it to print your own copies for sale. You cannot use it as a script for a commercial movie. You cannot go publish a sequel to it.
Now please just try to tell me that AI training is specifically covered by fair use and satire case law. Spoiler: you can’t.
This is a novel (pun intended) problem space and deserves to be discussed and decided, like everything else. So yeah, your cavalier dismissal is cavalierly dismissed.
I completely fail to see how it wouldn’t be considered transformative work
It fails the transcendence criterion.Transformative works go beyond the original purpose of their source material to produce a whole new category of thing or benefit that would otherwise not be available.
Taking 1000 fan paintings of Sauron and using them in combination to create 1 new painting of Sauron in no way transcends the original purpose of the source material. The AI painting of Sauron isn’t some new and different thing. It’s an entirely mechanical iteration on its input material. In fact the derived work competes directly with the source material which should show that it’s not transcendent.
We can disagree on this and still agree that it’s debatable and should be decided in court. The person above that I’m responding to just wants to say “bah!” and dismiss the whole thing. If we can litigate the issue right here, a bar I believe this thread has already met, then judges and lawmakers should litigate it in our institutions. After all the potential scale of this far reaching issue is enormous. I think it’s incredibly irresponsible to say feh nothing new here move on.
Typically the argument has been “a robot can’t make transformative works because it’s a robot.” People think our brains are special when in reality they are just really lossy.
Transformativeness is only one of the four fair use factors. Just because something is transformative can’t alone make something fair use.
Even if AI is transformative, it would likely fail on the third factor. Fair use requires you to take the minimum amount of the copyrighted work, and AI companies scrape as much data as possible to train their models. Very unlikely to support a finding of fair use.
The final factor is market impact. As generative AIs are built to mimic the creativite outputs of human authorship. By design AI acts as a market replacement for human authorship so it would likely fail on this factor as well.
Regardless, trained AI models are unlikely to be copyrightable. Copyrights require human authorship which is why AI and animal generated art are not copyrightable.
A trained AI model is a piece of software so it should be protectable by patents because it is functional rather than expressive. But a patent requires you to describe how it works, so you can’t do that with AI. And a trained AI model is self-generated from training data, so there’s no human authorship even if trained AI models were copyrightable.
The exact laws that do apply to AI models is unclear. And it will likely be determined by court cases.
No, you misunderstand. Yes, they can control how the content in the book is used - that’s what copyright is. But they can’t control what I do with the book - I can read it, I can burn it, I can memorize it, I can throw it up on my roof.
My argument is that the is nothing wrong with training an AI with a book - that’s input for the AI, and that is indistinguishable from a human reading it.
Now what the AI does with the content - if it plagiarizes, violates fair use, plagiarizes- that’s a problem, but those problems are already covered by copyright laws. They have no more business saying what can or cannot be input into an AI than they can restrict what I can read (and learn from). They can absolutely enforce their copyright on the output of the AI just like they can if I print copies of their book.
My objection is strictly on the input side, and the output is already restricted.
Makes sense. I would love to hear how anyone can disagree with this. Just because an AI learned or trained from a book doesn’t automatically mean it violated any copyrights.
It’s specifically distribution of the work or derivatives that copyright prevents.
So you could make an argument that an LLM that’s memorized the book and can reproduce (parts of) it upon request is infringing. But one that’s merely trained on the book, but hasn’t memorized it, should be fine.
But by their very nature the LLM simply redistribute the material they’ve been trained on. They may disguise it assiduously, but there is no person at the center of the thing adding creative stokes. It’s copyrighted material in, copyrighted material out, so the plaintiffs allege.
It’s 100% a new problem. There’s established precedent for things costing different amounts depending on their intended use.
For example, buying a consumer copy of song doesn’t give you the right to play that song in a stadium or a restaurant.
Training an entire AI to make potentially an infinite number of derived works from your work is 100% worthy of requiring a special agreement. This even goes beyond simple payment to consent; a climate expert might not want their work in an AI which might severely mischatacterize the conclusions, or might want to require that certain queries are regularly checked by a human, etc
The thing is, copyright isn’t really well-suited to the task, because copyright concerns itself with who gets to, well, make copies. Training an AI model isn’t really making a copy of that work. It’s transformative.
Should there be some kind of new model of renumeration for creators? Probably. But it should be a compulsory licensing model.
Challenge level impossible: try uploading something long to amazon written by chatgpt without triggering the plagiarism detector.
The slippery slope here is that we are currently considering humans and computers to be different because (something someone needs to actually define). If you say “AI read my book and output a similar story, you owe me money” then how is that different from “Joe read my book and wrote a similar story, you owe me money.” We have laws already that deal with this but honestly how many books and movies aren’t just remakes of Romeo and Juliet or Taming of the Shrew?!?
Well, fine, and I can’t fault new published material having a “no AI” clause in its term of service. But that doesn’t mean we get to dream this clause into being retroactively for all the works ChatGPT was trained on. Even the most reasonable law in the world can’t be enforced on someone who broke it 6 months before it was legislated.
Fortunately the “horses out the barn” effect here is maybe not so bad. Imagine the FOMO and user frustration when ToS & legislation catch up and now ChatGPT has no access to the latest books, music, news, research, everything. Just stuff from before authors knew to include the “hands off” clause - basically like the knowledge cutoff, but forever. It’s untenable, OpenAI will be forced to cave and pay up.
Even the most reasonable law in the world can’t be enforced on someone who broke it 6 months before it was legislated.
Sure it can. Just because it is a new law doesn’t mean they get to continue benefiting from IP ‘theft’ forever into the future.
Imagine the FOMO and user frustration when ToS & legislation catch up and now ChatGPT has no access to the latest books, music, news, research, everything. Just stuff from before authors knew to include the “hands off” clause
How is this an issue for the IP holders? Just because you build something cool or useful doesn’t mean you get a pass to do what you want.
basically like the knowledge cutoff, but forever. It’s untenable,
Untenable for ChatGPT maybe, but it’s not as if it’s the end of ‘knowledge’ or the end of AI. It’s just a single company product.
OpenAI and such being forced to pay a share seems far from the worst scenario I can imagine. I think it would be much worse if artists, writers, scientists, open source developers and so on were forced to stop making their works freely available because they don’t want their creations to be used by others for commercial purposes. That could really mean that large parts of humanity would be cut off from knowledge.
I can well imagine copyleft gaining importance in this context. But this form of licencing seems pretty worthless to me if you don’t have the time or resources to sue for your rights - or even to deal with the various forms of licencing you need to know about to do so.
However, if the output of an AI would not be considered infringing for a human, then it isn’t infringement.
It’s an algorithm that’s been trained on numerous pieces of media by a company looking to make money of it. I see no reason to give them a pass on fairly paying for that media.
You can see this if you reverse the comparison, and consider what a human would do to accomplish the task in a professional setting. That’s all an algorithm is. An execution of programmed tasks.
If I gave a worker a pirated link to several books and scientific papers in the field, and asked them to synthesize an overview/summary of what they read and publish it, I’d get my ass sued. I have to buy the books and the scientific papers. STEM companies regularly pay for access to papers and codes and standards. Why shouldn’t an AI have to do the same?
It’s an algorithm that’s been trained on numerous pieces of media by a company looking to make money of it.
If I read your book… and get an amazing idea… Turn it into a business and make billions off of it. You still have no right to anything. This is no different.
If I gave a worker a pirated link to several books and scientific papers in the field
There’s been no proof or evidence provided that ANY content was ever pirated. Has any of the companies even provided the dataset they’ve used yet?
Why is this the presumption that they did it the illegal way?
If I read your book… and get an amazing idea… Turn it into a business and make billions off of it. You still have no right to anything. This is no different
I don’t see how this is even remotely the same? These companies are using this material to create their commercial product. They’re not consuming it personally and developing a random idea later, far removed from the book itself.
I can’t just buy (or pirate) a stack of Blu-rays and then go start my own Netflix, which is akin to what is happening here.
If I gave a worker a pirated link to several books and scientific papers in the field, and asked them to synthesize an overview/summary of what they read and publish it, I’d get my ass sued. I have to buy the books and the scientific papers.
Well, if OpenAI knowingly used pirated work, that’s one thing. It seems pretty unlikely and certainly hasn’t been proven anywhere.
Of course, they could have done so unknowingly. For example, if John C Pirate published the transcripts of every movie since 1980 on his website, and OpenAI merely crawled his website (in the same way Google does), it’s hard to make the case that they’re really at fault any more than Google would be.
Haven’t people asked it to reproduce specific chapters or pages of specific books and it’s gotten it right?
I asked Bing Chat for the 10th paragraph of the first Harry Potter book, and it gave me this:
“He couldn’t know that at this very moment, people meeting in secret all over the country were holding up their glasses and saying in hushed voices: ‘To Harry Potter – the boy who lived!’”
It looks like technically I might be able to obtain the entire book (eventually) by asking Bing the right questions?
Then this is a copyright violation - it violates any standard for such, and the AI should be altered to account for that.
What I’m seeing is people complaining about content being fed into AI, and I can’t see why that should be a problem (assuming it was legally acquired or publicly available). Only the output can be problematic.
No, the AI should be shut down and the owner should first be paying the statutory damages for each use of registered works of copyright (assuming all parties in the USA)
If they have a company left after that, then they can fix the AI.
I think it’s not just the output. I can buy an image on any stock Plattform, print it on a T-Shirt, wear it myself or gift it to somebody. But if I want to sell T-Shirts using that image I need a commercial licence - even if I alter the original image extensivly or combine it with other assets to create something new. It’s not exactly the same thing but openAI and other companies certainly use copyrighted material to create and improve commercial products. So this doesn’t seem the same kind of usage an avarage joe buys a book for.
There is already a business model for compensating authors: it is called buying the book. If the AI trainers are pirating books, then yeah - sue them.
That’s part of the allegation, but it’s unsubstantiated. It isn’t entirely coherent.
It’s not entirely unsubstantiated. Sarah Silverman was able to get ChatGPT to regurgitate passages of her book back to her.
Her lawsuit doesn’t say that. It says,
when ChatGPT is prompted, ChatGPT generates summaries of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works—something only possible if ChatGPT was trained on Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works
That’s an absurd claim. ChatGPT has surely read hundreds, perhaps thousands of reviews of her book. It can summarize it just like I can summarize Othello, even though I’ve never seen the play.
This is a little off, when you quote a book you put the name of the book you’re quoting. When you refer to a book, you, um, refer to the book?
I think the gist of these authors complaints is that a sort of “technology laundered plagiarism” is occurring.
