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.
If I’m not mistaken AI work was just recently considered as NOT copyrightable.
So I find interesting that an AI learning from copyrighted work is an issue even though what will be generated will NOT be copyrightable.
So even if you generated some copy of Harry Potter you would not be able to copyright it. So in no way could you really compete with the original art.
I’m not saying that it makes it ok to train AIs on copyrighted art but I think it’s still an interesting aspect of this topic.
As others probably have stated, the AI may be creating content that is transformative and therefore under fair use. But even if that work is transformative it cannot be copyrighted because it wasn’t created by a human.
If you’re talking about the ruling that came out this week, that whole thing was about trying to give an AI authorship of a work generated solely by a machine and having the copyright go to the owner of the machine through the work-for-hire doctrine. So an AI itself can’t be authors or hold a copyright, but humans using them can still be copyright holders of any qualifying works.
How are they going to prove if something was written by an AI? Also, you can take the AI’s output and then modify it.
That’s definitely an issue. At what point does copyright applies if you are just helped by an AI ?
I guess the courts will have to decide that…
How do you tell if a piece of work contains AI generated content or not?
It’s not hard to generate a piece of AI content, put in some hours to round out AI’s signatures / common mistakes, and pass it off as your own. So in practise it’s still easy to benefit from AI systems by masking generate content as largely your own.
I mean, this is the exact way the U.S. Copyright Office’s guidance says they think you should use it.
Sure, but even under this guidance copyright owners of the training data are still shafted, based on how the data is scraped pretty much freely. Can an opportunist generate an unofficial sequel to Harry Potter, do the minimum to ensure they get copyright and reap the reward from it?
That’s how copyright has always worked. Fair use is complex, but as long as you’re not straight up copying someone’s work you’re fine. 50 Shades of Grey started out as Twilight fanfiction. So yeah, you could.
Yes fair use has its stipulations but AI is breaking new grounds here. We are no longer dealing with the reaction videos but in an era where literally dozen of pages of content can be generated in a matter of minutes, with relatively little human involvement. Perhaps it’s time to revisit if the law still holds in light of these new technology and tools.
You should read this article by Kit Walsh, who’s a senior staff attorney at the EFF.
Interesting read! Definitely a useful breakdown and I see the reasoning. Thanks for sharing.
Fair use has never been seriously challenged. I’m betting it might happen soon though. We have to remember Fair Use isn’t a law, it’s a set of guidelines under the law that has never been clearly defined.
First of all, fair use is not a set of guidelines, it’s a legal doctrine that allows us limited use of copyrighted material without permission from the owner. It is a part of the U.S. Copyright Act, which is a law enacted by Congress.
Second, fair use has been seriously challenged plenty of times, just to name a few:
Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc.
Authors Guild v. Google, Inc.
Lenz v. Universal Music Corp.
I recommend reading this article by Kit Walsh, who’s a senior staff attorney at the EFF, a digital rights group who recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone.
Fair use protects creativity, innovation, and our freedom of expression, but You almost sound like you want it weakened.
That’s not how copyright works. I’m embarrassed for you, and all the people who blindly upvoted you. Like… Yikes. What’s happening to this world?
You can’t publish copyrighted work as your own just because you’re legally not able to publish copyrighted work. That’s a open and shut case of copyright infringement. Why do I have to say this? Am I on candid camera?