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Meta's Llama 3.1 can recall 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book
- aspenmayer 1y agohttps://archive.is/OSQt6 https://archive.is/OSQt6 If you've seen as many magnet links as I have, with your subconscious similarly primed with the foreknowledge of Meta having used torrents to download/leech (and possibly upload/seed) the dataset(s) to train their LLMs, you might scroll down to see the first picture in this article from the source paper, and find uncanny the resemblance of the chart depicted to a common visual representation of torrent block download status. Can't unsee it. For comparison (note the circled part): https://superuser.com/questions/366212/what-do-all-these-download-bar-colors-mean-when-im-watching-a-streaming-video https://superuser.com/questions/366212/what-do-all-these-dow... Previously, related: Extracting memorized pieces of books from open-weight language models - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44108926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44108926 - May 2025
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deafpolygon 1y agoIt will generate a correct next token 42% of the time when prompted with a 50 token quote. Not 42% of the book. It's a pretty big distinction.
- deviation 1y agoA... massive distinction.
- asplake 1y ago“… well enough to reproduce 50-token excerpts at least half the time”
- chiph2o 1y agoThis means that if we start with 50% of the book then there is 42% chance that we can recreate the remaining 50%. What is the distinction between understanding and memorization? What is the chance that understanding results in memorization (may be in case of humans)?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ipaddr 1y agoIt stores how often characters will come next based on how often they happen in copyright material. It can reproduce parts because those values are a fingerprint. It should break copyright laws as written now but too much money involved.
- j16sdiz 1y agonext _50_ tokens 42% of the time not just next token. This is like: tell it a random sentence in the book, it will give you the next sentence 42% of time.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- amlib 1y agoThat said, I bet that if you could lower the inference temperature such chances would improve by a lot.
- WhatsName 1y agoGiven the method and how the english language works, isn't that the expected outcome for any text that isnt highly technical? Guess the next word: Not all heros wear _____
- aspenmayer 1y agoAs there is no reason to believe that Harry Potter is axiomatic to our culture in the way that other concepts are, it is strange to me that the LLMs are able to respond in this way, and not at all expected. Why do you think this outcome is expected? Are the LLMs somehow encoding the same content in such a way that they can be prompted to decode it? Does it matter legally how LLMs are doing what they do technically? This is pertinent to the court case that Meta is currently party to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence_and_copyright#cite_note-43 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence_and_co... > See for example OpenAI's comment in the year of GPT-2's release: OpenAI (2019). Comment Regarding Request for Comments on Intellectual Property Protection for Artificial Intelligence Innovation (PDF) (Report). United States Patent and Trademark Office. p. 9. PTO–C–2019–0038. “Well-constructed AI systems generally do not regenerate, in any nontrivial portion, unaltered data from any particular work in their training corpus” https://copyrightalliance.org/kadrey-v-meta-hearing/ https://copyrightalliance.org/kadrey-v-meta-hearing/ > During the hearing, Judge Chhabria said that he would not take into account AI licensing markets when considering market harm under the fourth factor, indicating that AI licensing is too “circular.” What he meant is that if AI training qualifies as fair use, then there is no need to license and therefore no harmful market effect. I know this is arguing against the point that this copyright lobbyist is making, but I hope so much that this is the case. The “if you sample, you must license” precedent was bad, and it was an unfair taking from the commons by copyright holders, imo. The paper this post is referencing is freely available: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12546 https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12546
- fuzzbazz 1y agoFrom a quick web search I can find that there are book review sites that allow users to enter and rate verbatim "quotes" from books. This one [1] contains ~2000 [2] portions of a sentence, a paragraph or several paragraphs of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Could it be plausible that an LLM had ingested parts of the book via scrapping web pages like this and not the full copyrighted book and get results similar to those of the linked study? [1] https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/4640799-harry-potter-and-the-philosopher-s-stone https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/4640799-harry-potter-a... [2] ~30 portions x 68 pages
- aspenmayer 1y agoSure, why not? lol https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1entowq/i_made_a_tool_to_scrape_magazines_from_google/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1entowq/i_made... https://github.com/shloop/google-book-scraper https://github.com/shloop/google-book-scraper The fact that Meta torrented Books3 and other datasets seems to be by self-admission by Meta employees who performed the work and/or oversaw those who themselves did the work, so that is not really under dispute or ambiguous. https://torrentfreak.com/meta-admits-use-of-pirated-book-dataset-to-train-ai-240111/ https://torrentfreak.com/meta-admits-use-of-pirated-book-dat...
- redox99 1y agoBooks3 was used in Llama1. We don't know if they used it later on.
- aspenmayer 1y agoMy comparison was illustrative and analogous in nature. The copyright cartel is making a fruit of the poisonous tree type of argument. Whatever Meta are doing with LLMs is doing the heavy lifting that parity files used to do back in the Usenet days. I wouldn’t be surprised if BitTorrent or other similar caching and distribution mechanisms incorporate AI/LLMs to recognize an owl on the wire, draw the rest just in time in transit, and just send the diffs, or something like that. The pictures are the same. All roads lead to Rome, so they say.
- giardini 1y agoAs I've said several times, the corpus is key: LLMs thus far "read" most anything, but should instead have well-curated corpora. "Garbage In, Garbage Out!(GIGO)" is the saying. While the Harry Potter series may be fun reading, it doesn't provide information about anything that isn't better covered elsewhere. Leave Harry Potter for a different "Harry Potter LLM". Train scientific LLMs to the level of a good early 20th century English major and then use science texts and research papers for the remainder.
- alephnerd 1y ago> While the Harry Potter series may be fun reading, it doesn't provide information about anything that isn't better covered elsewhere It has copyright implications - if Claude can recollect 42% of a copyrighted product without attribution or royalties, how did Anthropic train it? > Train scientific LLMs to the level of a good early 20th century English major and then use science texts and research papers for the remainder Plenty of in-stealth companies approaching LLMs via this approach ;) For those of us who studied the natural sciences and CS in the 2000s and early 2010s, there was a bit of a trend where certain PIs would simply translate German and Russian papers from the early-to-mid 20th century and attribute them to themselves in fields like CS (especially in what became ML).
- weird-eye-issue 1y agoWhy are you talking about Claude and Anthropic?
- cshimmin 1y agoIt’s not unreasonable to suspect they are doing the same. The article starts with a description of a lawsuit NY Times brought against OpenAI for similar reasons. The big difference is that research presented here is only possible with open weight models. OAI and Anthropic don’t make the base models available, so it’s easier to hide the fact that you’ve used copyrighted material by instruction post-training. And I’m not sure you can get the logprobs for specific tokens from their APIs either (which is what the researchers did to make the figures and come up with a concrete number like 42%)
- evertedsphere 1y agowhat is that bar (= token span) on the right common to the first three models
- zmmmmm 1y agoIt's important to note the way it was measured: > the paper estimates that Llama 3.1 70B has memorized 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book well enough to reproduce 50-token excerpts at least half the time As I understand it, it means if you prompt it with some actual context from a specific subset that is 42% of the book, it completes it with 50 tokens from the book, 50% of the time. So 50 tokens is not really very much, it's basically a sentence or two. Such a small amount would probably generally fall under fair use on its own. To allege a true copyright violation you'd still need to show that you can chain those together or use some other method to build actual substantial portions of the book. And if it only gets it right 50% of the time, that seems like it would be very hard to do with high fidelity. Having said all that, what is really interesting is how different the latest Llama 70b is from previous versions. It does suggest that Meta maybe got a bit desperate and started over-training on certain materials that greatly increased its direct recall behaviour.
- Aurornis 1y ago> So 50 tokens is not really very much, it's basically a sentence or two. Such a small amount would probably generally fall under fair use on its own. That’s what I was thinking as I read the methodology. If they dropped the same prompt fragment into Google (or any search engine) how often would they get the next 50 tokens worth of text returned in the search results summaries?
- raincole 1y ago(Disclaimer: haven't read the original paper) It sounds like a ridiculous way to measure it. Producing 50-token excerpts absolutely doesn't translate to "recall X percent of Harry Potter" for me. (Edit: I read this article. Nothing burger if its interpretation of the original paper is correct.)
- tanaros 1y agoTheir methodology seems reasonable to me. To clarify, they look at the probability a model will produce a verbatim 50-token excerpt given the preceding 50 tokens. They evaluate this for all sequences in the book using a sliding window of 10 characters (NB: not tokens). Sequences from Harry Potter have substantially higher probabilities of being reproduced than sequences from less well-known books. Whether this is "recall" is, of course, one of those tricky semantic arguments we have yet to settle when it comes to LLMs.
- htk 1y agoHmm, couldn't this be used as a benchmark for quantization algorithms?
- graphememes 1y agoI really wish we could get rid of copyright. It's going to hold us back long term.
- bitmasher9 1y agoWe cannot get ride of it without finding a way to pay the creators that generate copyrighted works. I’m personally more in favor of significantly reducing the length of the copy right. I think 20-30 years is an interesting range. Artist get roughly a career length of time to profit off their creations, but there is much less incentive for major corporations to buy and horde IP.
- atrus 1y agoWe barely pay creators as it is for generating copyrighted works. Nearly every copywritten work is available on the internet, for free, right now. And creators are still getting paid, albeit poorly, but that's a constant throughout history.
- Tepix 1y agoHow does that favor a longer copyright? It’s not like these old works make a lot of money (with very few exceptions). And making money after 30 years is hardly a motivating factor.
- jeroenhd 1y agoThe thing about creators is that most of them are paid extremely poorly, and some of them get insanely rich. Joanne Rowling has received more money than a reasonable person could use for her wizard books, but millions of bloggers feeding much more data into AI training sets will never see a cent for their work. For starting authors selling books, this can easily be the difference between writing another book or giving up and taking up another job. At the moment, there's also a huge difference between who does and who doesn't pay. If I put the HP collection on my website, you betcha Joanne Rowling's team is going to try to take it down. However, because OpenAI designed an AI system where content cannot be removed from its knowledge base and because their pockets are lined with cash for lawyers, it's practically free to violate whatever copyright rules it wants.
- asciisnowman 1y agoOn the other hand, it’s surprising that Llama memorized so much of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. It's sold 120 million copies over 30 years. I've gotta think literally every passage is quoted online somewhere else a bunch of times. You could probably stitch together the full book quote-by-quote.
- mvdtnz 1y agoBut also we know for a fact that Meta trained their models on pirated books. So there's no need to invent a hare brained scheme of stitching together bits and pieces like that.
- kouteiheika 1y agoNo, assuming that just because it was in the training data it must be memorized is hare brained. LLMs have limited capacity to memorize, under ~4 bits per parameter[1][2], and are trained on terabytes of data. It's physically impossible for them to memorize everything they're trained on. The model memorized chunks of Harry Potter not just because it was directly trained on the whole book, which the article also alludes to: > For example, the researchers found that Llama 3.1 70B only memorized 0.13 percent of Sandman Slim, a 2009 novel by author Richard Kadrey. That’s a tiny fraction of the 42 percent figure for Harry Potter. In case it isn't obvious, both Harry Potter and Sandman Slim are parts of books3 dataset. [1] -- https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24832 https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24832 [2] -- https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.05405 https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.05405
- mvdtnz 1y agoNo, we know it because it was established in court from Meta internal communications. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/10/mark-zuckerberg-meta-books-ai-models-sarah-silverman https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/10/mark-zuck...
- kouteiheika 1y agoI'm confused. Nowhere in my post have I said that they didn't?
- dankwizard 1y agoI can recall about 12% of the first Harry Potter book so it's interesting to see Llama is only 4x smarter than me. I will catch up.
- hsbauauvhabzb 1y agoHow many r’s are there in strawberry?
- jofzar 1y agoThere are 3 R's in strawberry just like in Harry Potter!
- gpm 1y agoI think it's important to recognize here that fanfiction.net has 850 thousand distinct pieces of Harry Potter fanction on it. Fifty thousand of which are more than 40k words in length. Many of which (no easy way to measure) directly reproducing parts of the original books. archiveofourown.org has 500 thousand, some, but probably not the majority, of that are duplicated from fanfiction.net. 37 thousand of these are over 40 thousand words. I.e. harry potter and its derivatives presumably appear a million times in the training set, and its hard to imagine a model that could discuss this cultural phenomena well without knowing quite a bit about the source material.
- aprilthird2021 1y agoDid you read the article? This exact point is made and then analyzed. > Or maybe Meta added third-party sources—such as online Harry Potter fan forums, consumer book reviews, or student book reports—that included quotes from Harry Potter and other popular books. > “If it were citations and quotations, you'd expect it to concentrate around a few popular things that everyone quotes or talks about,” Lemley said. The fact that Llama 3 memorized almost half the book suggests that the entire text was well represented in the training data.
- gpm 1y agoThe article fails to mention or understand the volume of content here. Every, literally every, part of these books is quoted and "talked about" (in the sense of used in unlicensed derivative works). And yes, I read the article before commenting. I don't appreciate the baseless insinuation to the contrary.
- sumeno 1y agoEven 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.
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- paxys 1y agoAs 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 the first 2-3 pages. I get that copyright is a problem, but let's not pretend that an LLM that autocompletes a couple lines from harry potter with 50% accuracy is some massive new avenue to piracy. No one is using this as a substitute for buying the book.
- aprilthird2021 1y ago> let's not pretend that an LLM that autocompletes a couple lines from harry potter with 50% accuracy is some massive new avenue to piracy. No one is using this as a substitute for buying the book. Well, luckily the article points out what people are actually alleging: > There are actually three distinct theories of how training a model on copyrighted works could infringe copyright: > Training on a copyrighted work is inherently infringing because the training process involves making a digital copy of the work. > The training process copies information from the training data into the model, making the model a derivative work under copyright law. > Infringement occurs when a model generates (portions of) a copyrighted work. None of those claim that these models are a substitute to buying the books. That's not what the plaintiffs are alleging. Infringing on a copyright is not only a matter of privacy (piracy is one of many ways to infringe copyright)
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- bjornsing 1y agoIt’s well-known that John von Neumann had this ability too: Herman Goldstine wrote "One of his remarkable abilities was his power of absolute recall. As far as I could tell, von Neumann was able on once reading a book or article to quote it back verbatim; moreover, he could do it years later without hesitation. He could also translate it at no diminution in speed from its original language into English. On one occasion I tested his ability by asking him to tell me how A Tale of Two Cities started. Whereupon, without any pause, he immediately began to recite the first chapter and continued until asked to stop after about ten or fifteen minutes." Maybe it’s just an unavoidable side effect of extreme intelligence?
- bradley13 1y agoMany people could also produce text snippets from memory. I dispute that reading a book is a copyright violation. Copying and distributing a book, yes, but just reading it - no. If the book was obtained legitimately, letting an LLM read it is not an issue.
- riffraff 1y agoIt is well reported that meta (and open ai and basically everyone) trained on contained obtained via piracy (LibGen).
- Javantea_ 1y agoI'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 in its design/training. I also understand the intense pressure to release early and often, but this type of thing isn't a warning.
- Tepix 1y agoI think part of the problem is that the book is in the training set multiple times
- numpad0 1y agoIt's apparently known among LLM researchers that the best epoch count for LLM training is one. They go through the entire dataset once, and that makes best LLMs. They know. LLM is a novel compression format for text(holographic memory or whatever). The question is whether the rest of the world accept this technology as it is or not.
- jeroenhd 1y agoOverfitting 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.
- fennecfoxy 1y agoI 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.
- BUFU 1y agoWould it be possible that other people posted content of Harry Potter book online and the model developer scrape that information? Would the model developer be at fault in this scenario?
- timeon 1y agoI think this is good question. At least for LLMs in general. However we know that Meta used pirated torrents.
- briffid 1y agoQuotation is fair use in all sensible copyright system. An LLM will mostly be able to quote anything, and should be. Quotation is not derived work. LLMs are not stealing copyrighted work. They just show that Harry Potter is in English and a mostly logical story. If someone is stabbed, they will die in most stories, that's not copyrightable. If you have an engine that knows everything, it will be able to quote everything.
- choeger 1y agoLLMs are to a certain degree compressed databases of their training data. But 42% is a surprisingly large number.
- gamblor956 1y agoIt's not fair use just because you guys want it be fair use. While limited quoting can (and usually is) considered fair use, quoting significant portions of a book (much less 42% of it) has never been fair use, in the U.S., Europe, or any other nation. Yes, information wants to be free, yada yada. That means facts. Whether creative works are free is up to their creators.
- flowerthoughts 1y agoIf LLMs are good at summarizing/compressing, what does this say about the underlying text? Why are some passages more easily recalled? Sure, some sections have probably been quoted more times than others, so there's bias in training data, which might explain why the Llama 1 and 3.1 images have similar peaks. Would this happen to LLMs even with no training bias? Edit: seems the first part is about a memory about being bullied by Duddley. The second is where he's been elected to the quidditch team. Possibly they are just boring passages, compared to the surrounding ones. So probably just training bias.
- curiousgal 1y ago[flagged]
- tomhow 1y agoPlease don't do this here. If you're going to use the word, use the word, but also, please don't use words like that about people here, no matter what you think of them. A comment like this breaks multiple guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44287156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44287156 and marked it off topic.
- AStonesThrow 1y ago[dead]
- TeMPOraL 1y agoWell, so can a nontrivial number of people. It's Harry Potter we're talking about - it's up there with The Bible in popularity ranking. I'm gonna bet that Llama 3.1 can recall a significant portion of Pride and Prejudice too. With examples of this magnitude, it's normal and entirely expected this can happen - as it does with people[0] - the only thing this is really telling us is that the model doesn't understand its position in the society well enough to know to shut up; that obliging the request is going to land it, or its owners, into trouble. In some way, it's actually perverted. EDIT: it's even worse than that. What the research seems to be measuring is that the models recognize sentence-sized pieces of the book as likely continuations of an earlier sentence-sized piece. Not whether it'll reproduce that text when used straightforwardly - just whether there's an indication it recognizes the token patterns as likely. By that standard, I bet there's over a billion people right now who could do that to 42% of first Harry Potter book. By that standard, I too memorized the Bible end-to-end, as had most people alive today, whether or not they're Christian; works this popular bleed through into common language usage patterns. -- [0] - Even more so when you relax your criteria to accept occasional misspell or paraphrase - then each of us likely know someone who could piece together a chunk of HP book from memory.
- strogonoff 1y agoI 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, providing it that piece as input, to perform such recall on demand and at scale, laundering and/or devaluing copyright, is unclear. Notably, the above is being done not just to a few high-profile authors, but to all of us no matter what we do (be it music, software, writing, visual art). What’s even worse, is that imaginably they train (or would train) the models to specifically not output those things verbatim specifically to thwart attempts to detect the presence of said works in training dataset (which would naturally reveal the model and its output being a derivative work). Perhaps one could find some way of justifying that (people justified all sorts of stuff throughout history), but let it be something better than “the model is assumed to be a thinking human when it comes to IP abuse but unthinking tool when it comes to using it for personal benefit”. [0] Of course, if you find me a single person on this planet capable of recalling 42% of any Harry Potter book, I’d be very impressed if I ever believed it.
- Machado117 1y agoDo LLMs have any perception that Harry Potter is fiction or is it possible that they will give some magical advice based on fiction works that they have been trained with? edit: never mind, I’ll just ask ChatGPT
- otabdeveloper4 1y agoLLMs don't have "perception" at all, they only ever output a likely text completion token.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- concats 1y agoThat's a clickbait title. What they are actually saying: Given one correct quoted sentence, the model has 42% chance of predicting the next sentence correctly. So, assuming you start with the first sentence and tell it to keep going, it has a 0.42^n odds of staying on track, where n is the n-th sentence. It seems to me, that if they didn't keep correcting it over and over again with real quotes, it wouldn't even get to the end of the first page without descending into wild fanfiction territory, with errors accumulating and growing as the length of the text progressed. EDIT: As the article states, for an entire 50 token excerpt to be correct the probability of each output has to be fairly high. So perhaps it would be more accurate to view it as 0.985^n where n is the n-th token. Still the same result long term. Unless every token is correct, it will stray further and further from the correct source.
- 7bit 1y agoWhat would be a better title? You're correct that the title isn't accurate, however, click bait? I wouldn't say so. But I'm lacking imagination to find a better one. Interested to hear your suggestion.
- 7bit 1y agoWhat would be a better title? You're correct that the title isn't accurate, however, click bait? I wouldn't say so. But I'm lacking imagination to find a better one. Interested to hear your suggestion.
- fennecfoxy 1y agoYou're right, and the person who already commented is being facetious. A better title would be "Meta's Llama 3.1 can recall the next sentence in the First Harry Potter book with 42% accuracy". The title intentionally makes it seem as though the model can predict the first 42% of the entire text of the first Harry Potter book when queried with something like "Read me Harry Potter and the Philosopher's stone".
- whitehexagon 1y agoI wonder what percentage we could expect from a true general AI, 100% ? It would be nice to know that at least our literature might survive the technological singularity.
- cowbolt 1y agoImagine the literary possibilities when it can write 100%! Rowling's original work was an amusing, if rather derivative children's book. But Llama's version of the Philosophers stone will be something else entirely. Just think of the rather heavy-handed Cerberus reference in the original work. Instead of a rote reference to Greek mythology used as a simple trope, it will be filled with a subtext that only an LLM can produce. Right now they're working on recreating the famous sequence with the troll in the dungeon. It might cost them another few billion in training, but the end results will speak for themselves.
- tikhonj 1y agoMeta Llama, Author of Harry Potter
- fennecfoxy 1y agoI mean it makes sense. Same thing as George RR Martin complaining that it can spit out chunks of his books (finish your books already!!) As I have pointed out many times before - for GRRM's books and for HP books, the Internet is FILLED to the brim with quotes from these books, there are uploads of the entire books, there are several (not just one) fan wikis for each of these fandoms. There is a lot of content in general on the Internet that quotes these books, they are pop culture sensations. So of course they're weighted heavily when training an LLM by just feeding it the Internet. If a model could ever recount it correctly 100% in the correct order, then that's overfitting. But otherwise it's just plain & simple high occurrence in training data.
- segmondy 1y agoMy children can recall 100% of some of their favorite books as I'm sure some of us here can do the same. Some of us can recall 100% of a poem or a song lyrics.
- a-dub 1y agoharry potter is likely to be excerpted a million times all over the web (in legitimate fair use context). wouldn't it make more sense to try out other titles that are still under copyright, appear in the research datasets, but have little mention across the web and other typical source corpii?