You know what would solve this? We all collectively agree this fucking tech is too important to be in the hands of a few billionaires, start an actual public free open source fully funded and supported version of it, and use it to fairly compensate every human being on Earth according to what they contribute, in general?
Why the fuck are we still allowing a handful of people to control things like this??
Setting aside the obvious answer of "because capitalism", there are a lot of obstacles towards democratizing this technology. Training of these models is done on clusters of A100 GPU's, which are priced at $10,000USD each. Then there's also the fact that a lot of the progress being made is being done by highly specialized academics, often with the resources of large corporations like Microsoft.
Additionally the curation of datasets is another massive obstacle. We've mostly reached the point of diminishing returns of just throwing all the data at the training of models, it's quickly becoming apparent that the quality of data is far more important than the quantity of the data (see TinyStories as an example). This means a lot of work and research needs to go into qualitative analysis when preparing a dataset. You need a large corpus of input, each of which are above a quality threshold, but then also as a whole they need to represent a wide enough variety of circumstances for you to reach emergence in the domain(s) you're trying to train for.
There is a large and growing body of open source model development, but even that only exists because of Meta "leaking" the original Llama models, and now more recently releasing Llama 2 with a commercial license. Practically overnight an entire ecosystem was born creating higher quality fine-tunes and specialized datasets, but all of that was only possible because Meta invested the resources and made it available to the public.
Actually in hindsight it looks like the answer is still "because capitalism" despite everything I've just said.
I know the answer to pretty much all of our “why the hell don’t we solve this already?” questions is: capitalism.
But I mean, as Lrrr would say “why does the working class, as the biggest of the classes, doesn’t just eat the other one?”.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
Someone should AGPL their novel and force the AI company to open source their entire neural network.
How can they prove that not some abstract public data has been used to train algorithms, but their particular intellectual property?
Well, if you ask e.g. ChatGPT for the lyrics to a song or page after page of a book, and it spits them out 1:1 correct, you could assume that it must have had access to the original.
Or at least excerpts from it. But even then, it's one thing for a person to put up a quote from their favourite book on their blog, and a completely different thing for a private company to use that data to train a model, and then sell it.
Can it recreate anything 1:1? When both my wife and I tried to get them to do that they would refuse, and if pushed they would fail horribly.
This is what I got. Looks pretty 1:1 for me.
Hilarious that it started with just "Buddy", like you'd be happy with only the first word.
there are a lot of possible ways to audit an AI for copyrighted works, several of which have been proposed in the comments here, but what this could lead to is laws requiring an accounting log of all material that has been used to train an AI as well as all copyrights and compensation, etc.
This is a good debate about copyright/ownership. On one hand, yes, the authors works went into 'training' the AI..but we would need a scale to then grade how well a source piece is good at being absorbed by the AI's learning. for example. did the AI learn more from the MAD magazine i just fed it or did it learn more from Moby Dick? who gets to determine that grading system. Sadly musicians know this struggle. there are just so many notes and so many words. eventually overlap and similiarities occur. but did that musician steal a riff or did both musicians come to a similar riff seperately? Authors dont own words or letters so a computer that just copies those words and then uses an algo to write up something else is no more different than you or i being influenced by our favorite heroes or i formation we have been given. do i pay the author for reading his book? or do i just pay the store to buy it?
While I am rooting for authors to make sure they get what they deserve, I feel like there is a bit of a parallel to textbooks here. As an engineer if I learn about statics from a text book and then go use that knowledge to he'll design a bridge that I and my company profit from, the textbook company can't sue. If my textbook has a detailed example for how to build a new bridge across the Tacoma Narrows, and I use all of the same design parameters for a real Tacoma Narrows bridge, that may have much more of a case.
So what's the difference between a person reading their books and using the information within to write something and an ai doing it?
Because AIs aren't inspired by anything and they don't learn anything
So uninspired writing is illegal?
I think this is more about frustration experienced by artists in our society at being given so little compensation.
The answer is staring us in the face. UBI goes hand in hand with developments in AI. Give artists a basic salary from the government so they can afford to live well. This isn't a AI problem this is a broken society problem. I support artists advocating for themselves, but the fact that they aren't asking for UBI really speaks to how hopeless our society feels right now.
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.
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.
I don't know how I feel about this honestly. AI took a look at the book and added the statistics of all of its words into its giant statistic database. It doesn't have a copy of the book. It's not capable of rewriting the book word for word.
This is basically what humans do. A person reads 10 books on a subject, studies become somewhat of a subject matter expert and writes their own book.
Artists use reference art all the time. As long as they don't get too close to the original reference nobody calls any flags.
These people are scared for their viability in their user space and they should be, but I don't think trying to put this genie back in the bottle or extra charging people for reading their stuff for reference is going to make much difference.
It’s not at all like what humans do. It has no understanding of any concepts whatsoever, it learns nothing. It doesn’t know that it doesn’t know anything even. It’s literally incapable of basic reasoning. It’s essentially taken words and converted them to numbers, and then it examines which string is likely to follow each previous string. When people are writing, they aren’t looking at a huge database of information and determining the most likely word to come next, they’re synthesizing concepts together to create new ones, or building a narrative based on their notes. They understand concepts, they understand definitions. An AI doesn’t, it doesn’t have any conceptual framework, it doesn’t even know what a word is, much less the definition of any of them.
This is tough. I believe there is a lot of unfair wealth concentration in our society, especially in the tech companies. On the other hand, I don't want AI to be stifled by bad laws.
If we try to stop AI, it will only take it away from the public. The military will still secretly use it, companies might still secretly use it. Other countries will use it and their populations will benefit while we languish.
Our only hope for a happy ending is to let this technology be free and let it go into the hands of many companies and many individuals (there are already decent models you can run on your own computer).
So, in your "only hope for a happy ending" scenario, how do the artists get paid? Or will we no longer need them after AI runs everything ;)
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/827/
This is so stupid. If I read a book and get inspired by it and write my own stuff, as long as I'm not using the copyrighted characters, I don't need to pay anyone anything other than purchasing the book which inspired me originally.
If this were a law, why shouldn't pretty much each modern day fantasy author not pay Tolkien foundation or any non fiction pay each citation.
There's a difference between a sapient creature drawing inspiration and a glorified autocomplete using copyrighted text to produce sentences which are only cogent due to substantial reliance upon those copyrighted texts.
All AI creations are derivative and subject to copyright law.
There’s a difference between a sapient creature drawing inspiration and a glorified autocomplete using copyrighted text to produce sentences which are only cogent due to substantial reliance upon those copyrighted texts.
But the AI is looking at thousands, if not millions of books, articles, comments, etc. That's what humans do as well - they draw inspiration from a variety of sources. So is sentience the distinguishing criteria for copyright? Only a being capable of original thought can create original work, and therefore anything not capable of original thought cannot create copyrighted work?
Also, irrelevant here but calling LLMs a glorified autocomplete is like calling jet engines a "glorified horse". Technically true but you're trivialising it.
Isn’t learning the basic act of reading text? I’m not sure what the AI companies are doing is completely right but also, if your position is that only humans can learn and adapt text, that broadly rules out any AI ever.
Isn’t learning the basic act of reading text?
not even close. that's not how AI training models work, either.
if your position is that only humans can learn and adapt text
nope-- their demands are right at the top of the article and in the summary for this post:
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
that broadly rules out any AI ever
only if the companies training AI refuse to pay
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
