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John Grisham, George R.R. Martin and more authors sue OpenAI for copyright infringement
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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Oh, so that's what GRRM is doing instead of writing the next ASOIAF book!
But seriously, AI proponents seem to think it's the Wild West and they can use whatever they want, for profit, with no repercussions...
How exactly has OpenAI harmed GRRM? It's not like you can ask it to output a free copy of an entire book.
Last I checked, the author is doing just fine, and I'm sure if he finishes another book before retiring it will sell very well regardless of the outcome of this lawsuit.
Also - I bet if OpenAI's balance sheet were public there wouldn't be any profits to be found. They're losing money hand over fist.
If they used his works to train models without arranging proper licensing prior they've been unjustly enriched.
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 buy a proper license or just buy/borrow the book from somewhere?
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.
Like the other commenter, I would be genuinely curious to hear 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.
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.