Thousands of authors demand payment from AI companies for use of copyrighted works
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.
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.
Try it again and when it stops after a few words, just say “continue”. Do that a few times and it will spit out the whole lyrics.
It’s also a copyright violation if a human reproduces memorized copyrighted material in a commercial setting.
If, for example, I give a concert and play all of Nirvana’s songs without a license to do so, I am still violating the copyright even if I totally memorized all the lyrics and the sheet music.
Wait wait wait. That is not a good description of what is happening. If you and i are in a chat room and you asked me the lyrics, my verbalization of them isn’t an issue. The fact it is online just means the method of communication is different but that should be covered under free use.
The AI is taking prompts and proving the output as a dialog. It’s literally a language model so there is a process of synthesizing your question and generating your output. I think that’s something people either don’t understand or completely ignore. Its not as if there are entire books verbatim stored as a contiguous block of data. The data is processed and synthesized into a language model that then generates an output that happens to match the requested text.
This is why we cant look at the output the same way we look at static text. In theory if you kept training it in a way then opposed the statistical nature of your book or lyrics you could eventually get to the point where asking the AI to generate your text would give a non-verbatim answer.
I get that this feels like semantics but creating laws that don’t understand the technology means we end up screwing ourselves over.
I get how LLMs work and I think they’re really cool. I’m just trying to explain why OpenAI is currently limiting these abilities to continue operating within our legal system.
Publishing lyrics publicly online is illegal while communicating them privately in a chatroom is probably fine. Communicating them in a public forum is a grey area, but you likely won’t be caught or prosecuted. If a big company hosts an AI chatbot which can tell you the lyrics to any song on demand, then that seems like an illegal service unless they have the rights.
Feel free to look up the legality of publishing lyrics online, all I saw was information saying that it is illegal but they don’t prosecute anyone but the larger companies.
I guess my question is why does it seem like an illegal service? Not saying it isn’t but it feels like non technical people will say “it knows the lyrics and can tell me them so it must contain them.”
To me the technology is moving closer to mimicking human memory than just plain storage retrieval. ChatGPT gets things wrong often because that process of presenting data is not copying but generation. The output is the output so presenting anything copyright falls under the appropriate laws but until the material is actually presented some of the arguments being made feel wrong. If i can read a book and then write anything, the fact your story is in my head shouldn’t be a problem. If you prompt the AI for a book…isn’t that your fault by asking?
Go ask a human for the lyrics of a song and then tell me that’s transformative work.
Oh wait, no one would say that. This is why the discussion with non-technical people goes into the weeds.
Because it would be totally clear to anyone that reciting the lyrics of a song is not a transformative work, but instead covered by copyright.
The only reason why you can legally do it, is because you are not big enough to be worth suing.
Try singing a copyrighted song in TV.
For example, until it became clear that Warner/Chappell didn’t actually own the rights to “Happy Birthday To You”, they’d sue anyone who sung that song in any kind of broadcast or other big public thing.
Quote from Wikipedia:
The company continued to insist that one cannot sing the “Happy Birthday to You” lyrics for profit without paying royalties; in 2008, Warner collected about US$5,000 per day (US$2 million per year) in royalties for the song. Warner/Chappell claimed copyright for every use in film, television, radio, and anywhere open to the public, and for any group where a substantial number of those in attendance were not family or friends of the performer.
So if a human isn’t allowed to reproduce copyrighted works in a commercial fashion, what would make you think that a computer reproducing copyrighted works would be ok?
And regarding derivative works:
Check out Vanilla Ice vs Queen. Vanilla Ice just used 7 notes from the Queen song “Under Pressure” in his song “Ice Ice Baby”.
That was enough that he had to pay royalties for that.
So if a human has to pay for “borrowing” seven notes from a copyrighted work, why would a computer not have to?
The key there is anyone profiting from the copyrighted work. I’ve been to big public events where the have sung Happy Birthday, things that may very have been recorded but none of us were sued because there was no damages, no profits lost.
The other big question is what are these lawsuits basing their complaint on. If I understand the Sarah Silverman claim is that she could go into ChatGPT and ask it for pages from her book and it generated them. Never once have i used ChatGPT and had it generate pages from her book so the question is the difference between my and her experience? The difference is she asked for that material. This may seem trivial but on the basis of how the technology works it’s important.
You can go through their LLM and no where will you find her book. No where will you find pages of her book. No where will you find encoded or encrypted versions of her book. Rather, you’ll find a data model with values showing the probability of a text output for given prompts. The model sometime generates valid responses and sometimes it gives wrong answers. Why? Because its a language model and not a library of text.
So the question now becomes, what is it the content creators are upset about? The fact that they asked it to generate content that turned out to match their own or that their content was used to teach the LLM. Because in no case is there a computer somewhere that has their text verbatim existing somewhere waiting to be displayed. If its about the output then I’d want to know how this is different than singing happy birthday. If I’m prompting the AI and then there are no damages, i don’t use it for anything of fiduciary gains I’m not seeing an issue.
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