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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Typically the argument has been "a robot can't make transformative works because it's a robot." People think our brains are special when in reality they are just really lossy.
Even if you buy that premise, the output of the robot is only superficially similar to the work it was trained on, so no copyright infringement there, and the training process itself is done by humans, and it takes some tortured logic to deny the technology's transformative nature
Go ask ChatGPT for the lyrics of a song and then tell me, that's transformative work when it outputs the exact lyrics.
Well, they're fixing that now. I just asked chatgpt to tell me the lyrics to stairway to heaven and it replied with a brief description of who wrote it and when, then said here are the lyrics: It stopped 3 words into the lyrics.
In theory as long as it isn't outputting the exact copyrighted material, then all output should be fair use. The fact that it has knowledge of the entire copyrighted material isn't that different from a human having read it, assuming it was read legally.
This feels like a solution to a non-problem. When a person asks the AI "give me X copyrighted text" no one should be expecting this to be new works. Why is asking ChatGPT for lyrics bad while asking a human ok?
It's not legal for anyone (human or not) to put song lyrics online without permission/license to do so. I was googling this to make sure I understood it correctly and it seems that reproducing the lyrics to music without permission to do so is copyright infringement. There are some lyrics websites that work with music companies to get licensing to post lyrics but most websites host them illegally and will them then down if they receive a DMCA request.
Wait wait wait. That is not a good description of what is happening. If you and i are in a chat room and you asked me the lyrics, my verbalization of them isn't an issue. The fact it is online just means the method of communication is different but that should be covered under free use.
The AI is taking prompts and proving the output as a dialog. It's literally a language model so there is a process of synthesizing your question and generating your output. I think that's something people either don't understand or completely ignore. Its not as if there are entire books verbatim stored as a contiguous block of data. The data is processed and synthesized into a language model that then generates an output that happens to match the requested text.
This is why we cant look at the output the same way we look at static text. In theory if you kept training it in a way then opposed the statistical nature of your book or lyrics you could eventually get to the point where asking the AI to generate your text would give a non-verbatim answer.
I get that this feels like semantics but creating laws that don't understand the technology means we end up screwing ourselves over.
I get how LLMs work and I think they're really cool. I'm just trying to explain why OpenAI is currently limiting these abilities to continue operating within our legal system. Hopefully the court cases find that there is in fact a difference between publishing the information on a normal website versus discussing it with a chatbot so that they don't have to be limited like this.
Publishing lyrics publicly online is illegal while communicating them privately in a chatroom is probably fine. Communicating them in a public forum is a grey area, but you likely won't be caught or prosecuted. If a big company hosts an AI chatbot which can tell you the lyrics to any song on demand, then that seems like an illegal service unless they have the rights.
Feel free to look up the legality of publishing lyrics online, all I saw was information saying that it is illegal but they don't prosecute anyone but the larger companies.
I guess my question is why does it seem like an illegal service? Not saying it isn't but it feels like non technical people will say "it knows the lyrics and can tell me them so it must contain them."
To me the technology is moving closer to mimicking human memory than just plain storage retrieval. ChatGPT gets things wrong often because that process of presenting data is not copying but generation. The output is the output so presenting anything copyright falls under the appropriate laws but until the material is actually presented some of the arguments being made feel wrong. If i can read a book and then write anything, the fact your story is in my head shouldn't be a problem. If you prompt the AI for a book...isn't that your fault by asking?
Try it again and when it stops after a few words, just say "continue". Do that a few times and it will spit out the whole lyrics.
It's also a copyright violation if a human reproduces memorized copyrighted material in a commercial setting.
If, for example, I give a concert and play all of Nirvana's songs without a license to do so, I am still violating the copyright even if I totally memorized all the lyrics and the sheet music.