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.
It’s 100% a new problem. There’s established precedent for things costing different amounts depending on their intended use.
For example, buying a consumer copy of song doesn’t give you the right to play that song in a stadium or a restaurant.
Training an entire AI to make potentially an infinite number of derived works from your work is 100% worthy of requiring a special agreement. This even goes beyond simple payment to consent; a climate expert might not want their work in an AI which might severely mischatacterize the conclusions, or might want to require that certain queries are regularly checked by a human, etc
Well, fine, and I can’t fault new published material having a “no AI” clause in its term of service. But that doesn’t mean we get to dream this clause into being retroactively for all the works ChatGPT was trained on. Even the most reasonable law in the world can’t be enforced on someone who broke it 6 months before it was legislated.
Fortunately the “horses out the barn” effect here is maybe not so bad. Imagine the FOMO and user frustration when ToS & legislation catch up and now ChatGPT has no access to the latest books, music, news, research, everything. Just stuff from before authors knew to include the “hands off” clause - basically like the knowledge cutoff, but forever. It’s untenable, OpenAI will be forced to cave and pay up.
OpenAI and such being forced to pay a share seems far from the worst scenario I can imagine. I think it would be much worse if artists, writers, scientists, open source developers and so on were forced to stop making their works freely available because they don’t want their creations to be used by others for commercial purposes. That could really mean that large parts of humanity would be cut off from knowledge.
I can well imagine copyleft gaining importance in this context. But this form of licencing seems pretty worthless to me if you don’t have the time or resources to sue for your rights - or even to deal with the various forms of licencing you need to know about to do so.
None of them are forced to stop making their works freely available. If they want to voluntarily stop making their works freely available to prevent commercial interests from using them, that’s on them.
Besides, that’s not so bad to me. The rest of us who want to share with humanity will keep sharing with humanity. The worst case imo is that artists, writers, scientists, and open source developers cannot take full advantage of the latest advancements in tech to make more and better art, writing, science, and software. We cannot let humanity’s creative potential be held hostage by anyone.
On the contrary, AI is making knowledge more accessible than ever before to large parts of humanity. The only comparible other technologies that have done this in recent times are the internet and search engines. Thank goodness the internet enables piracy that allows anyone to download troves of ebooks for free. I look forward to AI doing the same on an even greater scale.
Shouldn’t there be a way to freely share your works without having to expect an AI to train on them and then be able to spit them back out elsewhere without attribution?
You’re not talking about sharing it with humanity, you’re talking about feeding it into an AI. How is this holding back the creative potential of humanity? Again, you’re talking about feeding and training a computer with this material.
Sure it can. Just because it is a new law doesn’t mean they get to continue benefiting from IP ‘theft’ forever into the future.
How is this an issue for the IP holders? Just because you build something cool or useful doesn’t mean you get a pass to do what you want.
Untenable for ChatGPT maybe, but it’s not as if it’s the end of ‘knowledge’ or the end of AI. It’s just a single company product.
The thing is, copyright isn’t really well-suited to the task, because copyright concerns itself with who gets to, well, make copies. Training an AI model isn’t really making a copy of that work. It’s transformative.
Should there be some kind of new model of renumeration for creators? Probably. But it should be a compulsory licensing model.
Copyright also deals with derivative works.
Derivative and transformative are quite different though.
The slippery slope here is that we are currently considering humans and computers to be different because (something someone needs to actually define). If you say “AI read my book and output a similar story, you owe me money” then how is that different from “Joe read my book and wrote a similar story, you owe me money.” We have laws already that deal with this but honestly how many books and movies aren’t just remakes of Romeo and Juliet or Taming of the Shrew?!?
You’re bounded by the limits of your flesh. AI is not. The $12 you spent buying a book at Barns & Noble was based on the economy of scarcity that your human abilities constrain you to.
It’s hard to say that the value proposition is the same for human vs AI.
Well, Shakespeare has beed dead for a few years now, there’s no copyright to speak of.
And if you make a book based on an existing one, then you totally need permission from the author. You can’t just e.g. make a Harry Potter 8.
But AIs are more than happy to do exacly that. Or to even reproduce copyrighted works 1:1, or only with a few mistakes.
Challenge level impossible: try uploading something long to amazon written by chatgpt without triggering the plagiarism detector.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-launches-boom-ai-written-e-books-amazon-2023-02-21/
My point is that the restrictions can’t go on the input, it has to go on the output - and we already have laws that govern such derivative works (or reuse / rebroadcast).
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.
I completely fail to see how it wouldn’t be considered transformative work
It fails the transcendence criterion.Transformative works go beyond the original purpose of their source material to produce a whole new category of thing or benefit that would otherwise not be available.
Taking 1000 fan paintings of Sauron and using them in combination to create 1 new painting of Sauron in no way transcends the original purpose of the source material. The AI painting of Sauron isn’t some new and different thing. It’s an entirely mechanical iteration on its input material. In fact the derived work competes directly with the source material which should show that it’s not transcendent.
We can disagree on this and still agree that it’s debatable and should be decided in court. The person above that I’m responding to just wants to say “bah!” and dismiss the whole thing. If we can litigate the issue right here, a bar I believe this thread has already met, then judges and lawmakers should litigate it in our institutions. After all the potential scale of this far reaching issue is enormous. I think it’s incredibly irresponsible to say feh nothing new here move on.
I do think you have a point here, but I don’t agree with the example. If a fan creates the 1001 fan painting after looking at others, that might be quite similar if they miss the artistic quality to express their unique views. And it also competes with their source, yet it’s generally accepted.
Transformativeness is only one of the four fair use factors. Just because something is transformative can’t alone make something fair use.
Even if AI is transformative, it would likely fail on the third factor. Fair use requires you to take the minimum amount of the copyrighted work, and AI companies scrape as much data as possible to train their models. Very unlikely to support a finding of fair use.
The final factor is market impact. As generative AIs are built to mimic the creativite outputs of human authorship. By design AI acts as a market replacement for human authorship so it would likely fail on this factor as well.
Regardless, trained AI models are unlikely to be copyrightable. Copyrights require human authorship which is why AI and animal generated art are not copyrightable.
A trained AI model is a piece of software so it should be protectable by patents because it is functional rather than expressive. But a patent requires you to describe how it works, so you can’t do that with AI. And a trained AI model is self-generated from training data, so there’s no human authorship even if trained AI models were copyrightable.
The exact laws that do apply to AI models is unclear. And it will likely be determined by court cases.
Typically the argument has been “a robot can’t make transformative works because it’s a robot.” People think our brains are special when in reality they are just really lossy.
Even if you buy that premise, the output of the robot is only superficially similar to the work it was trained on, so no copyright infringement there, and the training process itself is done by humans, and it takes some tortured logic to deny the technology’s transformative nature
Go ask ChatGPT for the lyrics of a song and then tell me, that’s transformative work when it outputs the exact lyrics.
This is a little off, when you quote a book you put the name of the book you’re quoting. When you refer to a book, you, um, refer to the book?
I think the gist of these authors complaints is that a sort of “technology laundered plagiarism” is occurring.
I asked Bing Chat for the 10th paragraph of the first Harry Potter book, and it gave me this:
“He couldn’t know that at this very moment, people meeting in secret all over the country were holding up their glasses and saying in hushed voices: ‘To Harry Potter – the boy who lived!’”
It looks like technically I might be able to obtain the entire book (eventually) by asking Bing the right questions?
Then this is a copyright violation - it violates any standard for such, and the AI should be altered to account for that.
What I’m seeing is people complaining about content being fed into AI, and I can’t see why that should be a problem (assuming it was legally acquired or publicly available). Only the output can be problematic.
No, the AI should be shut down and the owner should first be paying the statutory damages for each use of registered works of copyright (assuming all parties in the USA)
If they have a company left after that, then they can fix the AI.
Again, my point is that the output is what can violate the law, not the input. And we already have laws that govern fair use, rebroadcast, etc.
I think it’s not just the output. I can buy an image on any stock Plattform, print it on a T-Shirt, wear it myself or gift it to somebody. But if I want to sell T-Shirts using that image I need a commercial licence - even if I alter the original image extensivly or combine it with other assets to create something new. It’s not exactly the same thing but openAI and other companies certainly use copyrighted material to create and improve commercial products. So this doesn’t seem the same kind of usage an avarage joe buys a book for.
It’s an algorithm that’s been trained on numerous pieces of media by a company looking to make money of it. I see no reason to give them a pass on fairly paying for that media.
You can see this if you reverse the comparison, and consider what a human would do to accomplish the task in a professional setting. That’s all an algorithm is. An execution of programmed tasks.
If I gave a worker a pirated link to several books and scientific papers in the field, and asked them to synthesize an overview/summary of what they read and publish it, I’d get my ass sued. I have to buy the books and the scientific papers. STEM companies regularly pay for access to papers and codes and standards. Why shouldn’t an AI have to do the same?
Well, if OpenAI knowingly used pirated work, that’s one thing. It seems pretty unlikely and certainly hasn’t been proven anywhere.
Of course, they could have done so unknowingly. For example, if John C Pirate published the transcripts of every movie since 1980 on his website, and OpenAI merely crawled his website (in the same way Google does), it’s hard to make the case that they’re really at fault any more than Google would be.
well no, because the summary is its own copyrighted work
Right, but not one the author of the book could go after. The article publisher would have the closest rights to a claim. But if I read the crib notes and a few reviews of a movie… Then go to summarize the movie myself… That’s derivative content and is protected under copyright.
The published summary is open to fair use by web crawlers. That was settled in Perfect 10 v Amazon.
Haven’t people asked it to reproduce specific chapters or pages of specific books and it’s gotten it right?
I haven’t been able to reproduce that, and at least so far, I haven’t seen any very compelling screenshots of it that actually match. Usually it just generates text, but that text doesn’t actually match.
If I read your book… and get an amazing idea… Turn it into a business and make billions off of it. You still have no right to anything. This is no different.
There’s been no proof or evidence provided that ANY content was ever pirated. Has any of the companies even provided the dataset they’ve used yet?
Why is this the presumption that they did it the illegal way?
I don’t see how this is even remotely the same? These companies are using this material to create their commercial product. They’re not consuming it personally and developing a random idea later, far removed from the book itself.
I can’t just buy (or pirate) a stack of Blu-rays and then go start my own Netflix, which is akin to what is happening here.
I never said that the idea would be removed from the book. You can literally take the idea from the book itself and make the money. There would be no issues. There is no dues owed to the book’s writer.
This is the whole premise for educational textbooks. You can explain to me how the whole world works in book form… I can go out and take those ideas wholesale from your book and apply them to my business and literally make money SOLELY from information from your book. There’s nothing due back to you as a writer from me nor my business.
You’ve failed to explain how that relates to your point. Sure you can purchase an econonomics textbook and then go become a finance bro, but that’s not what they’re doing here. They’re taking that textbook (that wasn’t paid for) and feeding it into their commercial product. The end product is derived from the author’s work.
To put it a different way, would they still be able to produce ChatGPT if one of the developers simply read that same textbook and then inputted what they learned into the model? My guess is no.
It’d be the same if I went and bought CDs, ripped my favorite tracks, and then put them into a compilation album that I then sold for money. My product can’t exist without having copied the original artists work. ChatGPT just obfuscates that by copying a lot of songs.
Nobody has provided any evidence that this is the case. Until this is proven it should not be assumed. Bandwagoning (and repeating this over and over again without any evidence or proof) against the ML people without evidence is not fair. The whole point of the Justice system is innocent until proven guilty.
Derivative works are 100% protected under copyright law. https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/what-are-derivative-works-under-copyright-law
This is the same premise that allows “fair use” that we all got up and arms about on youtube. Claiming that this doesn’t exist now in this case means that all that stuff we fought for on Youtube needs to be rolled back.
Why not? Why can’t someone grab a book, scan it… chuck it into an OCR and get the same content? There are plenty of ways that snippets of raw content could make it into these repositories WITHOUT asserting legal problems.
No… You could have for all intents and purposes have recorded all your songs from the radio onto a cassette… That would be 100% legal for personal consumption… which would be what the ML authors are doing. ChatGPT and others could have sources information from published sources that are completely legit. No “Author” has provided any evidence otherwise yet to believe that ChatGPT and others have actually broken a law yet. For all we know the authors of these tools have library cards, and fed in screenshots of the digital scans of the book or hand scanned the book. Or didn’t even use the book at all and contextually grabbed a bunch of content from the internet at large.
Since the ML bots are all making derivative works, rather than spitting out original content… they’d be covered by copyright as a derivative work.
This only becomes an actual problem if you can prove that these tools have done BOTH
A better comparison would probably be sampling. Sampling is fair use in most of the world, though there are mixed judgments. I think most reasonable people would consider the output of ChatGPT to be transformative use, which is considered fair use.
If I created a web app that took samples from songs created by Metallica, Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, Snoop Dogg, Slayer, Eminem, Mozart, Beethoven, and hundreds of other different musicians, and allowed users to mix all these samples together into new songs, without getting a license to use these samples, the RIAA would sue the pants off of me faster than you could say “unlicensed reproduction.”
It doesn’t matter that the output of my creation is clear-cut fair use. The input of the app–the samples of copyrighted works–is infringing.
That’s part of the allegation, but it’s unsubstantiated. It isn’t entirely coherent.
It’s not entirely unsubstantiated. Sarah Silverman was able to get ChatGPT to regurgitate passages of her book back to her.
I don’t know if this holds water though. You don’t need to trail the AI on the book itself to get that result. Just on discussions about the book which for sure include passages on the book.