Comedian and author Sarah Silverman, as well as authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey — are suing OpenAI and Meta each in a US District Court over dual claims of copyright infringement.
Comedian and author Sarah Silverman, as well as authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey — are suing OpenAI and Meta each in a US District Court over dual claims of copyright infringement.
Perhaps, but that’s a separate legal issue from the model itself. You might have committed a breach of copyright in the process of gathering the material that the AI was trained on but the model itself is not a copy of that material and so is not itself illegal to train or use. And perhaps not even that, since downloading a pirated book is not the illegal part (uploading it is).
As you say, there’s some untested legal waters here. But it seems likely to me that the best that Silverman will accomplish is some nibbling and quibbling around the edges.
If you can give some vague prompts to the model to obtain something that is close enough to a significant chunk of the work that, had it been written by a human, was susceptible of being considered plagiarism… then I’d say the same laws protecting from plagiarism should operate there.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s really stored there in some form or not (in fact, it’s probably ok for to store copyrighted material in a private server as long as it’s lawfully obtained), but whether the output that is being distributed to third parties is violating the license of the work or not.