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Stephen King: My Books Were Used to Train AI::One prominent author responds to the revelation that his writing is being used to coach artificial intelligence.
Is that illegal though? As long as the model isn’t reproducing the original then copyright isn’t being violated. Maybe in the future there will be laws against it but as of now the grounds for a lawsuit are shaky at best.
There are already laws around what you can’t and can’t do with copyrighted material. If the owners of the LLM didn’t obtain written permission I’d say they are on very shaky ground here.
What laws specifically? The only ones I can find refer to limits on redistribution, which isn’t happening here. If the models were able to reproduce the contents of the books that would be another issue that would need to be resolved. But I can’t find anything that would prohibit training.
Existing laws to protect copywritten material.
“AI systems are “trained” to create literary, visual, and other artistic works by exposing the program to large amounts of data, which may consist of existing works such as text and images from the internet. This training process may involve making digital copies of existing works, carrying a risk of copyright infringement. As the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has described, this process “will almost by definition involve the reproduction of entire works or substantial portions thereof.” OpenAI, for example, acknowledges that its programs are trained on “large, publicly available datasets that include copyrighted works” and that this process “necessarily involves first making copies of the data to be analyzed.” Creating such copies, without express or implied permission from the various copyright owners, may infringe the copyright holders’ exclusive right to make reproductions of their work.”
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10922
By that definition of copying Google is infringing on millions of copyrights through their search engine, and anyone viewing a copyrighted work online is also making an unauthorized copy. These companies are using data from public sources that others have access to. They are doing no more copying than a normal user viewing a webpage.
I don’t think so. Your comparisons aren’t really relevant. If Google scrapes a page containing copywritten material inadvertently and serves this to a user there are mechanisms to take down that content or face a lawsuit. Try posting a movie on Youtube, if a copyright holder notifies Google that content will be taken down.
Training a LLM is different, that material was used to help build the model and is now a part of that product. That creates a legal liability.