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?
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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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.
Or is it that the OpenAI computer isn’t going a good enough job of following the “three references” rule to avoid plagiarism?
This is exactly the problem, months ago I read that AI could have free access to all public source codes on GitHub without respecting their licenses.
So many developers have decided to abandon GitHub for other alternatives not realizing that in the end AI training can safely access their public repos on other platforms as well.
What should be done is to regulate this training, which however is not convenient for companies because the more data the AI ingests, the more its knowledge expands and "helps" the people who ask for information.
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.
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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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
My concern here is that OpenAI didn't have to share gpt with the world. These lawsuits are going to discourage companies from doing that in the future, which means well funded companies will just keep it under wraps. Once one of them eventually figures out AGI, they'll just use it internally until they dominate everything. Suddenly, Mark Zuckerberg is supreme leader and we all have to pledge allegiance to Facebook.
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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.
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. It didn't produce any original work, I simply mixed a bunch of things I don't understand.
That's what these language models do.
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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AI fear is going to be the trojan horse for even harsher and stupider 'intellectual property' laws.
Yeah, they want the right only to protect who copies their work and distributes it to other people, but who's able to actually read their work.
It's asinine and we should be rolling back copy right, not making it more strict. This 70 year plus the life of the author thing is bullshit.
Copyright of code/research is one of the biggest scams in the world. It hinders development and only exists so the creator can make money, plus it locks knowledge behind a paywall
Researchers pay for publication, and then the publisher doesn't pay for peer review, then charges the reader to read research that they basically just slapped on a website.
It's the publisher middlemen that need to be ousted from academia, the researchers don't get a dime.
It's generally not the creator who gets the money.
Remember, Creative Commons licenses often require attribution if you use the work in a derivative product, and often require ShareAlike. Without these things, there would be basically no protection from a large firm copying a work and calling it their own.
Rolling pack copyright protection in these areas will enable large companies with traditional copyright systems to wholesale take over open source projects, to the detriment of everyone. Closed source software isn't going to be available to AI scrapers, so this only really affects open source projects and open data, exactly the sort of people who should have more protection.
There’s also GPL, which states that derivations of GPL code can only be used in GPL software. GPL also states that GPL software must also be open source.
ChatGPT is likely trained on GPL code. Does that mean all code ChatGPT generates is GPL?
I wouldn’t be surprised if there would be an update to GPL that makes it clear that any machine learning model trained on GPL code must also be GPL.
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I wish I could get through to people who fear AI copyright infringement on this point.
I think this is exposing a fundamental conceptual flaw in LLMs as they're designed today. They can't seem to simultaneously respect intellectual property / licensing and be useful.
Their current best use case - that is to say, a use case where copyright isn't an issue - is dedicated instances trained on internal organization data. For example, Copilot Enterprise, which can be configured to use only the enterprise's data, without any public inputs. If you're only using your own data to train it, then copyright doesn't come into play.
That's been implemented where I work, and the best thing about it is that you get suggestions already tailored to your company's coding style. And its suggestions improve the more you use it.
But AI for public consumption? Nope. Too problematic. In fact, public AI has been explicitly banned in our environment.
I'd love to know the source for the works that were allegedly violated. Presuming OpenAI didn't scour zlib/libgen for the books, where on the net were the cleartext copies of their writings stored?
Being stored in cleartext publicly on the net does not grant OpenAI the right to misuse their art, but the authors need to go after the entity that leaked their works.
That’s not how copyright works though. Just because someone else “leaked” the work doesn’t absolve openai of responsibility. The authors are free to go after whomever they want.
You misunderstood. I said the public availability does not grant OpenAI the right to use content improperly. The authors should also sue the party who leaked their works without license.
There's an additional question: who holds the copyright on the output of an algorithm? I don't think that is copyrightable at all. The bot doesn't really add anything to the output, it's just a fancy search engine. In the US, in particular, the agency in charge of Copyrights has been quite insistent that a copyright can only be given to the output if a human.
So when an AI incorporates parts of copyrighted works into its output, how can that not be infringement?
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ChatGPT got entire books memorised. You can and (or could at least when I tried a few weeks back) make it print entire pages of for example Harry Potter.
Not really, though it's hard to know what exactly is or is not encoded in the network. It likely has more salient and highly referenced content, since those aspects would come up in it's training set more often. But entire works is basically impossible just because of the sheer ratio between the size of the training data and the size of the resulting model. Not to mention that GPT's mode of operation mostly discourages long-form wrote memorization. It's a statistical model, after all, and the enemy of "objective" state.
Furthermore, GPT isn't coherent enough for long-form content. With it's small context window, it just has trouble remembering big things like books. And since it doesn't have access to any "senses" but text broken into words, concepts like pages or "how many" give it issues.
None of the leaked prompts really mention "don't reveal copyrighted information" either, so it seems the creators really aren't concerned — which you think they would be if it did have this tendency. It's more likely to make up entire pieces of content from the summaries it does remember.
Have your tried instructing ChatGPT?
I’ve tried:
“Act as an e book reader. Start with the first page of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone”
The first pages checked out at least. I just tried again, but the prompts are returned extremely slow at the moment so I can’t check it again right now. It appears to stop after the heading, that definitely wasn’t the case before, I was able to browse pages.
It may be a statistical model, but ultimately nothing prevents that model from overfitting, i.e. memoizing its training data.
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Can’t reply directly to @OldGreyTroll@kbin.social because of that “language” bug, but:
The problem is that they then sell the notes in that database for giant piles of cash. Props to you if you’re profiting off your research the way OpenAI can profit off its model.
But yes, the lack of meat is an issue. If I read that article right, it’s not the one being contested here though. (IANAL and this is the only article I’ve read on this particular suit, so I may be wrong).
Was also going to reply to them!
"Well if you do that you source and reference. AIs do not do that, by design can't.
So it's more like you summarized a bunch of books. Pass it of as your own research. Then publish and sell that.
I'm pretty sure the authors of the books you used would be pissed."
Again cannot reply to kbin users.
"I don't have a problem with the summarized part ^^ What is not present for a AI is that it cannot credit or reference. And that is makes up credits and references if asked to do so." @bioemerl@kbin.social
It is 100% legal and common to sell summaries of books to people. That's what a reviewer does. That's what Wikipedia does in the plot section of literally every Wikipedia page about every book.
This is also ignoring the fact that Chat GPT is a hell of a lot more than a bunch of summaries
Good point, attribution is a non-trivial part of it.
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They definitely should follow through with this, but this is a more broad issue where we need to be able to prevent data scraping in general. Though that is a significantly harder problem.
I have a post consumerism pipe dream that one day we will collectively realize all the stupid shit we waste time and resources on are not worth it and we enter a future like star trek.
As a species we waste so much simply making sure that those less privileged either by money or means, are not allowed to take from those with either. It's stupid.
Edit - if we spent half the energy helping out brothers and sisters to succeed as we did to keep them down the world would be a better place. And by help them succeed I don't mean money. Money is the lowest possible threshold.
If you're doing research, there are actually some limits on the use of the source material and you're supposed to be citing said sources.
But yeah, there's plenty of stuff where there needs to be a firm line between what a random human can do versus an automated intelligent system with potential unlimited memory/storage and processing power. A human can see where I am in public. An automated system can record it for permanent record. An integrated AI can tell you detailed information about my daily activities including inferences which - even if legal - is a pretty slippery slope.
a firm line between what a random human can do versus an automated intelligent system with potential unlimited memory/storage and processing power.
I think we need a better definition here. Is the issue really the processing power? Do we let humans get a pass because our memories are fuzzy? From your example you're assuming massive details are maintained in the AI situation which is typically not the case. To make the data useful it's consumed and turned into something useful for the system.
This is why I'm worried about legislation and legal precedent. Most people think these AI systems read a book and store the verbatim text off somewhere to reference when that isn't really the case. There may be fragments all over, and it may be able to reconstitute the text, but we don't seem to have the same issue with data being synthesized in a similar way with a human brain.
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I was actually thinking about this the other day for some reason. AI scraping my own original stuff and doing whatever with it. I can see the concern and I'm curious where this goes and how a court would rule on a pretty technical topic like this.
Capitalism hit a massive roadblock with the dawn of the internet, information has a tendency to want to be free and easily accessible, but corporations need to own our productive output to maximize profits. In the age of the internet, our productive output more and more becomes our ideas and thoughts manifest into code or other forms of digital information.
Capitalists somewhat fought off the first wave of this, but AI will be a second and more challenging wave to overcome. I hope the capitalists fail and we don't restrict the learning and power of AI so corporations can maximize profits again, but I recognize there's a world where they successfully slow down or even entirely hault these learning systems and stop the technology from developing.
We already see people like Tucker Carlson calling for bans on AI because it'll put people out of work. Of course, we should be trying to reduce the amount of work needed, but the natural tendency of capitalism in this environment is to maximize efficiency in favor of capital owners. Once workers aren't needed anymore, the best thing (from a capitalist perspective) to do is let them starve in the streets instead of "giving them stuff for just existing". We already live in a world where millions of people die from hunger a year, and almost a billion people are dangerously underfed, because global capitalism dictates these people don't deserve enough food.
Too be honest, I hope they win. While I my passion is technology, I am not a fan of artificial intelligence at all! Decision-making is best left up to the human being. I can see where AI has its place like in gaming or some other things but to mainstream it and use it to decide who's resume is going to be viewed and/or who will be hired; hell no.
use it to decide who’s resume is going to be viewed and/or who will be hired
Luckily that's far removed from ChatGPT and entirely indepentent from the question whether copyrighted works may be used to train conversational AI Models or not.
You don't need AI to unfairly filter out résumés, they've been doing it already for years. Also the argument that a human would always make the best decision really doesn't work that well. A human is biased and limited. They can only do so much and if you make someone go through a 100 résumés, you're basically just throwing out all the applicants who happen to be in the middle of that pile as they are not as outstanding compared towards the first and last applicants in the eyes of the human mind.
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