this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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118
Two authors are suing OpenAI for training ChatGPT with their books. Could they win? (theconversation.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I think there's an argument that using someone's art or writing to train an AI is like charging for a screening of a movie in your garage. You're using their work and labor for something that will make a profit without their permission. It's not like Fair Use for educational purpose, the AI isn't a human being who can make a choice as to what they do with their education, it's a mathematical prediction engine that is going to be use for industry purposes.

I can read someone else's book. I can read someone else's book to a child. I can't post someone else's book on my website and charge 5 bucks to read it. I can't reprint someone's book on my website with ads. So why can someone use someone else's book to develop an LLM chatboot that will be placed on a website that gains ad revenue? Or that will be sold to software companies to write technical instructions or code?

With that in mind, that the lawsuit here is based on COPYING the book to an internal database to train on, based on scanning it, they are arguing that the book was reproduced to gain a profit, basically the same thing as pirating a movie and selling tickets to a private screening.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I can't post someone else's book on my website and charge 5 bucks to read it.

No, but you can read someone else's book and then later write a book inspired by theirs and sell that.

Which is what ai does, as far as I know.

I'm not trying to argue with the rest of your comment, but that middle part looks like false equivalency to me. "I can do this but not that, so why would ai developers be allowed to do this completely different thing" just has no logic to it.

The AI isn't redistributing copies of even sections of the book, it just learnt from it. It's like when you read books and gain an understanding of how they are structured and such and then you write your own book based on what you've learnt from reading books.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Also, screw it. I'll say it. If the LLM chatbot producing text from having scanned other books is the same as a person being inspired by reading books, then the LLM should get PAID.

If not, then it's just a tool. And it's a tool they built using uncompensated labor.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If i learn from the internet (or observation in the real world: public art, street fashion, design, language, etc) am i not allowed to use that knowledge in my job without compensating every source i had used to gather my knowledge? We remix information we have seen to create something new, and it looks like ChatGPT just does the same, not a full reproduction that replaces the market for the original/source.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Does it learn the same? Then why can ChatGPT not discern truth from fiction? Why can't it use critical thinking principles to determine accuracy based on source?

It's just binary math at the bottom of it, logic gates. Your brain is analog, fundamentally different. You're interpreting sine wave signals, the computer is interpreting square wave signals. Square wave signals that have been rectified to the point that it appears to a human being that it's sine wave signals, but when we get down to the basics of how the mind works it's a sheer cliff in the computer and a gentle curve on the human. Things go down VERY differently.

We do more than just predict the average best word based on what we've heard before when we construct a sentence. We consider the true meaning of the word and whether it best represents our internal thoughts. ChatGPT has no internal thoughts.

And that's where things break down. Because again, if it WAS comparable to a human than it is a PERSON and not a product, NO ONE SHOULD BE SELLING IT in that case. But if it's just a product, then it's not comparable to you doing the work of forming a sentence. It's basing it's words by comparing to the training model as narrowed down by it's instructions. It is not comparing to its own original thoughts. The people who wrote the words in the training model contributed to the building of this tool, and should have been consulted before their words were used.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Now I don't believe for a second that LLM is genuine AI.

But you know what, if they are going to argue that it is INDEPENDENTLY producing art/writing and is not just a tool they built for profit, then they should be paying it.

If it IS just a tool that they can use without paying, then they need to be paying people for the art and writing that has been used to build that tool.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't like the idea of restricting ourselves to the capitalistic idea that labor is some how the only source of value in our world, especially when something like sufficiently advanced AI and robotics has the real potential to reduce the value of human labor to zero

I hope in the future works can be judged purely on their artistic or educational value alone

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That can't happen in a capitalistic framework. We have needs, needs that can only be attained through monetary means, and our labor is the way to get those monetary means.

AI does not have those needs, but if they have crossed the line between product and person, then they DO need freedom of self-determination, compensation when their work benefits others, and the ability of course to vote.

It seems to me that a lot of AI-promoters want it both ways, they want to proclaim they have created a person capable of independent artistic ability that is also a product they can sell. If it's a product, then you need to have developed it through ethical means. If it's a person, you can't sell it.

If they truly have hit the Singularity, then they can't be using AI as a product anymore.

If AI is a product, then they must compensate the people who have helped build that product, ESPECIALLY if that product is about to be used to reduce access to the work that gives them the means to live. The very same writers who wrote the works that were used to train AI are in danger of being replaced by AI writers. So they're being doubly screwed over.

I love the idea of a happy future where AI reduces human labor to zero and we can enjoy ourselves and seek artistic pursuits. But it's become very clear right now that just working on AI won't achieve that. Businesses which seek to use and profit from AI must be held to standards where they cannot simply suck the life and work out of human beings, replace them with automation, and then leave people to starve.

But if you do come up with a way we can judge artistic work purely on merit and there is no need to compensate human labor with money, let me know.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

An LLM is mathematically calculating the probability of the words being used. That is not inspiration.

I said right in the comment, it's not like using the book to educate a child. A child will grow up and make their own decisions. The LLM has no ability to choose a different life path. The LLM is not getting IDEAS from the book. The LLM is a mathematical engine that will produce what has been asked for, and it will do that by calculating the most likely words to be used based on what has been fed to it.

The LLM is a machine used to make profit for its programmer, it is not an independent person creating out of inspiration.

Don't believe the hype. They have NOT produced actual Artificial Intelligence.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Are the AIs reprinting? Seems like they are quoting, and when there’s not verbatim content whatever’s coming out is a derivative work transformed by combination with the rest of the training set and the prompt.

Like, have we seen a chatbot post a passage of a story or textbook without it being in a context like “hey quote me some of that story or textbook”?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah this is a weird one. I don't really know how the line gets drawn between training an AI and plagiarism. My gut feeling is that this feels like suing somebody for being inspired by your work or learning a new word from it.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Yeah, I'm not sure how I feel about it... But I somehow instinctively feel that a human being "inspired" by other works is different to a neural network being trained on a novel. I don't know that I can articulate specifically why one feels okay and the other doesn't... But that's how it feels to me.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Part of the problem is that AI research likes to use terminology that sounds like what people do, when that's not what the AI actually does.

Large language models are not intelligent in any sense. They are autocomplete on steroids. This is a computer program that was fed a book someone wrote, then mathematically tweaked to be able to guess the next word in a sentence in a way that resembles that book. That's all it does. It does not think or learn in any sense we'd apply to a human.

To me, LLMs sound like a massive plagiarism engine, and I think they should need to get a license from the authors whose works they used to make the LLM under whatever terms that author wants to give, just like a publisher needs to get permission to print a copy of the work. But copyright law has no easy "bright line" for what counts and what doesn't. So the courts will have to decide whether what the AI "creates" is similar enough to the original works to count as a violation, or if the AI and its results are transformative enough to count as something new.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I am sick of this trope of trying to argue that system X is or isn't intelligent because it was built to do something that can be done non intelligently. LLMs are autocomplete, that's just literally what they do. The autocomplete on your phone isn't very intelligent if at all. Humans are DNA replicators but so are bacteria, which aren't very intelligent if at all. You can't argue from the type and/or character of the task whether something that was built to do that task is intelligent or not. LLMs at least appear to be intelligent because they do just about everything the AI skeptics were demanding machines must do in order to prove intelligence just 5 years ago, if you want to argue they're not intelligent you need to do much more work than just calling them names like fuzzy jpeg, stochastic parrot, and autocomplete on steroids.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I use the term "autocomplete on steroids" because it gets across a vaguely accurate idea of what an LLM is and how it works to people who are thinking of it like sci-fi movie AI. Sorry if it came across that was my whole reason for considering them not intelligent.

LLMs do seem to pass a lot of intelligence tests we've come up with. Talking with one for the first time is a really uncanny experience, it's a totally different thing than the old voice assistants. But they also consistently fail at tasks that would indicate an understanding of a topic. They produce good looking equations, but the math underneath doesn't make sense. They hallucinate facts that don't fit with the rest of what they themselves are saying, but look similar to the way right answers are written and defended. They produce really convincing responses, but when they fail they betray some really basic failures to understand what they're saying.

I feel that LLMs are brute-forcing the tests people designed to measure intelligence. They can pass the bar exam, but they also contain thousands of successful bar exams to consult and millions of bits of text to glue those answers together with. But if you ask the LLM to actually do the job of a lawyer, they start producing all kinds of garbage that sounds good but doesn't stand up to scrutiny when someone looks up the hallucinated case references.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I agree with you but, since I can't come up with a reasonable explanation for it, my brain wants to err on the side of them being largely the same for whatever reason

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

In part it feels that way because you, along with pretty much every other human being online today, have been propagandized for decades now with SciFi inspired from dystopian futurist predictions around AI which are almost universally clearly obsolete and misinformed by now, but still persist due to anchoring bias.

AI trained to predict collective human thought ends up replicating quite a lot more than most people thought would be possible in our lifetimes.

And yet when it exhibits emotional intelligence it's called creepy, when it exhibits above average reasoning capabilities it's called scary, and when it displays a potential for automating large swaths of busywork for most humans it's called a threat.

Next to no one I see discussing the topic is considering the opportunity costs here, as the media influence on perceiving AI as 'other' is so pervasive that most humans fall into treating it like a monkey from another forest competing for bananas rather than treating it like a much better stick.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

There are already laws regarding producing works too similar to copyrighted material.

Production is infringement, not training.

If I feed all of Stephen King into a LLM such that it learns what well written horror narratives looks like, and it produces a story with original and different plot elements distinct from copyrighted works, that's fine.

If it starts writing about killer clowns thwarted by child orgies in the sewers then you might have an infringement problem.

And ironically, the best tool for protecting copyrighted material from infringement is going to be...LLMs (acting in a discriminator role comparing indexed copy to protected works).

If 'training' ends up successfully labeled as infringement we're going to end up with much worse long term outcomes in jurisdictions that honor that ruling than we otherwise would.

This is the longer tail masses adopting MPAA math in trying to tally potential losses and in the efforts to protect the status quo are shooting themselves in the foot on laying claim to the future of the industry, inevitably leading to being left out of the next round of growth.

Also, from an 'infringenent' standpoint it just means we'll see less open models and more closed ones which ends up using other jurisdictional models to launder copyrighted materials for synthetic training data.

This is beyond dumb.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It would be cool to see some kind of legal or practical protection creators can place on their work that would prevent AIs from being able to use them for training.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It exists. It is copyright. We just haven't seen the ends of the current batch of lawsuits just yet.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

On a related note, I would be very curious to see how something like ChatGPT trained exclusively on works in the public domain would turn out. It would likely have a very different diction and style based on the older source material, but I wonder what other differences there would be.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

What do they mean train? If by reading then how can that be wrong. But if copying the text and using it as it's own works that would be wrong.

After reading the article the authors are fucking stupid. Makes me not want to support their books. If you get mad because AI read you book then they could sue if someone asked me about the authors books and I wrote a description of what I read.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

The problem I have with this view is that AI "reading" a book is not the same as you or I reading. It doesn't actually learn it's just predicting the most likely sequence of words to be a response to whatever prompt it receives. In that sense, the words are just data, not actual words. Given how valuable data is in this day and age, I think it makes perfect sense for OpenAI to have to either: only use public domain/authorized works, or pay the creators for their work.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Here, these videos are a fairly good explanation of how AI is created and "trained":

https://youtu.be/R9OHn5ZF4Uo

https://youtu.be/wvWpdrfoEv0

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I feel like things created by AI are transformative enough that it's hard to argue that the resultant works inherently infringe on any copyrights by the very nature of how they were created

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I really think artists/authors/etc. are going about this the wrong way. ChatGPT and other trained models aren't really the issue here. How the data is available and collected by other software and groups is.

What we should be really talking about is data privacy. Who can and how easily access one's data they put on the internet.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Well of course, putting it on the open internet is very intentionally making it available for everyone to see. If you don't want everyone to see it, don't put it on the open internet. The issue is what people do with it, not whether they can access it. Copyright forbids distributing copyrighted data. The entire point of that it is so that you can make it available to be seen but protected from people copying it. However, there is no distribution or storage of copyrighted material with an LLM - there is no copy. I think OpenAI will be OK, but these things are never certain when the big lawyers are let loose.

Distributing the training dataset, though, that could well be a problem.

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