Grisham, Martin join authors suing OpenAI: “There is nothing fair about this”
Grisham, Martin join authors suing OpenAI: “There is nothing fair about this”
Authors claim ChatGPT wouldn’t exist without their books.
![Grisham, Martin join authors suing OpenAI: “There is nothing fair about this” [Updated]](https://lemmy.film/pictrs/image/19648cd2-7ffc-420a-97b1-40c25b175da2.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=256)
Yesterday, popular authors including John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen, George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, and George Saunders joined the Authors Guild in suing OpenAI, alleging that training the company's large language models (LLMs) used to power AI tools like ChatGPT on pirated versions of their books violates copyright laws and is "systematic theft on a mass scale."
“Generative AI is a vast new field for Silicon Valley's longstanding exploitation of content providers," Franzen said in a statement provided to Ars. "Authors should have the right to decide when their works are used to ‘train’ AI. If they choose to opt in, they should be appropriately compensated.”
OpenAI has previously argued against two lawsuits filed earlier this year by authors making similar claims that authors suing "misconceive the scope of copyright, failing to take into account the limitations and exceptions (including fair use) that properly leave room for innovations like the large language models now at the forefront of artificial intelligence."
This latest complaint argued that OpenAI's "LLMs endanger fiction writers’ ability to make a living, in that the LLMs allow anyone to generate—automatically and freely (or very cheaply)—texts that they would otherwise pay writers to create."
Authors are also concerned that the LLMs fuel AI tools that "can spit out derivative works: material that is based on, mimics, summarizes, or paraphrases" their works, allegedly turning their works into "engines of" authors' "own destruction" by harming the book market for them. Even worse, the complaint alleged, businesses are being built around opportunities to create allegedly derivative works:
Businesses are sprouting up to sell prompts that allow users to enter the world of an author’s books and create derivative stories within that world. For example, a business called Socialdraft offers long prompts that lead ChatGPT to engage in 'conversations' with popular fiction authors like Plaintiff Grisham, Plaintiff Martin, Margaret Atwood, Dan Brown, and others about their works, as well as prompts that promise to help customers 'Craft Bestselling Books with AI.'
They claimed that OpenAI could have trained their LLMs exclusively on works in the public domain or paid authors "a reasonable licensing fee" but chose not to. Authors feel that without their copyrighted works, OpenAI "would have no commercial product with which to damage—if not usurp—the market for these professional authors’ works."
"There is nothing fair about this," the authors' complaint said.
Their complaint noted that OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman claims that he shares their concerns, telling Congress that "creators deserve control over how their creations are used” and deserve to "benefit from this technology." But, the claim adds, so far, Altman and OpenAI—which, claimants allege, "intend to earn billions of dollars" from their LLMs—have "proved unwilling to turn these words into actions."
Saunders said that the lawsuit—which is a proposed class action estimated to include tens of thousands of authors, some of multiple works, where OpenAI could owe $150,000 per infringed work—was an "effort to nudge the tech world to make good on its frequent declarations that it is on the side of creativity." He also said that stakes went beyond protecting authors' works.
"Writers should be fairly compensated for their work," Saunders said. "Fair compensation means that a person’s work is valued, plain and simple. This, in turn, tells the culture what to think of that work and the people who do it. And the work of the writer—the human imagination, struggling with reality, trying to discern virtue and responsibility within it—is essential to a functioning democracy.”
The authors' complaint said that as more writers have reported being replaced by AI content-writing tools, more authors feel entitled to compensation from OpenAI. The Authors Guild told the court that 90 percent of authors responding to an internal survey from March 2023 "believe that writers should be compensated for the use of their work in 'training' AI." On top of this, there are other threats, their complaint said, including that "ChatGPT is being used to generate low-quality ebooks, impersonating authors, and displacing human-authored books."
Authors claimed that despite Altman's public support for creators, OpenAI is intentionally harming creators, noting that OpenAI has admitted to training LLMs on copyrighted works and claiming that there's evidence that OpenAI's LLMs "ingested" their books "in their entireties."
"Until very recently, ChatGPT could be prompted to return quotations of text from copyrighted books with a good degree of accuracy," the complaint said. "Now, however, ChatGPT generally responds to such prompts with the statement, 'I can’t provide verbatim excerpts from copyrighted texts.'"
To authors, this suggests that OpenAI is exercising more caution in the face of authors' growing complaints, perhaps since authors have alleged that the LLMs were trained on pirated copies of their books. They've accused OpenAI of being "opaque" and refusing to discuss the sources of their LLMs' data sets.
Authors have demanded a jury trial and asked a US district court in New York for a permanent injunction to prevent OpenAI's alleged copyright infringement, claiming that if OpenAI's LLMs continue to illegally leverage their works, they will lose licensing opportunities and risk being usurped in the book market.
Ars could not immediately reach OpenAI for comment. [Update: OpenAI's spokesperson told Ars that “creative professionals around the world use ChatGPT as a part of their creative process. We respect the rights of writers and authors, and believe they should benefit from AI technology. We’re having productive conversations with many creators around the world, including the Authors Guild, and have been working cooperatively to understand and discuss their concerns about AI. We’re optimistic we will continue to find mutually beneficial ways to work together to help people utilize new technology in a rich content ecosystem.”]
Rachel Geman, a partner with Lieff Cabraser and co-counsel for the authors, said that OpenAI's "decision to copy authors’ works, done without offering any choices or providing any compensation, threatens the role and livelihood of writers as a whole.” She told Ars that "this is in no way a case against technology. This is a case against a corporation to vindicate the important rights of writers.”
Holy cow the comments here are so alarming. OpenAI isn't some non profit trying to better humanity. They are a for profit company making money with a product that is ILLEGALY derived from the work of others. Why are y'all so apathetic? Pretty disheartening.
Lemmy's opinion on the topic is often very biased towards the views of tech bros rather than writers/creators, at least that's what I've observed. Tech bros have a boner for LLM AIs. They don't have anything to lose from the development of these AIs, so they don't seem to understand the concerns of people who do.
Yeah, I was downvoted to hell in a copyright thread for suggesting that my work had worth and that I wasn't just freely handing it over to the general public. Sounds like a bunch of 12 year olds that have never created a fucking thing in their life except for some artistic skidmarks in their underwear. These kids have a lot to learn about life.
Tech bros have a boner for LLM AIs. They don't have anything to lose from the development of these AIs, so they don't seem to understand the concerns of people who do.
On top of this, it's becoming increasingly clear that many tech bros have never been genuinely moved by a piece of art whether it's visual or written so they genuinely don't understand that AI art is devoid of any real emotional impact. AI art just throws together cliches. It reminds me of that shitty AI generated conversation between Plato and Bill Gates when were so many tech bros talking about how "inspiring" it was.
Don't get me wrong, I love these AI tools coming out but they're so over hyped sometimes.
Disagreement isn't lack of understanding. Some of us are opposed to copyright, entirely. I'm personally not. But: this is not what copyright exists to protect against. And the more it feeds on, the less it resembles any specific work.
Fuck all the replies calling people unfeeling worthless robots over this. Miserable dehumanizing hypocrites.
Personally I think the copyright system should be abolished entirely, alongside capitalism, but I am radical like that
I just find "intellectual property" copyright to be completely unethical.
I don't exactly love the outsourcing of human creativity to AI, and personally really hope society continues to value actual human creativity, but the illegality of this stuff simply hasn't been established.
What is clear is that directly reproducing copyrighted works is illegal. Additionally, a human taking extensive inspiration from copyrighted works is generally perfectly legal. Some of the key questions are:
- Are AI models illegally reproducing copyrighted works?
- Does the sheer ease of use and scale of AI make a meaningful difference such that extensive inspiration is illegal?
- If AIs being extensively inspired by copyrighted works is in fact legal under current law, should it be? Or should legislation be passed explicitly stating that there's a material difference due to the drastically different speed and scale of, say, telling an AI to write Winds of Winter compared to an actual human struggling for years and years, and thus AI works need to be treated differently?
Personally, I'd say that (1) is a maybe, (2) is a no under current law, and therefore (3) is a yes, and I'd love to see legislation passed clarifying how we as a society want to treat AI works. I'm strongly of the opinion that human creativity is something very special and that it should be protected, but I am concerned about a future where that isn't valued very much in the face of an AI that knows your personal tastes exactly and can simply generate all the "content" you want in an instant.
Isn't the point of the lawsuit to find out if it's illegal? Until a ruling comes down, it's pretty ambiguous.
I was on board with AI using pre-existing Works to learn off of, but this was before they started hiding their content behind subscription services. Once that happened this became unethical. It's the difference between having a Pokemon fan game, and trying to publish your own fan mod of Pokemon sword and shield onto the market and expecting Nintendo just be cool with it.
The same people who were shilling for crypto and the nfts are now on board the LLM wagon, and they tend to be active on communities like these.
Yup, I remember listening to them talk about how blockchain was going to change the world, and the hype was exactly the same. There are things that will improve, tech will get a bit easier, but the tech will never live up to the hype. They'll just find something new to chase after when the shine wears off here.
Has George R. R. Martin even released a book since LLMs began collecting data? A Dance with Dragons came out 12 years ago.
He's written like a dozen novellas since then. I think he just got really sick of writing long stories and has enough money to just do whatever he feels like....which appears to not be finishing GoT.
Yes, plenty. Just not the one people want.
GRRM ensuring no one can complete his work once he is gone.
I caught him later on in 2006 and jesus christ. still no finish. Feast of Crows was soul sucking to read, I can't believe i did that to myself.
The first country to kill off LLMs with draconian interpretations of copyright law will simply be handing the industry to other countries on a golden platter. For this reason, I don't see the U.S. ruling in any sort of way that would damage the AI industry too much. There is simply too much money involved.
If enough countries join in then there will be a barrier to actually making money off of it. Even if you become the leader in AI if your method is just banned in other countries the money won't be there.
That being said, it doesn't seem like it's going to get very far anyway.
Given how we train models (content and math), AIs is not practical to ban/legislate away. While the public applications of AI are for content generation and NLP, as @Rinox alluded to, the military applications are where we are going to see the most focus from the government. As an example, the Lantirn targeting pod uses SVMs to profile aircraft from afar, and it took enormous engineering to get it accurate. Comparable object detection functionality can be obtained with NNs and off-the-shelf GPUs. Countries like China already have "differing philosophies" when it comes to intellectual property rights, so we can remove the largest manufacturing market from the potential list of those who would blanket ban AI. Ditto on any possibility of their military forgoing AI either.
The real problem here is copyright law, which has extended protections far and above the length of time that is reasonable. Had we terms of say 35 years, we could simply train on older material.
It's not about making money, not only at least. The other reason why the US, China and other countries are obsessed with AI, LLM, NN, ML is because it may prove decisive for their militaries.
What is thought by most militaries today is that we are at a turning point of sorts and the next generation of weapons will be powered by AI in some capacity, and the more we go on, the more AI will be involved (target acquisition, reaction, drone and missile guidance, APS, AA, etc)
They are fighting an uphill battle to get anything. It's a pretty strong argument that training a model is fair use.
Funny, but I don't think there's a very strong argument that training AI is fair use, especially when you consider how it intersects with the standard four factors that generally determine whether a use of copyrighted work is fair or not.
Specifically stuff like:
courts tend to give greater protection to creative works; consequently, fair use applies more broadly to nonfiction, rather than fiction. Courts are usually more protective of art, music, poetry, feature films, and other creative works than they might be of nonfiction works.
Courts have ruled that even uses of small amounts may be excessive if they take the “heart of the work.” ... Photographs and artwork often generate controversies, because a user usually needs the full image, or the full “amount,” and this may not be a fair use.
(Keep in mind that many popular AI models have been trained on vast amounts of entire artworks, large sections of text, etc.)
Effect on the market is perhaps more complicated than the other three factors. Fundamentally, this factor means that if you could have realistically purchased or licensed the copyrighted work, that fact weighs against a finding of fair use. To evaluate this factor, you may need to make a simple investigation of the market to determine if the work is reasonably available for purchase or licensing. A work may be reasonably available if you are using a large portion of a book that is for sale at a typical market price. “Effect” is also closely linked to “purpose.” If your purpose is research or scholarship, market effect may be difficult to prove. If your purpose is commercial, then adverse market effect may be easier to prove.
To me, this factor is by far the strongest argument against AI being considered fair use.
The fact is that today's generative AI is being widely used for commercial purposes and stands to have a dramatic effect on the market for the same types of work that they are using to train their data models--work that they could realistically have been licensing, and probably should be.
Ask any artist, writer, musician, or other creator whether they think it's "fair" to use their work to generate commercial products without any form of credit, consent or compensation, and the vast majority will tell you it isn't. I'm curious what "strong argument" that AI training is fair use is, because I'm just not seeing it.
AI training is taking facts which aren't subject to copyright, not actual content that is subject to it. The original work or a derivative isn't being distributed or copied. While it may be possible for a user to recreate a copyrighted material with sufficient prompting, the fact it's possible isn't any more relevant than for a copy machine. It's the same as an aspiring author reading all of Martin's work for inspiration. They can write a story based on a vaguely medieval England full of rape and murder, without paying Martin a dime. What they can't do is call it Westeros, or have the main character be named Eddard Stork.
There may be an argument that a copy needs to be purchased to extract the facts, but that's not any special license, a used copy of the book would be sufficient.
AI isn't doing anything that hasn't already been done by humans for hundreds of years, it's just doing it faster.
If I took 100 of the world's best-selling novels, wrote each individual word onto a flashcard, shuffled the entire deck, then created an entirely new novel out of that, (with completely original characters, plot threads, themes, and messaged) could it be said that I produced stolen work?
What if I specifically attempted to emulate the style of the number one author on that list? What if instead of 100 novels, I used 1,000 or 10,000? What if instead of words on flashcards, I wrote down sentences? What if it were letters instead?
At some point, regardless of by what means the changes were derived, a transformed work must pass a threshold whereby content alone it is sufficiently different enough that it can no longer be considered derivative.
Not even collage art automatically counts as fair use.
I don't see how this could work.
ChatGPTs output is not a derivative of a specific novel.
As I understand it, it's not about the output it's about the input.
Same basic principle as why universities don't simply give students a pirated copy of the entire textbook.
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It may not calculate well mathematically, if not factually at all, but ChatGPT can sure as hell wax poetically with some direction and input.
But the best I can say is that, for now, ChatGPT should be only be relegated to Fanfics, tbh, lmao...
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Martin, Jodi Picoult, and George Saunders joined the Authors Guild in suing OpenAI, alleging that training the company's large language models (LLMs) used to power AI tools like ChatGPT on pirated versions of their books violates copyright laws and is "systematic theft on a mass scale."
They claimed that OpenAI could have trained their LLMs exclusively on works in the public domain or paid authors "a reasonable licensing fee" but chose not to.
But, the claim adds, so far, Altman and OpenAI—which, claimants allege, "intend to earn billions of dollars" from their LLMs—have "proved unwilling to turn these words into actions."
Saunders said that the lawsuit—which is a proposed class action estimated to include tens of thousands of authors, some of multiple works, where OpenAI could owe $150,000 per infringed work—was an "effort to nudge the tech world to make good on its frequent declarations that it is on the side of creativity."
On top of this, there are other threats, their complaint said, including that "ChatGPT is being used to generate low-quality ebooks, impersonating authors, and displacing human-authored books."
We’re having productive conversations with many creators around the world, including the Authors Guild, and have been working cooperatively to understand and discuss their concerns about AI.
The original article contains 1,001 words, the summary contains 207 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Maybe AI can finish Winds of Winter for him
Can’t be any worse than season 8.
Is this bot going to get sued by boomer luddites, too?
Maybe AI can finish Winds of Winter for him
We are at the point now that we could invent Artificial Intelligence and develop it to a point that it could write the final GoT booK faster than GRRM, and better than HBO.
If I tried to publish a fan game using the source code of Mega Man Battle network, Capcom would be on my ass if you train your artificial intelligence off of the writing styles of popular authors and they don't see a lick? They should be on yours
Martin is exactly the person this threatens, because what he puts out is ultimately a type of slop. When you are committed to the "gritty realism" tenant of how anyone can die and plot lines might just become irrelevant, sabotaging any coherent notion of themes or meaning beyond that basic premise, what you are left with is basically just fake history and fake politics, a more elaborate version of putting army men and OCs on a map and just kind of vomitting meaningless worldbuilding details and "lore" about them fighting until enough people have died that you call it a book.
AI is largely incapable of effectively conveying themes except in the bluntest manner, but if all you need is to be willing to put writing violence, sexual pandering, arbitrary setting descriptions, and dramatic language, AI is more than up to that task, though you will still need to edit to fix contradictory details.
Martin is exactly the person this threatens, because what he puts out is ultimately a type of slop.
That was the appeal and the gimmick from the start of that hype wave: that he wrote something sort of like Lord of the Rings, but without a unifying thematic point to it outside of saying "what if Tolkien, but more mature" and that meant a lot more gore, torture, and sexual violence, with almost every character with lines and agency being an asshole. In some ways the lack of an intentional message to it all except "everyone with lasting agency and presence in this story is an asshole and the world sucks, and attempts to improve society somewhat are naive and doomed to fail, and also every time you bother the author he will kill another Stark, top kek" was also part of the appeal to its core audience because they didn't want to feel "preached" to.
Damn right LLMs could print an infinite amount of that and it'd be hard to tell the difference.
Be fair though, as fun of a gimmick as that is at first. It makes a completely boring and pointless story when I can't get invested in the states when pretty much everyone involved is going to die a pointless death that doesn't even bring anything about. Sure it's realistic and dark, but it's not a good story.
Eventually you just find yourself having to abandon this and just keep a few token protagonists alive like Jon Snow or whoever completely destroying the entire point of what you were trying to do to begin with, because you cannot have a narrative with a bunch of corpses unless your story is about the afterlife.
Solid point but I’m afraid it’s mostly shouting at the sun for rising at this point.
Brave new world, like it or not.
the limitations and exceptions (including fair use) that properly leave room for innovations
BUT WE CAN'T INNOVATE WITHOUT STEALING YOUR WORK AND FEEDING IT INTO THE CONTRAPTION!!! YOU'RE STIFLING INNOVAAAAAAAATIONNNN!!!the only good use of IP law is when it's being used to cudgel capitalist hubris, get fucked
‘move fast and break things’ enjoyers when they’re served papers since it turns out the thing they broke is the law
yeah... the quaility of comment isn't very high on this topic. Sure, George boy, summer prince, should go write right now and give the world the story he promised, but this goes far, far beyond that. Take your heads out of your butt, people.
I'm just one guy and my opinions don't matter, but uh... boo fucking hoo.
The fuck is an English language AI supposed to be trained on, if not popular examples of the English language? Churning the entire global corpus down to a mess of algebra is extremely transformative. Nevermind the end goal is a generalized program to produce anything, in limitless quantities, based on high-level descriptions and incomplete examples.
We can't even offer to use texts from thirty-odd years ago, in the public domain... because copyright maximalism like this shit right here have ruined the public domain. Surprisingly - A Game Of Thrones would still be in-copyright. It's from 1996. But there's another generation of living authors, and a whole mess of dead people, who haven't written much since well before then, and made quite a lot of money off what they did. That culture belongs to its audience now. That's what the money was for.
And that's fine, but they're owed royalties for it. If you create something, you have the right to charge for it, until we leave capitalism behind and move towards the federation, then people need to pay for things like food. GRR is fun to poke fun at, but think of all the college thesis or papers that were shamelessly stolen from individuals and can be used to create new ones. Those people deserve to eat for what they made.
If copyright needs to change then let's update copyright, but it's not fair to blame the people who created them is stuff for wanting what they're owed. As you point out, it would be worthless without what they contributed, and so by that, they have worth and value they are owed.
Stolen! Theft! Robbery!!!
Fuck that. They used publicly-available documents, and they used them to measure letter frequencies. The model just guesses what letter comes next. That's it. The more English text we shovel in, the more generic the model gets.
You don't pay royalties on every work you've ever read, before writing these comments.
When this technology is working properly, that's the level of impact each work has.
Well, if he would actually release his books, maybe Georgie-boy wouldn't have to feel threatened by a robot taking his job.
If he wrote another book, that would probably just get fed right into the training data like the rest of them, so he would have the same problem he has now.
Would be hilarious to see this get thrown out because the plaintiff has no standing to sue because he hasn't written anything in over a decade