Well, if you ask e.g. ChatGPT for the lyrics to a song or page after page of a book, and it spits them out 1:1 correct, you could assume that it must have had access to the original.

there are a lot of possible ways to audit an AI for copyrighted works, several of which have been proposed in the comments here, but what this could lead to is laws requiring an accounting log of all material that has been used to train an AI as well as all copyrights and compensation, etc.

Not without some seriously invasive warrants! Ones that will never be granted for an intellectual property case.

Intellectual property is an outdated concept. It used to exist so wealthier outfits couldn’t copy your work at scale and muscle you out of an industry you were championing.

It simply does not work the way it was intended. As technology spreads, the barrier for entry into most industries wherein intellectual property is important has been all but demolished.

i.e. 50 years ago: your song that your band performed is great. I have a recording studio and am gonna steal it muahahaha.

Today: “anyone have an audio interface I can borrow so my band can record, mix, master, and release this track?”

Intellectual property ignores the fact that, idk, Issac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz both independently invented calculus at the same time on opposite ends of a disconnected globe. That is to say, intellectual property doesn’t exist.

Ever opened a post to make a witty comment to find someone else already made the same witty comment? Yeah. It’s like that.

Personally speaking, I’ve generated some stupid images like different cities covered in baked beans and have had crude watermarks generate with them where they were decipherable enough that I could find some of the source images used to train the ai. When it comes to photo realistic image generation, if all the ai does is mildly tweak the watermark then it’s not too hard to trace back.

I’d think that given the nature of the language models and how the whole AI thing tends to work, an author can pluck a unique sentence from one of their works, ask AI to write something about that, and if AI somehow ‘magically’ writes out an entire paragraph or even chapter of the author’s original work, well tada, AI ripped them off.

I think that to protect creators they either need to be transparent about all content used to train the AI (highly unlikely) or have a disclaimer of liability, wherein if original content has been used is training of AI then the Original Content creator who have standing for legal action.

The only other alternative would be to insure that the AI specifically avoid copyright or trademarked content going back to a certain date.

They can’t. All they could prove is that their work is part of a dataset that still exists.

It’s 100% a new problem. There’s established precedent for things costing different amounts depending on their intended use.

For example, buying a consumer copy of song doesn’t give you the right to play that song in a stadium or a restaurant.

Training an entire AI to make potentially an infinite number of derived works from your work is 100% worthy of requiring a special agreement. This even goes beyond simple payment to consent; a climate expert might not want their work in an AI which might severely mischatacterize the conclusions, or might want to require that certain queries are regularly checked by a human, etc

When you sell a book, you don’t get to control how that book is used.

This is demonstrably wrong. You cannot buy a book, and then go use it to print your own copies for sale. You cannot use it as a script for a commercial movie. You cannot go publish a sequel to it.

Now please just try to tell me that AI training is specifically covered by fair use and satire case law. Spoiler: you can’t.

This is a novel (pun intended) problem space and deserves to be discussed and decided, like everything else. So yeah, your cavalier dismissal is cavalierly dismissed.

I asked Bing Chat for the 10th paragraph of the first Harry Potter book, and it gave me this:

“He couldn’t know that at this very moment, people meeting in secret all over the country were holding up their glasses and saying in hushed voices: ‘To Harry Potter – the boy who lived!’”

It looks like technically I might be able to obtain the entire book (eventually) by asking Bing the right questions?

This is a little off, when you quote a book you put the name of the book you’re quoting. When you refer to a book, you, um, refer to the book?

I think the gist of these authors complaints is that a sort of “technology laundered plagiarism” is occurring.

However, if the output of an AI would not be considered infringing for a human, then it isn’t infringement.

It’s an algorithm that’s been trained on numerous pieces of media by a company looking to make money of it. I see no reason to give them a pass on fairly paying for that media.

You can see this if you reverse the comparison, and consider what a human would do to accomplish the task in a professional setting. That’s all an algorithm is. An execution of programmed tasks.

If I gave a worker a pirated link to several books and scientific papers in the field, and asked them to synthesize an overview/summary of what they read and publish it, I’d get my ass sued. I have to buy the books and the scientific papers. STEM companies regularly pay for access to papers and codes and standards. Why shouldn’t an AI have to do the same?

There is already a business model for compensating authors: it is called buying the book. If the AI trainers are pirating books, then yeah - sue them.

That’s part of the allegation, but it’s unsubstantiated. It isn’t entirely coherent.

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Setting aside the obvious answer of “because capitalism”, there are a lot of obstacles towards democratizing this technology. Training of these models is done on clusters of A100 GPU’s, which are priced at $10,000USD each. Then there’s also the fact that a lot of the progress being made is being done by highly specialized academics, often with the resources of large corporations like Microsoft.

Additionally the curation of datasets is another massive obstacle. We’ve mostly reached the point of diminishing returns of just throwing all the data at the training of models, it’s quickly becoming apparent that the quality of data is far more important than the quantity of the data (see TinyStories as an example). This means a lot of work and research needs to go into qualitative analysis when preparing a dataset. You need a large corpus of input, each of which are above a quality threshold, but then also as a whole they need to represent a wide enough variety of circumstances for you to reach emergence in the domain(s) you’re trying to train for.

There is a large and growing body of open source model development, but even that only exists because of Meta “leaking” the original Llama models, and now more recently releasing Llama 2 with a commercial license. Practically overnight an entire ecosystem was born creating higher quality fine-tunes and specialized datasets, but all of that was only possible because Meta invested the resources and made it available to the public.

Actually in hindsight it looks like the answer is still “because capitalism” despite everything I’ve just said.

Because we shy away from responsibility.

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You think it is so simple you can just download it and run it on your laptop?

Copyright laws are really out of control at this point. Their periods are far too long and, like you said, how can anyone claim to truly be original at this point? A dedicated lawyer can find reasonable prior art for pretty much anything nowadays. The only reason old sources look original is because no records exist of the sources they used.

It’s not really a parallel.

The text books don’t have copyrights on the concepts and formulae they teach. They only have copyrights for the actual text.

If you memorize the text book and write it down 1:1 (or close to it) and then sell that text you wrote down, then you are still in violation of the copyright.

And that’s what the likes of ChatGPT are doing here. For example, ask it to output the lyrics for a song and it will spit out the whole (copyrighted) lyrics 1:1 (or very close to it). Same with pages of books.

But you paid for the textbook

I think that these are fiction writers. The maths you’d use to design that bridge is fact and the book company merely decided how to display facts. They do not own that information, whereas the Handmaid’s Tale was the creation of Margaret Atwood and was an original work.

You have a point but there’s a pretty big difference between something like a statistics textbook and the novel “Dune” for instance. One was specifically written to teach mostly pre-existing ideas and the other was created as entertainment to sell to a wide an audience as possible.

Plagiarism filters frequently trigger on chatgpt written books and articles.

An AI analyzes the words of a query and generates its response(s) based on word-use probabilities derived from a large corpus of copyrighted texts. This makes its output derivative of those texts in a way that someone applying knowledge learned from the texts is not.

Because AIs aren’t inspired by anything and they don’t learn anything