Authors demand credit and compensation from AI companies using their work without permission | OpenAI, Alphabet, and Meta have been called out::The letter, published by professional writers’ organization The Authors Guild, is addressed to the bosses of OpenAI, Alphabet, Meta, Stability AI, IBM, and Microsoft. It calls out…

  • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.com
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    1 year ago

    Yes, but it isn’t legal to download a repository of pirated books to read and learn from.

    Sure, but that still doesn’t change any of the above statements. If I steal a book from a library, read it… You get the point. All you can get me for is for… What exactly? Cost of the book + maybe a civil penalty? This is going to be a nothing burger for these writers if they’re hoping for a payday. Further how do we know what specific repository that the AI got it’s content from? It could be that the content it got was from some forum of a person summarizing a chapter + a review for the book + <insert tons more content from another source>. There’s no evidence I’ve seen thusfar that any of these AI systems are accessing books illegally to begin with. Or that those books were the only source that it derives its responses from.

    The AI isn’t reproducing the book and thus isn’t violating copyright as literally everything it will produce is derivative which is protected. Unless you can get the AI to recite a book back verbatim… Which I’ve not been successful in doing personally… and I’ve seen no evidence of anyone else doing either.

    • kromem@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Cost of the book + maybe a civil penalty?

      Does no one remember the days of Napster and the multiples over retail cost that people caught pirating were charged?

      And technically piracy is a federal crime, so there could even be criminal charges.

      A “nothing burger”?

      Let’s see…oh my, what’s this? 504.c.2

      In a case where the copyright owner sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that infringement was committed willfully, the court in its discretion may increase the award of statutory damages to a sum of not more than $150,000.

      That’s per work infringed.

      Nothing burger indeed.

      OpenAI is on the other end of over two decades of fearmongering and lobbying to enact laws with ridiculous penalties for piracy in the digital age.

      As for how we know where they got the information, that’s what subpoenas are for in a legal proceeding. Even if training information is not publicly disclosed, whether they did or didn’t pirate content is going to come out privately in court.

      The AI doesn’t need to reproduce the book for OpenAI to have infringed in illegally sourcing the copyrightable material they used in training.

      • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.com
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        1 year ago

        You failed to read my post. You jumped straight into an assumption that piracy can be proved rather than actually reading what I’ve posted.

        If you’re going to continue with strawman arguments then please return to reddit.

        • kromem@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Piracy can be proved if it occurred by talking to employees under oath and subpoenaing relevant email records.

          The idea the court would need to reverse engineer ChatGPT to find out is absurd.