Authors 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.
Trick is educating the octogenarians in the senate to understand any of what you just wrote.
I'd say they should have to follow the most-restrictive license of all of their training data, and that existing CC/FOSS licenses don't count because they were designed for use in a pre-LLM world.
It seems like a pretty reasonable request. But people like free stuff, and when they think about who will get screwed by this they like to imagine that they're sticking it to the biggest publishers of mass media.
But IRL, those publishers are giddy with the idea that instead of scouting artists and bullying them into signing over their IP, they can just summon IP on demand.
The people who will suffer are the independents who refused to sign over their IP. They never got their payday, and now they never will either.
I think we just need to ban the ability to copyright any AI output. Unless you can prove you created, and or paid for the rights for every piece of training data, I don't see how it's fair. Even then, there are still arguments against letting AI create IP.
The people I’m seeing outraged are artists and authors who did not sign their ideas over for public access or for disingenuous use. not a faceless publisher with cloth bags and dollar signs painted on them. Also I don’t think you understand what public and private ownership means. A person is allowed to privately own their own creation. They don’t owe that to the world. The world isn’t entitled to it.
Here's 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. That includes requiring to retrain from scratch. 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 aren't reselling their information, they're linking you to the source which then the website decides what to do with your traffic. Which they usually want your traffic, that's the point of a public site.
That's like trying to say it's 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.
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 — before you could’ve predicted the concept of search engines — 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 don't 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 it's 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 -- 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 -- something that I think even many strident "AI" supporters agree with -- so using it as a justification for the ethics of LLMs reveals just how weak the group's 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. It's 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.
This is no different than every other capitalist enterprise. The whole system works on taking a public resource, claiming private ownership of it, and then selling it back to the public for profit.
First it was farmland, then coal and minerals, oil, seafood, and now ideas. Its how the system works and is the whole reason people have been trying to stop it for the past 150 years.
The people making the laws are there because they and/or their parents and/or grandparents did the exact same thing. As despicable and corrupt as it is you won't change it by complaining and no-one is going to make a law to stop it.
God damned right. Every "new" thing tends to be stolen. In more event history, its stolen from other capital, or from innovation with a free license, rather than artwork. Publishers might actually be able to make a problem out of this.
I hope they can at least get compensated.
So where can I check to see if my book was used? I published a book.
Did you ever comment on Reddit before 2015? If so, your copyrighted material was used to train the modern LLMs even if your published book wasn't used at all.
The database is here. You'll have to sign up for a free trial if you're not a subscriber to The Atlantic already. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/books3-database-generative-ai-training-copyright-infringement/675363/
What about my Reddit history?
Arguably there's more of my text there that was used to train these LLMs than most authors in that list.
The comment elsewhere in this thread about models built on broad public data needing to be public in turn is a salient one.
IP laws were designed to foster innovation, not hold it back.
I'd much rather see a world where we have open access models trained broadly and accelerating us towards greener pastures than one where book publishers get a few extra cents from less capable closed models that take longer for us to reach the heyday where LLMs can do things like review the past 20 years of cancer research in order to identify promising trends in allocation of future resources.
OpenAI should probably rightfully be dinged for downloading copyrighted media the same way any average user would be sued when caught doing the same.
But the popular arguments these days for making training infringement are ass backwards and a slippery slope to a far more dystopian future than the alternative.
Everyone’s a fan of fair use until it’s their work that is transformed.
Absolutely agree
Ok so it’s been stealing art now it’s coming for authors. At what point do we hold the coalition who started this shit culpable for numerous accounts of plagiarism?
TIL "culpable" is an English word too. Culpable means guilty in Spanish and I thought you were a Spanish speaker doing spanglish. Now I know you're just a man of culture.
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.
It's 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.
Does this fall under fair-use part of copyright?
The training argument is probably going to come up dry by the time the court works its way through expert testimony, as the underlying argument for training as infringement is insane.
But where OpenAI is probably in hot water is that torrenting 100k books in the first place runs afoul of existing copyright legislation.
Everyone is debating the training in these suits, but the real meat and potatoes is going to be the initial infringement of obtaining the books, not how they were subsequently used.
There's an idea by Barath Raghavan about an AI dividend that companies pay each netizen a share for the data they use to train these models.
I am into this idea if companies can't even do a simple opt-in mechanism.
Curious if the AI company actually bought those books or if they just came across them by pirating.
Oh, they're 100% pirated. Sorry this isn't open, but the preview should give you enough information. The database is available elsewhere, IIRC. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/books3-database-generative-ai-training-copyright-infringement/675363/
I 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.
...like the naturally occuring neural networks are.
That's an interesting take, I didn't know software could be inspired by other people's works. And here I thought software just did exactly as it's instructed to do. These are language models. They were given data to train those models. Did they pay for the data that they used to train for it, or did they scrub the internet and steal all these books along with everything everyone else has said?
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.
They weren't 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.
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?
Clearly not. He's saying that other authors have done the same as the software does. The software creators implemented the same principle into their llm. You are being daft on purpose.
These are machines, though, not human beings.
I guess I'd have to be an author to find out how I'd feel about it, to be fair.
What's the difference? On the most fundamental level it's all the same.
I don't think anyone is faulting the machines for this, just the people who instruct the machines to do it.
But terminator said neural networks
Did you write a comment on Reddit before 2015? If so, your copyrighted content was used without your permission to train today's LLMs, so you absolutely get to feel one way or another about it.
The idea that these authors were somehow the backbone of the models when any individual contribution was like spitting in the ocean and model weights would have considered 100 pages of Twilight fan fiction equivalent to 100 pages from Twilight is honestly one of the negative impacts of the extensive coverage these suits are getting.
Pretty much everyone who has ever written anything indexed online is a tiny part of today's LLMs.
Generally they probably bought the books they read though.
If George RR Martin torrented Tolkien, wouldn't he be infringing on the copyright no matter how he subsequently incorporated it into future output?
I completely agree that the training as infringement argument is ludicrous.
But OpenAI exposed themselves to IP infringement by sailing the high seas in how they obtained the works in the first place.
I hate that the world we live in is one where so much data is gated behind paywalls, but the law is what it is, and if the government was going to come down hard on Aaron Swartz for trying to bypass paywalls for massive amounts of written text, it's not exactly fair if there's a double standard for OpenAI doing the same thing in an even more closed fashion.
But yes, the degree of entitled focus on the premise of training an AI as equivalent of infringing is weird as heck to see from authors drawing quite clearly from earlier works in their own output.
God that Aaron/jstor thing makes me see red every time. Swartz was scraping jstor to publish it for the benefit of everyone, openai is doing it to make billions of dollars. Don't forget who the bad guys are (and donate to sci-hub)
I have to assume that openAI also paid for the books. if yes then i consider it the same as me reciting passages from memory or coming up with derivative text.
if no, then by all means, go after them and any model trainer for the cost of one book.
Asking an LLM to recite an entire novel isn't even vaguely a thing yet.