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Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews

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Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews

#31

Post by somenameforme »

low_tech_love wrote: post #10

So many questions: Are these books copyright by Tom Lesley, ChatGPT, OpenAI, ...? Should he share the money with OpenAI, or with the internet? Do we need to update the definitions of plagiarism? So it goes.

This [1] is, to my knowledge, the latest word on who'd own the copyright. And the answer is most likely the author, with the second most likely candidate being nobody. In a nutshell, "AI" generated content itself cannot be copyrighted since the process is carried out by software instead of a human, and software cannot be assigned ownership of copyright. However, material that is sufficiently recombined in a 'creative way' can be copyrighted.

The case/example mentioned is that a single image from image generation software cannot be copyrighted, but a series of related images being used to tell a story can be copyrighted, because it's a human carrying out the creative task.

[1] - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/us-issues-guidan...

Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews

#32

Post by stonemetal12 »

low_tech_love wrote: post #10

So many questions: Are these books copyright by Tom Lesley, ChatGPT, OpenAI, ...? Should he share the money with OpenAI, or with the internet? Do we need to update the definitions of plagiarism? So it goes.

There maybe some need to legally clarify how much input is necessary for Tom to claim copyright.

ChatGPT can't, legally speaking only humans are capable of claiming copyright. In the monkey selfie case a few years ago it was determined animals and machines can't claim copyright. In cases where there is no human author, the work is public domain.

Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews

#33

Post by inetsee »

thih9 wrote: post #26

Is it legal to publish books with content copied from chatgpt output? Is it possible to prove (in a legal sense) that this content comes from chatgpt?

The Copyright Office has decreed that AI generated content cannot be Copyrighted. If these books have a copyright listing then they are a violation of the rules. I doubt if the "author" is at risk for legal repurcussions, beyond not being able to sue for copyright violation.

Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews

#34

Post by rcarr »

mkl95 wrote: post #14
ccleve wrote: post #12

All the books have approximately the same number of reviews. Is Amazon completely uninterested in dealing with fake reviews?

More positive reviews = more sales. They are not just uninterested in dealing with fake reviews, their algorithms reward products with positive reviews regardless of their authenticity. Of course if you report it, they eventually deal with it, as long as it is required by some law.

Only if they’re taking a very short term perspective. If the customer is left feeling like they’re consistently getting scammed, they will stop shopping at Amazon and take their money elsewhere. I highly, highly doubt Amazon is letting these through the net on purpose.

Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews

#36

Post by tivert »

dahart wrote: post #11

This was an inevitable outcome of ChatGPT/LLMS, no? I expect to see a lot more of this by a lot of different people. I feel like a ton of the examples I’ve seen to date are effectively regurgitating Stack Overflow (sometimes verbatim!) and in a kind of abstract way, I feel like this is exactly the same as someone opportunistically publishing a bunch of auto-generated books… publishing a model trained on a bunch of we…

This is actually a spin on an existing git-rich-quick scam (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw). Version 1.0 had people hiring low cost ghostwriters for hundreds of dollars to bang out a book on some SEO topic. Now you use the same playbook with "AI," with far less upfront cost.

Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews

#37

Post by topkai22 »

thih9 wrote: post #26

Is it legal to publish books with content copied from chatgpt output? Is it possible to prove (in a legal sense) that this content comes from chatgpt?

I’m not a lawyer, but I really doubt it’d be illegal in the US at least.

Just creating a book from ChatGPT is not against its terms of service, as “ OpenAI hereby assigns to you all its right, title and interest in and to Output. This means you can use Content for any purpose, including commercial purposes such as sale or publication, if you comply with these Terms.” What would be against the TOS is claiming that the output is human generated, so theoretically OpenAI could sue.

The courts have recently held that AI generated images are not copyrightable, so these “books” are basically just public domain content (where they aren’t directly copying existing human generated content). It’s not illegal to republish public domain content as your own.

The thing that might be straight up illegal here is the reviews. Those appear to be completely fake and probably constitute fraud.

Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews

#38

Post by armitron »

rcarr wrote: post #34
mkl95 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More positive reviews = more sales. They are not just uninterested in dealing with fake reviews, their algorithms reward products with positive reviews regardless of their authenticity. Of course if you report it, they eventually deal with it, as long as it is required by some law.

Only if they’re taking a very short term perspective. If the customer is left feeling like they’re consistently getting scammed, they will stop shopping at Amazon and take their money elsewhere. I highly, highly doubt Amazon is letting these through the net on purpose.

It doesn't seem like they care. For the last coupe of years, their packing of books for mailing has been so bad (end result that the books one received would be severely damaged) that I've stopped buying books from Amazon altogether (I'd already stopped buying anything but books due to bad reviews and scams). Most of my friends/work colleagures have done the same.

Re: Tom Lesley has published 40 books in 2023, all with 100% positive reviews

#39

Post by stonemetal12 »

inetsee wrote: post #33
thih9 wrote: post #26

Is it legal to publish books with content copied from chatgpt output? Is it possible to prove (in a legal sense) that this content comes from chatgpt?

The Copyright Office has decreed that AI generated content cannot be Copyrighted. If these books have a copyright listing then they are a violation of the rules. I doubt if the "author" is at risk for legal repurcussions, beyond not being able to sue for copyright violation.

I have yet to see a legal argument that says the output of ChatGPT is free from derivative works claims. So you can't assert ownership of the output, but that doesn't mean someone else can't assert rights on the grounds of derivative works.

It is one of the reasons I don't see Copilot going anywhere. Any company that uses it can't assert ownership over their own IP, and if Copilot accidently reproduces a chunk of training data verbatim then someone else can.

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