stopthatgirl7Authors Are Furious After Finding Their Works on List of Books Used To Train AI
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.
JackGreenEarthI would be proud, but you do you.
đď¸đđď¸But would you get paid?
Yes. People wouldnât be able to pirate my story through an AI, it wouldnât spit it out verbatim. Theyâd still need to buy or pirate it other ways.
They donât 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?
FaceDeerYou think spoilers should be illegal?
You appear to be saying that:
the AI just tells them what happens
Is a violation of the author's copyright.
I know, right? Itâs weird.
GibdosI 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.
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 âneural networksâ come from an early misunderstanding of how the brain stores information. Itâs a LOT more complicated and frankly, barely understood.
originaluciferso its barely understood, but this definitely is not it. got it.
But you, random stranger on the internet, knows better than the guy that literally works in the field. Got it.
i do? where did i claim that?
Itâs a LOT more complicated and frankly, barely understood.
Yet you confidently state that the brain doesn't work the way LLMs do?
Obviously it doesn't work exactly the same way that LLMs do, if only because of the completely different substrates. But when you get to more nebulous concepts like "creativity" and "inspiration" it's not so clear.
people have a definite fear of being defined as machines... not sure why we think were so special..
The part where brain and neural net differ is in the learning via backpropagation, that seem to be done different in the brain, as there is no mechanism to go backwards through the network and jiggle the weights.
That aside, they seem to work very similar once they are trained, as the knowledge they are able to extract from data ends up being basically the same that a human would be able to extract. There is surprisingly little weirdness in AI and a surprising amount of human-like capabilities.
Tell you what, you get a landmark legal decision classifying LLM as people and then weâll talk.
Until then itâs 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
More to the point: they replicate patterns of words.
So do humans.
Thatâs a Bingo!
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?
Thatâs an interesting take, I didnât know software could be inspired by other peopleâs works. Here. I thought software just did exactly as itâs instructed to do.
Well, now you know; software can be inspired by other people's works. That's what AIs are instructed to do during their training phase.
Software cannot be âinspiredâ
AIs in their training stages are simply just running extreme statistical analysis on the input material. Theyâre not âlearningâ theyâre not âinspiredâ theyâre not âunderstandingâ
The anthropomorphism of these models is a major problem. They are not human, they donât learn like humans.
The anthropomorphism of these models is a major problem.
People attributing any kind of person hood or sentience is certainly a problem, the models are fundamentally not capable of that (no loops, no hidden thought). At least for now. However what you are doing isnât really much better, just utterly wrong in the opposite direction.
Those models are very definitely do âlearnâ and âunderstandâ by every definition of the word. Simply playing around with that will quickly show that and itâs baffling that anybody would try to claim otherwise. Yes, there are limits to what they can understand and there are plenty things that they canât do, but the amount of questions they can answer goes far beyond what is directly in the training data. Heck, even the fact that they hallucinate is proof that they understand, since it would be impossible to make completely plausible, but incorrect, stuff up without having a deep understanding of the topics. Also humans make mistakes too and theyâll also make stuff up, so this isnât even anything AI specific.
Yeah, thatâs just flat out wrong
Hallucinations happen when thereâs gaps in the training data and itâs just statistically picking whatâs most likely to be next. It becomes incomprehensible when the model breaks down and doesnât know where to go. However, the model doesnât see a difference between hallucinating nonsense and a coherent sentence. Theyâre exactly the same to the model.
The model does not learn or understand anything. It statistically knows what the next word is. It doesnât need to have seen something before to know that. It doesnât understand what itâs outputting, itâs just outputting a long string that is gibberish to it.
I have formal training in AI and 90%+ of what I see people claiming AI can do is a complete misunderstanding of the tech.
I have formal training in AI
Than why do you keep talking such bullshit? You sound like you never even tried ChatGPT.
It statistically knows what the next word is.
Yes, thatâs understanding. What do you think your brain does differently? Please define whatever weird definition you have of âunderstandâ.
It doesnât understand what itâs outputting, itâs just outputting a long string that is gibberish to it.
Which is obviously nonsense, as I can ask it questions about its output. It can find mistakes in its own output and all that. It obviously understands what it is doing.
They werenât given data. They were shown data then the company spent tens of millions of dollars on cpu time to do statistical analysis of the data shown.
A computer being shown data is a computer being given data. I donât understand your argument.
The data is gone by the time a user interacts with the AI. ChatGPT has no access to any books.
And here I thought software just did exactly as itâs instructed to do.
AI isnât 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.
Lieutenant LianaHey, computational linguist here who works with large language models. This is the most ridiculous thing I ever read.
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.
Itâs 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.
Hereâs 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. Sam Altman was crying for regulations for scary AI, right?
Would search engines only be allowed to show search results for sources that had opted in? They "train" their search engine on public data too, after all.
They arenât reselling their information, theyâre linking you to the source which then the website decides what to do with your traffic. Which they usually want your traffic, thatâs the point of a public site.
Thatâs like trying to say itâs bad to point to where a book store is so someone can buy from it. Whereas the LLM is stealing from that bookstore and selling it to you in a back alley.
AI isnât either. Itâs selling statistical data about the books.
It literally shares passages verbatim
It shares popular quotes from books, it canât reproduce arbitrary content from a book. The content needs to be heavily duplicated in the training data to stick around, and even than half of it might still end up being made up on the spot.
Also request for copyrighted content will be blocked by ChatGPT and just receive the stock âI canâd do thatâ response anyway.
If you have some damning examples that show the opposite, show them.
Being blocked by ChatGPT just means that the interaction layer you see doesnât show the output, not that the output wasnât generated.
Everything you see thatâs public facing and interfacing with an AI is an extreme filtering layer for what is output. Thereâs tons of checks that happen to ensure that they donât output illegal content or any of a million other undesirable things.
Iâm too lazy and care too little but you can basically get it to roleplay as a book expert or something and to âremindâ you of certain passages. It gets around the filter pretty easily, thatâs how jailbreaks work.
Thatâs maybe an issue. I mirror speech a lot, though. How large are the passages?
âIâm not reselling your book, I am selling a machine that holds a mathematical formula that partly represents your entire book word for word and can reprint it on command!â
I mean, yeah? They were running to a concrete description. That is not valid. My brain has most of Terry Pratchettâs works.
LLMs can't reprint their entire training data on demand. They rarely even remember quotes.
First: There are mechanisms to opt out (robots.txt and meta noindex)
Second: There is some foreknowledge on the part of the web author. Even in the early days of the web, in order to distribute anything you had to understand the basics of hypermedia, among which is the idea that anything can link to anything else and clients can be users or machines alike.
Third: Even though you are correct that search engines are tokenizing text and doing statistical analysis to recombine the tokens into novel forms in order to rank against queries, those novel forms are never presented to the user. Only direct quotes. So a user never gets a false reference to the supposed content of a page (unless the page itself lies to crawler requests).
Fourth: All of the technical points above are pretty much meaningless, because we are social creatures and our norms donât stem from a mechanical flow chart divorced from real-world context.
Creators are generally okay with their content being copied into search DBs, because they know itâs going to lead to users finding the true author of those words, which will advance their creative pursuits either through collaboration or monetary support.
Creators are complaining about content being copied into LLMs, because their work will be presented out of context, often cited incorrectly, keep people away from the author of those words, and undermine the lifeblood of their creative pursuits â be it attracting new collaborators or making sales.
Whether it technically counts as IP infringement or not under current law? Who really cares? Current IP law is a fucking scam, designed to bully creators out of their own creations and assign full control to holding companies who see culture as nothing more than a financial instrument to be optimized. We desperately need to change IP law anyway â something that I think even many strident âAIâ supporters agree with â so using it as a justification for the ethics of LLMs reveals just how weak the groupâs position truly is.
LLM vendors see an opportunity for profit, if they can get away with it. They are offering consumers a utopian vision of infinite access to content while creating an IP chokepoint that they can enshittify once it blows past critical mass. Itâs the same tactics the social media companies used 15 years ago, and it weighs heavy on my heart that so many Lemmy users are falling for it once again while the lesson is still so fresh.
Everyoneâs a fan of fair use until itâs their work that is transformed.
Either we make all art a common freely licensed good and pay artists a flat solidarity wage to feed them, or we donât do that and keep it how it is, but having a loophole exception for some AI corporations is not the way to go.
Absolutely agree
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 âownsâ ideas is assinine.
OpenAI, Google, all these fucks should be forced to open source their models, end of story.
You can do this open source right now
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 doesnât make me wrong, dammit!
should be open source by law.
That doesnât make sense. The âsourceâ of the AI model is the publically available information, which the creators have to right to redistribute.
The rules of Open Source simply do not work for AI models. Youâd have to come up with some other rules.
Yeah, it ought to be owned by the people who contributed the work that trained it. But thatâs socialism.
⌠No really, that would literally be socialism.
My friend, there are already numerous open source models out there. Itâs a thing.