Authors sue ChatGPT creator OpenAI

Under the umbrella of the Authors Guild, a group of 17 prominent and best-selling authors, including Jonathan Franzen, Jodi Picoult, George Saunders, Elin Hilderbrand and George RR Martin, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, developer of the major language model ChatGPT, for copyright infringement. He filed a lawsuit because of it.

They claim that OpenAI is “copying” their work “wholesale” by using this work to train its models, and that this copying may allow derivative works to be created without permission or compensation.

This lawsuit follows previous lawsuits from other writers, including comedian Sarah Silverman and Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon, as well as similar lawsuits filed against image-generating platforms like OpenAI’s DALL-E, alleging that writers’ and artists’ work is a vital component It has the nature of This technology is something that requires permission to be developed.

Here are my feelings about this suit.

Good morning my baby.

I don’t think I know what the consequences of these lawsuits will be, and while I sympathize with the authors (for obvious reasons), I don’t think these AI companies should be stopped.

But I believe it is probably past time to figure out how creators’ rights can be properly protected in this new technological age. The US copyright system is certainly an imperfect tool for balancing the interests of publishers, authors, scholars, and readers, but it is what we have. Sometimes when something new comes along the only way to decide what is what is to fight about it. In our system, litigation is a way to wage this fight.

There are a few different issues at work here. First, the plaintiffs allege that the AI ​​models were trained on pirated copies of original texts, a form of receiving (or repurposing) stolen goods.

The biggest issue concerns what constitutes “fair use” under copyright law. Fair use allows the use of “limited portions” of the work of others “for purposes such as commentary, criticism, reporting, and scientific reports.” How much are people allowed to use?

Add a shrug. There are no hard and fast guidelines in terms of word count or percentage of another work. The law says fair use “depends on all the circumstances.”

You may notice that in the list of activities that fall under fair use, “training a broad language model” is not among them, but the inclusion of “like” indicates that the list is not comprehensive and that OpenAI will fall back on a model. The defense is that any text created by ChatGPT or its more advanced cousins ​​will be an “original” rather than a copy of any author’s copyrighted work.

Needless to say, these are complex issues, and the initial response from OpenAI suggests that they want to reach some sort of compromise with writers and the Writers’ Guild, perhaps to avoid the worst-case scenario where their descriptions would require reporting. and authors whose work appears in the educational data will be compensated.

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Perhaps they also fear the discovery process of lawsuits that might require them to disclose the content of their training data; Something that OpenAI and other LLM developers have resisted so far.

Honestly, I don’t know if what OpenAI did in creating ChatGPT constitutes fair use, and I’m not sure others do either. The potential existence of such technology was not taken into account when laws and guidelines were written.

What I do know is that some transparency would be welcome. Allowing powerful tech companies to operate with impunity just because they claim to be innovators is no way to protect ourselves from exploitation.

John Warner is the author of “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Requirements.”

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Book recommendations from Biblioracle

John Warner tells you what you should read, based on the last five books you’ve read.

1. “Lillian Boxfish Goes for a Walk” By Kathleen Rooney

2. “Prom Mom” By Laura Lippman

3. “Diving from Clausen Pier” By Ann Packer

4. “Stones to Ibarra” By Harriet Doerr

5. “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” by Louis de Bernieres

—Beth P., Chicago

There are a variety of interesting books here. I hope the sweet and spare story of two people who find each other late will be a good fit for you. The book is “Our Night Souls” by Kent Haruf.

1. “When Breath Becomes Air” By Paul Kalanithi

2. “Water Agreement” By Abraham Verghese

3. “Evil Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsolver

4. “Tom Lake” By Ann Patchett

5. “Lincoln Highway” By Amor Towles

— Mary M., Lake Forest

I see it has been a while since I recommended “Mrs.” “The Bridge” by Evan Connell. I’ve never met anyone who appreciates carefully written books like the ones above and doesn’t find the novel magnificent.

1. “Sacred” by Stephen King

2. “American Prometheus” By Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin

3. “I’m Happy My Mother Is Dead” By Jennette McCurdy

4. “Page Boy” by Elliot Page

5. “Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow” By Gabrielle Zevin

—Jillian N., Burlington, Vermont

“Perfect Tunes” by Emily Gould is a mother/daughter story set against the backdrop of music and art, and I think it suits Jillian very well.

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Send a list of the last five books you read and your hometown to: biblioracle@gmail.com