cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1246165

Two authors sued OpenAI, accusing the company of violating copyright law. They say OpenAI used their work to train ChatGPT without their consent.

  • iMike@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Soo, if I read a book without asking the author first, he can sue me for reading the book?

    • Moskus@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yes, apparently we do. It’s like there’s a correct way of reading a book, and if you read that book to improve your English you are doing it wrong

      This is going to be interesting. We’ll end up having to sign an EULA before reading soon…

      • 80085@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        To be fair, GPT is not a person. It’s like a fuzzy database with lossy-compression. If they over-trained GPT on specific books, it could cite the books verbatim, which would then violate copyright and IP laws. (Not that I’m a fan of IP laws).

      • mycroft@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        While I appreciate thinking of this in absurdity, you’re being disingenuous here. It’s like reading a book for a person with eidetic memory then asking for “writing in the style of so and so.” And so you use exactly the sentence structure, the verbiage and even the paragraph style. When inspected, you perfectly reproduced the writing style, but effectively only changed a couple words to match the request.

        You reproduced 95% of an essay, and 5% of it is yours. You didn’t improve on the work, you simply changed the least amount of it you could to suit your purpose.

        The way these systems retain the relative symbols is irrelevant if the structure and form of the original is what gives it it’s value. The parameters are simply those things that are elements of someone elses copyrighted material. The lawsuit alleges that the books were used, well it’s not too hard to get GPT to spit out gutenberg books, or to lie to it and get it to think other books it knows are now public domain and have it do the same. Paragraph and page you can get it to barf them back out verbatim.