Open AI, books, articles and more

I recently blogged about the fact that AI couldn’t be much good with the amount of material that is available online.

We recently spotted an ars technica article Judge rejects most ChatGPT copyright claims from book authors which throws out a lot of what authors are saying is a copyright violation.

I’m not saying this case is over yet, as there’s more to figure out. But the authors that are going after Open AI have a set back.

A US district judge in California has largely sided with OpenAI, dismissing the majority of claims raised by authors alleging that large language models powering ChatGPT were illegally trained on pirated copies of their books without their permission.

We know that chat GPT has its issues, but as I wrote in my prior post dealing with the new york times, my one or two tests even ith a different model seemed to do what it needed to do.

By allegedly repackaging original works as ChatGPT outputs, authors alleged, OpenAI’s most popular chatbot was just a high-tech “grift” that seemingly violated copyright laws, as well as state laws preventing unfair business practices and unjust enrichment.

So what is this to mean? It rewrote part of some of the book when answering a question and did it word for word without giving any type of attribution?

According to judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, authors behind three separate lawsuits—including Sarah Silverman, Michael Chabon, and Paul Tremblay—have failed to provide evidence supporting any of their claims except for direct copyright infringement.

I could see why direct copyright infringement could be a problem, but based on what I’ve seen from our community, they did very specific things and got very specific things and nothing to me came from any of these authors from what I can tell. But that’s of course a small sample.

Among copyright claims tossed by Martínez-Olguín were accusations of vicarious copyright infringement. Perhaps most significantly, Martínez-Olguín agreed with OpenAI that the authors’ allegation that “every” ChatGPT output “is an infringing derivative work” is “insufficient” to allege vicarious infringement, which requires evidence that ChatGPT outputs are “substantially similar” or “similar at all” to authors’ books.

There’s plenty more, feel free to read the article. Its only going to get more interesting. The article goes in to more detail in regards to the DMCA and other aspects that were part of the case getting thrown out except for the copyright violations that may still remain.