this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
380 points (95.2% liked)

Technology

59466 readers
3522 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

GenAI tools ‘could not exist’ if firms are made to pay copyright::undefined

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Marcbmann@lemmy.world 7 points 9 months ago (3 children)

While I would like to be in a world where knowledge is free, this is apples and oranges.

OpenAI can purchase a textbook and read it. If their AI uses the knowledge gained to explain maths to an individual, without reproducing the original material, then there's no issue.

The difference is the student in your example didn't buy their textbook. Someone else bought it and reproduced the original for others to study from.

If OpenAI was pirating textbooks, that would be a wholly separate issue.

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 2 points 9 months ago (3 children)

The fact that the "AI" can spit out whole passages verbatim when given the right prompts, suggests that there is a big problem here and they haven't a clue how to fix it.

It's not "learning" anything other than the probable order of words.

[–] FatCrab@lemmy.one 4 points 9 months ago

I really hate this reduction of gpt models. Is the model probabilistic? Absolutely. But it isn't simply learning a comprehensible probability of words--it is generating a massively complex conditional probability sequence for words. Largely, humans might be said to do the same thing. We make a best guess at the sequence of words we decide to use based on conditional probabilities along a myriad number of conditions (including semantics of the thing we want to say).

[–] Marcbmann@lemmy.world 0 points 9 months ago

Completely agree. And that should be the focal point of the issue.

Sam Altman is correctly stating that AI is not possible without using copyrighted materials. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

His mistake is not redirecting the conversation. He should be talking about the efforts they're making to stop their machine from reproducing copyrighted works. Not whether or not they should be allowed to use it in the first place.

[–] 1Fuji2Taka3Nasubi@lemmy.zip 2 points 9 months ago

I agree that the issues

  • whether AI output are derivative works of its input, and
  • whether input to AI is fair use and requires no compensation

are separate, but I think they are related, in that AI companies are trying to impose whatever interpretation of copyright that is convenient to them to the rest of the society.

And indeed Meta pirated books to feed its AI.

https://www.techspot.com/news/101507-meta-admits-using-pirated-books-train-ai-but.html

[–] sixCats@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I was under the impression they mentioned at some point torrenting things

[–] 1Fuji2Taka3Nasubi@lemmy.zip 1 points 9 months ago