No that’s not how it works. It stores learned information like “word x is more likely to follow word y than word a” or “people from country x are more likely to consume food a than b”. That is what is distributed when the AI model is shared. To learn that, it just reads books zillions of times and updates its table of likelihoods. Just like an artist might listen to a Lil Wayne album hundreds of times and each time they learn a little bit more about his rhyme style or how beats work or whatever. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s a layperson’s explanation of how it works. The book isn’t stored in there somewhere. The book’s contents aren’t transferred to other parties.
The learning model is artificial, vs a human that is sentient. If a human learns from a piece of work, that’s fine if they emulate styles in their own work. However, sample that work, and the original artist is due compensation. This was a huge deal in the late 80s with electronic music sampling earlier musical works, and there are several cases of copyright that back original owners’ claim of royalties due to them.
The lawsuits allege that the models used copyrighted work to learn. If that is so, writers are due compensation for their copyrighted work.
This isn’t litigation against the technology. It’s litigation around what a machine can freely use in its learning model. Had ChatGPT, Meta, etc., used works in the public domain this wouldn’t be an issue. Yet it looks as if they did not.
EDIT
And before someone mentions that the books may have been bought and then used in the model, it may not matter. The Birthday Song is a perfect example of copyright that caused several restaurant chains to use other tunes up until the copyright was overturned in 2016. Every time the AI uses the copied work in its’ output it may be subject to copyright.
The creator of ChatGPT is sentient. Why couldn’t it be said that this is their expression of the learned works?
I can read a copy written work and create a work from the experience and knowledge gained. At what point is what I’m doing any different to the A.I.?
For one thing: when you do it, you’re the only one that can express that experience and knowledge. When the AI does it, everyone an express that experience and knowledge. It’s kind of like the difference between artisanal and industrial. There’s a big difference of scale that has a great impact on the livelihood of the creators.
There is a practical difference in the time required and sheer scale of output in the AI context that makes a very material difference on the actual societal impact, so it’s not unreasonable to consider treating it differently.
Set up a lemonade stand on a random street corner and you’ll probably be left alone unless you have a particularly Karen-dominated municipal government. Try to set up a thousand lemonade stands in every American city, and you’re probably going to start to attract some negative attention. The scale of an activity is a relevant factor in how society views it.
For one thing, you can do the task completely unprompted. The LLM has to be told what to do. On that front, you have an idea in your head of the task you want to achieve and how you want to go about doing it, the output is unique because it’s determined by your perceptions. The LLM doesn’t really have perceptions, it has probabilities. It’s broken down the outputs of human creativity into numbers and is attempting to replicate them.
It’s litigation around what a machine can freely use in its learning model.
No, its not that, either. It’s litigation around what resources a person can exploit to develop a product without paying for that right.
The machine is doing nothing wrong. It’s not feeding itself.