One prominent author responds to the revelation that his writing is being used to coach artificial intelligence.
By Stephen King
Non-paywalled link: https://archive.li/8QMmu
I’ve read some of his books too.
Just as long as you don’t in any way absorb the information into your brain it’s okay.
I understand what authors are trying to say, but legally I don’t quite get how they can say that an AI is doing anything other than reading the books, which obviously they’re allowed to do.
It is not as if they are making the books publicly available for free, and it’s not as if writing in the style of another author is illegal, so I’m not quite sure what law has been broken here.
It’s baffling to me seeing comments like this as if the ‘AI’ is some natural intelligence just hanging out going around reading books it’s interested in for the hell of it… No. These are software companies illegally using artists works (which we require licensing for commercial use) to develop a commercial, profit generating product. Whatever the potential outputs of the AI are is irrelevant when the sources used to train it were obtained illegally.
These are software companies illegally using artists works
There is nothing illegal about what they’re doing. You may want it to be illegal, but it’s not illegal until laws are actually passed to make it illegal. Things are not illegal by default.
Copyright only prevents copying works. Not analyzing them. The results of the analysis are not the same as the original work.
It’s illegal to create a derivative work which is what the output of an LLM is.
No, it’s not. Something that is merely in the style of something else is not a derivative work. If that were the case there’d be lawsuits everywhere.
LLMs regurgitate their training set. This has been proven many times. In fact from what I’ve seen LLMs are either regurgitating or hallucinating.
there’d be lawsuits everywhere
Early days.