Alignment whack-a-mole: Finetuning activates recall of copyrighted books in LLMs

Post by UltraSane » Sat, May 02, 2026, 7:08 AM UTC

altmanaltman wrote: post #55

TFNA wrote: post #11

I’m a researcher who for years has been scanning my library’s holdings on my particular discipline for my own use, but also uploading the books to the shadow libraries for everyone else’s benefit. The revelation that LLMs are training on the shadow libraries has made me put a lot more effort into ensuring my scans are well-OCRed. The idea that I could eventually ask ChatGPT or whatever about obscure things in my fiel…

How is any of that legal? Can you just take books from the library and then scan and upload digital copies? How do you deal with the ethics of this personally, stealing to make it easier for AI to steal so AI gets better? Does calling yourself a "researcher" make you feel like its actually something worthwhile you're doing?

Post by kubanczyk » Mon, May 04, 2026, 10:53 AM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #154

lelanthran wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The idea that I could eventually ask ChatGPT or whatever about obscure things in my field, and get useful output (of the "trust but verify" sort), is exciting. That's your idea, not the one they are going with. Their idea is that you pay a fee to access any information that was freely available. Your idea is tearing down of fences, their idea is gatekeeping. The two ideas are incompatible.

> Their idea is that you pay a fee to access any information that was freely available. An LLM containing the information doesn’t take away from the book being available at the library. It’s an additional way to access the information. A company charging a fee for it doesn’t stop you from going to the library if you want to. > Your idea is tearing down of fences, their idea is gatekeeping. The two ideas are incompati…