Comment on John Grisham, George R.R. Martin and more authors sue OpenAI for copyright infringement

• Nahvi@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I get the logic, but I think it is a more complex issue than that.

  How many writer’s have read his works and been influenced by them? Did they just buy a proper license or just buy/borrow the book from somewhere?

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  • FireTower@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    There’s a fundamental difference between an author inspired by anothers work and an algorithm that was manufactured by a corporation to comb others work and reproduce derivatives, in my mind.

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    • Nahvi@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Like the other commenter, I would be genuinely curious to here your thoughts on that fundamental difference.

      I am by no means an AI expert, but my impressions is that AI sill needs to process each book and incorporate the new knowledge into its existing knowledge. Which at least from a surface level sounds a lot like what I do when I read a new book.

      The fact that each AI is effectively a non-sapient slave of a person or corporation really doesn’t change my opinion.

      Have you ever had a reason to read much in a new or developing sub-genre? As a fan of LitRPG, a genre that virtually didn’t exist 10 years ago, I can tell you with some certainty that everything is a derivative work of something. It is amazing how as soon as one author pulls in and idea from another genre, the next 30 novels that come out will have some variation of the same idea, and the 300 that follow it will each have variations of those.

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      • FireTower@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        I replied to the other guy with an answer on the difference. The TLDR IMO there’s a difference between someone who has been inspired by another work and someone who has taken a work with the intent creating a product based on it.

        It’s one thing for those 30 LitRPG books to come out from authors who loved the concepts of the first book. It’d be another thing for a company to analyze what made the first book successful (for lack of a better word the author’s style) and then create a tool that can release hundreds of LitRPG books a day flooding the market and making it harder for the original author to sell his work.

        Also the authors of those inspired novels have the capacity to add their own creativity to their works an AI can only add the creativity from other’s works.

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      • float@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        That’s pretty much my opinion about this, too. It’s not like GRRM invented dragons that were hatched from eggs or anything like that. Having said that, I do think it’s problematic if the AI model belongs to a company and it’s not transparent about what data is being used to train their model.

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    • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Please, articulate that difference, focusing specifically on what copyright actually protects.

      That’s not a flippant statement. That’s an open, honest request.

      I do not see any relevant difference between hiring a person to read and discuss a bunch of books, and a program built to read and discuss a bunch of books.

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      • FireTower@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        I’d argue that the scenario where someone is paying someone to intentionally replicate others work shares the same problems I see with a program doing the same. There’s a difference IMO from the man who wants to write a fantasy story because he loved GRRM’s work and the man who is being payed to analyze the works of GRRM to create a product.

        As for copyright protections, I’d recommend Tom Scott’s video on the subject. There’s a number of factors considered when deciding fair use and there’s no clear line in the sand. The important things to consider is how and why a source material was used. If this program was made to solely produce a parody of GRRM’s world or writing style that’d be a strong fair use argue IMO.

        Here’s the factors for fair use:

        1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; 2)the nature of the copyrighted work;
        2. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and 4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

        I would say that the kind of use they engage in is commercial. Their source material here is a commercial fiction property, which doesn’t help them as much as it would in the case of say something non-commercial and nonfiction. I’ll assume they used all his written work to train the algorithms but little shows in the output product, this does help the fair use case. But doing well on one pillar of the fair use test doesn’t mean the work qualifies. Lastly IMO again an algorithm can produce fantasy books at a rate which GRRM can not compete and might impact the larger market for fantasy literature.

        https://youtu.be/1Jwo5qc78QU?si=OKqxTjJ7gavCs2N4

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