439
Authors Are Furious After Finding Their Works on List of Books Used To Train AI
(www.themarysue.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
439 points (93.5% liked)
Technology
59087 readers
3244 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Here's an idea, legally force companies like OpenAI to rely on opt-in data, rather then build their entire company on stealing massive amounts of data. That includes requiring to retrain from scratch. Sam Altman was crying for regulations for scary AI, right?
Would search engines only be allowed to show search results for sources that had opted in? They "train" their search engine on public data too, after all.
They aren't reselling their information, they're linking you to the source which then the website decides what to do with your traffic. Which they usually want your traffic, that's the point of a public site.
That's like trying to say it's bad to point to where a book store is so someone can buy from it. Whereas the LLM is stealing from that bookstore and selling it to you in a back alley.
AI isn't either. It's selling statistical data about the books.
It literally shares passages verbatim
So does any site that quotes the book. Just being trained on a work doesn't give the model the ability to cite it word for word. For most of the books in this set you wouldn't even be able to get a single accurate quote out of most models. The models gain the ability to cite passages from training on other sources citing these same passages.
It shares popular quotes from books, it can't reproduce arbitrary content from a book. The content needs to be heavily duplicated in the training data to stick around (e.g. from book reviews), and even than half of it might still end up being made up on the spot.
Also request for copyrighted content will be blocked by ChatGPT and just receive the stock "I can'd do that" response anyway.
If you have some damning examples that show the opposite, show them.
Being blocked by ChatGPT just means that the interaction layer you see doesn’t show the output, not that the output wasn’t generated.
Everything you see that’s public facing and interfacing with an AI is an extreme filtering layer for what is output. There’s tons of checks that happen to ensure that they don’t output illegal content or any of a million other undesirable things.
I'm too lazy and care too little but you can basically get it to roleplay as a book expert or something and to "remind" you of certain passages. It gets around the filter pretty easily, that's how jailbreaks work.
That's maybe an issue. I mirror speech a lot, though. How large are the passages?
That claim is disingenuous at best, and misinformed otherwise.
LLMs can't reprint their entire training data on demand. They rarely even remember quotes.
Don't bother shouting into the AI misinformation void.
People aren't going to put down their pitchforks and torches to brush up on basic ML principles and it's just going to frustrate you engaging.
It's going to be a non-issue within 24 months anyways.
No matter how the OpenAI court cases land, the writing is on the wall that the next generations of models are going to be built on the backs of synthetic data, which is inherently without copyright.
At best rulings against OpenAI mean a secondary market emerges in China for repackaging copyrighted data into synthetic data of equivalent value to help buffer SotA synthetic data in avoiding model collapse.
It's not even going to end up amounting to a minor speedbump to progress by the time the court cases are finalized.
Let the armchair activists rant and rage and tire themselves out worrying about a fabricated version of reality, and just focus more on staying informed about actual reality for yourself when all this passes.
It will be years before people eventually drop the bias against AI we self-instilled from shortsighted Sci-Fi over the past few decades, and until then the average person online will be irrationally upset about something related to the tech. Might as well run themselves ragged over the misinformed "it just remixes copyright" in the meantime.
On the one hand, I agree with your estimation of how things will go overall.
On the other hand, though, I think there's value to be had in pushing back against the misinformation whenever it comes up. I don't think AI is going to be hindered by it in the long run, but it's possible that in the short run it's going to kill interesting projects and harm some of the people who are experimenting with it.
And I have seen technologies that have suffered from longer-term difficulties once the zeitgeist turned against them despite having technical merit. There are useful applications for NFTs to be had out there, for example, but just try mentioning them when the opportunity arises and see what sort of reaction you get.
Yes, though to be fair these things often move in pendulum swings back and forth and that's a natural component of any system finding equilibrium.
Just as AI has many detractors raised to fear HAL or the Terminator and approaching any news of what's perceived as the existential threat they were warned of with hyper caution, there's also a ton of hypemasters packaging up snake oil with AI having become the new 'quantum' to slap on a pile of crap and claim is gold.
The two are going to balance out.
NFTs were hyped to shit on numerous get rich quick pyramid schemes, and a number of companies that were jumping on the bandwagon to try and catch a wave rightfully abandoned what was going to be a terrible idea (i.e. Square Enix).
That said, the technology isn't going anywhere and I'm sure we'll see peer to peer cryptography backed exchanges of goods and services continuing to work their way into future products where the technology makes sense on its own merits as opposed to hype cycles.
The utility of AI, and specifically LLMs, is so astounding right now even in its infancy that it's not going anywhere no matter where public opinion sits. It just won't necessarily be used as a selling point, like for a new Coke flavor. Which is ultimately going to be a good thing.
I agree that misinformation tends to be bad, and I do have legitimate concerns that the feverous anti-AI crowd is going to end up cutting off their nose to spite their face driving a technological revolution behind closed doors of international conglomerates rather than open access, but at a certain point pretty soon this ship is going to be out of anyone's control, and just as the DCMA doesn't actually prevent me from downloading The Matrix right now vs in 2000 outside of a few extra hoops, the likely eventual "let's try to handicap AI Act" is probably not going to prevent me from running model weights published in Israel or Japan on a local GPU.
I used to get more stressed about the rhetoric online, but it's reached a point where it's clear 90% of people aren't looking for facts or understanding, they are only seeking confirmation bias and down voting anything that doesn't deliver it.
In that climate, why waste our time? Discussions where one stands to learn through contribution and formulating a comment are still probably worthwhile, but a lot of discussion of AI in more general forums have honestly just turned into tantrums where no one wants to have their outrage party rained on.
It's become the equivalent of explaining the science of immunity to antivax crowds.
I mean, yeah? They were running to a concrete description. That is not valid. My brain has most of Terry Pratchett's works.
First: There are mechanisms to opt out (robots.txt and meta noindex)
Second: There is some foreknowledge on the part of the web author. Even in the early days of the web — before you could’ve predicted the concept of search engines — in order to distribute anything you had to understand the basics of hypermedia, among which is the idea that anything can link to anything else and clients can be users or machines alike.
Third: Even though you are correct that search engines are tokenizing text and doing statistical analysis to recombine the tokens into novel forms in order to rank against queries, those novel forms are never presented to the user. Only direct quotes. So a user never gets a false reference to the supposed content of a page (unless the page itself lies to crawler requests).
Fourth: All of the technical points above are pretty much meaningless, because we are social creatures and our norms don't stem from a mechanical flow chart divorced from real-world context.
Creators are generally okay with their content being copied into search DBs, because they know it's going to lead to users finding the true author of those words, which will advance their creative pursuits either through collaboration or monetary support.
Creators are complaining about content being copied into LLMs, because their work will be presented out of context, often cited incorrectly, keep people away from the author of those words, and undermine the lifeblood of their creative pursuits -- be it attracting new collaborators or making sales.
Whether it technically counts as IP infringement or not under current law? Who really cares? Current IP law is a fucking scam, designed to bully creators out of their own creations and assign full control to holding companies who see culture as nothing more than a financial instrument to be optimized. We desperately need to change IP law anyway -- something that I think even many strident "AI" supporters agree with -- so using it as a justification for the ethics of LLMs reveals just how weak the group's position truly is.
LLM vendors see an opportunity for profit, if they can get away with it. They are offering consumers a utopian vision of infinite access to content while creating an IP chokepoint that they can enshittify once it blows past critical mass. It's the same tactics the social media companies used 15 years ago, and it weighs heavy on my heart that so many Lemmy users are falling for it once again while the lesson is still so fresh.