This is the best summary I could come up with:
ChatGPT creator OpenAI has been on the receiving end of two high profile lawsuits by authors who are absolutely livid that the AI startup used their writing to train its large language models, which they say amounts to flaunting copyright laws without any form of compensation.
One of the lawsuits, led by comedian and memoirist Sarah Silverman, is playing out in a California federal court, where the plaintiffs recently delivered a scolding on ChatGPT’s underlying technology.
At the crux of the author’s lawsuit is the argument that OpenAI is ruthlessly mining their material to create “derivative works” that will “replace the very writings it copied.”
The authors shoot down OpenAI’s excuse that “substantial similarity is a mandatory feature of all copyright-infringement claims,” calling it “flat wrong.”
It can brag that it’s a leader in a booming AI industry, but in doing so it’s also painted a bigger target on its back, making enemies of practically every creative pursuit.
High profile literary luminaries behind that suit include George R. R. Martin, Jonathan Franzen, David Baldacci, and legal thriller maestro John Grisham.
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Did anyone expect them to go “oh, okay, that makes sense after all”?
Amazing how every new generation of technology has a generation of users of the previous technology who do whatever they can do stop its advancement. This technology takes human creativity and output to a whole new level, it will advance medicine and science in ways that are difficult to even imagine, it will provide personalized educational tutoring to every student regardless of income, and these people are worried about the technicality of what the AI is trained on and often don’t even understand enough about AI to even make an argument about it. If people like this win, whatever country’s legal system they win in will not see the benefits that AI can bring. That society is shooting themselves in the foot.
Your favorite musician listened to music that inspired them when they made their songs. Listening to other people’s music taught them how to make music. They paid for the music (or somebody did via licensing fees or it was freely available for some other reason) when they listened to it in the first place. When they sold records, they didn’t have to pay the artist of every song they ever listened to. That would be ludicrous. An AI shouldn’t have to pay you because it read your book and millions like it to learn how to read and write.
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.
When you download Vicuna or Stable Diffusion XL, they’re a handful of gigabytes. But when you go download LAION-5B, it’s 240TB. So where did that data go if it’s being copy/pasted and regurgitated in its entirety?
Its less about copying the work, its more like looking at patterns that appear in a work.
To bring a very rudimentary example, if I wanted a word and the first letter was Q, what would the second letter be.
Of course, statistically, the next letter is u, and its not common for words starting with Q to have a different letter after that. ML/AI is like taking these small situations, but having a ridiculous amount of parameters to come up with something based on several internal models. These paramters of course generally have some context.
Its like if you were told to read a book thoroughly, and then after was told to reproduce the same book. You probably cannot make it 1:1, but could probably get the general gist of a story. The difference between you and the machine is the machine read a lot of books, and contextually knows patterns so that it can generate something similar faster and more accurate, but not exactly the original one for one thing.
You’re humanizing the software too much. Comparing software to human behavior is just plain wrong. GPT can’t even reason properly yet. I can’t see this as anything other than a more advanced collage process.
Open used intellectual property without consent of the owners. Major fucked.
If ‘anybody’ does anything similar to tracing, copy&pasting or even sampling a fraction of another person’s imagery or written work, that anybody is violating copyright.
You’re mystifying and mythologising humans too much. The learning process is very equivalent.
Well, there still a shit ton we don’t understand about human.
We do, however, understand everything about machine learning.
If ‘anybody’ does anything similar to tracing, copy&pasting or even sampling a fraction of another person’s imagery or written work, that anybody is violating copyright.
Ok, but tracing is literally a part of the human learning process. If you trace a work and sell it as your own that’s bad. If you trace a work to learn about the style and let that influence your future works that is what every artist already does.
The artistic process isn’t copyrighted, only the final result. The exact same standards can apply to AI generated work as already do to anything human generated.
i don’t know the specifics of the lawsuit but i imagine this would parallel piracy.
in a way you could say that Open has pirated software directly from multiple intellectual properties. Open has distributed software which emulates skills and knowledge. remember this is a tool, not an individual.
sampling a fraction of another person’s imagery or written work.
So citing is a copyright violation? A scientific discussion on a specific text is a copyright violation? This makes no sense. It would mean your work couldn’t build on anything else, and that’s plain stupid.
Also to your first point about reasoning and advanced collage process: you are right and wrong. Yes an LLM doesn’t have the ability to use all the information a human has or be as precise, therefore it can’t reason the same way a human can. BUT, and that is a huge caveat, the inherit goal of AI and in its simplest form neural networks was to replicate human thinking. If you look at the brain and then at AIs, you will see how close the process is. It’s usually giving the AI an input, the AI tries to give the desired output, them the AI gets told what it should have looked like, and then it backpropagates to reinforce it’s process. This already pretty advanced and human-like (even look at how the brain is made up and then how AI models are made up, it’s basically the same concept).
Now you would be right to say “well in it’s simplest form LLMs like GPT are just predicting which character or word comes next” and you would be partially right. But in that process it incorporates all of the “knowledge” it got from it’s training sessions and a few valuable tricks to improve. The truth is, differences between a human brain and an AI are marginal, and it mostly boils down to efficiency and training time.
And to say that LLMs are just “an advanced collage process” is like saying “a car is just an advanced horse”. You’re not technically wrong but the description is really misleading if you look into the details.
And for details sake, this is what the paper for Llama2 looks like; the latest big LLM from Facebook that is said to be the current standard for LLM development:
I don’t think that Sarah Silverman and the others are saying that the tech shouldn’t exist. They’re saying that the input to train them needs to be negotiated as a society. And the businesses also care about the input to train them because it affects the performance of the LLMs. If we do allow licensing, watermarking, data cleanup, synthetic data, etc. in a way that is transparent, I think it’s good for the industry and it’s good for the people.
I don’t need to negotiate with Sarah Silverman if Im handed her book by a friend, and neither should an AI
But you do need to negotiate with Sarah Silverman, if you take that book, rearrange the chapters, and then try sell it for profit. Obviously that’s extremified but it’s The argument they’re making.
Except the AI owner does. It’s like sampling music for a remix or integrating that sample into a new work. Yes, you do not need to negotiate with Sarah Silverman if you are handed a book by a friend. However if you use material from that book in a work it needs to be cited. If you create an IP based off that work, Sarah Silverman deserves compensation because you used material from her work.
No different with AI. If the AI used intellectual property from an author in its learning algorithm, than if that intellectual property is used in the AI’s output the original author is due compensation under certain circumstances.
An LLM isn’t human and shouldn’t be treated the same as a human. It’s as foolish as corporate personhood.
its a bit more than that if the ai is told to make something in the style of.
Yeah, and a person could make something in the style of someone else. And it would only be copyright infringement if the work does not meaningfully change the original and give credit to the original artist.
How is this any different?
I mean people have doing new works in the style of other artists for a while as well.
yeah again they can’t crank out a new one every 5 minutes and actually it would overwhelm the courts as its very easy for those works to be to similar. take the guy who tried to sue disney by writing a book based on finding nemo when he found out they were making a story like that. He was shady and tried to play timeline games but he did not need to make a story just like it.
seethe
Very concerning word use from you.
The issue art faces isn’t that there’s not enough throughput, but rather there’s not enough time, both to make them and enjoy them.
Headline is stupid.
Millenails journalism is fucking got to stop with these clown word choices…
That’s always been the case, though, imo. People had to make time for art. They had to go to galleries, see plays and listen to music. To me it’s about the fair promotion of art, and the ability for the art enjoyer to find art that they themselves enjoy rather than what some business model requires of them, and the ability for art creators to find a niche and to be able to work on their art as much as they would want to.
I take it we don’t use the phrase “good writers borrow, great writers steal” in this day and age…
Wait till they find out photographers spend their whole careers trying to emulate the style of previous generations. Or that Adobe has been implementing AI-driven content creation into Photoshop and Lightroom for years now, and we’ve been pretending we don’t notice because it makes our jobs easier.