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.
Any AI model that uses publically available information for training should be open source by law.
This business where corporations (that includes authors, who are published by huge corporations) fight over who “owns” ideas is assinine. When it comes down to it, this is a fight about money being wrapped in an argument about “ideas.”
AI models were developed with the collective knowledge and wisdom of society. They’re like libraries and should be public like libraries. OpenAI, Google, all those fucks should be forced to open source their models, end of story.
Trick is educating the octogenarians in the senate to understand any of what you just wrote.
Yup! My ideas about what should happen are so far removed from what will actually happen they could be Planet X.
But that doesn’t make me wrong, dammit!
One less to educate now. Hopefully replaced by someone that doesn’t need diapers.
I’d say they should have to follow the most-restrictive license of all of their training data, and that existing CC/FOSS licenses don’t count because they were designed for use in a pre-LLM world.
It seems like a pretty reasonable request. But people like free stuff, and when they think about who will get screwed by this they like to imagine that they’re sticking it to the biggest publishers of mass media.
But IRL, those publishers are giddy with the idea that instead of scouting artists and bullying them into signing over their IP, they can just summon IP on demand.
The people who will suffer are the independents who refused to sign over their IP. They never got their payday, and now they never will either.
I think we just need to ban the ability to copyright any AI output. Unless you can prove you created, and or paid for the rights for every piece of training data, I don’t see how it’s fair. Even then, there are still arguments against letting AI create IP.
The people I’m seeing outraged are artists and authors who did not sign their ideas over for public access or for disingenuous use. not a faceless publisher with cloth bags and dollar signs painted on them. Also I don’t think you understand what public and private ownership means. A person is allowed to privately own their own creation. They don’t owe that to the world. The world isn’t entitled to it.
You can do this open source right now
should be open source by law.
That doesn’t make sense. The “source” of the AI model is the publically available information, which the creators have no right to redistribute.
The rules of Open Source simply do not work for AI models. You’d have to come up with some other rules.
My friend, there are already numerous open source models out there. It’s a thing.
The whole legal situation around AI models isn’t clear and common Open Source licenses are an ill fit for them because you aren’t distributing the source, but just a binary blob. You can’t just take any random accumulation of data and slap a Open Source license on it, especially when that accumulation is the result of proprietary data, incompatible licenses and all that.
Most people don’t care and just remix everything as they please, but just because you can download for free something doesn’t make it Open Source. Furthermore a lot of the models exclude commercial use or otherwise restrict the use in ways that are incompatible with the Open Source definition.
Has any of the model made it into Debian yet?
Oh, okay. Well you should tell IBM, they’re clearly confused.
They are, just like a lot of other people. For example they cite LLaMa 2 as a popular open source model, while it restricts commercial use.
What do you define as “source” for an AI model? Training code? Training data set?
Yeah, it ought to be owned by the people who contributed the work that trained it. But that’s socialism. … No really, that would literally be socialism.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
AI isn’t either. It’s selling statistical data about the books.
It literally shares passages verbatim
So does any site that quotes the book. Just being trained on a work doesn’t give the model the ability to cite it word for word. For most of the books in this set you wouldn’t even be able to get a single accurate quote out of most models. The models gain the ability to cite passages from training on other sources citing these same passages.
It shares popular quotes from books, it can’t reproduce arbitrary content from a book. The content needs to be heavily duplicated in the training data to stick around (e.g. from book reviews), and even than half of it might still end up being made up on the spot.
Also request for copyrighted content will be blocked by ChatGPT and just receive the stock “I can’d do that” response anyway.
If you have some damning examples that show the opposite, show them.
Being blocked by ChatGPT just means that the interaction layer you see doesn’t show the output, not that the output wasn’t generated.
Everything you see that’s public facing and interfacing with an AI is an extreme filtering layer for what is output. There’s tons of checks that happen to ensure that they don’t output illegal content or any of a million other undesirable things.
I’m too lazy and care too little but you can basically get it to roleplay as a book expert or something and to “remind” you of certain passages. It gets around the filter pretty easily, that’s how jailbreaks work.
That’s maybe an issue. I mirror speech a lot, though. How large are the passages?
That claim is disingenuous at best, and misinformed otherwise.
“I’m not reselling your book, I am selling a machine that holds a mathematical formula that partly represents your entire book word for word and can reprint it on command!”
LLMs can’t reprint their entire training data on demand. They rarely even remember quotes.
Don’t bother shouting into the AI misinformation void.
People aren’t going to put down their pitchforks and torches to brush up on basic ML principles and it’s just going to frustrate you engaging.
It’s going to be a non-issue within 24 months anyways.
No matter how the OpenAI court cases land, the writing is on the wall that the next generations of models are going to be built on the backs of synthetic data, which is inherently without copyright.
At best rulings against OpenAI mean a secondary market emerges in China for repackaging copyrighted data into synthetic data of equivalent value to help buffer SotA synthetic data in avoiding model collapse.
It’s not even going to end up amounting to a minor speedbump to progress by the time the court cases are finalized.
Let the armchair activists rant and rage and tire themselves out worrying about a fabricated version of reality, and just focus more on staying informed about actual reality for yourself when all this passes.
It will be years before people eventually drop the bias against AI we self-instilled from shortsighted Sci-Fi over the past few decades, and until then the average person online will be irrationally upset about something related to the tech. Might as well run themselves ragged over the misinformed “it just remixes copyright” in the meantime.
On the one hand, I agree with your estimation of how things will go overall.
On the other hand, though, I think there’s value to be had in pushing back against the misinformation whenever it comes up. I don’t think AI is going to be hindered by it in the long run, but it’s possible that in the short run it’s going to kill interesting projects and harm some of the people who are experimenting with it.
And I have seen technologies that have suffered from longer-term difficulties once the zeitgeist turned against them despite having technical merit. There are useful applications for NFTs to be had out there, for example, but just try mentioning them when the opportunity arises and see what sort of reaction you get.
I mean, yeah? They were running to a concrete description. That is not valid. My brain has most of Terry Pratchett’s works.
First: There are mechanisms to opt out (robots.txt and meta noindex)
Second: There is some foreknowledge on the part of the web author. Even in the early days of the web — before you could’ve predicted the concept of search engines — in order to distribute anything you had to understand the basics of hypermedia, among which is the idea that anything can link to anything else and clients can be users or machines alike.
Third: Even though you are correct that search engines are tokenizing text and doing statistical analysis to recombine the tokens into novel forms in order to rank against queries, those novel forms are never presented to the user. Only direct quotes. So a user never gets a false reference to the supposed content of a page (unless the page itself lies to crawler requests).
Fourth: All of the technical points above are pretty much meaningless, because we are social creatures and our norms don’t stem from a mechanical flow chart divorced from real-world context.
Creators are generally okay with their content being copied into search DBs, because they know it’s going to lead to users finding the true author of those words, which will advance their creative pursuits either through collaboration or monetary support.
Creators are complaining about content being copied into LLMs, because their work will be presented out of context, often cited incorrectly, keep people away from the author of those words, and undermine the lifeblood of their creative pursuits – be it attracting new collaborators or making sales.
Whether it technically counts as IP infringement or not under current law? Who really cares? Current IP law is a fucking scam, designed to bully creators out of their own creations and assign full control to holding companies who see culture as nothing more than a financial instrument to be optimized. We desperately need to change IP law anyway – something that I think even many strident “AI” supporters agree with – so using it as a justification for the ethics of LLMs reveals just how weak the group’s position truly is.
LLM vendors see an opportunity for profit, if they can get away with it. They are offering consumers a utopian vision of infinite access to content while creating an IP chokepoint that they can enshittify once it blows past critical mass. It’s the same tactics the social media companies used 15 years ago, and it weighs heavy on my heart that so many Lemmy users are falling for it once again while the lesson is still so fresh.
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?
TIL “culpable” is an English word too. Culpable means guilty in Spanish and I thought you were a Spanish speaker doing spanglish. Now I know you’re just a man of culture.
I certainly hope that none of these authors have ever read a book before or have been inspired by something written by another author.
Generally they probably bought the books they read though.
If George RR Martin torrented Tolkien, wouldn’t he be infringing on the copyright no matter how he subsequently incorporated it into future output?
I completely agree that the training as infringement argument is ludicrous.
But OpenAI exposed themselves to IP infringement by sailing the high seas in how they obtained the works in the first place.
I hate that the world we live in is one where so much data is gated behind paywalls, but the law is what it is, and if the government was going to come down hard on Aaron Swartz for trying to bypass paywalls for massive amounts of written text, it’s not exactly fair if there’s a double standard for OpenAI doing the same thing in an even more closed fashion.
But yes, the degree of entitled focus on the premise of training an AI as equivalent of infringing is weird as heck to see from authors drawing quite clearly from earlier works in their own output.
I have to assume that openAI also paid for the books. if yes then i consider it the same as me reciting passages from memory or coming up with derivative text.
if no, then by all means, go after them and any model trainer for the cost of one book.
Asking an LLM to recite an entire novel isn’t even vaguely a thing yet.
Well, here’s straight from one of the suits against them:
“The OpenAI Books2 dataset can be estimated to contain about 294,000 titles. The only ‘internet-based books corpora’ that have ever offered that much material are notorious ‘shadow library’ websites like Library Genesis (aka LibGen), Z-Library (aka B-ok), Sci-Hub, and Bibliotik. The books aggregated by these websites have also been available in bulk via torrent systems.”
I’m not even sure how they would have logistically gone about purchasing 294,000 books in bulk in digital form to be fed into training. Using the existing collections seems much more likely, but I suppose we’ll see what turns up in litigation.
Also, the penalty for downloading copyrighted material if willful infringement is up to $250,000 per work. So it’s quite a bit more than the cost of one book on the line…
God that Aaron/jstor thing makes me see red every time. Swartz was scraping jstor to publish it for the benefit of everyone, openai is doing it to make billions of dollars. Don’t forget who the bad guys are (and donate to sci-hub)
That would be a much better comparison if it was artificial intelligence, but these are just reinforcement learning models. They do not get inspired.
just reinforcement learning models
…like the naturally occuring neural networks are.
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.
It’s a LOT more complicated and frankly, barely understood.
Yet you confidently state that the brain doesn’t work the way LLMs do?
Obviously it doesn’t work exactly the same way that LLMs do, if only because of the completely different substrates. But when you get to more nebulous concepts like “creativity” and “inspiration” it’s not so clear.
The part where brain and neural net differ is in the learning via backpropagation, that seem to be done different in the brain, as there is no mechanism to go backwards through the network and jiggle the weights.
That aside, they seem to work very similar once they are trained, as the knowledge they are able to extract from data ends up being basically the same that a human would be able to extract. There is surprisingly little weirdness in AI and a surprising amount of human-like capabilities.
people have a definite fear of being defined as machines… not sure why we think were so special…
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.
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?
Clearly not. He’s saying that other authors have done the same as the software does. The software creators implemented the same principle into their llm. You are being daft on purpose.
Curious if the AI company actually bought those books or if they just came across them by pirating.
Oh, they’re 100% pirated. Sorry this isn’t open, but the preview should give you enough information. The database is available elsewhere, IIRC. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/books3-database-generative-ai-training-copyright-infringement/675363/
Does this fall under fair-use part of copyright?
It hasn’t been tested in court yet but I don’t see why it shouldn’t.
Fair use is any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and “transformative” purpose, such as to comment upon, criticize, or parody a copyrighted work.
I don’t see why it should.
The creation of the AI model is transformative. The AI’s model does not contain a literal copy of the copyrighted work.
No, but the training data does contain a copy. And making a model is not criticising, commenting upon, or creating a parody of it.
That list is not exclusive, it’s just a list of examples of fair use.
The training data is not distributed with the AI model.
it’s just a list of examples of fair use.
Yes, it’s a list of quite similar ways of commenting upon a work. Please explain how training an LLM is like any of those things, and thus, how Fair use would apply.
I’m not saying that training an LLM is like any of those things. I’m saying it doesn’t have to be like those things in order for it to still be fair use.
Pay for every bit of information you’ve read and regurgitated on exams.
AI is not human and should not be treated like a human
It’s not. The humans that trained it (assumably) purchased the material used to train it. What’s the problem?
The training argument is probably going to come up dry by the time the court works its way through expert testimony, as the underlying argument for training as infringement is insane.
But where OpenAI is probably in hot water is that torrenting 100k books in the first place runs afoul of existing copyright legislation.
Everyone is debating the training in these suits, but the real meat and potatoes is going to be the initial infringement of obtaining the books, not how they were subsequently used.
Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. decided that it is fair use to scan books and make large parts of them available verbatim on the net. What AI does is far more transformative than that, as very little of a book can be reproduced verbatim with AI (e.g. popular quotes), you really just get “knowledge” from the books. The sources are however lost in the process, unlike with Google, which by itself however also makes it difficult to argue for copyright violation, since you can’t point at what was actually copied.
Everyone’s a fan of fair use until it’s their work that is transformed.
Either we make all art a common freely licensed good and pay artists a flat solidarity wage to feed them, or we don’t do that and keep it how it is, but having a loophole exception for some AI corporations is not the way to go.
Absolutely agree
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.
I would be proud, but you do you.
But would you get paid?
Yes. People wouldn’t be able to pirate my story through an AI, it wouldn’t spit it out verbatim. They’d still need to buy or pirate it other ways.
They don’t need to, the AI just tells them what happens. Why are you against the author being able to consent for their work to be trained on and being compensated?
You think spoilers should be illegal?
I know, right? It’s weird.
?
You appear to be saying that:
the AI just tells them what happens
Is a violation of the author’s copyright.
do they also complain when their books are used to train wet networks in public schools? those networks are also later exploited by corporations who dont give back the writers. hmmmmmmm
