This type of reasoning keeps coming up with seemingly zero consideration for why copyright actually exists. The goal of copyright, under US law, is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts".
The goal of companies creating these LLMs is to supersede the use of source material they draw from, like books. You use an LLM because it has all the answers without having to spend the money compensating the original authors, or put in the work digesting it yourself, that's their entire value proposition.
Their end game is to create a product so good that nobody has a reason to ever buy a book again. A few hours after you publish your book, the LLM will gobble it up and distribute the insights contain within to all of their users for free, "it's fair use", they say. There won't be any economic incentive to write books at that point, and so "the progress of science and useful arts" will crawl to a halt. Copyright defeated.
If LLM companies are allowed to produce market substitutes of original works then the goal of copyright is being defeated on a technicality and this ought to be a discussion about whether copyright should be abolished completely, not a discussion about whether big tech should be allowed to get away with it.
Nobody is going to stop buying Harry Potter books because they can get an LLM to spit out ~50 words from one of the books. The proportionality factor is very clearly relevant here.
> If LLM companies are allowed to produce market substitutes of original works
Did Meta publish a book written by an LLM?
> The goal of copyright, under US law, is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts".
I would consider training LLMs to be very much in line with those goals.
> Instead, Authors contend generically that training LLMs will result in an explosion of works competing with their works — such as by creating alternative summaries of factual events, alternative examples of compelling writing about fictional events, and so on. This order assumes that is so (Opp. 22–23 (citing, e.g., Opp. Exh. 38)). But Authors’ complaint is no different than it would be if they complained that training schoolchildren to write well would result in an explosion of competing works. This is not the kind of competitive or creative displacement that concerns the Copyright Act. The Act seeks to advance original works of authorship, not to protect authors against competition.
Copyright law was spurred by the spread of the printing press, a machine which has ability to output full replicas. It does not assume human-like input/output limitations.
> A fair ruling would have declared that authors must be able to forbid the usage of their work as training data for any given model because the "transformative" processes that are being executed are wildly beyond what the writers of the law knew were even possible
Copyright's basis in the US is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Declaring a transformative use illegal because it's so novel would seem to run directly counter to that.
To my understanding it's generally the opposite (a pre-existing use with an established market that the rightsholder had expected to exploit) that would weigh against a finding of fair use.
- It is not accurate to describe training as “encoding works into the model”.
– A model cannot recreate a Harry Potter book.
Neither of these have anything to do with “the spirit of the law”.
I kind of assumed I could ask it for verses from the bible one by one till i have the full book?
When i ask chatgpt for a specific page or so from HP I get the impression that the model would be perfectly capable of doing so but is hindred by extra work openAI put in to prevent the answer specifically because of copyright. In which case the question: What if someone manages to do some prompt trickery again to get past it? Are they then responsible?
Can you do this for the general case? No, not even for extremely popular books. People might quote Harry Potter a lot, but they don’t quote the entire thing over and over, chapter and verse, on hundreds of thousands of different websites. The number of times Bible verses appear in the training data is going to absolutely dwarf the number of times Harry Potter quotes appear, and people aren’t quoting all parts of Harry Potter, just the interesting parts.
> When i ask chatgpt for a specific page or so from HP I get the impression that the model would be perfectly capable of doing so but is hindred by extra work openAI put in to prevent the answer specifically because of copyright.
They do put extra work in to filter this stuff out, but even if they didn’t the model wouldn’t be able to reproduce entire chapters, let alone entire books.
You can test this for yourself. Remember, this lawsuit isn’t against OpenAI, it’s against Meta. Download Llama and try to get it to reproduce Harry Potter. There won’t be any guardrails imposed on top of the model if you run it locally.
I'm fairly certain I could find the entire thing in plain text in multiple places online. A quick google gives the philosophers stone as the second result in pdf format on the internet archive but i'm sure with a bit of looking i'd bump into a lot of plaintext copies.
They might have taken measures to prevent this from being anywhere their training data (i think it would be fairly easy and something they'd likely do) but if they at any point failed for a book or so that they didn't consider wouldn't my original question stand?
The Bible isn’t just a book, it’s been a massive part of human culture for millennia, to the point of it shaping language itself. LLMs might be able to memorise the Bible, but it’s not because they can memorise books, it’s because the Bible is far more than just a book.
I doubt every part of those books get quoted everywhere on a numbered basis like the bible might be. For only recently public domain books it seems to be overly cautious trough the retroactively applied filtering where it refuses if it suspects there might be a single country where copyright still applies.
This is the part I have a problem with, that threshold was put there for humans based on their capabilities, it's an extremely dishonest assessment that the same threshold must apply for a LLM and it's outputs, those works were created to be read by humans not a for-profit statistical inference machine, the derivative nature were also expected to be caused by the former no the later, so the judge should have admitted that the context of the law is insufficient and that copyright must include the power of forbidding the usage of one's work into such model for copyright to continue fulfilling it's intended purpose (or move the case to the supreme court I guess)
It wasn’t. It’s there because a small proportion being reproduced doesn’t harm the copyright holder in the same way a full reproduction does.
Nobody is going to stop buying Harry Potter books because they can get an LLM to spit out ~50 words from the book. This is entirely in line with the spirit of the law. This is exactly why proportionality is a factor in fair use.