Authors using a new tool to search a list of 183,000 books used to train AI are furious to find their works on the list.
Any AI model that uses publically available information for training should be open source by law.
This business where corporations (that includes authors, who are published by huge corporations) fight over who “owns” ideas is assinine. When it comes down to it, this is a fight about money being wrapped in an argument about “ideas.”
AI models were developed with the collective knowledge and wisdom of society. They’re like libraries and should be public like libraries. OpenAI, Google, all those fucks should be forced to open source their models, end of story.
Trick is educating the octogenarians in the senate to understand any of what you just wrote.
Yup! My ideas about what should happen are so far removed from what will actually happen they could be Planet X.
But that doesn’t make me wrong, dammit!
One less to educate now. Hopefully replaced by someone that doesn’t need diapers.
I’d say they should have to follow the most-restrictive license of all of their training data, and that existing CC/FOSS licenses don’t count because they were designed for use in a pre-LLM world.
It seems like a pretty reasonable request. But people like free stuff, and when they think about who will get screwed by this they like to imagine that they’re sticking it to the biggest publishers of mass media.
But IRL, those publishers are giddy with the idea that instead of scouting artists and bullying them into signing over their IP, they can just summon IP on demand.
The people who will suffer are the independents who refused to sign over their IP. They never got their payday, and now they never will either.
I think we just need to ban the ability to copyright any AI output. Unless you can prove you created, and or paid for the rights for every piece of training data, I don’t see how it’s fair. Even then, there are still arguments against letting AI create IP.
The people I’m seeing outraged are artists and authors who did not sign their ideas over for public access or for disingenuous use. not a faceless publisher with cloth bags and dollar signs painted on them. Also I don’t think you understand what public and private ownership means. A person is allowed to privately own their own creation. They don’t owe that to the world. The world isn’t entitled to it.
You can do this open source right now
should be open source by law.
That doesn’t make sense. The “source” of the AI model is the publically available information, which the creators have no right to redistribute.
The rules of Open Source simply do not work for AI models. You’d have to come up with some other rules.
My friend, there are already numerous open source models out there. It’s a thing.
The whole legal situation around AI models isn’t clear and common Open Source licenses are an ill fit for them because you aren’t distributing the source, but just a binary blob. You can’t just take any random accumulation of data and slap a Open Source license on it, especially when that accumulation is the result of proprietary data, incompatible licenses and all that.
Most people don’t care and just remix everything as they please, but just because you can download for free something doesn’t make it Open Source. Furthermore a lot of the models exclude commercial use or otherwise restrict the use in ways that are incompatible with the Open Source definition.
Has any of the model made it into Debian yet?
Oh, okay. Well you should tell IBM, they’re clearly confused.
They are, just like a lot of other people. For example they cite LLaMa 2 as a popular open source model, while it restricts commercial use.
What do you define as “source” for an AI model? Training code? Training data set?
Yeah, it ought to be owned by the people who contributed the work that trained it. But that’s socialism. … No really, that would literally be socialism.
Here’s an idea, legally force companies like OpenAI to rely on opt-in data, rather then build their entire company on stealing massive amounts of data. That includes requiring to retrain from scratch. Sam Altman was crying for regulations for scary AI, right?
This is no different than every other capitalist enterprise. The whole system works on taking a public resource, claiming private ownership of it, and then selling it back to the public for profit.
First it was farmland, then coal and minerals, oil, seafood, and now ideas. Its how the system works and is the whole reason people have been trying to stop it for the past 150 years.
The people making the laws are there because they and/or their parents and/or grandparents did the exact same thing. As despicable and corrupt as it is you won’t change it by complaining and no-one is going to make a law to stop it.
God damned right. Every “new” thing tends to be stolen. In more event history, its stolen from other capital, or from innovation with a free license, rather than artwork. Publishers might actually be able to make a problem out of this.
I certainly hope that none of these authors have ever read a book before or have been inspired by something written by another author.
That would be a much better comparison if it was artificial intelligence, but these are just reinforcement learning models. They do not get inspired.
More to the point: they replicate patterns of words.
So do humans.
That’s a Bingo!
just reinforcement learning models
…like the naturally occuring neural networks are.
The brain does not work the way you think… (I work in the field, bio-informatics). What you call “neural networks” come from an early misunderstanding of how the brain stores information. It’s a LOT more complicated and frankly, barely understood.
Yeah, accurately simulating a single pyramidal neuron requires an eight-layer deep neural network:
that was an interesting read, thank you
so its barely understood, but this definitely is not it. got it.
Tell you what, you get a landmark legal decision classifying LLM as people and then we’ll talk.
Until then it’s software being fed content in a way not permitted by its license i.e. the makers of that software committing copyright infringement.
What exactly was not permitted by the license? Reading?
Using it to (create a tool to) create derivatives of the work on a massive scale.
Wikipedia: In copyright law, a derivative work is an expressive creation that includes major copyrightable elements of a first, previously created original work.
I think you may be off a bit on what a derivative work is. I don’t see LLMs spouting out major copyrightable elements of books. They can give a summary sure, but Cliff Notes would like to have a word if you think that’s copyright infringement.
Better tell that Google and their search index, book scanning project and knowledge graph.
I didn’t know those were LLMs, TIL.
Well when that happens we have laws. So no problems
Would you be okay with applying that argument for any crime?
That’s an interesting take, I didn’t know software could be inspired by other people’s works. And here I thought software just did exactly as it’s instructed to do. These are language models. They were given data to train those models. Did they pay for the data that they used to train for it, or did they scrub the internet and steal all these books along with everything everyone else has said?
And here I thought software just did exactly as it’s instructed to do.
AI isn’t software. Everything the AI knows is from the books. There is no human instructing the AI what to do. All the human does is build the scaffolding to let the AI learn, everything else is in the data.
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These are machines, though, not human beings.
I guess I’d have to be an author to find out how I’d feel about it, to be fair.
Machines that aren’t reproducing or distributing works
I don’t think anyone is faulting the machines for this, just the people who instruct the machines to do it.
But terminator said neural networks
Damn.
These are machines, though, not human beings.
What’s the difference? On the most fundamental level it’s all the same.
A human, regardless of how many books they read, will have personal experiences that are undeniably unique to themselves. They will interpret the works they read differently from each other based on their worldly experiences. Their writing, no matter how many books they read and get inspired on, will always be influenced by their own personal lives. They can experience love, hate, heartbreak, empathy, sadness, and happiness.
This is something a LLM does not have, and in my opinion, is a massive distinguishing factor. So on a “fundamental” level, it is not the same. It is no where near the same.
A human, regardless of how many books they read, will have personal experiences that are undeniably unique to themselves.
So will every AI. ChatGPT will give you different answers than Bard or WizardLM, since they are all trained on different books. And every StableDiffusion model creates different images, different styles, different topics, etc. It’s all in the data they “experienced”.
do you really think we are that far off… from giving a foundational memory and motivation layers to these LLMs, that could mimic… or even… generate the generic thoughts youre indicating?
i dont think so. you seem to imply its impossibility, i expect its inevitability. the human brain will not be a black box forever… it still exists in a world of physics we can emulate, even if rudimentary.
The same thing as with tooooooons of things: scale.
Nobody cares if one dude steals office supplies at work. Now, if everyone stats doing it, or if the single guy steals everything, then action is taken.
Nobody cares if a random person draws in the same style and with same characters as you, but if they start to sell them, or god forbid, out-sell you, then there is a problem.
Nobody cares (except police I guess) if a random driver drives double the speed limit and annoys people living next to the road on the weekends, but when tons of people do it, you get speed bumps.
Nobody cares if few people pirate movies, but when it gets to mainstream and companies notice that there might be money being lost. Then you get whatever we have now.
Nobody cares if the mudhill behind your house erodes a bit and you get mud on your shoes. Have a bunch of that erode and you realise the danger…
You have been fine-tuning your own writing style for a decade and random schmuck starts to write similarly, you probably don’t care. No harm done. Now, get an AI to write 10 000 books in a weekend and someone starts to sell them… well now you have a completely different problem.
On a fundamental level the exact same thing is happening, yet action is only taken after a certain threshold is step over.
Bingo.
Unless you think theres no difference between killing a person and closing a program, I think we can agree they should be treated differently in the eyes of the law.
And so theres a difference between a person reading a book and being inspired by it, and someone writing a program that automatically transforms the book in data that can create new books.
Wait. Are human beings machines?
Please do not take this as support of ai use of copyrighted works (I don’t), but as far as I can tell, yes we are machines. This rant is just me being aspie atm, so feel free to ignore it.
We are thinking machines programmed by our genetics, predispositions, experiences, and circumstances. A 2 part explanation of how humans are merely products of their circumstances was once put forward to me. The first part is that humans can do anything, but only the thing we want to do most.
For instance, a common rebuttal is that people can choose go to the gym even when they find the experience of exercise undesirable. However, when that happens, it’s merely a case of other wants out balancing the want to not go to the gym, typically they want to be fit.
We want to not spend money, but we want to not rush going to jail for stealing more, usually. We want to not work overtime, but sometimes we want the extra cash more than that.
The second part of the argument is that we can’t choose what we want. When someone talks themselves out of the slice of cheesecake, they aren’t changing what they want, they’re resolving said want against the larger want they have to lose weight.
And if we make decisions by our wants, while said wants are not decided by us, then despite appearances we are little more than complex automata.
Biological machines, yes.
Are you saying the writers of these programs have read all these books, and were inspired by them so much they wrote millions of books? And all this software is doing is outputting the result of someone being inspired by other books?
Clearly not. He’s saying that other authors have done the same as the software does. The software creators implemented the same principle into their llm. You are being daft on purpose.
It’s not the same principle. Large language models aren’t ‘inspired’ to write new works. Software can’t be inspired. It follows instructions. Even though large language models might feel like somebody is talking back to you and giving you new information, it’s just code following instructions designed to predict output based on the input provided and the data supplied. There’s no inspiration to be had, and to attribute inspiration to language models is a huge mischaracterization of what’s happening under the hood. Can a language model, without being told what to do, actually use any of the data it was fed to create something? No. Every single large language model requires some sort of input from a user to act as a seed before any sort of response can begin.
This is why it’s so stupid to call this shit AI, because people start thinking it’s actual intelligence. Really, It’s just a fancy illusion.
This is why it’s so stupid to call this shit AI
It is using the term as defined. Maybe stop being a stupid parrot just repeating crap you heard else where and use your brain for a moment. I am losing hope that humans are capable of thought reading all this junk.
They purchased their books to get inspiration from, the original author gets paid, and the author consented to selling it. That’s the difference.
Also the LLM can post entire snippets or chapters of books, which of course you’ll take at face value even if it hallucinates and makes the author look like a worse author then they are.
I hope they can at least get compensated.
So where can I check to see if my book was used? I published a book.
The database is here. You’ll have to sign up for a free trial if you’re not a subscriber to The Atlantic already. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/books3-database-generative-ai-training-copyright-infringement/675363/
they were compensated when the company using the book, purchased the book. you can’t tell me what to do with the words written in the book once I’ve purchased it. nor do you own the ideas or things I come up with as a result of your words in your book. of course this argument only holds up if they purchased the book. if it was “stolen” then they are entitled to the $24.95 their book costs.
Good point. I guess this aspect is much different from the AI Art scene, where the producers of the dataset are usually not compensated for their drawings.
Yea I hope they get their $1 for their contribution
Ok so it’s been stealing art now it’s coming for authors. At what point do we hold the coalition who started this shit culpable for numerous accounts of plagiarism?
TIL “culpable” is an English word too. Culpable means guilty in Spanish and I thought you were a Spanish speaker doing spanglish. Now I know you’re just a man of culture.
There’s an idea by Barath Raghavan about an AI dividend that companies pay each netizen a share for the data they use to train these models.
I am into this idea if companies can’t even do a simple opt-in mechanism.
Curious if the AI company actually bought those books or if they just came across them by pirating.
Oh, they’re 100% pirated. Sorry this isn’t open, but the preview should give you enough information. The database is available elsewhere, IIRC. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/books3-database-generative-ai-training-copyright-infringement/675363/
Everyone’s a fan of fair use until it’s their work that is transformed.
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Absolutely agree
Does this fall under fair-use part of copyright?
Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. decided that it is fair use to scan books and make large parts of them available verbatim on the net. What AI does is far more transformative than that, as very little of a book can be reproduced verbatim with AI (e.g. popular quotes), you really just get “knowledge” from the books. The sources are however lost in the process, unlike with Google, which by itself however also makes it difficult to argue for copyright violation, since you can’t point at what was actually copied.
do they also complain when their books are used to train wet networks in public schools? those networks are also later exploited by corporations who dont give back the writers. hmmmmmmm
They do get paid for that, however. They get a share of the value of each book sold. Those schools are paying for the books.
There is also the catch that those wet networks are of finite lifespan and are output throttled. This limits the losses caused. A lot of authors also consider improving those networks a big part of why they write.
It’s the difference between someone hand drawing a Micky mouse birthday card for their sibling, and hallmark mass producing them for sale. The former is considered acceptable, the latter is grounds for a law suit.
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This troll isn’t even good, why bother?
It’'s wacky, but some people don’t believe ideas are “owned” and need to be “rented” out for use and that no piece of art is an island, they all “steal” from prior works.
Can you believe that? Next thing you know there will be human sacrifices, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria!
I agree with them that an idea can’t be owned but it’s a misunderstanding of “AI” to compare it to artistic inspiration
No it’s not, it’s exactly the same thing. What if you go to an AI image generator and tell it to make a cat in the style of Picasso, Van Gough, and Todd McFarlane? What then? Who’s art is it “stealing”? Is it not creating a transformative piece of work? That’s exactly how the human brain works.
I think the real issue is the greedy fucks hoarding the models behind closed source projects and trying to bleed everyone else for access to them. The models should be available to anyone for any reason since they used the common knowledge and general advancement of society. They’re like libraries, and they should be public like libraries.
Anyways, the real reason I responded in the first place was your dismissive tone that any opinion going against the mob mentality about AI is somehow trolling.
I would be proud, but you do you.
But would you get paid?
Yes. People wouldn’t be able to pirate my story through an AI, it wouldn’t spit it out verbatim. They’d still need to buy or pirate it other ways.
They don’t need to, the AI just tells them what happens. Why are you against the author being able to consent for their work to be trained on and being compensated?
