One prominent author responds to the revelation that his writing is being used to coach artificial intelligence.

By Stephen King

Non-paywalled link: https://archive.li/8QMmu

  • Phanatik@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    LLMs have been caught plagiarising works, by the simple nature of how they function. They predict the next word based on an assumed context of the previous words, they’re very good at constructing sentences but often the issue is “where is it getting its information from?” Authors never consented to their works being fed into an optimisation algorithm and neither did artists when DALL E was created.

    For authors, you buy the book and thus the author is paid but that’s not what happened with ChatGPT.

    • Duxon@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      LLMs have been caught plagiarising works

      Any source for this? I have never seen that.

      I’m highly skeptical about GPT4 having been directly trained on copyrighted material by Stephen King. Simply by all the sheer information about his works, including summaries, themes, characters, and critical analyses that are publicly available, a good LLM can appear to be able to plagiarize these works, while it doesn’t. If I’m right, there is no leverage for creators to complain. Just accept that that’s the world we’re living in now. I don’t see why this world will stop the sales of books or movie rights on books, etc.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      Authors never consented to their works being fed into an optimisation algorithm

      Yeah I know they didn’t but at worst the company owes them 30 bucks for the licence. I don’t think copyright law gives authors the right to say who can buy their works, so at the absolute worst, the AI company’s stole a book.

      To be clear I’m not saying that this should be allowed, I’m just saying that under the current legal system I’m not sure they actually committed that much of a crime. Obviously it needs to be updated, but you do that through political reform (and good luck with that because AI is big bucks), not through the courts.

      • Phanatik@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Copyright Law doesn’t talk about who can consume the work. ChatGPT’s theft is no different to piracy and companies have gotten very pissy about their shit being pirated but when ChatGPT does it (because the piracy is hidden behind its training), it’s fine. The individual authors and artists get shafted in the end because their work has been weaponised against them.

        • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Copyright Law doesn’t talk about who can consume the work.

          What law does talk about it, then?