Technology

Trick is educating the octogenarians in the senate to understand any of what you just wrote.

I'd say they should have to follow the most-restrictive license of all of their training data, and that existing CC/FOSS licenses don't count because they were designed for use in a pre-LLM world.

It seems like a pretty reasonable request. But people like free stuff, and when they think about who will get screwed by this they like to imagine that they're sticking it to the biggest publishers of mass media.

But IRL, those publishers are giddy with the idea that instead of scouting artists and bullying them into signing over their IP, they can just summon IP on demand.

The people who will suffer are the independents who refused to sign over their IP. They never got their payday, and now they never will either.

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.

God damned right. Every "new" thing tends to be stolen. In more event history, its stolen from other capital, or from innovation with a free license, rather than artwork. Publishers might actually be able to make a problem out of this.

That would be a much better comparison if it was artificial intelligence, but these are just reinforcement learning models. They do not get inspired.

That's an interesting take, I didn't know software could be inspired by other people's works. And here I thought software just did exactly as it's instructed to do. These are language models. They were given data to train those models. Did they pay for the data that they used to train for it, or did they scrub the internet and steal all these books along with everything everyone else has said?

These are machines, though, not human beings.

I guess I'd have to be an author to find out how I'd feel about it, to be fair.

Are you saying the writers of these programs have read all these books, and were inspired by them so much they wrote millions of books? And all this software is doing is outputting the result of someone being inspired by other books?

Generally they probably bought the books they read though.

If George RR Martin torrented Tolkien, wouldn't he be infringing on the copyright no matter how he subsequently incorporated it into future output?

I completely agree that the training as infringement argument is ludicrous.

But OpenAI exposed themselves to IP infringement by sailing the high seas in how they obtained the works in the first place.

I hate that the world we live in is one where so much data is gated behind paywalls, but the law is what it is, and if the government was going to come down hard on Aaron Swartz for trying to bypass paywalls for massive amounts of written text, it's not exactly fair if there's a double standard for OpenAI doing the same thing in an even more closed fashion.

But yes, the degree of entitled focus on the premise of training an AI as equivalent of infringing is weird as heck to see from authors drawing quite clearly from earlier works in their own output.

So where can I check to see if my book was used? I published a book.