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> 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 implicat
by 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%)
- alephnerd 1y agoGood call! I brain farted and wrote Claude/Anthropic instead of Meta/Llama.
- ninetyninenine 1y agoSo if I memorized Harry Potter the physical encoding which definitely exists in my brain is a copyright violation?
- teaearlgraycold 1y agoI think humans get a special exception in cases like this
- otabdeveloper4 1y agoNo they don't. Commercial intent is what is prosecuted in IP law.
- shrewduser 1y agomaybe if you re wrote it from memory.
- lithiumii 1y agoYou are not selling or distributing copies of your brain.
- harry8 1y agoIf you perform it from memory in public without paying royalties then yes, yes it is. Should it be? Different question.
- dvt 1y ago> the physical encoding which definitely exists in my brain is a copyright violation First of all, we don't really know how the brain works. I get that you're being a snarky physicalist, but there's plenty of substance dualists, panpsychsts, etc. out there. So, some might say, this is a reductive description of what happens in our brains. Second of all, yes, if you tried to publish Harry Potter (even if it was from memory), you would get in trouble for copyright violation.
- ninetyninenine 1y agoRight but the physical encoding already exists in my brain or how can I reproduce it in the first place? We may not know how the encoding works but we do know that an encoding exists because a decoding is possible. My question is… is that in itself a violation of copyright? If not then as long as LLMs don’t make a publication it shouldn’t be a copyright violation right? Because we don’t understand how it’s encoded in LLMs either. It is literally the same concept.
- epgui 1y ago> It has copyright implications - if Claude can recollect 42% of a copyrighted product without attribution or royalties, how did Anthropic train it? Personally I’m assuming the worst. That being said, Harry Potter was such a big cultural phenomenon that I wonder to what degree might one actually be able to reconstruct the books based solely on publicly accessible derivative material.