Technology

"Theft" is never a technically accurate word when dealing with the so called "intellectual property", because the digital content being copied without authorization is legal in tons of cases, and because, come on, property is very explicitly exclusive. I cannot copy my house or my car, but I can make copies of my works for virtually 0 cost.

Using data for training ML models is even explicitly allowed in some jurisdictions (e.g. Japan), and is likely to be fair use everywhere else. LLMs are very transformative, and while they often can produce verbatim copies of fragments of copyrighted works, they don't store the whole works or significant pieces of them.

Don't get me wrong, I don't like big companies making big money. I would not mind a law that would force models to be open sourced. But restricting them to train their models on public data by restricting fair use, it would harm them very little (they could pay something if they are making some profit), while small researchers or companies would never be able to compete, because they would not have the upfront costs, nor the economic engineering to disguise profits and pay less.

Ha, ya know? I think I know some people who will just regurgitate whatever input they receive

........

:(

I've just asked Gemini about cheese that slides off pizza, it didn't recommend glue.

I'm confused exactly what you're saying here. It does seem from your experiment that if you specifically ask it to, Chat GPT can reproduce selected pieces of copyrighted creative works verbatim, but what's your point? You posted the screenshots underneath a quote about how AI systems extract patterns from works rather than copying them so I guess you want to show that it can at times in fact just copy things despite this seeming claim to the opposite, but the fact that you prompted the system to do it seems to kind of dilute this point a bit. In any case, it's not just reproducing the work, it's producing output that is relevant to your naturally phrased English language input, and selecting which particular passage in a way that is specifically relevant to the way your input was phrased and also adding additional output aside from the quoted passage which is also relevant and unique to the prompt.

The developers make the analogy of a person being influenced by works in the creation of their own and that that is considered acceptable. If you asked Bob Dylan to cite a passage from a work by Hemingway and he successfully remembered such a passage and in the correct context recited it to you verbatim, followed by an explanation for why it's a good passage to have selected, you wouldn't take from that exchange that this was proof that Bob Dylan was not really actually 'influenced' by anything but was instead just cobbling together the work of others when he produces his music. If anything, it'd likely be regarded as a mark of how well read Bob Dylan must be that he could remember the passage so accurately and choose a passage that so successfully fits the brief of your request. I don't typically want to leap to the defence of these AI models that wholesale take in so much creative work and mechanistically re-assemble it without compensation nor input from the artist but I wouldn't pretend that it's not an issue with at least a little nuance to it and I can't see what these screenshots prove.

Heh. Funny that this comment is uncontroversial. The Internet Archive supports Fair Use because, of course, it does.

This is from a position paper explicitly endorsed by the IA:

Based on well-established precedent, the ingestion of copyrighted works to create large language models or other AI training databases generally is a fair use.

By

• Library Copyright Alliance
• American Library Association
• Association of Research Libraries