Thousands of authors demand payment from AI companies for use of copyrighted works
Thousands of authors demand payment from AI companies for use of copyrighted works
Thousands of published authors are requesting payment from tech companies for the use of their copyrighted works in training artificial intelligence tools, marking the latest intellectual property critique to target AI development.
Thousands of authors demand payment from AI companies for use of copyrighted works::Thousands of published authors are requesting payment from tech companies for the use of their copyrighted works in training artificial intelligence tools, marking the latest intellectual property critique to target AI development.
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There is already a business model for compensating authors: it is called buying the book. If the AI trainers are pirating books, then yeah - sue them.
There are plagiarism and copyright laws to protect the output of these tools: if the output is infringing, then sue them. However, if the output of an AI would not be considered infringing for a human, then it isn’t infringement.
When you sell a book, you don’t get to control how that book is used. You can’t tell me that I can’t quote your book (within fair use restrictions). You can’t tell me that I can’t refer to your book in a blog post. You can’t dictate who may and may not read a book. You can’t tell me that I can’t give a book to a friend. Or an enemy. Or an anarchist.
Folks, this isn’t a new problem, and it doesn’t need new laws.
It's 100% a new problem. There's established precedent for things costing different amounts depending on their intended use.
For example, buying a consumer copy of song doesn't give you the right to play that song in a stadium or a restaurant.
Training an entire AI to make potentially an infinite number of derived works from your work is 100% worthy of requiring a special agreement. This even goes beyond simple payment to consent; a climate expert might not want their work in an AI which might severely mischatacterize the conclusions, or might want to require that certain queries are regularly checked by a human, etc
My point is that the restrictions can’t go on the input, it has to go on the output - and we already have laws that govern such derivative works (or reuse / rebroadcast).
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OpenAI and such being forced to pay a share seems far from the worst scenario I can imagine. I think it would be much worse if artists, writers, scientists, open source developers and so on were forced to stop making their works freely available because they don't want their creations to be used by others for commercial purposes. That could really mean that large parts of humanity would be cut off from knowledge.
I can well imagine copyleft gaining importance in this context. But this form of licencing seems pretty worthless to me if you don't have the time or resources to sue for your rights - or even to deal with the various forms of licencing you need to know about to do so.
I think it would be much worse if artists, writers, scientists, open source developers and so on were forced to stop making their works freely available because they don’t want their creations to be used by others for commercial purposes.
None of them are forced to stop making their works freely available. If they want to voluntarily stop making their works freely available to prevent commercial interests from using them, that’s on them.
Besides, that’s not so bad to me. The rest of us who want to share with humanity will keep sharing with humanity. The worst case imo is that artists, writers, scientists, and open source developers cannot take full advantage of the latest advancements in tech to make more and better art, writing, science, and software. We cannot let humanity’s creative potential be held hostage by anyone.
That could really mean that large parts of humanity would be cut off from knowledge.
On the contrary, AI is making knowledge more accessible than ever before to large parts of humanity. The only comparible other technologies that have done this in recent times are the internet and search engines. Thank goodness the internet enables piracy that allows anyone to download troves of ebooks for free. I look forward to AI doing the same on an even greater scale.
Shouldn't there be a way to freely share your works without having to expect an AI to train on them and then be able to spit them back out elsewhere without attribution?
No, there shouldn’t because that would imply restricting what I can do with the information I have access to. I am in favor of maintaining the sort of unrestricted general computing that we already have access to.
The rest of us who want to share with humanity will keep sharing with humanity. The worst case imo is that artists, writers, scientists, and open source developers cannot take full advantage of the latest advancements in tech to make more and better art, writing, science, and software. We cannot let humanity’s creative potential be held hostage by anyone.
You're not talking about sharing it with humanity, you're talking about feeding it into an AI. How is this holding back the creative potential of humanity? Again, you're talking about feeding and training a computer with this material.
Even the most reasonable law in the world can't be enforced on someone who broke it 6 months before it was legislated.
Sure it can. Just because it is a new law doesn't mean they get to continue benefiting from IP 'theft' forever into the future.
Imagine the FOMO and user frustration when ToS & legislation catch up and now ChatGPT has no access to the latest books, music, news, research, everything. Just stuff from before authors knew to include the "hands off" clause
How is this an issue for the IP holders? Just because you build something cool or useful doesn't mean you get a pass to do what you want.
basically like the knowledge cutoff, but forever. It's untenable,
Untenable for ChatGPT maybe, but it's not as if it's the end of 'knowledge' or the end of AI. It's just a single company product.
The thing is, copyright isn't really well-suited to the task, because copyright concerns itself with who gets to, well, make copies. Training an AI model isn't really making a copy of that work. It's transformative.
Should there be some kind of new model of renumeration for creators? Probably. But it should be a compulsory licensing model.
The slippery slope here is that we are currently considering humans and computers to be different because (something someone needs to actually define). If you say "AI read my book and output a similar story, you owe me money" then how is that different from "Joe read my book and wrote a similar story, you owe me money." We have laws already that deal with this but honestly how many books and movies aren't just remakes of Romeo and Juliet or Taming of the Shrew?!?
If you say “AI read my book and output a similar story, you owe me money” then how is that different from “Joe read my book and wrote a similar story, you owe me money.”
You're bounded by the limits of your flesh. AI is not. The $12 you spent buying a book at Barns & Noble was based on the economy of scarcity that your human abilities constrain you to.
It's hard to say that the value proposition is the same for human vs AI.
We are making an assumption that humans do "human things". If i wrote a derivative work of your $12 book, does it matter that the way i wrote it was to use a pen and paper and create a statistical analysis of your work and find the "next best word" until i had a story? Sure my book took 30 years to write but if i followed the same math as an AI would that matter?
It’s not even looking for the next best word. It’s looking for the next best token. It doesn’t know what words are. It reads tokens.
Good point.
I could easily see laws created where they blanket outlaw computer generated output derived from other human created data sets and sudden medical and technical advancements stop because the laws were written by people who don't understand what is going on.
It wouldn't matter, because derivative works require permission. But I don't think anyone's really made a compelling case that OpenAI is actually making directly derivative work.
The stronger argument is that LLM's are making transformational work, which is normally fair use, but should still require some form of compensation given the scale of it.
But no one is complaining about publishing derived work. The issue is that "the robot brain has full copies of my text and anything it creates 'cannot be transformative'". This doesn't make sense to me because my brain made a copy of your book too, its just really lossy.
I think right now we have definitions for the types of works that only loosely fit human actions mostly because we make poor assumptions of how the human brain works. We often look at intent as a guide which doesn't always work in an AI scenario.
Yeah, that's basically it.
But I think what's getting overlooked in this conversation is that it probably doesn't matter whether it's AI or not. Either new content is derivative or it isn't. That's true whether you wrote it or an AI wrote it.
I agree with that, but do politicians and judges who know absolutely nothing about the subject?
I haf a professor in college who taught about cyber security. He was renowned in his field and was asked by the RIAA to testify about some cases related to file sharing. I lost respect for him when he intentionally refrained from stating that it wasnt possible for anyone outside of the home network yo know what or who was actually downloading stuff. The technology was being ignored and an invalid view was presented for a judge who couldn't ELI5 how the internet worked let along actually networking protocols.
Well, Shakespeare has beed dead for a few years now, there's no copyright to speak of.
And if you make a book based on an existing one, then you totally need permission from the author. You can't just e.g. make a Harry Potter 8.
But AIs are more than happy to do exacly that. Or to even reproduce copyrighted works 1:1, or only with a few mistakes.
If a person writes a fanfic harry potter 8 it isn't a problem until they try to sell it or distribute it widely. I think where the legal issues get sticky here are who caused a particular AI generated Harry Potter 8 to be written.
If the AI model attempts to block this behavior. With contract stipulations and guardrails. And if it isn't advertised as "a harry potter generator" but instead as a general purpose tool... then reasonably the legal liability might be on the user that decides to do this or not. Vs the tool that makes such behavior possible.
Hypothetically what if an AI was trained up that never read Harry Potter. But its pretty darn capable and I feed into it the entire Harry Potter novel(s) as context in my prompt and then ask it to generate an eighth story --- is the tool at fault or am I?
Fanfic can actually be a legal problem. It's usually not prosecuted, because it harms the brand to do so, but if a company was doing that professionally, they'd get into serious hot water.
Regarding your hypothetical scenario: If you train the AI with copyrighted works, so that you can make it reproduce HP8, then you are at fault.
If the tool was trained with HP books and you just ask really nicely to circumvent the protections, I would guess the tool (=> it's creators) would certainly be at fault (since it did train on copyrighted material and the protections were obviously not good enough), and at the latest when you reproduce the output, you too are.
It seems like people are afraid that AI can do it when i can do it too. But their reason for freaking out is....??? It's not like AI is calling up publishers trying to get Harry Potter 8 published. If i ask it to create Harry Potter 1 but change his name to Gary Trotter it's not the AI that is doing something bad, it's me.
That was my point. I can memorize text and its only when I play it off as my own that it's wrong. No one cares that I memorized the first chapter and can recite it if I'm not trying to steal it.
That's not correct. The issue is not whether you play it off as your own, but how much the damages are that you can be sued for. If you recite something that you memorized in front of a handful of friends, the damages are non-existant and hence there is no point in sueing you.
But if you give a large commercial concert and perform a cover song without permission, you will get sued, no matter if you say "This song is from <insert original artist> and not from me", because it's not about giving credit, it's about money.
And regarding getting something published: This is not so much about big name art like Harry Potter, but more about people doing smaller work. For example, voice actors (both for movie translations and smaller things like announcements in public transport) are now routinely replaced by AI that was trained on their own voices without their permission.
Similar story with e.g. people who write texts for homepages and ad material. Stuff like that. And that has real-world consequences already now.
The issue is not whether you play it off as your own, but how much the damages are that you can be sued for.
I think that's one in the same. I'm just not seeing the damages here because the output of the AI doesn't go any further than being AI output without a further human act. Authors are idiots if they claim "well someone could ask ChatGPT to output my entire book and you could read it for free." If you want to go after that type of crime then have ChatGPT report the users asking for it. If your book is accessible via a library I'm not see any difference between you asking ChatGPT to write in someone's style and asking me to write in their style. If you ask ChatGPT for lines verbatim i can recite them too. I don't know what legitimate damages they are claiming.
For example, voice actors
I think this is a great example but again i feel like the law is not only lacking but would need to outlaw other human acts not currently considered illegal.
If you do impressions you're mimicking the tone, cadence and selection of language someone else does. You arent recording them and playing back the recording, you are using your own voice box to create a sound similar to the celebrity. An AI sound generator isn't playing back a recording either. It's measuring tone, cadence, and language used and creates a new sound similar to the celebrity. The only difference here is that the AI would be more precise than a humans ability to use their voice.
Copyright also deals with derivative works.
Derivative and transformative are quite different though.
Challenge level impossible: try uploading something long to amazon written by chatgpt without triggering the plagiarism detector.
When you sell a book, you don’t get to control how that book is used.
This is demonstrably wrong. You cannot buy a book, and then go use it to print your own copies for sale. You cannot use it as a script for a commercial movie. You cannot go publish a sequel to it.
Now please just try to tell me that AI training is specifically covered by fair use and satire case law. Spoiler: you can’t.
This is a novel (pun intended) problem space and deserves to be discussed and decided, like everything else. So yeah, your cavalier dismissal is cavalierly dismissed.
I completely fail to see how it wouldn't be considered transformative work
It fails the transcendence criterion.Transformative works go beyond the original purpose of their source material to produce a whole new category of thing or benefit that would otherwise not be available.
Taking 1000 fan paintings of Sauron and using them in combination to create 1 new painting of Sauron in no way transcends the original purpose of the source material. The AI painting of Sauron isn’t some new and different thing. It’s an entirely mechanical iteration on its input material. In fact the derived work competes directly with the source material which should show that it’s not transcendent.
We can disagree on this and still agree that it’s debatable and should be decided in court. The person above that I’m responding to just wants to say “bah!” and dismiss the whole thing. If we can litigate the issue right here, a bar I believe this thread has already met, then judges and lawmakers should litigate it in our institutions. After all the potential scale of this far reaching issue is enormous. I think it’s incredibly irresponsible to say feh nothing new here move on.
I do think you have a point here, but I don't agree with the example. If a fan creates the 1001 fan painting after looking at others, that might be quite similar if they miss the artistic quality to express their unique views. And it also competes with their source, yet it's generally accepted.
Being able to dialog with a book, even to the point of asking the AI to "take on the persona of a character in the book" and support ongoing is substantively a transcendent version of the original. That one can, as a small subset of that transformed version, get quotes from the original work feels like a small part of this new work.
If this had been released for a single work. Like, "here is a star wars AI that can take on the persona of star wars characters" and answer questions about the star wars universe etc. I think its more likely that the position I'm taking here would lose the debate. But this is transformative against the entire set of prior material from books, movies, film, debate, art, science, philosophy etc. It merges and combines all of that. I think the sheer scope of this new thing supports the idea that its truly transformative.
A possible compromise would be to tax AI and use the proceeds to fund a UBI initiative. True, we'd get to argue if high profile authors with IP that catches the public's attention should get more than just blogger or a random online contributor -- but the basic path is that AI is trained on and succeeds by standing on the shoulders of all people. So all people should get some benefits.
Typically the argument has been "a robot can't make transformative works because it's a robot." People think our brains are special when in reality they are just really lossy.
Even if you buy that premise, the output of the robot is only superficially similar to the work it was trained on, so no copyright infringement there, and the training process itself is done by humans, and it takes some tortured logic to deny the technology's transformative nature
Oh i think those people are wrong, but we tend to get laws based on people who don't understand a topic deciding how it should work.
Go ask ChatGPT for the lyrics of a song and then tell me, that's transformative work when it outputs the exact lyrics.
Go ask a human for the lyrics of a song and then tell me that's transformative work.
Oh wait, no one would say that. This is why the discussion with non-technical people goes into the weeds.
Because it would be totally clear to anyone that reciting the lyrics of a song is not a transformative work, but instead covered by copyright.
The only reason why you can legally do it, is because you are not big enough to be worth suing.
Try singing a copyrighted song in TV.
For example, until it became clear that Warner/Chappell didn't actually own the rights to "Happy Birthday To You", they'd sue anyone who sung that song in any kind of broadcast or other big public thing.
Quote from Wikipedia:
> The company continued to insist that one cannot sing the "Happy Birthday to You" lyrics for profit without paying royalties; in 2008, Warner collected about US$5,000 per day (US$2 million per year) in royalties for the song. Warner/Chappell claimed copyright for every use in film, television, radio, and anywhere open to the public, and for any group where a substantial number of those in attendance were not family or friends of the performer.
So if a human isn't allowed to reproduce copyrighted works in a commercial fashion, what would make you think that a computer reproducing copyrighted works would be ok?
And regarding derivative works:
Check out Vanilla Ice vs Queen. Vanilla Ice just used 7 notes from the Queen song "Under Pressure" in his song "Ice Ice Baby".
That was enough that he had to pay royalties for that.
So if a human has to pay for "borrowing" seven notes from a copyrighted work, why would a computer not have to?
The key there is anyone profiting from the copyrighted work. I've been to big public events where the have sung Happy Birthday, things that may very have been recorded but none of us were sued because there was no damages, no profits lost.
The other big question is what are these lawsuits basing their complaint on. If I understand the Sarah Silverman claim is that she could go into ChatGPT and ask it for pages from her book and it generated them. Never once have i used ChatGPT and had it generate pages from her book so the question is the difference between my and her experience? The difference is she asked for that material. This may seem trivial but on the basis of how the technology works it's important.
You can go through their LLM and no where will you find her book. No where will you find pages of her book. No where will you find encoded or encrypted versions of her book. Rather, you'll find a data model with values showing the probability of a text output for given prompts. The model sometime generates valid responses and sometimes it gives wrong answers. Why? Because its a language model and not a library of text.
So the question now becomes, what is it the content creators are upset about? The fact that they asked it to generate content that turned out to match their own or that their content was used to teach the LLM. Because in no case is there a computer somewhere that has their text verbatim existing somewhere waiting to be displayed. If its about the output then I'd want to know how this is different than singing happy birthday. If I'm prompting the AI and then there are no damages, i don't use it for anything of fiduciary gains I'm not seeing an issue.
Well, they're fixing that now. I just asked chatgpt to tell me the lyrics to stairway to heaven and it replied with a brief description of who wrote it and when, then said here are the lyrics: It stopped 3 words into the lyrics.
In theory as long as it isn't outputting the exact copyrighted material, then all output should be fair use. The fact that it has knowledge of the entire copyrighted material isn't that different from a human having read it, assuming it was read legally.
This feels like a solution to a non-problem. When a person asks the AI "give me X copyrighted text" no one should be expecting this to be new works. Why is asking ChatGPT for lyrics bad while asking a human ok?
It's not legal for anyone (human or not) to put song lyrics online without permission/license to do so. I was googling this to make sure I understood it correctly and it seems that reproducing the lyrics to music without permission to do so is copyright infringement. There are some lyrics websites that work with music companies to get licensing to post lyrics but most websites host them illegally and will them then down if they receive a DMCA request.
Wait wait wait. That is not a good description of what is happening. If you and i are in a chat room and you asked me the lyrics, my verbalization of them isn't an issue. The fact it is online just means the method of communication is different but that should be covered under free use.
The AI is taking prompts and proving the output as a dialog. It's literally a language model so there is a process of synthesizing your question and generating your output. I think that's something people either don't understand or completely ignore. Its not as if there are entire books verbatim stored as a contiguous block of data. The data is processed and synthesized into a language model that then generates an output that happens to match the requested text.
This is why we cant look at the output the same way we look at static text. In theory if you kept training it in a way then opposed the statistical nature of your book or lyrics you could eventually get to the point where asking the AI to generate your text would give a non-verbatim answer.
I get that this feels like semantics but creating laws that don't understand the technology means we end up screwing ourselves over.
I get how LLMs work and I think they're really cool. I'm just trying to explain why OpenAI is currently limiting these abilities to continue operating within our legal system. Hopefully the court cases find that there is in fact a difference between publishing the information on a normal website versus discussing it with a chatbot so that they don't have to be limited like this.
Publishing lyrics publicly online is illegal while communicating them privately in a chatroom is probably fine. Communicating them in a public forum is a grey area, but you likely won't be caught or prosecuted. If a big company hosts an AI chatbot which can tell you the lyrics to any song on demand, then that seems like an illegal service unless they have the rights.
Feel free to look up the legality of publishing lyrics online, all I saw was information saying that it is illegal but they don't prosecute anyone but the larger companies.
Try it again and when it stops after a few words, just say "continue". Do that a few times and it will spit out the whole lyrics.
It's also a copyright violation if a human reproduces memorized copyrighted material in a commercial setting.
If, for example, I give a concert and play all of Nirvana's songs without a license to do so, I am still violating the copyright even if I totally memorized all the lyrics and the sheet music.
Transformativeness is only one of the four fair use factors. Just because something is transformative can't alone make something fair use.
Even if AI is transformative, it would likely fail on the third factor. Fair use requires you to take the minimum amount of the copyrighted work, and AI companies scrape as much data as possible to train their models. Very unlikely to support a finding of fair use.
The final factor is market impact. As generative AIs are built to mimic the creativite outputs of human authorship. By design AI acts as a market replacement for human authorship so it would likely fail on this factor as well.
Regardless, trained AI models are unlikely to be copyrightable. Copyrights require human authorship which is why AI and animal generated art are not copyrightable.
A trained AI model is a piece of software so it should be protectable by patents because it is functional rather than expressive. But a patent requires you to describe how it works, so you can't do that with AI. And a trained AI model is self-generated from training data, so there's no human authorship even if trained AI models were copyrightable.
The exact laws that do apply to AI models is unclear. And it will likely be determined by court cases.
No, you misunderstand. Yes, they can control how the content in the book is used - that’s what copyright is. But they can’t control what I do with the book - I can read it, I can burn it, I can memorize it, I can throw it up on my roof.
My argument is that the is nothing wrong with training an AI with a book - that’s input for the AI, and that is indistinguishable from a human reading it.
Now what the AI does with the content - if it plagiarizes, violates fair use, plagiarizes- that’s a problem, but those problems are already covered by copyright laws. They have no more business saying what can or cannot be input into an AI than they can restrict what I can read (and learn from). They can absolutely enforce their copyright on the output of the AI just like they can if I print copies of their book.
My objection is strictly on the input side, and the output is already restricted.
Makes sense. I would love to hear how anyone can disagree with this. Just because an AI learned or trained from a book doesn't automatically mean it violated any copyrights.
The base assumption of those with that argument is that an AI is incapable of being original, so it is "stealing" anything it is trained on. The problem with that logic is that's exactly how humans work - everything they say or do is derivative from their experiences. We combine pieces of information from different sources, and connect them in a way that is original - at least from our perspective. And not surprisingly, that's what we've programmed AI to do.
Yes, AI can produce copyright violations. They should be programmed not to. They should cite their sources when appropriate. AI needs to "learn" the same lessons we learned about not copy-pasting Wikipedia into a term paper.
It's specifically distribution of the work or derivatives that copyright prevents.
So you could make an argument that an LLM that's memorized the book and can reproduce (parts of) it upon request is infringing. But one that's merely trained on the book, but hasn't memorized it, should be fine.
But by their very nature the LLM simply redistribute the material they’ve been trained on. They may disguise it assiduously, but there is no person at the center of the thing adding creative stokes. It’s copyrighted material in, copyrighted material out, so the plaintiffs allege.
They don't redistribute. They learn information about the material they've been trained on - not there natural itself*, and can use it to generate material they've never seen.
- Bigger models seem to memorize some of the material and can infringe, but that's not really the goal.
This is a little off, when you quote a book you put the name of the book you’re quoting. When you refer to a book, you, um, refer to the book?
I think the gist of these authors complaints is that a sort of “technology laundered plagiarism” is occurring.
Copyright 100% applies to the output of an AI, and it is subject to all the rules of fair use and attribution that entails.
That is very different than saying that you can’t feed legally acquired content into an AI.
I asked Bing Chat for the 10th paragraph of the first Harry Potter book, and it gave me this:
"He couldn’t know that at this very moment, people meeting in secret all over the country were holding up their glasses and saying in hushed voices: ‘To Harry Potter – the boy who lived!’"
It looks like technically I might be able to obtain the entire book (eventually) by asking Bing the right questions?
Then this is a copyright violation - it violates any standard for such, and the AI should be altered to account for that.
What I’m seeing is people complaining about content being fed into AI, and I can’t see why that should be a problem (assuming it was legally acquired or publicly available). Only the output can be problematic.
No, the AI should be shut down and the owner should first be paying the statutory damages for each use of registered works of copyright (assuming all parties in the USA)
If they have a company left after that, then they can fix the AI.
Again, my point is that the output is what can violate the law, not the input. And we already have laws that govern fair use, rebroadcast, etc.
I think it's not just the output. I can buy an image on any stock Plattform, print it on a T-Shirt, wear it myself or gift it to somebody. But if I want to sell T-Shirts using that image I need a commercial licence - even if I alter the original image extensivly or combine it with other assets to create something new. It's not exactly the same thing but openAI and other companies certainly use copyrighted material to create and improve commercial products. So this doesn't seem the same kind of usage an avarage joe buys a book for.
There is already a business model for compensating authors: it is called buying the book. If the AI trainers are pirating books, then yeah - sue them.
That's part of the allegation, but it's unsubstantiated. It isn't entirely coherent.
It's not entirely unsubstantiated. Sarah Silverman was able to get ChatGPT to regurgitate passages of her book back to her.
Her lawsuit doesn't say that. It says,
when ChatGPT is prompted, ChatGPT generates summaries of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works—something only possible if ChatGPT was trained on Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works
That's an absurd claim. ChatGPT has surely read hundreds, perhaps thousands of reviews of her book. It can summarize it just like I can summarize Othello, even though I've never seen the play.
I don't know if this holds water though. You don't need to trail the AI on the book itself to get that result. Just on discussions about the book which for sure include passages on the book.
However, if the output of an AI would not be considered infringing for a human, then it isn’t infringement.
It's an algorithm that's been trained on numerous pieces of media by a company looking to make money of it. I see no reason to give them a pass on fairly paying for that media.
You can see this if you reverse the comparison, and consider what a human would do to accomplish the task in a professional setting. That's all an algorithm is. An execution of programmed tasks.
If I gave a worker a pirated link to several books and scientific papers in the field, and asked them to synthesize an overview/summary of what they read and publish it, I'd get my ass sued. I have to buy the books and the scientific papers. STEM companies regularly pay for access to papers and codes and standards. Why shouldn't an AI have to do the same?
If I gave a worker a pirated link to several books and scientific papers in the field, and asked them to synthesize an overview/summary of what they read and publish it, I’d get my ass sued. I have to buy the books and the scientific papers.
Well, if OpenAI knowingly used pirated work, that's one thing. It seems pretty unlikely and certainly hasn't been proven anywhere.
Of course, they could have done so unknowingly. For example, if John C Pirate published the transcripts of every movie since 1980 on his website, and OpenAI merely crawled his website (in the same way Google does), it's hard to make the case that they're really at fault any more than Google would be.
well no, because the summary is its own copyrighted work
The published summary is open to fair use by web crawlers. That was settled in Perfect 10 v Amazon.
Right, but not one the author of the book could go after. The article publisher would have the closest rights to a claim. But if I read the crib notes and a few reviews of a movie... Then go to summarize the movie myself... That's derivative content and is protected under copyright.
Haven't people asked it to reproduce specific chapters or pages of specific books and it's gotten it right?
I haven't been able to reproduce that, and at least so far, I haven't seen any very compelling screenshots of it that actually match. Usually it just generates text, but that text doesn't actually match.
Gotcha. This seems like a good way to test for it then, I think.
It’s an algorithm that’s been trained on numerous pieces of media by a company looking to make money of it.
If I read your book... and get an amazing idea... Turn it into a business and make billions off of it. You still have no right to anything. This is no different.
If I gave a worker a pirated link to several books and scientific papers in the field
There's been no proof or evidence provided that ANY content was ever pirated. Has any of the companies even provided the dataset they've used yet?
Why is this the presumption that they did it the illegal way?
If I read your book... and get an amazing idea... Turn it into a business and make billions off of it. You still have no right to anything. This is no different
I don't see how this is even remotely the same? These companies are using this material to create their commercial product. They're not consuming it personally and developing a random idea later, far removed from the book itself.
I can't just buy (or pirate) a stack of Blu-rays and then go start my own Netflix, which is akin to what is happening here.
They’re not consuming it personally and developing a random idea later, far removed from the book itself.
I never said that the idea would be removed from the book. You can literally take the idea from the book itself and make the money. There would be no issues. There is no dues owed to the book's writer.
This is the whole premise for educational textbooks. You can explain to me how the whole world works in book form... I can go out and take those ideas wholesale from your book and apply them to my business and literally make money SOLELY from information from your book. There's nothing due back to you as a writer from me nor my business.
You've failed to explain how that relates to your point. Sure you can purchase an econonomics textbook and then go become a finance bro, but that's not what they're doing here. They're taking that textbook (that wasn't paid for) and feeding it into their commercial product. The end product is derived from the author's work.
To put it a different way, would they still be able to produce ChatGPT if one of the developers simply read that same textbook and then inputted what they learned into the model? My guess is no.
It'd be the same if I went and bought CDs, ripped my favorite tracks, and then put them into a compilation album that I then sold for money. My product can't exist without having copied the original artists work. ChatGPT just obfuscates that by copying a lot of songs.
They’re taking that textbook (that wasn’t paid for) and feeding it into their commercial product.
Nobody has provided any evidence that this is the case. Until this is proven it should not be assumed. Bandwagoning (and repeating this over and over again without any evidence or proof) against the ML people without evidence is not fair. The whole point of the Justice system is innocent until proven guilty.
The end product is derived from the author’s work.
Derivative works are 100% protected under copyright law. https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/what-are-derivative-works-under-copyright-law
This is the same premise that allows "fair use" that we all got up and arms about on youtube. Claiming that this doesn't exist now in this case means that all that stuff we fought for on Youtube needs to be rolled back.
To put it a different way, would they still be able to produce ChatGPT if one of the developers simply read that same textbook and then inputted what they learned into the model? My guess is no.
Why not? Why can't someone grab a book, scan it... chuck it into an OCR and get the same content? There are plenty of ways that snippets of raw content could make it into these repositories WITHOUT asserting legal problems.
It’d be the same if I went and bought CDs, ripped my favorite tracks, and then put them into a compilation album that I then sold for money.
No... You could have for all intents and purposes have recorded all your songs from the radio onto a cassette... That would be 100% legal for personal consumption... which would be what the ML authors are doing. ChatGPT and others could have sources information from published sources that are completely legit. No "Author" has provided any evidence otherwise yet to believe that ChatGPT and others have actually broken a law yet. For all we know the authors of these tools have library cards, and fed in screenshots of the digital scans of the book or hand scanned the book. Or didn't even use the book at all and contextually grabbed a bunch of content from the internet at large.
Since the ML bots are all making derivative works, rather than spitting out original content... they'd be covered by copyright as a derivative work.
This only becomes an actual problem if you can prove that these tools have done BOTH
- obtain content in an illegal fashion
- provide the copyrighted content freely without fair-use or other protections.
A better comparison would probably be sampling. Sampling is fair use in most of the world, though there are mixed judgments. I think most reasonable people would consider the output of ChatGPT to be transformative use, which is considered fair use.
If I created a web app that took samples from songs created by Metallica, Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, Snoop Dogg, Slayer, Eminem, Mozart, Beethoven, and hundreds of other different musicians, and allowed users to mix all these samples together into new songs, without getting a license to use these samples, the RIAA would sue the pants off of me faster than you could say "unlicensed reproduction."
It doesn't matter that the output of my creation is clear-cut fair use. The input of the app--the samples of copyrighted works--is infringing.
> If I created a web app that took samples from songs created by Metallica, Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, Snoop Dogg, Slayer, Eminem, Mozart, Beethoven, and hundreds of other different musicians, and allowed users to mix all these samples together into new songs, without getting a license to use these samples, the RIAA would sue the pants off of me faster than you could say “unlicensed reproduction.”
The RIAA is indeed a litigious organization, and they tend to use their phalanx of lawyers to extract anyone who does anything creative or new into submission.
But sampling is generally considered fair use.
And if the algorithm you used actually listened to tens of thousands of hours of music, and fed existing patterns into a system that creates new patterns, well, you'd be doing the same thing anyone who goes from listening to music to writing music does. The first song ever written by humans was probably plagiarized from a bird.