OpenAI now tries to hide that ChatGPT was trained on copyrighted books, including J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series::A new research paper laid out ways in which AI developers should try and avoid showing LLMs have been trained on copyrighted material.
Should we distinguish it though? Why shouldn’t (and didn’t) artists have a say if their art is used to train LLMs? Just like publicly displayed art doesn’t provide a permission to copy it and use it in other unspecified purposes, it would be reasonable that the same would apply to AI training.
But it kinda does. If I see a van Gogh painting, I can be inspired to make a painting in the same style.
When “ai” “learns” from an image, it doesn’t copy the image or even parts of the image directly. It learns the patterns involved instead, over many pictures. Then it uses those patterns to make new images.
Ah, but that’s the thing. Training isn’t copying. It’s pattern recognition. If you train a model “The dog says woof” and then ask a model “What does the dog say”, it’s not guaranteed to say “woof”.
Similarly, just because a model was trained on Harry Potter, all that means is it has a good corpus of how the sentences in that book go.
Thus the distinction. Can I train on a comment section discussing the book?