Authors using a new tool to search a list of 183,000 books used to train AI are furious to find their works on the list.
I hope they can at least get compensated.
What about my Reddit history?
Arguably there’s more of my text there that was used to train these LLMs than most authors in that list.
The comment elsewhere in this thread about models built on broad public data needing to be public in turn is a salient one.
IP laws were designed to foster innovation, not hold it back.
I’d much rather see a world where we have open access models trained broadly and accelerating us towards greener pastures than one where book publishers get a few extra cents from less capable closed models that take longer for us to reach the heyday where LLMs can do things like review the past 20 years of cancer research in order to identify promising trends in allocation of future resources.
OpenAI should probably rightfully be dinged for downloading copyrighted media the same way any average user would be sued when caught doing the same.
But the popular arguments these days for making training infringement are ass backwards and a slippery slope to a far more dystopian future than the alternative.
they were compensated when the company using the book, purchased the book. you can’t tell me what to do with the words written in the book once I’ve purchased it. nor do you own the ideas or things I come up with as a result of your words in your book. of course this argument only holds up if they purchased the book. if it was “stolen” then they are entitled to the $24.95 their book costs.
That’s the thing – they weren’t.
The case has two prongs.
One is that training the AI on copyrighted material is somehow infringement, which is total BS and a dangerous path for the world to go down.
The other is that copyrighted material was illegally downloaded by OpenAI, which is pretty much an open and shut case, as they didn’t buy up copies of 100k books, they basically torrented them.
And because of ridiculous IP laws bought by industry lobbyists in the dawn of the digital age, the damages are more like $250,000 per book if willful infringement, not $24.95.
Had they purchased them, these cases would very likely be headed for the dumpster heap.
That said, there’s a certain irony to Lemmy having pirate subs as one of the most popular while also generally being aggressively pro-enforcement on IP infringement.
Training AI on copyrighted material is infringement and I’ll die on that hill. It’s use of copyrighted material to create a commercial product. Doesn’t get any more clear cut than that.
I know as an artist/musician/photographer I’d rather not put my creations out there at all if it means some corporation is going to be able to steal it.
The database is here. You’ll have to sign up for a free trial if you’re not a subscriber to The Atlantic already. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/books3-database-generative-ai-training-copyright-infringement/675363/
Did you ever comment on Reddit before 2015? If so, your copyrighted material was used to train the modern LLMs even if your published book wasn’t used at all.