The fact that the ai can summarize these works in detail is proof that they were trained using copyrighted material without permission, (which is not fair use) Sarah Silverman is obviously not going to be hurt financially by this, but there are hundreds of thousands of authors who definitely will be affected. They have every right to sue.
Why does “fair use” even fall into it? I’m not familiar with their specific license, but the general definition of copyright is:
A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time.
Nothing was copied, or distributed (in a form that anybody can consider “The Work”), or displayed, or performed. The only possible legal argument they have is adapting as a derivative work. And anybody who is familiar with how an LLM works knows that the form that results from reading in content is completely different from the source.
LLMs/LDMs are not taking in billions of books and putting them into a database. It is a very lossy process. Out of all of the billions of images trained from the Stable Diffusion database, the resulting model is 4 GBs. There is no universe where you can store billions of images into a mere 4 GBs. Stable Diffusion cannot and will not, pixel-by-pixel, reproduce a Van Gogh. It can make something that kind of looks like a Van Gogh, but styles are not copyrightable.
The same applies to an LLM like ChatGPT. It cannot reproduce entire books, or anywhere close to that. If you ask it to recreate Page 25 of Silverman’s book, it can’t do it. If it doesn’t even contain a minor portion of the original material, it can’t even be considered a derivative work.
They don’t have a case. They have a lot of publicity and noise, but they will lose to inevitability.
You make a lot of excellent points, but I think the main issue of contention is just using copyrighted work to train generative AI without the author’s permission regardless.
If they did ask permission, there would be no problem. But an author or artist should be given the choice if their work is going to be used to train an AI.
You make a lot of excellent points, but I think the main issue of contention is just using copyrighted work to train generative AI without the author’s permission regardless.
If I read a book at the library… and come up with an amazing revolutionary product. Then make a company and go on to make billions of dollar per year. The original book Author has no claim to my income.
There’s no contention. This is just a money grab. Copyright doesn’t disallow people from consuming the content as they please. It simply disallows someone to pass off the original works as your own when it’s not.
Well yeah, art is made to be consumed by people.
And all art is inspired by other art. People write scifi books after reading other scifi books etc Thats not the issue here.
The issue is artists should be able to opt out of having their work taken and fed into a big project they have no control over.
There is already a well established practise of getting permission in academic settings for reprinting written work/journal articles/etc. etc. And all published authors and academics understand that their work will be read, maybe used in an academic setting, summarized, debated, discussed, quoted, etc. Getting permission is definitely a thing in academia.
People keep taking issue with this articles use of “summarizing” and linking to wikipedia… Summaries of copyrighted work are obviously not illegal.
This article is oversimplified and does a crummy job of explaining the problem. Ars Technica does a much better job explaining.
The fact that the ai can summarize these works in detail is proof that they were trained using copyrighted material without permission, (which is not fair use) Sarah Silverman is obviously not going to be hurt financially by this, but there are hundreds of thousands of authors who definitely will be affected. They have every right to sue.
Why does “fair use” even fall into it? I’m not familiar with their specific license, but the general definition of copyright is:
Nothing was copied, or distributed (in a form that anybody can consider “The Work”), or displayed, or performed. The only possible legal argument they have is adapting as a derivative work. And anybody who is familiar with how an LLM works knows that the form that results from reading in content is completely different from the source.
LLMs/LDMs are not taking in billions of books and putting them into a database. It is a very lossy process. Out of all of the billions of images trained from the Stable Diffusion database, the resulting model is 4 GBs. There is no universe where you can store billions of images into a mere 4 GBs. Stable Diffusion cannot and will not, pixel-by-pixel, reproduce a Van Gogh. It can make something that kind of looks like a Van Gogh, but styles are not copyrightable.
The same applies to an LLM like ChatGPT. It cannot reproduce entire books, or anywhere close to that. If you ask it to recreate Page 25 of Silverman’s book, it can’t do it. If it doesn’t even contain a minor portion of the original material, it can’t even be considered a derivative work.
They don’t have a case. They have a lot of publicity and noise, but they will lose to inevitability.
You make a lot of excellent points, but I think the main issue of contention is just using copyrighted work to train generative AI without the author’s permission regardless.
If they did ask permission, there would be no problem. But an author or artist should be given the choice if their work is going to be used to train an AI.
If I read a book at the library… and come up with an amazing revolutionary product. Then make a company and go on to make billions of dollar per year. The original book Author has no claim to my income.
There’s no contention. This is just a money grab. Copyright doesn’t disallow people from consuming the content as they please. It simply disallows someone to pass off the original works as your own when it’s not.
Well yeah, art is made to be consumed by people.
And all art is inspired by other art. People write scifi books after reading other scifi books etc Thats not the issue here.
The issue is artists should be able to opt out of having their work taken and fed into a big project they have no control over.
So in your opinion a should University have to ask each authors permission before using their work as a reference for each study run there one by one?
There is already a well established practise of getting permission in academic settings for reprinting written work/journal articles/etc. etc. And all published authors and academics understand that their work will be read, maybe used in an academic setting, summarized, debated, discussed, quoted, etc. Getting permission is definitely a thing in academia.