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.
Our ancient legal system trying to lend itself to “protecting authors” is fucking absurd. AI is the future. Are we really going to let everyone take a shot suing these guys over this crap? Its a useful program and infrastructure for everyone.
Holding technology back for antiquated copyright law is downright absurd.
Edit: I want to add that I’m not suggesting copyright should be a free for all on your books or hard work, but rather that this is a computer program and a major breakthrough, and in the same way that if I read a book no one sues my brain for consumption I don’t think we should sue an AI: it is not reproducing books. In the same manner that many footnotes websites about books do not reproduce a book by summarizing their content. With the contingency that until Open AI does not have an event where their reputation has to be re-evaluated (IE this is subject to change if they start trying to reproduce books).
Stop comparing AI to a person. It’s not a person, it doesn’t do the things a person does, and it doesn’t have the rights of a person.
And yes the laws are antiquated. We need new laws that will protect authors.
Finally, no, you can’t just throw out all other considerations because you think AI is useful.
and it doesn’t have the rights of a person.
And we have determined that AI created work cannot be copyrighted - because it’s not a person. Nobody’s trying to claim that AI somehow has the rights of a person.
But reading a bunch of books and then creating new material using the knowledge gained in those books is not copyright infringement and should be not treated as such. I can take Andy Warhol’s style and create as many advertisements as I want with it. He doesn’t own the style, nobody does.
Why should that be any different for a company using AI? Makes no sense to me.
You have been duped into thinking copyright is protecting authors when really copyright primarily exists to protect companies like Disney.
For clarity’s sake, the original intent behind copyright was definitely to protect authors and thereby foster creativity, but corporations like Disney have lobbied very successfully over the years to prevent original works from becoming public domain.
Meanwhile, in classic fashion, those same companies have taken public domain works and turned them into ludicrously successful IPs!
I argue that this is a positive aspect of capitalism that our governments have unduly suppressed in favor of corporate sponsors (further solidified by an increasing legal allowance of such sponsorships), and that we should return to a more reasonable timeframe for full exclusivity.
I’m not sure about that at all. At what point does a computer program become intelligent enough to not have human rights but have some cognition of fair use.
I think it needs to be really hashed out by someone who understands both copyright law and data warehouses, and some programming. It’s a sparse field for sure but we need someone equipped for it.
Because I don’t think it’s as linear as you’re describing it.
People see that they were purchased for 10 billion dollars and want a piece of the pie.
Its a bit pedantic, but I’m not really sure I support this kind of extremist view of copyright and the scale of whats being interpreted as ‘possessed’ under the idea of copyright. Once an idea is communicated, it becomes a part of the collective consciousness. Different people interpret and build upon that idea in various ways, making it a dynamic entity that evolves beyond the original creator’s intention. Its like issues with sampling beats or records in the early days of hiphop. Its like the very principal of an idea goes against this vision, more that, once you put something out into the commons, its irretrievable. Its not really yours any more once its been communicated. I think if you want to keep an idea truly yours, then you should keep it to yourself. Otherwise you are participating in a shared vision of the idea. You don’t control how the idea is interpreted so its not really yours any more.
If thats ChatGPT or Public Enemy is neither here nor there to me. The idea that a work like Peter Pan is still possessed is such a very real but very silly obvious malady of this weirdly accepted but very extreme view of the ability to possess an idea.
If you sample someone else’s music and turn around and try to sell it, without first asking permission from the original artist, that’s copyright infringement.
So, if the same rules apply, as your post suggests, OpenAI is also infringing on copyright.
If you sample someone else’s music and turn around and try to sell it, without first asking permission from the original artist, that’s copyright infringement.
I think you completely and thoroughly do not understand what I’m saying or why I’m saying it. No where did I suggest that I do not understand modern copyright. I’m saying I’m questioning my belief in this extreme interpretation of copyright which is represented by exactly what you just parroted. That this interpretation is both functionally and materially unworkable, but also antithetical to a reasonable understanding of how ideas and communication work.
Because in practical terms, writers and artists’ livelihoods are being threatened by AIs who were trained on their work without their consent or compensation. Ultimately the only valid justification for copyright is to enable the career of professional creators who contribute to our culture. We knew how ideas and communication worked when copyright was first created. That is why it’s a limited time protection, a compromise.
All the philosophical arguments about the nature of ideas and learning, and how much a machine may be like a person don’t change that if anyone dedicates years of their efforts to develop their skills only to be undercut by an AI who was trained on their own works, is an incredibly shitty position to be in.
That’s life under capitalism.
I agree with you in essence (I’ve put a lot of time into a free software game).
However, people are entitled to the fruits of their labor, and until we learn to leave capitalism behind artists have to protect their work to survive. To eat. To feed their kids. And pay their rent.
Unless OpenAi is planning to pay out royalties to everyone they stole from, what their doing is illegal and immoral under our current, capitalist paradigm.
A sample is a fundamental part of a song’s output, not just its input. If LLMs are changing the input’s work to a high enough degree is it not protected as a transformative work?
it’s more like a collage of everyone’s words. it doesn’t make anything creative because ot doesn’t have a body or life or real social inputs you could say. basically it’s just rearranging other people’s words.
A song that’s nothing but samples. but so many samples it hides that fact. this is my view anyway.
and only a handful of people are getting rich of the outputs.
if we were in some kinda post capitalism economy or if we had UBI it wouldn’t bother me really. it’s not the artists ego I’m sticking up for, but their livelihood
Ai isn’t interpreting anything. This isn’t the sci-fi style of ai that people think of, that’s general ai. This is narrow AI, which is really just an advanced algorithm. It can’t create new things with intent and design, it can only regurgitate a mix of pre-existing stuff based on narrow guidelines programmed into it to try and keep it coherent, with no actual thought or interpretation involved in the result. The issue isn’t that it’s derivative, the issue is that it can only ever be inherently derivative without any intentional interpretation or creativity, and nothing else.
Even collage art has to qualify as fair use to avoid copyright infringement if it’s being done for profit, and fair use requires it to provide commentary, criticism, or parody of the original work used (which requires intent). Even if it’s transformative enough to make the original unrecognizable, if the majority of the work is not your own art, then you need to get permission to use it otherwise you aren’t automatically safe from getting in trouble over copyright. Even using images for photoshop involves creative commons and commercial use licenses. Fanart and fanfic is also considered a grey area and the only reason more of a stink isn’t kicked up over it regarding copyright is because it’s generally beneficial to the original creators, and credit is naturally provided by the nature of fan works so long as someone doesn’t try to claim the characters or IP as their own. So most creators turn a blind eye to the copyright aspect of the genre, but if any ever did want to kick up a stink, they could, and have in the past like with Anne Rice. And as a result most fanfiction sites do not allow writers to profit off of fanfics, or advertise fanfic commissions. And those are cases with actual humans being the ones to produce the works based on something that inspired them or that they are interpreting. So even human made derivative works have rules and laws applied to them as well. Ai isn’t a creative force with thoughts and ideas and intent, it’s just a pattern recognition and replication tool, and it doesn’t benefit creators when it’s used to replace them entirely, like Hollywood is attempting to do (among other corporate entities). Viewing AI at least as critically as actual human beings is the very least we can do, as well as establishing protection for human creators so that they can’t be taken advantage of because of AI.
I’m not inherently against AI as a concept and as a tool for creators to use, but I am against AI works with no human input being used to replace creators entirely, and I am against using works to train it without the permission of the original creators. Even in the artist/writer/etc communities it’s considered to be a common courtesy to credit other people/works that you based a work on or took inspiration from, even if what you made would be safe under copyright law regardless. Sure, humans get some leeway in this because we are imperfect meat creatures with imperfect memories and may not be aware of all our influences, but a coded algorithm doesn’t have that excuse. If the current AIs in circulation can’t function without being fed stolen works without credit or permission, then they’re simply not ready for commercial use yet as far as I’m concerned. If it’s never going to be possible, which I just simply don’t believe, then it should never be used commercially period. And it should be used by creators to assist in their work, not used to replace them entirely. If it takes longer to develop, fine. If it takes more effort and manpower, fine. That’s the price I’m willing to pay for it to be ethical. If it can’t be done ethically, then imo it shouldn’t be done at all.
I thought this way too, but after playing with ChatGPT and Mid Journey near daily, I have seen many moments of creativity way beyond the source it was trained on. I think a good example that I saw was on a YouTube video (sorry I cannot recall which to link) where thr prompt was animals made of sushi and wow, was it ever good and creative on how it made them and it was photo realistic. This is just not something you an find anywhere on the Internet. I just did a search and found some hand drawn Japanese style sushi with eyes and such, but nothing like what I saw in that video.
I have also experienced it suggested ways to handle coding on my VR Theme Park app that is very unconventional and not something anyone has posted about as near as I can tell. It seems to be able to put 2 and 2 together and get 8. Likely as it sees so much of everything at once that it can connect the dots on ways we would struggle too. It is more than regurgitated data and it surprises me near daily.
Just because you think it seems creative due to your lack of experience with human creativity, that doesn’t mean it is uniquely creative. It’s not, it can’t be by its very nature, it can only regurgitate an amalgamation of stuff fed into it. What you think you see is the equivalent of paradoilia.
Your broader point would be stronger if it weren’t framed around what seems like a misunderstanding of modern AI. To be clear, you don’t need to believe that AI is “just” a “coded algorithm” to believe it’s wrong for humans to exploit other humans with it. But to say that modern AI is “just an advanced algorithm” is technically correct in exactly the same way that a blender is “just a deterministic shuffling algorithm.” We understand that the blender chops up food by spinning a blade, and we understand that it turns solid food into liquid. The precise way in which it rearranges the matter of the food is both incomprehensible and irrelevant. In the same way, we understand the basic algorithms of model training and evaluation, and we understand the basic domain task that a model performs. The “rules” governing this behavior at a fine level are incomprehensible and irrelevant-- and certainly not dictated by humans. They are an emergent property of a simple algorithm applied to billions-to-trillions of numerical parameters, in which all the interesting behavior is encoded in some incomprehensible way.
Bro I don’t think you have any idea what you’re talking about. These AIs aren’t blenders, they are designed to recognize and replicate specific aspects of art and writing and whatever else, in a way that is coherent and recognizable. Unless there’s a blender that can sculpt Michelangelo’s David out of apple peels, AI isn’t like a blender in any way.
But even if they were comparable, a blender is meant to produce chaos. It is meant to, you know, blend the food we put into it. So yes, the outcome is dictated by humans. We want the individual pieces to be indistinguishable, and deliberate design decisions get made by the humans making them to try and produce a blender that blends things sufficiently, and makes the right amount of chaos with as many ingredients as possible.
And here’s the thing, if we wanted to determine what foods were put into a blender, even assuming we had blindfolds on while tossing random shit in, we could test the resulting mixture to determine what the ingredients were before they got mashed together. We also use blenders for our own personal use the majority of the time, not for profit, and we use our own fruits and vegetables rather than stuff we stole from a neighbor’s yard, which would be, you know, trespassing and theft. And even people who use blenders to make something that they sell or offer publicly almost always list the ingredients, like restaurants.
So even if AI was like a blender, that wouldn’t be an excuse, nor would it contradict anything I’ve said.
I disagree with your interpretation of how an AI works, but I think the way that AI works is pretty much irrelevant to the discussion in the first place. I think your argument stands completely the same regardless. Even if AI worked much like a human mind and was very intelligent and creative, I would still say that usage of an idea by AI without the consent of the original artist is fundamentally exploitative.
You can easily train an AI (with next to no human labor) to launder an artist’s works, by using the artist’s own works as reference. There’s no human input or hard work involved, which is a factor in what dictates whether a work is transformative. I’d argue that if you can put a work into a machine, type in a prompt, and get a new work out, then you still haven’t really transformed it. No matter how creative or novel the work is, the reality is that no human really put any effort into it, and it was built off the backs of unpaid and uncredited artists.
You could probably make an argument for being able to sell works made by an AI trained only on the public domain, but it still should not be copyrightable IMO, cause it’s not a human creation.
TL;DR - No matter how creative an AI is, its works should not be considered transformative in a copyright sense, as no human did the transformation.
if it’s being done for profit, and fair use requires it to provide commentary, criticism, or parody of the original work used. Even if it’s transformative enough to make the original unrecognizable
I’m going to need a source for that. Fair use is a flexible and context-specific, It depends on the situation and four things: why, what, how much, and how it affects the work. No one thing is more important than the others, and it is possible to have a fair use defense even if you do not meet all the criteria of fair use.
I’m a bit confused about what point you’re trying to make. There is not a single paragraph or example in the link you provided that doesn’t support what I’ve said, and none of the examples provided in that link are something that qualified as fair use despite not meeting any criteria. In fact one was the opposite, as something that met all the criteria but still didn’t qualify as fair use.
The key aspect of how they define transformative is here:
Has the material you have taken from the original work been transformed by adding new expression or meaning?
These (narrow) AIs cannot add new expression or meaning, because they do not have intent. They are just replicating and rearranging learned patterns mindlessly.
Was value added to the original by creating new information, new aesthetics, new insights, and understandings?
These AIs can’t provide new information because they can’t create something new, they can only reconfigure previously provided info. They can’t provide new aesthetics for the same reason, they can only recreate pre-existing aesthetics from the works fed to them, and they definitely can’t provide new insights or understandings because again, there is no intent or interpretation going on, just regurgitation.
The fact that it’s so strict that even stuff that meets all the criteria might still not qualify as fair use only supports what I said about how even derivative works made by humans are subject to a lot of laws and regulations, and if human works are under that much scrutiny then there’s no reason why AI works shouldn’t also be under at least as much scrutiny or more. The fact that so much of fair use defense is dependent on having intent, and providing new meaning, insights, and information, is just another reason why AI can’t hide behind fair use or be given a pass automatically because “humans make derivative works too”. Even derivative human works are subject to scrutiny, criticism, and regulation, and so should AI works.
Neural networks are based on the same principles as the human brain, they are literally learning in the exact same way humans are. Copyrighting the training of neural nets is the essentially the same thing as copyrighting interpretation and learning by humans.
To add to that, Harry Potter is the worst example to use here. There is no extra billion that JK Rowling needs to allow her to spend time writing more books.
Copyright was meant to encourage authors to invest in their work in the same way that patents do. If you were going to argue about the issue of lifting content from books, you should be using books that need the protection of copyright, not ones that don’t.
Well, I’d consider agreeing if the LLMs were considered as a generic knowledge database. However I had the impression that the whole response from OpenAI & cie. to this copyright issue is “they build original content”, both for LLMs and stable diffusion models. Now that they started this line of defence I think that they are stuck with proving that their “original content” is not derivated from copyrighted content 🤷
Well, I’d consider agreeing if the LLMs were considered as a generic knowledge database. However I had the impression that the whole response from OpenAI & cie. to this copyright issue is “they build original content”, both for LLMs and stable diffusion models. Now that they started this line of defence I think that they are stuck with proving that their “original content” is not derivated from copyrighted content 🤷
Yeah I suppose that’s on them.
One of the first things I ever did with ChatGPT was ask it to write some Harry Potter fan fiction. It wrote a short story about Ron and Harry getting into trouble. I never said the word McGonagal and yet she appeared in the story.
So yeah, case closed. They are full of shit.
There is enough non-copywrited Harry Potter fan fiction out there that it would not need to be trained on the actual books to know all the characters. While I agree they are full of shit, your anecdote proves nothing.
While I agree they are full of shit, your anecdote proves nothing.
Why? Because you say so?
He brings up a valid point, it seems transformative.
The sentence they wrote right before your quoted sentence answers your braindead question.
are we no longer allowed to borrow books from friends?
Yeah, but if you wanna act out the contents of the book and sell it as a movie, you need to buy the rights.
Yes but there’s a threshold of how much you need to copy before it’s an IP violation.
Copying a single word is usually only enough if it’s a neologism.
Two matching words in a row usually isn’t enough either.
At some point it is enough though and it’s not clear what that point is.
On the other hand it can still be considered an IP violation if there are no exact word matches but it seems sufficiently similar.
Until now we’ve basically asked courts to step in and decide where the line should be on a case by case basis.
We never set the level of allowable copying to 0, we set it to “reasonable”. In theory it’s supposed to be at a level that’s sufficient to, “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” (US Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8).
Why is it that with AI we take the extreme position of thinking that an AI that makes use of any information from humans should automatically be considered to be in violation of IP law?
Making use of the information is not a violation – making use of that violation to turn a profit is a violation. AI software that is completely free for the masses without any paid upgrades can look at whatever it wants. As soon as a corporation is making money on it though, it’s in violation and needs to pay up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As a Civilian Pirating is no Problem but if its a Company that behaves like they own their Neural Network to 100%.
Piracy is gonna live as long Services are Bad for Average Joe,but these US Corps can afford to pay for this.
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.
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.
Lol, say that to the first (obscure) Harry Potter line I tried on ChatGPT.
