OpenAI Gets Some of Sarah Silverman's Suit Cut in Mixed Ruling - Slashdot

Posted by msmash

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  Her book is the funniest comedian authored book I've ever listened to. The only funny one, actually.

  Mostly about her bedwetting. A lot funnier than that sounds.

• If it's not fair use, and the court rules that it's not, do we then have to buy a new license every time we want to read a book once more?

  How does a machine reading a book fundamentally differ from a human, and why would the act of reading constitute a copyright violation?

  Am I misreading this, or is Sarah Silverman's argument really that she doesn't want machines reading her work without a pay-per-read license?

  • If it's not fair use, and the court rules that it's not, do we then have to buy a new license every time we want to read a book once more?

    How does a machine reading a book fundamentally differ from a human, and why would the act of reading constitute a copyright violation?

    Am I misreading this, or is Sarah Silverman's argument really that she doesn't want machines reading her work without a pay-per-read license?

    This would cause problems for text-to-speech used by the blind... a machine reading her work and then plagiarising it, reading it out loud to someone? THEIVES!

  • "How does a machine reading a book fundamentally differ from a human, and why would the act of reading constitute a copyright violation?"

    Interesting question. It is well known that there are tons of copyrighted intellectual property (IP) embedded in the datasets used to train LLM's. And I think it is also known that some clever users of these LLM's have figured out ways to coerce the models to regurgitate significant portions of this IP verbatim (more or less), which could (theoretically) violate the "fair use" standards of copyright laws.

    So the administrators and governments will probably see the need to create additional regulations, rules and laws to minimize the impact of this problem.

    • Re:

      The act of reading a book is not copyright violation. A machine that reads a book to someone who has the right to read the book but can't because they're blind isn't copyright violation. But the act of memorizing it and then reciting it to large groups of people for pay probably is. Even the act of making a derivative work and then selling it is a violation, and that's what OpenAI is alleged to be doing, is it not?

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      • Re:

        Don't forget Amazon was sued for doing this with their Kindle. https://www.theguardian.com/te... [theguardian.com]

        What constitutes a derivative work though? A quote? An analysis? Using the ideas of a book in abstract to answer a question the book touches on?

      • Re:

        I don't see any evidence that OpenAI is trying to have ChatGPT recite memorized work. Outside of some fairly specific queries that would probably be a non-useful output.

        I don't think that's what derivative means from a legal sense. It's not just copying someone's style, you need to copy a specific work.

        Consider all the satirical news shows that spun off from the Daily Show (often on different networks). You might consider them "derivative" in the creative sense, but none of them got sued by Comedy Central.

    • Re: If it's not fair use

      You need to read a book in order to copy it, whether you are a scribe in a monastery or a machine. The claim here is that OpenAI is copying the book and then storing it using a lossy algorithm, which is basically what an LLM is. The question is how lossy should lossy be before it becomes no longer an issue of copyright. The same conversations were had about JPEG a long time ago.

      Of course {Open}AI and its supporters will claim it doesnâ(TM)t have a full copy of anything, but it is a graph database of wo

  • Re:

    "Yes please!" - Text Book Publishers

  • Depends on what is remembered

    How does a machine storing the entire contents of a book differ from an eBook which is also an electronic copy of the entire work? Ultimately I think it will depend on how much of the work is stored. If an AI can recite large passages of a book then it is hard to see that as fair use but, it if only remembers the gist of the story and characters plus a few fragments of text then that sounds much more like a human and so clearly fair use.

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  • Re:

    Isn't this about getting access to the material in the first place? Did OpenAI purchase a legal copy of each of those books? Are they permitted to use a library pass or equivalent to access those books (IANAL but this seems a violation of terms but I have no idea). Once you have the book you don't need a license to read it again -- unless you bought it an electronic DRM you can no longer access or something, right?

    • Re: If it's not fair use

      I'll like to revoke every degree issues in the past 2 decades for anyone who used pirated textbooks to obtain their degrees.