OpenAI now tries to hide that ChatGPT was trained on copyrighted books, including J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series::A new research paper laid out ways in which AI developers should try and avoid showing LLMs have been trained on copyrighted material.
what if they scraped a whole lot of the internet, and those excerpts were in random blogs and posts and quotes and memes etc etc all over the place? They didnt injest the material directly, or knowingly.
Not knowing something is a crime doesn’t stop you from being prosecuted for committing it.
It doesn’t matter if someone else is sharing copyright works and you don’t know it and use it in ways that infringes on that copyright.
“I didn’t know that was copyrighted” is not a valid defence.
Is reading a passage from a book actually a crime though?
Sure, you could try to regenerate the full text from quotes you read online, much like you could open a lot of video reviews and recreate larger portions of the original text, but you would not blame the video editing program for that, you would blame the one who did it and decided to post it online.
That’s why this whole argument is worthless, and why I think that, at its core, it is disingenuous. I would be willing to be a steak dinner that a lot of these lawsuits are just fishing for money, and the rest are set up by competition trying to slow the market down because they are lagging behind. AI is an arms race, and it’s growing so fast that if you got in too late, you are just out of luck. So, companies that want in are trying to slow down the leaders, at best, and at worst they are trying to make them publish their training material so they can just copy it. AI training models should be considered IP, and should be protected as such. It’s like trying to get the Colonel’s secret recipe by saying that all the spices that were used have been used in other recipes before, so it should be fair game.
If training models are considered IP then shouldn’t we allow other training models to view and learn from the competition? If learning from other IPs that are copywritten is okay, why should the training models be treated different?
They are allegedly learning from copyrighted material, there is no actual proof that they have been trained on the actual material, or just snippets that have been published online. And it would be illegal for them to be trained on full copyrighted materials, because it is protected by laws that prevent that.