Always impressive how the AI community, both inside large companies and not, seems to assume data just exists for them to use, copyright or personal rights be damned.
It'll work well until we can upload ourselves to the cloud and we'll have to revisit it
It's a grains-to-heap problem; eventually, you have to make an ugly choice.
But yeah that’s separate from the question of whether you properly licensed the data to train on in the first place.
A big chunk of the computing community seems to approach licensing as “I can see it, so I can use it.” (See GPL code used where it shouldn’t be.)
You're not generally distributing, performing, &c. your state of mind. On the other hand, if you then go and generate work based on what you read, then distributing that work certainly can be infringing. Thus "clean room" techniques, where one team reads copyrighted text, writes up a spec (which may then be checked off by lawyers), and then another team, without reading the copyrighted text, implements based off the spec, are sometimes used to attempt to launder copyright taint.
Taking a step back, the fact that well-known authors have infamously declared that they don't read fanfiction as a CYA move against accusations of plagiarism suggests that yes, brains that have read text are widely considered derivative.
I don't think I agree. My employer values my contribution in some part as an oracle. People at work ask me questions and I answer them. Those answers come from the sum of my experiences (a biochemical 'model'). Other people more directly conduct public performances of their talent.
If nothing else this will likely blur the lines on what's considered original work.
Hell, unless you paid for it, you shouldn’t even have the collection to train on, whether you distribute it or not.
Effectively, everyone’s focusing on whether your story(/model) is sufficiently transformative from Die Hard to be fair use for you to distribute it, without addressing the complaint that you snuck into the theater too, and held the door for others to follow me in.
Are you objecting to the use of data for training, or to the compilation of training datasets?
The GP is objecting to the casualness with which privacy rights and intellectual property rights are ignored by so many in the AI community, not to a choice of whether they object to one or another specific manifestation of how the community is doing so.
[edit added]: Those who would argue "no, there is no casual ignoring of rights", consider for example the official DMCA takedown instructions for the collection [0].
Or is the trained model a derived work of those books?
Perhaps we should figure that before we start a dystopian nightmare of written material.
Training a language model, I would argue, is equivalent (in terms of being derivative) to generating a list of the top ten words in a corpus of text. Not really a derived work.
Edit: https://the-eye.eu/public/Books/humble_books_20180509/
Cue the "they're depriving me of my income" complaints from authors.
That was not the question.
However, the legal environment is very different than in the commercial world or consumer piracy, as it generally involves various legal exemptions (differing between locales) that do allow such usage. For example, I work in NLP research on aspects that involve handling large corpora of copyrighted text. It's easier to do it with cooperation of the publishers for various practical reasons, however, we still can and do use also the works of the publishers who would refuse to grant any permission, because local copyright law has specific exceptions that allows the usage these works for noncommercial research purposes. Doing so is not ignoring their rights, their rights are not violated but rather they are limited; their exclusivity right (privilege would be a more appropriate word) to make copies is not absolute. There are even some countries with explicit legal duty for the publishers to provide digital versions of their works to national corpora where they will be used for (among other things) machine learning models.
The specific consequence, however, is that we can't legally share the full datasets which we are using with the public, like it was done in the original post with this particular dataset, as that would be a violation of the publishers' commercial rights; we can provide them to specific researchers for limited noncommercial purposes only. But I can download this dataset or one like this and use it my research legally; just as I can rip up a physical book, scan it, make a digital copy and OCR it, and use it in a research corpus (with copies distributed to other researchers) even if the publisher disapproves.
It's not that simple unfortunately, and companies could still send a C&D/threaten invoking the CFAA, and it would still be a mess. Although in practice it's not worth the effort for companies to sue as long as the scraper is not monetarily benefiting from it (which is how the court case happened).