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.
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.
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
Typically the argument has been “a robot can’t make transformative works because it’s a robot.” People think our brains are special when in reality they are just really lossy.
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.
So what’s the difference between a person reading their books and using the information within to write something and an ai doing it?
