A lot of artists are doing mix and match and they're fine because it's framed as artistic interpretation. Can the author point to examples of LLMs reproducing some original work without being explicitly asked to do so? If not, what's the argument?
I read the source code and like some patterns that I reuse in my later works. Is that plagiarism? If not, what's the difference with LLMs in this sense?
'Plagiarism' is an overreach. An LLM works a lot like the human brain does in terms of how it gathers its ideas for what to output, just like people do. When you write or create art, your ideas are a synthesis of everything you've experienced externally, directed and focused by the context of what it is you are looking to create/output. Nothing in your head is more original than what an LLM might produce. If you hadn't listened to music composed by other composers for most of your life you wouldn't be able to generate a new composition and neither would an LLM. Are you plagiarizing when you write a new composition because you listened to famous composers and practically memorized their music over your training run (your life)? I'd say no. Plagiarism is more like the intentional act of copying work instead of doing your own synthesis.
Is a painter who was trained on Van Gogh or Salvador Dali plagiarising those artists when their own work shows influences of their work? Meh, I dont think so
Is Greta Van Fleet plagiarising Led Zepplin? Some would say so out of distaste but it's not an actual fact.
You actually have no idea if an LLM works "a lot like the human brain". No one does. It is still not clear if neural networks are capable of generalization to data outside of the training set in any capacity. Not just LLMs.
If they could, why would we need these monstrous models, even for simple problems?
I for one am still baffled at just how OpenAI/Anthropic and the likes have gotten away with the biggest copyright infringements (or perhaps IP-theft, I'm not sure what the correct term is) in history (the data collection for training) without any legal ramifications.
Even if it turns out to be perfectly legal I think a "retreat" to this position of LLM generation being Plagiarism (and therefore being uninteresting and morally bad) is quite a reasonable action.
It also separates LLMs for searching through documents quite nicely from content generation which since I would be hard pressed to consider a "fuzzy search" as a form of plagiarism.
The legal or ethical status of generated output is still up for discussion. I myself do not think neural networks can generalize and thus I would have to say that it still would be copyright infringement since its just regurgitation of input data. Just because I bought a book doesn't mean I get to re-publish it.
they are not outputting or "regurgitating" like that, especially as the models get smaller, they just cannot encode that much information for reproduction, not so dissimilar from humans
maybe a couple of years back in the early experiments, but not today, if it were easy to get them to do it still, the activists would have by now
A lot of artists are doing mix and match and they're fine because it's framed as artistic interpretation. Can the author point to examples of LLMs reproducing some original work without being explicitly asked to do so? If not, what's the argument?
I read the source code and like some patterns that I reuse in my later works. Is that plagiarism? If not, what's the difference with LLMs in this sense?
'Plagiarism' is an overreach. An LLM works a lot like the human brain does in terms of how it gathers its ideas for what to output, just like people do. When you write or create art, your ideas are a synthesis of everything you've experienced externally, directed and focused by the context of what it is you are looking to create/output. Nothing in your head is more original than what an LLM might produce. If you hadn't listened to music composed by other composers for most of your life you wouldn't be able to generate a new composition and neither would an LLM. Are you plagiarizing when you write a new composition because you listened to famous composers and practically memorized their music over your training run (your life)? I'd say no. Plagiarism is more like the intentional act of copying work instead of doing your own synthesis.
Is a painter who was trained on Van Gogh or Salvador Dali plagiarising those artists when their own work shows influences of their work? Meh, I dont think so
Is Greta Van Fleet plagiarising Led Zepplin? Some would say so out of distaste but it's not an actual fact.
You actually have no idea if an LLM works "a lot like the human brain". No one does. It is still not clear if neural networks are capable of generalization to data outside of the training set in any capacity. Not just LLMs.
If they could, why would we need these monstrous models, even for simple problems?
I for one am still baffled at just how OpenAI/Anthropic and the likes have gotten away with the biggest copyright infringements (or perhaps IP-theft, I'm not sure what the correct term is) in history (the data collection for training) without any legal ramifications.
Even if it turns out to be perfectly legal I think a "retreat" to this position of LLM generation being Plagiarism (and therefore being uninteresting and morally bad) is quite a reasonable action.
It also separates LLMs for searching through documents quite nicely from content generation which since I would be hard pressed to consider a "fuzzy search" as a form of plagiarism.
If they buy the books, is it still theft?
For training purposes? I'd say no.
The legal or ethical status of generated output is still up for discussion. I myself do not think neural networks can generalize and thus I would have to say that it still would be copyright infringement since its just regurgitation of input data. Just because I bought a book doesn't mean I get to re-publish it.
they are not outputting or "regurgitating" like that, especially as the models get smaller, they just cannot encode that much information for reproduction, not so dissimilar from humans
maybe a couple of years back in the early experiments, but not today, if it were easy to get them to do it still, the activists would have by now