this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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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
Well, fine, and I can't fault new published material having a "no AI" clause in its term of service. But that doesn't mean we get to dream this clause into being retroactively for all the works ChatGPT was trained on. Even the most reasonable law in the world can't be enforced on someone who broke it 6 months before it was legislated.
Fortunately the "horses out the barn" effect here is maybe not so bad. 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 - basically like the knowledge cutoff, but forever. It's untenable, OpenAI will be forced to cave and pay up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?!?
Copyright also deals with derivative works.
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.
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.
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.
I completely fail to see how it wouldn't be considered transformative work
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's part of the allegation, but it's unsubstantiated. It isn't entirely coherent.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.