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John Grisham, George R.R. Martin and more authors sue OpenAI for copyright infringement
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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I get the logic, but I think it is a more complex issue than that.
How many writer's have read his works and been influenced by them? Did they buy a proper license or just buy/borrow the book from somewhere?
There's a fundamental difference between an author inspired by anothers work and an algorithm that was manufactured by a corporation to comb others work and reproduce derivatives, in my mind.
Like the other commenter, I would be genuinely curious to hear your thoughts on that fundamental difference.
I am by no means an AI expert, but my impressions is that AI sill needs to process each book and incorporate the new knowledge into its existing knowledge. Which at least from a surface level sounds a lot like what I do when I read a new book.
The fact that each AI is effectively a non-sapient slave of a person or corporation really doesn't change my opinion.
Have you ever had a reason to read much in a new or developing sub-genre? As a fan of LitRPG, a genre that virtually didn't exist 10 years ago, I can tell you with some certainty that everything is a derivative work of something. It is amazing how as soon as one author pulls in and idea from another genre, the next 30 novels that come out will have some variation of the same idea, and the 300 that follow it will each have variations of those.
I replied to the other guy with an answer on the difference. The TLDR IMO there's a difference between someone who has been inspired by another work and someone who has taken a work with the intent creating a product based on it.
It's one thing for those 30 LitRPG books to come out from authors who loved the concepts of the first book. It'd be another thing for a company to analyze what made the first book successful (for lack of a better word the author's style) and then create a tool that can release hundreds of LitRPG books a day flooding the market and making it harder for the original author to sell his work.
Also the authors of those inspired novels have the capacity to add their own creativity to their works an AI can only add the creativity from other's works.
Thank you for the response. I am not sure I agree with your exact stance, but you make several compelling points along the way.
Using the Fair Use doctrine is definitely a good way to narrow down where the dividing line is. I think we can easily agree that making a GRRM specific AI to make derivative, non-parody, commercial works would definitely be on the wrong side of the line.
When I was picturing the bots, I was picturing something more along the lines of AI bots that had consumed all human literary works, or at the very least all modern English literary works.
ChatGPT write me a short story where the Main Character is a Magical Golem that follows the Three Laws of Isaac Asimov. It should be written in the style of a Greek Tragedy but set in Feudal Japan. The Main Character should be able to gain in magical power until he eventually attempts to break into the Heavens. There should be gods trying to interfere in his ascension but not in ways the MC cannot resolve. Base the gods off of archetypes from Norse Mythology, but name them after characters from GRRM's game of thrones based on similar personality types.
Such a work would both be wholly derivative and yet wholly unique. Despite swiping GRRM's unique names this work should be perfectly fine in my mind. Edit: Even if it was commercialized.
I see what you're getting at but I feel that once we get past the GRRM specific example some of the same issues still remain.
For example if it was instead a GRRM & JK Rowling and wrote in a style of the two in my eyes it hasn't escaped the problem of the GRRM AI it's compounded them by adding one more author who's works is being used. Then we could extrapolate that out to it's true scale where it uses most written literature (although some presumably pub domain).
I just see it as if doing it to one person's work is wrong doing to two people's work aught to be twice as bad.
That's pretty much my opinion about this, too. It's not like GRRM invented dragons that were hatched from eggs or anything like that. Having said that, I do think it's problematic if the AI model belongs to a company and it's not transparent about what data is being used to train their model.
Please, articulate that difference, focusing specifically on what copyright actually protects.
That's not a flippant statement. That's an open, honest request.
I do not see any relevant difference between hiring a person to read and discuss a bunch of books, and a program built to read and discuss a bunch of books.
I'd argue that the scenario where someone is paying someone to intentionally replicate others work shares the same problems I see with a program doing the same. There's a difference IMO from the man who wants to write a fantasy story because he loved GRRM's work and the man who is being payed to analyze the works of GRRM to create a product.
As for copyright protections, I'd recommend Tom Scott's video on the subject. There's a number of factors considered when deciding fair use and there's no clear line in the sand. The important things to consider is how and why a source material was used. If this program was made to solely produce a parody of GRRM's world or writing style that'd be a strong fair use argue IMO.
Here's the factors for fair use:
I would say that the kind of use they engage in is commercial. Their source material here is a commercial fiction property, which doesn't help them as much as it would in the case of say something non-commercial and nonfiction. I'll assume they used all his written work to train the algorithms but little shows in the output product, this does help the fair use case. But doing well on one pillar of the fair use test doesn't mean the work qualifies. Lastly IMO again an algorithm can produce fantasy books at a rate which GRRM can not compete and might impact the larger market for fantasy literature.
https://youtu.be/1Jwo5qc78QU?si=OKqxTjJ7gavCs2N4
I'm going to stop you right there. Your argument seems to rest on the idea that knowledge and discussion of a book constitutes "replication". I don't concede this. I don't think we even get to the question of "fair use" because I don't see how knowledge and discussion can be considered copying that book.
If we were taking direct quotes from the book, we could get into copyright and fair use issues, sure. But I have never seen these AIs produce a direct quote from any source.
I don't think what the AI is doing with its knowledge of the book is sufficiently close enough to the book to be considered a derivation or replication. Can you show me otherwise?
Having the capacity to produce a derivative work is not the same thing as actually producing a derivative work. Copyright may prohibit the derivation itself, but it certainly does not prohibit the capability of creating such a derivation.