Comment by JimDabell
15 hours ago
I made two points:
- It is not accurate to describe training as “encoding works into the model”.
– A model cannot recreate a Harry Potter book.
Neither of these have anything to do with “the spirit of the law”.
15 hours ago
I made two points:
- It is not accurate to describe training as “encoding works into the model”.
– A model cannot recreate a Harry Potter book.
Neither of these have anything to do with “the spirit of the law”.
Can it not recreate a book?
I kind of assumed I could ask it for verses from the bible one by one till i have the full book?
When i ask chatgpt for a specific page or so from HP I get the impression that the model would be perfectly capable of doing so but is hindred by extra work openAI put in to prevent the answer specifically because of copyright. In which case the question: What if someone manages to do some prompt trickery again to get past it? Are they then responsible?
No, it can’t recreate a book. Well, maybe it could get most of the way for the Bible. That is an exceptional case because its adherents are constantly quoting verses religiously. I expect it’s the most reproduced, quoted, and translated book in history by a very significant margin. It’s also not copyrighted.
Can you do this for the general case? No, not even for extremely popular books. People might quote Harry Potter a lot, but they don’t quote the entire thing over and over, chapter and verse, on hundreds of thousands of different websites. The number of times Bible verses appear in the training data is going to absolutely dwarf the number of times Harry Potter quotes appear, and people aren’t quoting all parts of Harry Potter, just the interesting parts.
> When i ask chatgpt for a specific page or so from HP I get the impression that the model would be perfectly capable of doing so but is hindred by extra work openAI put in to prevent the answer specifically because of copyright.
They do put extra work in to filter this stuff out, but even if they didn’t the model wouldn’t be able to reproduce entire chapters, let alone entire books.
You can test this for yourself. Remember, this lawsuit isn’t against OpenAI, it’s against Meta. Download Llama and try to get it to reproduce Harry Potter. There won’t be any guardrails imposed on top of the model if you run it locally.
>People might quote Harry Potter a lot, but they don’t quote the entire thing over and over, chapter and verse, on hundreds of thousands of different websites.
I'm fairly certain I could find the entire thing in plain text in multiple places online. A quick google gives the philosophers stone as the second result in pdf format on the internet archive but i'm sure with a bit of looking i'd bump into a lot of plaintext copies.
They might have taken measures to prevent this from being anywhere their training data (i think it would be fairly easy and something they'd likely do) but if they at any point failed for a book or so that they didn't consider wouldn't my original question stand?
4 replies →
> proportionality threshold for copyright to matter.
This is the part I have a problem with, that threshold was put there for humans based on their capabilities, it's an extremely dishonest assessment that the same threshold must apply for a LLM and it's outputs, those works were created to be read by humans not a for-profit statistical inference machine, the derivative nature were also expected to be caused by the former no the later, so the judge should have admitted that the context of the law is insufficient and that copyright must include the power of forbidding the usage of one's work into such model for copyright to continue fulfilling it's intended purpose (or move the case to the supreme court I guess)
> that threshold was put there for humans based on their capabilities
It wasn’t. It’s there because a small proportion being reproduced doesn’t harm the copyright holder in the same way a full reproduction does.
Nobody is going to stop buying Harry Potter books because they can get an LLM to spit out ~50 words from the book. This is entirely in line with the spirit of the law. This is exactly why proportionality is a factor in fair use.