A long form response to the concerns and comments and general principles many people had in the post about authors suing companies creating LLMs.
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).
Your logic is flawed in that derivative works are not a violation of copyright. Generally, copyright protects a text or piece of art from being reproduced. Specific characters and settings can be protected by copyright, concepts and themes cannot. People take inspiration from the work of others all the time. Lots of TV shows or whatever are heavily informed by previous works, and that’s totally fine.
Copyright protects the reproduction of other peoples work, and the reuse of their specific characters. It doesn’t protect style, themes, concepts, etc. IE. the things that an AI is trying to derive. So like if you trained your LLM only on Tolkien such that it always told stories about Gandalf and the hobbits, then that would be a problem.
“Reading with intent?” that sounds ridiculous. The only thing of concern is the work produced.
Open up! It’s the thought-police! We have reason to believe you are reading with intent to commit a criminal act! You are under arrest! Anything you say or think can and will be used against you in the court of law!
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.
We’re already heading in a direction that mainly benefits those who are already in power. The real impact of these lawsuits appears to be favoring corporations and copyright holders, without sufficient thought to how they might limit individuals like us. People are already anxious about AI taking their jobs, right? But if we keep creating laws that continuously favor the same powerful few, it shouldn’t shock us when the average person can’t keep up. Just to give you an idea, instead of being able to use Large Language Models (LLMs) to make my work easier, I may be forced to completely abandon this tech due to this kind of shortsightedness. LLMs should be a tool available to ALL of us, not just those at the top.
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.
I’ll bet ChatGPT could write an epic rap battle about it.
