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Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement

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Re: Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement

#311
post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't completely new, similar issues came up with search engines and this may be seen as 'transformative'. But there may be issues with models that happily reproduce copyrighted texts in their entirety along with other novel issues like models that hallucinate defamatory things or other such problems. Still, I doubt this particular genie can be stuffed back into the bottle, so we'll probably see a lot of litigat…

I agree it's not an entirely new issue. But it's a little different from search results. Say I use the generative paint brush in photoshop. It reproduces a portion of the copyrighted work. I then use the image on an advertising campaign, other merchandise, or post the final product as my own work. Would I be responsible? Would Adobe? Given that retraining these models is not simple, or cheap, would this be just 'cost…

How the copyrighted work is reproduced is irrelevant wrt whether copyright is violated.

I suspect you would be held liable, though you would probably have a claim of your own to make against Adobe depending on the nature of the work in question.

"Errors and Ommisions" is a fairly standard name for the type of insurance you are thinking of. Typically, you would get it to cover you / your small business in the event that you, by mistake or minor negligence, caused harm to a client (i.e. a bug that cost them some sales).

I don't know the ins and outs of the insurance too well, but as long as it didn't create something super famous like the Nike swoosh, a genuine mistake through the use of an industry standard tool like Adobe might be covered.

Re: Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's take a second to remember that copyright is the reason ~every child doesn't have access to ~every book ever written. While it might be too disruptive to eliminate copyright overnight, we should remember that our world will be much better and improve much faster to the extent we can reduce copyright's impact. And we should cheer it on when it happens. A majority of the world's population in 2023 has a smartphone…

It would look largely identical to ours, I think. It's pretty trivial to get access to many, if not most, e-books. Any public-domain work is available on Project Gutenberg [0]. Copyrighted works can be accessed for free using tools of various legality: Libby [1] is likely sponsored by your local library and gives free access to e-books and audiobooks. Library Genesis [2] has a questionable legal status but has a huge…

Public domain would be fine, if we had the original copyright term instead of "life of the author plus seventy years."

Libby is an interesting option, though I'm curious how many kids in disadvantaged countries would actually have access to it.

Regarding Libgen, I'm not convinced it makes the case for modern copyright to say it's fine, because people can just violate copyright.

Re: Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's take a second to remember that copyright is the reason ~every child doesn't have access to ~every book ever written. While it might be too disruptive to eliminate copyright overnight, we should remember that our world will be much better and improve much faster to the extent we can reduce copyright's impact. And we should cheer it on when it happens. A majority of the world's population in 2023 has a smartphone…

There are already many more public domain books than people are inclined to read: https://www.gutenberg.org/ https://librivox.org/ many of which form the basis for an education: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34630153 And most of which, when in copyright, paid their authors quite handsomely in terms of royalties. If you believe that books should exist without copyright, then one has to ask --- how many books ha…

>If you believe that books should exist without copyright, then one has to ask --- how many books have you written which you have explicitly placed in the public domain? Or, how many authors have you patronized so as to fund their writing so that they can publish their works freely?

Lol

Edit: I should probably clarify here. While I can’t speak for OP, I can say that, for some reason, I am sure there are people who have done both lol

Re: Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

jeez, way to make it personal I agree that copyright is done for in an age of generative models, and as a pirate I'm kind of rooting for it, but i'm not so sure it's unequivocally a Good Thing. I'm interested to understand history better, how art and science was produced and distributed before the legal fiction of intellectual property. the point of allowing someone a monopoly on their work is to share it with the pu…

I think you're right that it'll be tried, but seems unlikely to work. All it takes is one person in the enclave to leak it, intentionally or accidentally.

Re: Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not was he's saying at all. He's saying you can train an AI on copyrighted material just like people can learn from copyrighted material. If you acquire the material illegally that a separate issue that training AI doesn't give you any protection against.

Can I memorize copyrighted material and recite it on Youtube? What if I do so but imperfectly? Where do you draw the line? If it's infringement for a human to do that why is it not for a LLM?

That's not what LLMs typically do, though. Pull up ChatGPT and ask it to recite Harry Potter for you. It'll fail.

Ask it to write a book similar to Harry Potter, and it'll make an attempt at it. But human writers absolutely do read Harry Potter and write similar books, and that's perfectly legal. There have probably been thousands of published books inspired by Lord of the Rings.

Re: Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement

#316

> The lawsuit against OpenAI alleges that summaries of the plaintiffs’ work generated by ChatGPT indicate the bot was trained on their copyrighted content. “The summaries get some details wrong” but still show that ChatGPT “retains knowledge of particular works in the training dataset," the lawsuit says. Setting aside the whole issue of whether LLM constitutes a derived work of whatever it's trained on, this sounds l…

There's an interesting nuance here if you were to put a human in the place of the LLM. We have read thousands of works; does that mean anything we write is derivative?

Re: Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement

#317
post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then most people stop writing books because they can't get paid for their time/effort and ~every child will be stuck with outdated knowledge within a decade.

Or maybe we could figure out a new economic model, instead of blindly sticking with one based on the limitations of the pre-digital age.

How about you go figure out this new economic model, and come back when it's ready. Until then, the existing model will persist, thank you

Re: Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement

#318
post #79
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it different from asking to me to summarize anything? I could have bought the book, or read the Wikipedia page, or listened people talking about it, or downloaded the torrent. In all those cases my summary could be right or could be wrong. If the rights holders know that I dowloaded the torrent they could sue me. In the other cases they can't. What if it turns out that OpenAI bought a copy of every book ingest…

I feel like thats one of the many questions regulators and law makers are going to be asked long term. I'm sure buying the book for "commercial purposes" like that would't be appropriate, but then again, does that mean if I read it and then summarize it in my work, or regurgitate its info as part of my job...I'm violating a license? A world where humans have special permissions but LLMs don't seems pretty interesting…

There's nothing illegal about reading a book and then circulating your summary/review of it. This doesn't even get into issues of fair use because you aren't redistributing any of the copyrighted material in the first place, merely facts and your own opinions about it.

The separate issue that's concerning is that GPT can't be trusted to accurately summarize anything obscure at all, but it'll sure throw text at you nonetheless.

Re: Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement

#319

The best thing that could happen to humanity is if OpenAI is sued comically into oblivion. LLMs are the anti-humanity, and the sooner we rid the planet of them the better off we'll be.

Downvote me all you want to show you have nothing to say. Return to my comment in 10 years to find I'm right.
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