this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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Authors using a new tool to search a list of 183,000 books used to train AI are furious to find their works on the list.

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[–] 0ddysseus@lemmy.world 51 points 11 months ago (1 children)

This is no different than every other capitalist enterprise. The whole system works on taking a public resource, claiming private ownership of it, and then selling it back to the public for profit.

First it was farmland, then coal and minerals, oil, seafood, and now ideas. Its how the system works and is the whole reason people have been trying to stop it for the past 150 years.

The people making the laws are there because they and/or their parents and/or grandparents did the exact same thing. As despicable and corrupt as it is you won't change it by complaining and no-one is going to make a law to stop it.

[–] Franzia@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 points 11 months ago

God damned right. Every "new" thing tends to be stolen. In more event history, its stolen from other capital, or from innovation with a free license, rather than artwork. Publishers might actually be able to make a problem out of this.

[–] mojo@lemm.ee 48 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Here's an idea, legally force companies like OpenAI to rely on opt-in data, rather then build their entire company on stealing massive amounts of data. That includes requiring to retrain from scratch. Sam Altman was crying for regulations for scary AI, right?

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 15 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Would search engines only be allowed to show search results for sources that had opted in? They "train" their search engine on public data too, after all.

[–] mojo@lemm.ee 18 points 11 months ago (14 children)

They aren't reselling their information, they're linking you to the source which then the website decides what to do with your traffic. Which they usually want your traffic, that's the point of a public site.

That's like trying to say it's bad to point to where a book store is so someone can buy from it. Whereas the LLM is stealing from that bookstore and selling it to you in a back alley.

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[–] Gibdos@feddit.de 29 points 11 months ago (8 children)

I certainly hope that none of these authors have ever read a book before or have been inspired by something written by another author.

[–] adriaan@sh.itjust.works 35 points 11 months ago (2 children)

That would be a much better comparison if it was artificial intelligence, but these are just reinforcement learning models. They do not get inspired.

[–] Hackerman_uwu@lemmy.world 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

More to the point: they replicate patterns of words.

[–] lloram239@feddit.de 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)
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[–] Shurimal@kbin.social 7 points 11 months ago (2 children)

just reinforcement learning models

...like the naturally occuring neural networks are.

[–] Khalic@kbin.social 29 points 11 months ago (7 children)

The brain does not work the way you think… (I work in the field, bio-informatics). What you call “neural networks” come from an early misunderstanding of how the brain stores information. It’s a LOT more complicated and frankly, barely understood.

[–] canihasaccount@lemmy.world 11 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, accurately simulating a single pyramidal neuron requires an eight-layer deep neural network:

https://www.cell.com/neuron/pdf/S0896-6273(21)00501-8.pdf

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[–] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Tell you what, you get a landmark legal decision classifying LLM as people and then we'll talk.

Until then it's software being fed content in a way not permitted by its license i.e. the makers of that software committing copyright infringement.

[–] Touching_Grass@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

What exactly was not permitted by the license? Reading?

[–] sab@lemmy.world 13 points 11 months ago (5 children)

Using it to (create a tool to) create derivatives of the work on a massive scale.

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

An AI model is not a derivative work. It does not contain the copyrighted expression, just information about the copyrighted expression.

[–] SirGolan@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 11 months ago

Wikipedia: In copyright law, a derivative work is an expressive creation that includes major copyrightable elements of a first, previously created original work.

I think you may be off a bit on what a derivative work is. I don't see LLMs spouting out major copyrightable elements of books. They can give a summary sure, but Cliff Notes would like to have a word if you think that's copyright infringement.

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[–] newthrowaway20@lemmy.world 29 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (14 children)

That's an interesting take, I didn't know software could be inspired by other people's works. And here I thought software just did exactly as it's instructed to do. These are language models. They were given data to train those models. Did they pay for the data that they used to train for it, or did they scrub the internet and steal all these books along with everything everyone else has said?

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[–] elbarto777@lemmy.world 21 points 11 months ago (17 children)

These are machines, though, not human beings.

I guess I'd have to be an author to find out how I'd feel about it, to be fair.

[–] Touching_Grass@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Machines that aren't reproducing or distributing works

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[–] Wander@kbin.social 18 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Are you saying the writers of these programs have read all these books, and were inspired by them so much they wrote millions of books? And all this software is doing is outputting the result of someone being inspired by other books?

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[–] pavnilschanda@lemmy.world 21 points 11 months ago (8 children)

I hope they can at least get compensated.

[–] Fredselfish@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago (3 children)

So where can I check to see if my book was used? I published a book.

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[–] Smoogs@lemmy.world 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Ok so it’s been stealing art now it’s coming for authors. At what point do we hold the coalition who started this shit culpable for numerous accounts of plagiarism?

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[–] Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Curious if the AI company actually bought those books or if they just came across them by pirating.

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[–] leaky_shower_thought@feddit.nl 7 points 11 months ago

There's an idea by Barath Raghavan about an AI dividend that companies pay each netizen a share for the data they use to train these models.

I am into this idea if companies can't even do a simple opt-in mechanism.

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