A long form response to the concerns and comments and general principles many people had in the post about authors suing companies creating LLMs.
If the rumor is true that OpenAI is using libgen to obtain books, then this will be a very interesting fight.
Authors profiteering from arcane copyright laws vs. a sleazy company that hypes up an LLM as if it were HAL from 2001. Who is worse? Who should lose?! I’m on the edge of my seat already!
Authors profiteering from arcane copyright laws
I get this argument from the film, movie, television, videogame industry, and other more modern ones out there. But outside a handful of actual big name authors the average writer isnt exactly raking it in.
Also thanks to being a relic of the past we do still have libraries which offer books for free to read with a subscription and not only is this common, but its a celebrated thing among most authors and the reading community.
If I read her book, someone asked me to summarize it and I did - would she sue me for copyright infringement too? Do I need her permission to read her book?
It seems to me like a cheap attempt to advertise her book.
To read it in the first place, before you summarize it, you need to obtain it legally by either buying it, or checking it out from the library (which has bought it).
Most of this stems from a misunderstand of how LLM work.
The original work is not stored anywhere. No copy of it has been made. Just tons and tons of statistics used to inform models.
Since there is no copy there is no violation of copyright. Again, no copy of the book is getting made. The content of the books is not stored “verbatim”. The book is not copied. I don’t know how many other ways to put this.
Summarizing a book also does not require one to have “read” it, contrary to the complaint. I never read “The DaVinci Code”, but I can give a summary of it.
With assertions in the complaint being clearly false it’s hard to take it seriously and it’ll get chucked the first time a judge has to deal with it.
Maybe Silverman would have a point if it were standard practice to pay royalties to people you get inspiration from. But she doesn’t pay everyone who wrote anything she read, said anything she heard, or other comedians who influenced her. So why should someone influenced by her pay?
If I read 100,000 books how do you determine “which one” I got inspiration from? Same situation here.
Copyright doesn’t apply just to stuff copied verbatim though, it applies to a lot more. It really doesn’t matter if it is or isn’t stored verbatim. Translations and derivative works are not exact copies and still fall under copyright. Copyright even applies to broad things such as “a concept of a character” and this can result in some pretty strange arguments some copyright holders might use, such as “Sherlock Holmes that doesn’t smile is public domain, but Sherlock Holmes who shows emotion is copyright infringement” as described here.
It doesn’t matter if an exact copy of the book was made. It matters if the core information that book carried was taken as a whole and used elsewhere. And even though the data was transformed as statistical information, the information is still there in that model. The model itself is basically just an “unauthorized translation” of hundreds of thousands of works into a very esoteric format.
The whole argument of “inspiration” is also misleading. Inspiration is purely a human trait. We’re not talking about humans being inspired. We’re talking about humans using copyrighted material to create a model, and about computers using that model to create content. Unless you’d argue that humans should be considered the same thing as machines in the eyes of the law, this argument simply doesn’t work.
Look up RAM copy doctrine. It is pretty easy to argue they are making a copy.
I think the whole thing about megacorps being the problem here is a bit short sighted, I don’t think it will be too much longer before anyone can spin up their own LLM. It doesn’t exactly take Google levels of resources. I’m as happy to shit on megacorps as the next person here but IP law as it is is BS.
More likely than not any changes made will be to benefit large corporations at the expense of individuals and competition. I’m imagining a world where copyright law has made it so that only big corporations can afford to pay for LLM training data. As if individuals had to pay library book prices for a personal book to train their personal LLM. This desire to “cash in” may just play right into the megacorporation’s hand.
I agree that cashing in is at least important part of this. As I understand it, however, past a certain point creating and using LLMs is in fact extremely expensive. That’s why GPT4 limits user interactions, for example. I also think that the more restricted these tools are in general, the better for everyone. It’s absolutely possible to use them in positive ways, but as it stamps they are mostly just flooding the internet with garbage at killing low level content jobs.
I don’t know what the authors are complaining about. All the AI is doing is trawling through a lexicon of words and rearranging them into an order that will sell books. It’s exactly what authors do. This is about money.
deleted by creator
Hi, it’s me the author!
First of all, thanks for reading.
In the article I explain that it is not exactly what authors do, we reading and writing are an inherently human activity and the consumption and processing of massive amounts of data (far more than a human with a photographic memory could process in a hundred million lifetimes) is a completely different process to that.
I also point out that I don’t have a problem with LLMs as a concept, and I’m actually excited about what they can do, but that they are inherently different from humans and should be treated as such by the law.
My main point is that authors should have the ability to decree that they don’t want their work used as training data for megacorporations to profit from without their consent.
So, yes in a way it is about money, but the money in question being the money OpenAI and Meta are making off the backs of millions of unpaid and often unsuspecting people.
I think it’s an interesting topic, thanks for the article.
It does start to raise some interesting questions, if an author doesn’t want they book to be ingested by a LLM, then what is acceptable? Should all LLMs now be ignorant of that work? What about summaries or reviews of that work?
What if from a summary of a book an LLM could extrapolate what’s in the book? Or write a similar book to the original, does that become a new work or is it still fall into the issue of copyright?
I do fear that copyright laws will muddy the waters and slow down the development of LLMs and have a greater impact more than any government standards ever will!
I’m all for muddy waters and slow development of LLMs at this juncture. The world is enough of a capitalist horrorshow and so far all this tech provides is a faster way to accelerate the already ridiculously wide class divide. Just my cynical luddite take of the day…
One of the things they are alleging is that the books were acquired illegally
They’re “complaining” about unique qualities of their art being used, without consent, to create new things which ultimately de-value their original art.
It’s a debate to be had, I’m not clearly in favour of either argument here, but it’s quite obvious what they’re upset with.
If it’s a debate to be had then it’s something that should have been debated hundreds of years ago when copyright was first invented, because every author or artist re-uses the “unique qualities” of other peoples’ art when making their own new stuff.
There’s the famous “good authors copy, great authors steal” quote, but I rather like the related one by C. E. M. Joad mentioned in that article: “the height of originality is skill in concealing origins.”
I think the main difference between derivative/inspired works created by humans and those created by AI is the presence of “creative effort.” This is something that humans can do, but narrow AI cannot.
Even bland statements humans make about nonfiction facts have some creativity in them, even if the ideas are non-copyrightable (e.g., I cannot copyright the fact that the declaration of independence was signed in 1776. However, the exact way I present this fact can be copyrightable- a timeline, chart, table, passage of text, etc. could all be copyrightable).
“Creative effort” is a hard thing to pin down, since “effort” alone does not qualify (e.g., I can’t copyright a phone directory even if I spent a lot of effort collecting names/numbers, since simply putting names and numbers alongside each other in alphabetical isn’t particularly creative or original). I don’t think there’s really a bright line test for what constitutes as “creative,” but it doesn’t take a lot. Randomness doesn’t qualify either (e.g., I can’t just pick a random stone out of a stream and declare copyright on it, even if it’s a very unique-looking rock).
Narrow AI is ultimately just a very complex algorithm created based on training data. This is oversimplifying a lot of steps involved, but there isn’t anything “creative” or “subjective” involved in how an LLM creates passages of text. At most, I think you could say that the developers of the AI have copyright over the initial code used to make that AI. I think that the outputs of some functional AI could be copyrightable by its developers, but I don’t think any machine-learning AI would really qualify if it’s the sole source of the work.
Personally, I think that the results of what an AI like Midjourney or ChatGPT creates would fall under public domain. Most of the time, it’s removed enough from the source material that it’s not really derivative anymore. However, I think if someone were to prompt one of these AI to create a work that explicitly mimics that of an author or artist, that could be infringement.
IANAL, this is just one random internet user’s opinion.
I think this has to do with intent. If I read a book to use it for the basis of a play, that would be illegal. If I read for enjoyment, that is legal. Since AI does not read for enjoyment, but only to use it for the basis of creating something else, that would be illegal.
Is my logic flawed?
This isn’t how it works at all. I can, and should, and do, read and consume all sorts of media with the intention of stealing from it for my own works. If you ask for writing advice, this is actually probably one of the first things you’ll hear: read how other people do it.
So this does not work as an argument, “the intent of the reading” because if so humans could never generate any new media either.
This is the thing I kept shouting when diffusion models took off. People are effectively saying “make it illegal for neural nets to learn from anything creative or productive anywhere in any way”
Because despite the differences in architecture, I think it is parallel.
If the intent and purpose of the tool was to make copies of the work in a way we would consider theft if done by a human, I would understand.
The same way there isn’t any legal protection on neural nets learning from personal and abstract information to manipulate and predict or control the public, the intended function of the tool should make it illegal.
But people are too self focused and ignorant to riot enmass about that one.
The dialogue should also be in creating a safety net as more and more people lose value in the face of new technology.
But fuck any of that, what if an a.i. learned from a painting I made ten year ago, like any other disney/warner hired artists who may have learned from it? Unforgivable.
At least peasants get to use stable diffusion instead of hiring a team of laborers.
I don’t believe it’s reproducing my art, even if asked to do so, and I don’t think I’m entitled to anything.
Also copyright has been fucked for decades. It hasn’t served the people since long before the Mickey mouse protection act.
Specific to this article “Imagine a single human, reading a novel. Now pretend that human has a photographic memory and they can store that data perfectly”
Because that’s what it was doing right? Perfectly reproducing the work? No? That’s just regular computers? Or a human using a computer?
Humanity needs a big update.
Regardless of intent, let’s not pretend that the scale at which LLMs “process” information to generate new content is comparable to humans. That is obviously what was intended for copyright laws (so far).
