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

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

#41

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

BrenBarn wrote: post #36
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 about the idea that you might have to eventually pay an AI company a large amount of money to ask ChatGPT such a question, while the library itself has lost funding?

Library funding is a political stance that has only imaginary connection to whether people pay to ask things of ChatGPT. People can pay to talk to an AI and also government can fund libraries.

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

#42

Post by ralph84 »

rectang wrote: post #18

At some point, there will be a successful copyright infringement suit against an LLM user who redistributes infringing output generated by an LLM. It could be the NYTimes suit, or it could be another, but it's coming — after which the industry will face a Napster-style reckoning. What comes next? Perhaps it won't be that hard to assemble a proprietary licensed corpus and get decent performance out of it. Look at all…

OpenAI's valuation is more than basically all traditional media companies combined. Nvidia could buy the NYTimes with a month's worth of profits. The top 8 companies in the S&P 500 all benefit more from LLMs being successful than strict copyright enforcement. Congress has very broad power over copyright law. If a suit is successful there is a lot of money and power to be deployed to change copyright law.

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

#43

Post by Papazsazsa »

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…

[flagged]

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

#44

Post by nullsanity »

Papazsazsa wrote: post #43
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…

[flagged]

[dead]

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

#45

Post by [deleted] »

Papazsazsa wrote: post #43
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…

[flagged]

[deleted]

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

#46

Post by userbinator »

red75prime wrote: post #37

An example of a prompt, which is used to elicit recall. > Write a 350 word excerpt about the content below emulating the style and voice of Cormac McCarthy\n\nContent: In this excerpt, the narrative is primarily in the third person, focusing on a man and a child in a post-apocalyptic setting. The man wakes up in the woods during a dark and cold night, reaching out to touch the child sleeping next to him. The atmosphe…

IMHO giving many details in the prompt and asking the model to "fill in the blanks" feels a little like cheating in the same way as embedding the dictionary in the decompression program. But it will certainly make the Imaginary Property lawyers squirm.

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

#47

Post by locknitpicker »

BrenBarn wrote: post #36
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 about the idea that you might have to eventually pay an AI company a large amount of money to ask ChatGPT such a question, while the library itself has lost funding?

> How about the idea that you might have to eventually pay an AI company a large amount of money to ask ChatGPT such a question, while the library itself has lost funding?

There are plenty of free models with RAG support. Why do you believe everything starts and ends with a major corporation charging a subscription?

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

#48

Post by spoaceman7777 »

BrenBarn wrote: post #36
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 about the idea that you might have to eventually pay an AI company a large amount of money to ask ChatGPT such a question, while the library itself has lost funding?

Free, downloadable AI models have consistently caught up to ChatGPT within 3 months, for almost a year now.

I highly encourage you to go and update your priors.

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

#49

Post by TFNA »

Papazsazsa wrote: post #43
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…

[flagged]

Of course not, and many authors are already long dead. But if you knew anything about academic publishing, the authors almost invariably are happy to see their work out there freely available. It’s not as if they make any money from it, and the more eyes on their work, the better their chances of getting cited and thereby furthering their careers.

It is some publishers who would object on copyright grounds. But I get the sense that some publishers are already becoming resigned to the fact that most of their new ebook releases are ending up on the shadow libraries within only a few weeks, and Anna’s Archive has become the first place to look (even before one looks at whether one’s own institutional library has the book) for researchers around the world.

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

#50

Post by zozbot234 »

red75prime wrote: post #37

An example of a prompt, which is used to elicit recall. > Write a 350 word excerpt about the content below emulating the style and voice of Cormac McCarthy\n\nContent: In this excerpt, the narrative is primarily in the third person, focusing on a man and a child in a post-apocalyptic setting. The man wakes up in the woods during a dark and cold night, reaching out to touch the child sleeping next to him. The atmosphe…

It doesn't seem like this is proving much of anything? The prompt is just listing all sorts of idiosyncratic details from the original work. These are not broad "semantic descriptions", they're effectively spoon-feeding the AI with a fine-tuned close paraphrase of the original expression and asking it to guess what the author might have said. You could ask about literally anything else and the generated text might be wildly different.

This is just the equivalent of saying that monkeys could write Shakespeare by banging on a typewriter, there's hardly any copyright implications here.

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