6 ms·

> "Fair use" doesn't generally include taking the author's entire work (or for that matter, his entire lifetime's corpus). If someone studies every one of Step

by troupe 3y ago

> "Fair use" doesn't generally include taking the author's entire work (or for that matter, his entire lifetime's corpus). If someone studies every one of Stephen King's books, studies King's style, studies his plots, etc. and uses the knowledge to learn how to be a writer, there is no need to invoke "fair use" unless they are actually copying King's books. Studying an author's corpus in order to be able to produce works like the author is not copyright infringement. It is just the way we learn...and the way LLMs learn as well. If we want to say it isn't allowed because LLM read too quickly, then we could do that. Maybe make them not read any faster than humans. But LLMs aren't doing something different than humans other than just the speed at which they do it.

ang_cire 3y ago
If you read the PDF, you'd know that OpenAI admits they ARE actually copying his books, in order to train on them, and they are arguing that this is okay because they don't want to have to obtain a legal copy of the work, because that would be too expensive. They are literally arguing they should be allowed to illegally download stuff so long as no human reads the downloaded work directly. To further your analogy, it would be like your prospective writer objecting to being arrested for stealing the books from the bookstore because he just wanted to become a better writer by studying them, not read them for entertainment purposes.
- pests 3y ago
  This reminds me of the Google Books lawsuit back in the 2010s. Google didn't ask permission from every copyright holder but was still allowed to scan books due to fair use.
  - kelseyfrog 3y ago
    This very lawsuit is referenced in OpenAI's memo as precedent > Perhaps the most compelling case on point is Authors Guild v. Google. There, search engine Google digitally scanned “tens of millions of books” without their authors’ permission for inclusion in a searchable digital database.
  - ang_cire 3y ago
    The big difference is that Google legally obtained the copies of the books they scanned. OpenAI did not. Publicly-accessible != legal to download/ copy. The copyright infringement in Google's case was not illegally obtaining the original work, it was about the snippets they provided. In OpenAI's case, it is also about the illegal obtainment (downloading) of the original work, which they admit to in their brief, but argue shouldn't be illegal if they intend only to transform it. That element was not present in AGI v Google.
- troupe 3y ago
  If you are saying that they illegally obtained King's book, then the issue is the fact that the stole the book from somewhere. I don't disagree with your assessment there. But if they checked the book out from the library and let the LLM read it, the fact that it has read it shouldn't be any different than if you had read it as a human. If I break into the court house to let my child see the artwork in the public areas, the issue isn't whether my child can see, learn from, and copy the style of the artwork. The issue is that I broke into the court house instead of going in the front door when it was open to the public.
  - ang_cire 3y ago
    > if they checked the book out from the library and let the LLM read it Did you know it's actually illegal to photocopy books you check out from the library? It's an illegal copy. That aside, the analogies between humans and ML models fall apart when you actually get into the details, which is why AI companies don't want that. Human brains don't have RAM and Disk storage that keep direct copies of works. Computers do. Human brains are not entirely deterministic calculators. Computers are. If you have all the state data of an AI model, you can know exactly what it will produce, and the input data is a necessary component of that state data, so it's not transformative in the same way as a human brain in the first place. 2 humans will not create the exact same output given a shared starting state in the way that 2 computers (AI models included) will. The only reason people falsely believe AI models are different is because no one actually traces through that state data, and there are enough pseudo-random variables involved and state-changes that they create the illusion of non-determinism, but that is, in point of fact, an illusion.
    - troupe 3y ago
      You are assuming that an LLM is saving a copy of the book it reads.
      - pclmulqdq 3y ago
        LLMs don't read, they are trained. Yes, training involves saving a copy of the training corpus.
pests 3y ago
> Studying an author's corpus in order to be able to produce works like the author is not copyright infringement. You didn't finish the analogy. Not just produce "works like the author" but being able to regenerate those original works word-for-word. Is that copyright infringement? If I have the entire Dark Tower series memorized word-for-word, and reproduce passages or entire chapters on-demand for others. It's just the way some people learn.
- troupe 3y ago
  Well yes. If you reproduce passages from a book (from memory or otherwise) and present it as your own, that is copyright infringement. We have lots of well established law about how much things can be similar without infringing. LLMs that are just spitting out full copies of what they were trained on aren't functioning correctly or haven't been trained on enough content.
  - pests 3y ago
    > LLMs that are just spitting out full copies of what they were trained on aren't functioning correctly or haven't been trained on enough content. So all of them? None of the LLM's are "functioning correctly"? Because I can get every LLM to reproduce passages from a book.
denton-scratch 3y ago
Yeah, I said that. You're not the only commenter that has pointed out to me that the model doesn't contain the training corpus; that the model is analogous to a human writer who learns to write by becoming a voracious reader. I acknowledge that, I think the analogy is fair. The problem is that the memory capacity of the model appears to be humungous; I've never played with ChatGPT, but I understand that it can quote accurately and at some length from a wide range of literature. By the model, I mean the model behind ChatGPT. I suspect this "memory" amounts to having unimaginable numbers of parameters, i.e. something like overfit. I realize that's just one LLM, and there are other models that are neither generative nor language models, and that have to be much more restrained in what they consider a "parameter".

by troupe 3y ago

ang_cire 3y ago

If you read the PDF, you'd know that OpenAI admits they ARE actually copying his books, in order to train on them, and they are arguing that this is okay because they don't want to have to obtain a legal copy of the work, because that would be too expensive. They are literally arguing they should be allowed to illegally download stuff so long as no human reads the downloaded work directly. To further your analogy, it would be like your prospective writer objecting to being arrested for stealing the books from the bookstore because he just wanted to become a better writer by studying them, not read them for entertainment purposes.

pests 3y ago
This reminds me of the Google Books lawsuit back in the 2010s. Google didn't ask permission from every copyright holder but was still allowed to scan books due to fair use.
- kelseyfrog 3y ago
  This very lawsuit is referenced in OpenAI's memo as precedent > Perhaps the most compelling case on point is Authors Guild v. Google. There, search engine Google digitally scanned “tens of millions of books” without their authors’ permission for inclusion in a searchable digital database.
- ang_cire 3y ago
  The big difference is that Google legally obtained the copies of the books they scanned. OpenAI did not. Publicly-accessible != legal to download/ copy. The copyright infringement in Google's case was not illegally obtaining the original work, it was about the snippets they provided. In OpenAI's case, it is also about the illegal obtainment (downloading) of the original work, which they admit to in their brief, but argue shouldn't be illegal if they intend only to transform it. That element was not present in AGI v Google.
troupe 3y ago
If you are saying that they illegally obtained King's book, then the issue is the fact that the stole the book from somewhere. I don't disagree with your assessment there. But if they checked the book out from the library and let the LLM read it, the fact that it has read it shouldn't be any different than if you had read it as a human. If I break into the court house to let my child see the artwork in the public areas, the issue isn't whether my child can see, learn from, and copy the style of the artwork. The issue is that I broke into the court house instead of going in the front door when it was open to the public.
- ang_cire 3y ago
  > if they checked the book out from the library and let the LLM read it Did you know it's actually illegal to photocopy books you check out from the library? It's an illegal copy. That aside, the analogies between humans and ML models fall apart when you actually get into the details, which is why AI companies don't want that. Human brains don't have RAM and Disk storage that keep direct copies of works. Computers do. Human brains are not entirely deterministic calculators. Computers are. If you have all the state data of an AI model, you can know exactly what it will produce, and the input data is a necessary component of that state data, so it's not transformative in the same way as a human brain in the first place. 2 humans will not create the exact same output given a shared starting state in the way that 2 computers (AI models included) will. The only reason people falsely believe AI models are different is because no one actually traces through that state data, and there are enough pseudo-random variables involved and state-changes that they create the illusion of non-determinism, but that is, in point of fact, an illusion.
  - troupe 3y ago
    You are assuming that an LLM is saving a copy of the book it reads.
    - pclmulqdq 3y ago
      LLMs don't read, they are trained. Yes, training involves saving a copy of the training corpus.

pests 3y ago

> Studying an author's corpus in order to be able to produce works like the author is not copyright infringement. You didn't finish the analogy. Not just produce "works like the author" but being able to regenerate those original works word-for-word. Is that copyright infringement? If I have the entire Dark Tower series memorized word-for-word, and reproduce passages or entire chapters on-demand for others. It's just the way some people learn.

troupe 3y ago
Well yes. If you reproduce passages from a book (from memory or otherwise) and present it as your own, that is copyright infringement. We have lots of well established law about how much things can be similar without infringing. LLMs that are just spitting out full copies of what they were trained on aren't functioning correctly or haven't been trained on enough content.
- pests 3y ago
  > LLMs that are just spitting out full copies of what they were trained on aren't functioning correctly or haven't been trained on enough content. So all of them? None of the LLM's are "functioning correctly"? Because I can get every LLM to reproduce passages from a book.

denton-scratch 3y ago

Yeah, I said that. You're not the only commenter that has pointed out to me that the model doesn't contain the training corpus; that the model is analogous to a human writer who learns to write by becoming a voracious reader. I acknowledge that, I think the analogy is fair. The problem is that the memory capacity of the model appears to be humungous; I've never played with ChatGPT, but I understand that it can quote accurately and at some length from a wide range of literature. By the model, I mean the model behind ChatGPT. I suspect this "memory" amounts to having unimaginable numbers of parameters, i.e. something like overfit. I realize that's just one LLM, and there are other models that are neither generative nor language models, and that have to be much more restrained in what they consider a "parameter".