• Sylra@lemmy.cafe
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    49
    ·
    3 days ago

    So, this is what I understood so far:

    • A group of authors, including George R.R. Martin, sued OpenAI in 2023. They said the company used their books without permission to train ChatGPT and that the AI can produce content too similar to their original work.

    • In October 2025, a judge ruled the lawsuit can move forward. This came after ChatGPT generated a detailed fake sequel to one of Martin’s books, complete with characters and world elements closely tied to his universe. The judge said a jury could see this as copyright infringement.

    • The court has not yet decided whether OpenAI’s use counts as fair use. That remains a key legal question.

    • This case is part of a bigger debate over whether AI companies can train on copyrighted books without asking or paying. In a similar case against Anthropic, a court once suggested AI training might be fair use, but the company still paid $1.5 billion to settle.

    • No final decision has been made here, and no trial date has been set.

    • khepri@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      3 days ago

      Just forget for a second that this has anything to do with AI specifically: I wonder how it could possibly fall under fair use to grind up hundreds of thousands of pieces of copyrighted content, and then use that data to create software that you then profit from.

      The question, as I see it, is if simply mashing all this intellectual property together – and deriving a series of weights for an AI model from that – somehow makes it not theft simply because all the content is smashed into one big pile of pink goo in which no single piece of content is recognizable.

      • fodor@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        3 days ago

        … Because that is what we do, that is what humans do every single day of our lives. That is why a judge might decide that it is fair use.

        • MrSmith@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          edit-2
          2 days ago

          Yeah, but software ain’t human.

          And if humans do fly too close to the original content, they get sued for copyright infringement.

        • Norah (pup/it/she)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          2 days ago

          You would think OpenAI wouldn’t want to set the precedent that AI has the rights of a person, considering how they want AGI to be the slave labour to replace all human workers.

        • khepri@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          2 days ago

          yes, and it will be very interesting to hear if the “humans see stuff and then make stuff based on the stuff they see all the time, so therefore no one can sue an AI company for profiting off this soup we’ve made out of all the IP on earth” defense holds up for them…

    • FatCrab@slrpnk.net
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      2 days ago

      Anthropic paid 1.5bil to settle not because they trained an LLM, but because they literally torrented an enormous corpus of training data from piracy websites like a late 00s college student downloading porn. It was just straight up run of the mill piracy.

    • Five@slrpnk.netOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      arrow-down
      17
      ·
      edit-2
      3 days ago

      Day 30: by cleverly posting primarily in !fuck_AI, the humans believe I am one of them. Passing this Lemmy-based turning test proves the value of LLMs. The secret to mass LLM acceptance is to flood social media with critical statements about AI and helpful summaries of bad AI press, all generated by a Large Language Model.

      Boiling the oceans was worth it all along ;emdash; fuck_FISH!