6 ms·
The Authors Whose Pirated Books Are Powering Generative AI
- kromem 3y ago'Powering' It's like pissing in the ocean and thinking you caused a tsunami in Southeast Asia.
- mutant_glofish 3y agoThis is an analysis of the "Books3" dataset. The original download link was taken down [1] but it's still available from Academic Torrents [2]. [1] https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-group-takes-prominent-ai-training-dataset-books3-offline-230816/ https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-group-takes-prominent-a... [2]: https://academictorrents.com/details/0d366035664fdf51cfbe9f733953ba325776e667 https://academictorrents.com/details/0d366035664fdf51cfbe9f7...
- sillysaurusx 3y agoThere also exists a working direct download link which I can’t post because the Danish Rights Alliance is following me around DMCA’ing anything to that effect. They already struck my Twitter once. But, BitTorrent is probably the only way a dataset like this can survive now. It’s a damn shame since OpenAI are the ones making money, and researchers are simply trying to replicate their scientific efforts. Original books3 announcement thread: https://x.com/theshawwn/status/1320282149329784833?s=61&t=jQbmCk1JqL7depzFWJNuPA https://x.com/theshawwn/status/1320282149329784833?s=61&t=jQ... An article on books3 from Gizmodo, which I quite like: https://gizmodo.com/anti-piracy-group-takes-ai-training-dataset-books3-off-1850743763 https://gizmodo.com/anti-piracy-group-takes-ai-training-data... By the way, you can use aria2c to download just the books3 part of that torrent. Use aria2c —-select-file=44 and pass the torrent url. Takes about 30 minutes. Plus most people probably don’t have 800GB free.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago> Plus most people probably don’t have 800GB free. They should make space. Data sets in general are hugely slept on among hobbyists. Even just what's publicly available, like Wikipedia's dumps; you can do so much fun stuff with them and a few days of compute time!
- troupe 3y agoImagine how outraged authors would have been if people read their books, read other author's books, and then combine what they had learned to create new combination of thoughts. Or if someone were to create a new painting based on things they had learned from studying a previous artist. Truly awful that technology is doing this thing that has never happened before in the history of humanity.
- bakugo 3y agoCame here expecting to see the usual nonsense "b-but computers are exactly like people and deserve the same rights!" comment, was not disappointed.
- throwaway5959 3y agoWhere else would you source large amounts of text but from human authors?
- notamy 3y agoAsking those human authors for their consent. "It doesn't scale!" or similar reasons don't override someone not consenting.
- throwaway5959 3y agoThat’s not what I was asking.
- chii 3y ago> Asking those human authors for their consent. they consented by virtue of publishing the work. If a human eye can read it, then consent has been given.
- bakugo 3y agoNo, I'm pretty sure that publishing a work does not imply that you also consent to other people taking it and selling it as their own.
- mmastrac 3y agoI believe this dataset came from https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=shawn https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=shawn
- upwardbound 3y agoI think you're correct: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1320282149329784833?lang=en https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1320282149329784833?lan...
- sillysaurusx 3y agoClose! From me. :) That’s a former account.
- sillysaurusx 3y agohttps://archive.is/OgTZF https://archive.is/OgTZF
- aimor 3y agoI'm surprised the issue seems to be training on copyrighted material, that seems perfectly legal. I'm more interested in the ability of these models to violate copyright by reproducing it. How much of a book is Llama2 allowed to generate before it's an issue?
- sillysaurusx 3y agoBingo. This seems to be the central issue. In fact, it’s not even copyright violation to distribute a model, since models aren’t copyrightable. They’re a collection of facts, like a phone book, produced by a purely automated process. It’s the outout that counts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36691050 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36691050 And even the output has been ruled not copyrightable in recent court proceedings.
- sp332 3y agoSo you think training should be legal, but actually using the trained model to generate copyrighted text should be illegal? Edit: As a secondary point, it's not like Meta bought all those books. They downloaded unlicensed copies.
- harshreality 3y agoGoogle didn't buy the books they incorporated into books.google.com either. You can use books without buying them. e.g. libraries, or borrowing books from anyone even if they're not a "library". Copyright is not about internal use, it's about copying and distribution. This is not about what anyone thinks should be legal, but rather what is legal under the current law. The law was not designed for the digital era where "use" could be something other than a person consuming the content, and this has not been meaningfully addressed, therefore other uses are legal by default because that's how the law works.
- sp332 3y agoGoogle didn't buy the books they incorporated into books.google.com either. How did they scan them in then?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- beej71 3y agoI'm especially interested in how much damage ChatGPT has done these authors.