2 authors say OpenAI 'ingested' their books to train ChatGPT. Now they're suing, and a 'wave' of similar court cases may follow.

3 years ago by L4sBot to c/technology

Two authors sued OpenAI, accusing the company of violating copyright law. They say OpenAI used their work to train ChatGPT without their consent.

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OldGreyTroll 109 points 3 years ago

If I read a book to inform myself, put my notes in a database, and then write articles, it is called "research". If I write a computer program to read a book to put the notes in my database, it is called "copyright infringement". Is the problem that there just isn't a meatware component? Or is it that the OpenAI computer isn't going a good enough job of following the "three references" rule to avoid plagiarism?

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bioemerl 72 points 3 years ago

Yeah. There are valid copyright claims because there are times that chat GPT will reproduce stuff like code line for line over 10 20 or 30 lines which is really obviously a violation of copyright.

However, just pulling in a story from context and then summarizing it? That's not a copyright violation that's a book report.

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nlogn 49 points 3 years ago

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bioemerl 43 points 3 years ago

It's incredibly convenient for companies.

Big companies like open AI can easily afford to download big data sets from companies like Reddit and deviantArt who already have the permission to freely use whatever work you upload to their website.

Individual creators do not have that ability and the act of doing this regulation will only force AI into the domain of these big companies even more than it already is.

Regulation would be a hideously bad idea that would lock these powerful tools behind the shitty web APIs that nobody has control over but the company in question.

Imagine the world is the future, magical new age technology, and Facebook owns all of it.

Do not allow that to happen.

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mydataisplain 18 points 3 years ago

Is it practically feasible to regulate the training? Is it even necessary? Perhaps it would be better to regulate the output instead.

It will be hard to know that any particular GET request is ultimately used to train an AI or to train a human. It's currently easy to see if a particular output is plagiarized. https://plagiarismdetector.net/ It's also much easier to enforce. We don't need to care if or how any particular model plagiarized work. We can just check if plagiarized work was produced.

That could be implemented directly in the software, so it didn't even output plagiarized material. The legal framework around it is also clear and fairly established. Instead of creating regulations around training we can use the existing regulations around the human who tries to disseminate copyrighted work.

That's also consistent with how we enforce copyright in humans. There's no law against looking at other people's work and memorizing entire sections. It's also generally legal to reproduce other people's work (eg for backups). It only potentially becomes illegal if someone distributes it and it's only plagiarism if they claim it as their own.

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Kilamaos 7 points 3 years ago

Plus, any regulation to limit this now means that anyone not already in the game will never breakthrough. It's going to be the domain of the current players for years, if not decades. So, not sure what's better, the current wild west where everyone can make something, or it being exclusive to the already big players and them closing the door behind

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ThoughtGoblin 3 points 3 years ago

AI could have free access to all public source codes on GitHub without respecting their licenses.

IANAL, but aren't their licenses are being respected up until they are put into a codebase? At least insomuch as Google is allowed to display code snippets in the preview when you look up a file in a GitHub repo, or you are allowed to copy a snippet to a StackOverflow discussion or ticket comment.

I do agree regulation is a very good idea, in more ways than just citation given the potential economic impacts that we seem clearly unprepared for.

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magic_lobster_party 13 points 3 years ago

The fear is that the books are in one way or another encoded into the machine learning model, and that the model can somehow retrieve excerpts of these books.

Part of the training process of the model is to learn how to plagiarize the text word for word. The training input is basically “guess the next word of this excerpt”. This is quite different compared to how humans do research.

To what extent the books are encoded in the model is difficult to know. OpenAI isn’t exactly open about their models. Can you make ChatGPT print out entire excerpts of a book?

It’s quite a legal gray zone. I think it’s good that this is tried in court, but I’m afraid the court might have too little technical competence to make a ruling.

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Wander 10 points 3 years ago

Say I see a book that sells well. It's in a language I don't understand, but I use a thesaurus to replace lots of words with synonyms. I switch some sentences around, and maybe even mix pages from similar books into it. I then go and sell this book (still not knowing what the book actually says).

I would call that copyright infringement. The original book didn't inspire me, it didn't teach me anything, and I didn't add any of my own knowledge into it. I didn't produce any original work, I simply mixed a bunch of things I don't understand.

That's what these language models do.

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nyakojiru 5 points 3 years ago

What about… they are making billions from that “read” and “storage” of information copyrighted from other people. They need to at least give royalties. This is like google behavior, using people data from “free” products to make billions. I would say they also need to pay people from the free data they crawled and monetized.

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qwertyqwertyqwerty 1 point 3 years ago

I’d say the main difference is that AI companies are profiting off of the training material, which seem unethical/illegal.

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reggie -28 points 3 years ago

I honestly do not care whether it is or is not copyright infringment, just hope to see "AI" burn :3

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Dav 29 points 3 years ago

AI isnt a boogyman, it's a set of tools. No chance it's going away even if Open AI suddenly disappeared.