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.
All this copyright/AI stuff is so silly and a transparent money grab.
They’re not worried that people are going to ask the LLM to spit out their book; they’re worried that they will no longer be needed because a LLM can write a book for free. (I’m not sure this is feasible right now, but maybe one day?) They’re trying to strangle the technology in the courts to protect their income. That is never going to work.
Notably, there is no “right to control who gets trained on the work” aspect of copyright law. Obviously.
Designing and marketing a system to plagiarize works en masse? That’s the cash grab.
Can you elaborate on this concept of a LLM “plagiarizing”? What do you mean when you say that?
What I mean is that it is a statistical model used to generate things by combining parts of extant works. Everything that it “creates” is a piece of something that already exists, often without the author’s consent. Just because it is done at a massive scale doesn’t make it less so. It’s basically just a tracer.
Not saying that the tech isn’t amazing or likely a component of future AI but, it’s really just being used commercially to rip people off and worsen the human condition for profit.
This describes all art. Nothing is created in a vacuum.
No, it really doesn’t, nor does it function like human cognition. Take this example:
I, personally, to decide that I wanted to make a sci-fi show. I don’t want to come up with ideas so, I want to try to do something that works. I take the scripts of every Star Trek: The Search for Spock, Alien, and Earth Girls Are Easy and feed them into a database, seperating words into individual data entries with some grammatical classification. Then, using this database, I generate a script, averaging the length of the films, with every word based upon its occurrence in the films or randomized, if it’s a tie. I go straight into production with “Star Alien: The Girls Are Spock”. I am immediately sued by Disney, Lionsgate, and Paramount for trademark and copyright infringement, even though I basically just used a small LLM.
You are right that nothing is created in a vacuum. However, plagiarism is still plagiarism, even if it is using a technically sophisticated LLM plagiarism engine.
ChatGPT doesn’t have direct access to the material it’s trained on. Go ask it to quote a book to you.
That really doesn’t make an appreciable difference. It doesn’t need direct access to source data, if it’s already been transferred into statistical data.
It does rule out “plagiarism”, however, since it means it can’t pull directly from any training material.
I should have asked earlier: what do you think plagiarism is?