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Comment by ctoth | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sure this doesn't address the key point, that OpenAI and others apparently used a giant dump of pirated epubs as one of their training sources.

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If I watch a pirated copy of Oppenheimer and then summarize the plot to you, the piracy would be a crime, but the summarization would not.

If you watch a pirated copy of Oppenheimer, perfectly memorise it with machine-like accuracy, and then recreate it, then yeah you might be in violation of copyright law.

LLMs are very good at creating things in the style of existing work, but they aren't that great at re-creating existing work verbatim. For example, here's what happens if you prompt Midjourney to draw "the mona lisa": https://i.imgur.com/njOlL5h.jpg

Obviously these are attempts at recreating the Mona Lisa, but none of them are the Mona Lisa. Whether they fall within fair use is an entirely separate question.

It originally being pirated or not would not come into play if its a copyright violation or not. Its a violation if it's 1:1 and billed as such, otherwise its a parody or inspired by

If you did so and as a consequence it was provable that far fewer people saw Oppenheimer, resulting in economic damages to the copyright owner, then the summarization may not qualify as fair use and might very well be a crime.

(Btw I'm not saying that's the case, but that's essentially the argument)

Not sure how that would negate the fair use defence.

If they're using pirated books, haven't they already committed copyright infringement by keeping these copies? The model itself might be transformative, but I think that is a separate issue.

If the companies had bought all of the ebooks, then they might be in the clear.

But even given that, does that transfer on to the AI model itself?

Or is it "you did a bad thing in the process of making another thing but we can only punish the initial act"

The question is can you stop it from blatantly offering up a copy of some ones work?

Yes you can create a transformative work but if you can get it to make an exact copy and can't get it to stop doing that I would say there's a problem.

if your a service provider and I send you a DCMA request how do you handle it?

Have you tried to get an AI to create a direct copy of something of any substantial length?

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