At the crux of the author's lawsuit is the argument that OpenAI is ruthlessly mining their material to create "derivative works" that will "replace the very writings it copied."

The authors shoot down OpenAI's excuse that "substantial similarity is a mandatory feature of all copyright-infringement claims," calling it "flat wrong."

Goodbye Star Wars, Avatar, Tarantino’s entire filmography, every slasher film since 1974…

I don't care what works a neural network gets trained on. How else are we supposed to make one?

Should I care more about modern eternal copyright bullshit? I'd feel more nuance if everything a few decades old was public-domain, like it's fucking supposed to be. Then there'd be plenty of slightly-outdated content to shovel into these statistical analysis engines. But there's not. So fuck it: show the model absolutely everything, and the impact of each work becomes vanishingly small.

Models don't get bigger as you add more stuff. Training only twiddles the numbers in each layer. There are two-gigabyte networks that have been trained on hundreds of millions of images. If you tried to store those image, verbatim, they would each weigh barely a dozen bytes. And the network gets better as that number goes down.

The entire point is to force the distillation of high-level concepts from raw data. We've tried doing it the smart way and we suck at it. "AI winter" and "good old-fashioned AI" were half a century of fumbling toward the acceptance that we don't understand how intelligence works. This brute-force approach isn't chosen for cost or ease or simplicity. This is the only approach that works.

Copyright is already just a band-aid for what is really an issue of resource allocation.

If writers and artists weren't at risk of loosing their means of living, we wouldn't need to concern ourselves with the threat of an advanced tool supplanting them. Nevermind how the tool is created, it is clearly very valuable (otherwise it would not represent such a large threat to writers) and should be made as broadly available (and jointly-owned and controlled) as possible. By expanding copyright like this, all we're doing is gatekeeping the creation of AI models to the largest of tech companies, and making them prohibitively expensive to train for smaller applications.

If LLM's are truly the start of a "fourth industrial revolution" as some have claimed, then we need to consider the possibility that our economic arrangement is ill-suited for the kind of productivity it is said AI will bring. Private ownership (over creative works, and over AI models, and over data) is getting in the way of what could be a beautiful technological advancement that benefits everyone.

Instead, we're left squabbling over who gets to own what and how.

I think the place we haven't quite gotten to yet is that copyright is probably the wrong law for this. What the AI is doing is reverse engineering the authors magic formula for creating new works, which would likely be patent law.

In the past this hasn't really been possible for a person to do reliably, and it isn't really quantifiable as far as filling a patent for your process, yet the AI does it anyway, leaving us in a weird spot.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

ChatGPT creator OpenAI has been on the receiving end of two high profile lawsuits by authors who are absolutely livid that the AI startup used their writing to train its large language models, which they say amounts to flaunting copyright laws without any form of compensation.

One of the lawsuits, led by comedian and memoirist Sarah Silverman, is playing out in a California federal court, where the plaintiffs recently delivered a scolding on ChatGPT's underlying technology.

At the crux of the author's lawsuit is the argument that OpenAI is ruthlessly mining their material to create "derivative works" that will "replace the very writings it copied."

The authors shoot down OpenAI's excuse that "substantial similarity is a mandatory feature of all copyright-infringement claims," calling it "flat wrong."

It can brag that it's a leader in a booming AI industry, but in doing so it's also painted a bigger target on its back, making enemies of practically every creative pursuit.

High profile literary luminaries behind that suit include George R. R. Martin, Jonathan Franzen, David Baldacci, and legal thriller maestro John Grisham.

The original article contains 369 words, the summary contains 180 words. Saved 51%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

"substantial similarity is a mandatory feature of all copyright-infringement claims"

Is that not a requirement? Time for me to start suing people!

I take it we don't use the phrase "good writers borrow, great writers steal" in this day and age...