Sarah Silverman and other authors are suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement, alleging that they're training their LLMs on books via Library Genesis and Z-Library

stephen , 11 months ago

Who? Like no sarcasm, who is she?

cypherpunks OP , 11 months ago

She’s the actress who played Rain Robinson in the Star Trek: Voyager third season episodes “Future’s End” and “Future’s End, Part II”.

(I guess she’s done some other stuff too, which you can read about in her wikipedia article…)

Uriel238 , 11 months ago

I think this is going to raise some questions about fair use, since AI projects are absolutely a derivative works that are sufficiently removed from the content they used. (There may be some argument that it’s also educational use.)

This case may rekindle questions about fair use given that our current copyright-maximalist clime has been less interested in enforcing fair use and more interested in enforcing copyright regardless of fair use.

Andreas , 11 months ago

Are they going to keep the lawsuit focused on OpenAI and Meta or turn it into yet another lawsuit against piracy?

Uriel238 , 11 months ago

Any lawsuit that rules in favor of copyright holders promotes piracy (as opposed to legalizing use of copyrighted material).

The more draconian and extreme our copyright laws, the more there is a need for a piracy sector.

AlexWIWA , 11 months ago

Good. Fuck openai

CaptainBasculin , 11 months ago

It’s not illegal for a human to learn from the contents of a book, so why the fuck it’s illegal for an AI?

AceTKen , 11 months ago

Because the thing referred to as AI (which is definitely not AI) is simply strip mining the book to shit out “content.”

It is not reading, understanding, or learning from the book. It is using it to sell services for its masters.

An author should control their work. They should be able to decide for themselves whether or not they want to help big tech sell garbage to idiots.

dingus , 11 months ago

More detailed coverage from The Verge: theverge.com/…/sarah-silverman-openai-meta-chatgp…

The complaint lays out in steps why the plaintiffs believe the datasets have illicit origins — in a Meta paper detailing LLaMA, the company points to sources for its training datasets, one of which is called ThePile, which was assembled by a company called EleutherAI. ThePile, the complaint points out, was described in an EleutherAI paper as being put together from “a copy of the contents of the Bibliotik private tracker.” Bibliotik and the other “shadow libraries” listed, says the lawsuit, are “flagrantly illegal.”

I used to have a Bibliotik account, and if this is true about ThePile, they very likely have at least the beginnings of a successful case.

AlbigensianGhoul , 11 months ago

I apologize for the inconvenience, but as an AI language model, I don’t have direct access to books or copyrighted materials like “The Bedwetter” by Sarah Silverman.

Pack it up, guys!

On a serious note corporations abusing authors’ copyrighted work is on an entire different level to civilian piracy and I hope they get seriously shafted over it. Same thing for Bing and Bard. All of chatGPT is built on dubious or outright illegal datasets and there is no reason huge multinationals shouldn’t at least pay and inform the authors of those works. But in reality the blame will probably be shifted to the libraries.

Albinoghost , 11 months ago

AI makes the art, so we have more time for work.

cypherpunks OP , 11 months ago

Machines Work is a song about this

cyborganism , 11 months ago

You know… Instead of having AI create art while humans bust their asses at work, why not make AI do the work and let humans create art?

auf , 11 months ago

Because it can

SpaceToast , 11 months ago

Because then people wouldn’t pay out the ass for small conveniences. Keeping people working as much as possible is the point.