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.

  • joe@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    All this copyright/AI stuff is so silly and a transparent money grab.

    They’re not worried that people are going to ask the LLM to spit out their book; they’re worried that they will no longer be needed because a LLM can write a book for free. (I’m not sure this is feasible right now, but maybe one day?) They’re trying to strangle the technology in the courts to protect their income. That is never going to work.

    Notably, there is no “right to control who gets trained on the work” aspect of copyright law. Obviously.

    • DandomRude@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      There is nothing silly about that. It’s a fundamental question about using content of any kind to train artificial intelligence that affects way more than just writers.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I seriously doubt Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI because she’s worried ChatGPT will one day be funnier than she is. She just doesn’t want it ripping off her work.

      • joe@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        What do you mean when you say “ripping off her work”? What do you think an LLM does, exactly?

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          In her case, taking elements of her book and regurgitating them back to her. Which sounds a lot like they could be pirating her book for training purposes to me.

          • Rodeo
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            1 year ago

            How do you know they didn’t just buy the book?

          • joe@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Quoting someone’s book is not “ripping off” the work.

              • joe@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                So you’re saying that as long as they buy 1 copy of the book, it’s all good?

                • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  No, I’m not saying that. If she’s right and it can spit out any part of her book when asked (and someone else showed that it does that with Harry Potter), it’s plagiarism. They are profiting off of her book without compensating her. Which is a form of ripping someone off. I’m not sure what the confusion here is. If I buy someone’s book, that doesn’t give me the right to put it all online for free.

                  • joe@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    It’s not plagiarism if it says it’s her book, lol.

                    What are your feelings on public libraries? And does it spit out the entire book, or just excerpts?

      • joe@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Can you elaborate on this concept of a LLM “plagiarizing”? What do you mean when you say that?

        • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 year ago

          What I mean is that it is a statistical model used to generate things by combining parts of extant works. Everything that it “creates” is a piece of something that already exists, often without the author’s consent. Just because it is done at a massive scale doesn’t make it less so. It’s basically just a tracer.

          Not saying that the tech isn’t amazing or likely a component of future AI but, it’s really just being used commercially to rip people off and worsen the human condition for profit.

          • joe@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Everything that it “creates” is a piece of something that already exists, often without the author’s consent

            This describes all art. Nothing is created in a vacuum.

            • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.org
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              1 year ago

              No, it really doesn’t, nor does it function like human cognition. Take this example:

              I, personally, to decide that I wanted to make a sci-fi show. I don’t want to come up with ideas so, I want to try to do something that works. I take the scripts of every Star Trek: The Search for Spock, Alien, and Earth Girls Are Easy and feed them into a database, seperating words into individual data entries with some grammatical classification. Then, using this database, I generate a script, averaging the length of the films, with every word based upon its occurrence in the films or randomized, if it’s a tie. I go straight into production with “Star Alien: The Girls Are Spock”. I am immediately sued by Disney, Lionsgate, and Paramount for trademark and copyright infringement, even though I basically just used a small LLM.

              You are right that nothing is created in a vacuum. However, plagiarism is still plagiarism, even if it is using a technically sophisticated LLM plagiarism engine.

              • joe@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                ChatGPT doesn’t have direct access to the material it’s trained on. Go ask it to quote a book to you.

                • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.org
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                  1 year ago

                  That really doesn’t make an appreciable difference. It doesn’t need direct access to source data, if it’s already been transferred into statistical data.

                  • joe@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    It does rule out “plagiarism”, however, since it means it can’t pull directly from any training material.

                    I should have asked earlier: what do you think plagiarism is?