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, marking the latest intellectual property critique to target AI development.
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.
It’s not really a parallel.
The text books don’t have copyrights on the concepts and formulae they teach. They only have copyrights for the actual text.
If you memorize the text book and write it down 1:1 (or close to it) and then sell that text you wrote down, then you are still in violation of the copyright.
And that’s what the likes of ChatGPT are doing here. For example, ask it to output the lyrics for a song and it will spit out the whole (copyrighted) lyrics 1:1 (or very close to it). Same with pages of books.
The memorization is closer to that of a fanatic fan of the author. It usually knows the beginning of the book and the more well known passages, but not entire longer works.
By now, ChatGPT is trying to refuse to output copyrighted materials know even where it could, and though it can be tricked, they appear to have implemented a hard filter for some more well known passages, which stops generation a few words in.
Have you tried just telling it to “continue”?
Somewhere in the comments to this post I posted screenshots of me trying to get lyrics for “We will rock you” from ChatGPT. It first just spat out “Verse 1: Buddy,” and ended there. So I answered with “continue”, it spat out the next line and after the second “continue” it gave me the rest of the lyrics.
Similar story with e.g. the first chapter of Harry Potter 1 and other stuff I tried. The output is often not perfect, with a few words being wrong, but it’s very clearly a “derived work” of the original. In the view of copyright law, changing a few words here is not a valid way of getting around copyrights.
