Apparently, stealing other people’s work to create product for money is now “fair use” as according to OpenAI because they are “innovating” (stealing). Yeah. Move fast and break things, huh?
“Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression—including blogposts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents—it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials,” wrote OpenAI in the House of Lords submission.
OpenAI claimed that the authors in that lawsuit “misconceive[d] the scope of copyright, failing to take into account the limitations and exceptions (including fair use) that properly leave room for innovations like the large language models now at the forefront of artificial intelligence.”
The amount of second hand content an LLM needs to consume to train inevitably includes copyrighted material. If they used this thread, the quotes OP included would end up in the training set.
The amount of fan forums and wikis on copy written material provide copious amounts of information about the stories and facilitate the retelling. They’re right that it is impossible for a general purpose LLM.
My personal experience so far though has been that general purpose and multiple modality LLMs are less consistently useful to me than GPT4 was at launch. I think small, purpose built LLMs with trusted content providers have a better chance of success for most users, but we will see if anyone can make that work given the challenge of bringing users to the right one for the right task.