Sarah Silverman Podcast (YouTube)
Sarah Silverman is one of several authors suing both OpenAI and its ChatGPT as well as Meta/Facebook for copyright infringements. The lawsuits claim that the companies’ respective artificial intelligence programs, which generate content for users so people will not need to actually do any work themselves, used their work without permission or compensation.
Well, it was only a matter of time before this would happen. People have been saying all along that AI based writing programs just rewrite other people’s work. And, even when significant changes are made to the text, legally if certain concepts, original idea or the basic style remains unchanged it could be considered a copyright infringement.
And that is not all. The bigger problem here is that if use of all these AI writing services like ChatGPT continues to increase it may put the real writers out of business. This is part of the reason why Hollywood writers are currently on strike. And, should this happen, there will no longer be any sources of material for ChatGPT and the rest to use as a source for content.
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According to one of the lawsuits, “The books aggregated by these websites have also been available in bulk via torrent (file sharing) systems.” It goes on to claim, “these flagrantly illegal shadow libraries have long been of interest to the AI-training community.”
The programs claim to “summarize” works, but real authors and creators like Sarah Silverman aren’t buying that. The suit goes on to say, “The summaries get some details wrong” but programs like ChatGPT retain, “knowledge of particular works in the training dataset. If a user prompts ChatGPT to summarize a copyrighted book, it will do so.”
ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a chatbot that was launched by OpenAI in November 2022. Chatbot.com explains that a chatbot is a software that simulates human-like conversations with users via chat. Its key task is to answer user questions with instant messages. OpenAI is an artificial intelligence (AI) research laboratory run by the for-profit corporation OpenAI LP and its parent company, the non-profit OpenAI Inc.
In the case of Meta, the company in February released LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI), what it calls a state-of-the-art foundational large language model designed to help researchers advance their work in this subfield of AI. Smaller, more performant models such as LLaMA enable others in the research community who don’t have access to large amounts of infrastructure to study these models, further democratizing access in this important, fast-changing field, explains Meta.
LLaMA works by taking a sequence of words as an input and predicts a next word to recursively generate text. To train our model, we chose text from the 20 languages with the most speakers, focusing on those with Latin and Cyrillic alphabets.
But Sarah Silverman and the others say the program uses their work without permission.
The lawsuit filed against Meta specifically claims that the company’s LLaMA models are “themselves infringing derivative works.” This is because, says the suit, they “cannot function without the expressive information extracted from the plaintiffs’ infringed works.”
Sarah Silverman is not shy when it comes to sharing her political beliefs with the world. The comic/writer/actor certainly has plenty of enemies out there. But when it comes to copyright infringements – what some people call stealing – she will probably find plenty of allies among her detractors.
