Live data from Hacker News

Meta's Llama 3.1 can recall 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book

understandingai.org

231–240 of 326 posts

Re: Meta's Llama 3.1 can recall 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book

#231

I'm surprised no one in the comments has mentioned overfitting. Perhaps this is too obvious but I think of it as a very clear bug in a model if it asserts something to be true because it has heard it once. I realize that training a model is not easy, but this is something that should've been caught before it was released. Either QA is sleeping on the job or they have intentionally released a model with serious flaws…

Overfitting makes for more human-like output (because it's repeating words written by a human). Out of all possible failure states of a model, overfitting is probably what you want out of an LLM, as long as it's not overfitted enough to lose lawsuits.

I disagree. I'd include overfitting for LLMs as creating unreasonably strong connections to individual sequences used for training, whereas a good mix of that and connections between chunks of those sequences are required.

Re: Meta's Llama 3.1 can recall 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book

#232
post #64

As an experiment I searched Google for "harry potter and the sorcerer's stone text": - the first result is a pdf of the full book - the second result is a txt of the full book - the third result is a pdf of the complete harry potter collection - the fourth result is a txt of the full book (hosted on github funny enough) Further down there are similar copies from the internet archive and dozens of other sites. All in…

> No one is using this as a substitute for buying the book. You don't get to say that. Copyright protects the author of a work, but does not bind them to enforce it in any instance. Unlike a trademark, a copyright holder does not lose their protection by allowing unlicensed usage. It is wholly at the copyright holders discretion to decide which usages they allow and which they do not.

Of their exact work, sure, but Cliff notes exist for many books and don't infringe copyright.

Re: Meta's Llama 3.1 can recall 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book

#233
post #223
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve yet to read an actual argument defending commercial LLM’s as fair use based on existing (edit:legal) criteria.

If you really haven't read a single argument about it then you're deliberately blocking them out, because it just takes a couple minutes of searching. https://www.arl.org/blog/training-generative-ai-models-on-co... https://hls.harvard.edu/today/does-chatgpt-violate-new-york-... https://www.bakerdonelson.com/artificial-intelligence-and-co... https://www.techpolicy.press/to-support-ai-defend-the-open-i...

Those support the utility or debate individual points but don’t make a coherent argument that LLM are strictly fair use.

First link provides quotes but doesn’t actually make an argument that LLM’s are fair use under current precedent. Rather that training AI can be fair use and researchers would like LLM’s to include copyrighted works to aid research on modern culture. The second article goes into depth but isn’t a defense of LLM’s. If anything they suggest a settlement is likely. The final instead argues for the utility of LLM’s, which is relevant but doesn’t rely on existing precedent, the court could rule in favor of some mandatory licensing scheme for example.

The third gets close: “We expect AI companies to rely upon the fact that their uses of copyrighted works in training their LLMs have a further purpose or different character than that of the underlying content. At least one court in the Northern District of California has rejected the argument that, because the plaintiffs' books were used to train the defendant’s LLM, the LLM itself was an infringing derivative work. See Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Case No. 23-cv-03417, Doc. 56 (N.D. Cal. 2023). The Kadrey court referred to this argument as "nonsensical" because there is no way to understand an LLM as a recasting or adaptation of the plaintiffs' books. Id. The Kadrey court also rejected the plaintiffs' argument that every output of the LLM was an infringing derivative work (without any showing by the plaintiffs that specific outputs, or portion of outputs, were substantially similar to specific inputs). Id.”

Very relevant, but runs into issues when large sections can be recovered and people do use them as substitutes for the original work.

Re: Meta's Llama 3.1 can recall 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book

#234
post #184
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve yet to read an actual argument defending commercial LLM’s as fair use based on existing (edit:legal) criteria.

It seems like a pretty reasonable argument and easy enough to make. A human with a great memory could probably recreate some absurd % of Harry Potter after reading it, there are some very unusual minds out there. It is clear that if they read Harry Potter and being capable of reproducing it on demand as a party trick that would be fair use. So the LLM should also be fair use since it is using a mechanism similar enou…

I'm fairly sure that the law treats humans and machines differently, so arguing that it would be OK if a person did it therefore it's OK to build a machine that does it is not very helpful. (I'm not sure you're doing that but lots of random non-lawyers on the Internet seem to be doing that.)

Claims like this demonstrate it, really: it is obviously not copyright infringement for a human to memorise a poem and recite it in private; it obviously is copyright infringement to build a machine that does that and grant public access to that machine. (Or does anyone think that's not obvious?)

Re: Meta's Llama 3.1 can recall 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book

#235
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like a pretty reasonable argument and easy enough to make. A human with a great memory could probably recreate some absurd % of Harry Potter after reading it, there are some very unusual minds out there. It is clear that if they read Harry Potter and being capable of reproducing it on demand as a party trick that would be fair use. So the LLM should also be fair use since it is using a mechanism similar enou…

> A human with a great memory This kind of argument keeps popping up usually to justify why training LLMs on protected material is fair, and why their output is fair. It's always used in a super selective way, never accounting for confounding factors, just because superficially it sort of supports that idea. Exceptional humans are exceptional, rare. When they learn, or create something new based on prior knowledge, o…

That’s why the “transformative” argument falls so flat to me. It’s about transformation in the mind and hands of a human.

Traditionally tools that reduce the friction of creating those transformations make a work less “transformed” in the eyes of the law, not more so. In this case the transformation requires zero mental or physical effort.

Re: Meta's Llama 3.1 can recall 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs aren't probabilistic. The randomness is bolted on top by the cloud providers as a trick to give them a more humanistic feel. Under the hood they are 100% deterministic, modulo quantization and rounding errors. So yes, it is very much possible to use LLMs as a lossy compressed archive for texts.

Has nothing to do with "cloud providers". The randomness is inherent to the sampler, using a sampler that picks top probability for next token would result in lower quality output as I have definitely seen it get stuck in certain endless sequences when doing that. Ie you get something like "Complete this poem 'over yonder hills I saw' output: a fair maiden with hair of gold like the sun gold like the sun gold like th…

> would result in lower quality output

No it wouldn't.

> seen it get stuck in certain endless sequences when doing that

Yes, and infinite loops is just an inherent property of LLMs, like hallucinations.

Re: Meta's Llama 3.1 can recall 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book

#237
post #109
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it is. It's just a form of compression. If I train an autoencoder on an image, and distribute the weights, that would obviously be the same as distributing the content. Just because the content is commingled with lots of other content doesn't make it disappear. Besides, where did the sections of text from the input works that show up in the output text come from? Divine inspiration? God whispering to the ma…

[flagged]

> For one thing, they are probabilistic, so you wouldn't get the same content back every time like you would with a compression algorithm.

If I make a compression algorithm that randomly changes some pixels, can I use it to distribute pirated movies?

Re: Meta's Llama 3.1 can recall 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep waiting for the day when software stops being compared to a human person (a being with agency, free will, consciousness, and human rights of its own) for the purposes of justifying IP law circumvention. Yes, there is no problem when a person reads some book and recalls pieces[0] of it in a suitable context. How would that in any way address when certain people create and distribute commercial software, providi…

I keep waiting for the day when people realise that IP law has been used and abused and thanks to Disney extended out for many, many lifetimes and all manner of dirty tricks/hacks to keep the late stage capitalism profit engine going. I 100% agree that if an LLM can entirely reproduce a book then that is copyright infringement, overfitting and generally a bad model. I also believe that in this case, HP (and other pop…

Laws can have been used and abused and still be important. I know it’s hard to believe but the independent artists who were already struggling need IP laws to survive.

Otherwise Disney and the like can just come in, make copies or derivatives, and profit without paying those artists a penny.

Which everyone usually agrees (or used to) is not a fair outcome.

But somehow giant corporations not named Disney taking the same work in the same extractive mode in order to create an art-job-destroying machine is totally fine because Disney bad?

Maybe most people making this argument are also all for UBI and wealth redistribution on a massive scale, but they don’t seem to mention it much when trashing IP laws.

Re: Meta's Llama 3.1 can recall 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book

#239
post #107
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even assuming you are correct, which I'm skeptical of, does this make it better? It's essentially the same thing, they are copying from a source that is violating copyright, whether that's a pirated book directly or a pirated book via fanficton.

Generally I think it matters a great deal to get the facts right when discussing something with nuance. Is this specific fact required to make my beliefs consistent... Yes I think it is, but if you disagree with me in other ways it might not be important to your beliefs. Legally (note: not a lawyer) I'm generally of the opinion that A) Torrenting these books was probably copyright infringement on Meta's part. They sh…

[deleted]

Re: Meta's Llama 3.1 can recall 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it Llama violating the "copyright" or is it the researcher pushing it to do so?

If you distribute a zip file of the book, are you violating copyright, or is it the person who unzips it?

If you walk through the N-gram database with a copy of Harry Potter in hand and observe that for N=7, you can find any piece of it in the database with above-average frequency, does that mean N-gram database is violating copyright?
Post reply on HN