Comedian and author Sarah Silverman, as well as authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey — are suing OpenAI and Meta each in a US District Court over dual claims of copyright infringement.
ThePile, which was assembled by a company called EleutherAI. ThePile, the complaint points out, was described in an EleutherAI paper as being put together from “a copy of the contents of the Bibliotik private tracker.” Bibliotik and the other “shadow libraries” listed, says the lawsuit, are “flagrantly illegal.”
I think this is where the crux of the case lies since the article mentions these are only available illegally through torrents.
This is starting to touch on the root of why they keep calling this “AI”, “training”, etc. They aren’t doing this for strictly marketing, they are attempting to skew public opinion. These companies know intimately how to do that.
They’re going to argue that if torrents are legal for educational purposes (ie the loophole that all trackers use), and they’re just “training” an “AI” then they’re just engaging in education. And an ignorant public might buy it.
These kinds of cases will be viewed as landmark cases in the future and honestly I don’t have huge hopes. The history of these companies is engineer first, excuse the lack of ethics later. Or the philosophy of “it’s easier to apologize than ask”.
It’s the defacto term for how we fit a statistical model to data, unrelated to any copyright concepts. I’m pretty sure we called it “training” back in 1997 when I was doing neural networks at uni, and it’s probably been used well before then too.
Neural nets are based on the concept of Hebbian learning (from the 1930s), because they are trying to mimic how a biological neural network learns.
This concept of training/learning has persisted because it’s a good analogy of what we are trying to do with these statistical models, even if they aren’t strictly neural networks.
This concept of training/learning has persisted because it’s a good analogy of what we are trying to do with these statistical models, even if they aren’t strictly neural networks.
LLMs are indeed neural networks.
TBH I’m not really familiar with how the AI has developed over the years. Wikipedia says that ChatGPT is proprietary, which leads me to believe it’s hasn’t been developed with research grants or government involvement. Is this the case? Can a company legally develop an AI by obtaining its learning material through illegal means? Which it sounds as if Open AI and Meta did through the use of Bibliotik.
I can’t see how this doesn’t have some legal ramification, but IANAL.