Pearson taking legal action over use of its textbooks to train language models

https://www.standard.co.uk/business/pearson-takes-legal-action-over-use-of-its-content-to-train-ai-b1079807.html

by redbell • 3 years ago

35 60 3 years ago

standard.co.uk

My favorite anti depression book is Feeling Good by Dr. Burns. I especially like the "if that were true, it would mean that..." exercise in the book, where you drill down to the root cause of your negative thoughts.

So I asked chatgpt about the book, and the exercise, and how to do it, and examples of the 9 cognitive distortions you're supposed to label your responses with. It was very helpful and knew the material well.

It made me wonder this exact point. If you wrote a book on a very rare subject that you were basically the only popular source of detailed info on... And now these models just answer questions for people without having to buy the book.. is that really fair?

Edit: I guess this isn't really that different than the fact I read the book and have described it to many friends and even done the exercise with them.

mindcrime4• 3 years ago

If you wrote a book on a very rare subject that you were basically the only popular source of detailed info on... And now these models just answer questions for people without having to buy the book.. is that really fair?

What if a person bought a copy of the book, read it and learned the material, and then provided advice to people based on the material. I think most people would say that that is fair. So why is it less fair for the AI to do what is effectively the same thing? Is it simply a matter of scale? Or is there something more fundamental at work?

nicenewtemp845• 3 years ago

That was basically my edit, we may have missed each other.

The only point I can see making is that for some reason I doubt openai actually paid the author for the contents of the book, but maybe they did.

Maybe they borrowed ebooks one by one from some digital library and ingested them that way for free.

mywittyname• 3 years ago

I'd argue ChatGPT is closer to restating copyrighted materials in a different way. And that is legally questionable. Whether that actually matters depends on how much money is at stake and how much each party cares to spend to enforce or protect their viewpoint.

Allowing these systems to utilize copyrighted materials without compensating the copyright holder is a legal loophole the size of the sun. Then it becomes a perfectly legal defense to write "an AI" that slurps up copyrighted material and produces results that are "based on" that material.

My issue is that the copyrighted work is fundamentally integrated into the algorithm. Say you wrote a program that would input a copyrighted work, then prints out the contents, but with some words replaced with synonyms. Would the output of that be okay? What about if phrases were replaced? How about if entire sections are added, rearranged, and/or removed? At some point, the results become so mangled as to not be recognizable, but the fact that a copyrighted work serves as an input to the program is still an issue, IMHO.

A major difference between humans and computers is that a human can't (generally) recall hundreds of pages of text and regurgitate it on demand. So a human who has read a book only retains a fraction of the contents, and even then, generally they don't retain all of the information accurately.

tonyedgecombe• 3 years ago

I do wonder if it will disincentivise the author from writing the book in the first place. What’s the point if an AI is going to regurgitate the material to every Tom, Dick and Harry thereby killing the demand for the book.

exabrial2• 3 years ago

Answer is pretty obvious: One is a computer program, literally designed to pilfer copyrighted works, the other is a human being.

JonChesterfield• 3 years ago

What if one person bought the book, copied it, and distributed it for negligible cost to anyone with a passing interest in the contents? Sounds pretty similar to copyright infringement.

bombcar• 3 years ago

It made me wonder this exact point. If you wrote a book on a very rare subject that you were basically the only popular source of detailed info on... And now these models just answer questions for people without having to buy the book.. is that really fair?

Dr Burns seems to have done well, so in his case I'd think he was at least adequately compensated for his life's work. You can't answer "fairness" on copyright in all cases just by that, but this particular case I feel there's little or no harm done.

If people start selling these GPT things because they let you avoid fair recompense, that's another thing we'll have to work out as a society.

torstenvl3• 3 years ago

answer questions for people without having to buy the book.. is that really fair?

Yes.

It's fair because that happens all the time with non-AI intelligences (i.e., people). No author has the right to prevent me from discussing a book with someone. If I were a clinician and incorporated that exercise into my practice, as long as I wasn't copying any content (e.g., worksheets, scoring tables, etc.), then I owe nothing to the author.

It's also a fundamental principle of copyright law, at least in the United States.

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/499/340/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....

whateveracct• 3 years ago

AI and humans aren't the same thing. Even if we do anthropomorphize AI.

blibble• 3 years ago

No author has the right to prevent me from discussing a book with someone.

a lossy compression function is not "someone"

nicenewtemp845• 3 years ago

At what point is it discussing a subject, vs basically verbatim listing things, methods, reasoning from a book?

nickfromseattle3• 3 years ago

Are you OK with the developers of LLMs capturing the most value of every incremental piece of content created by humans in perpetuity?

The difference is scale. A human can use their learnings from copyrighted work to get a job making $80,000/year. An LLM can use their learnings from copyrighted work to become the biggest, most profitable company ever.

nicenewtemp845• 3 years ago

As a side note, how would we all feel if someone wrote a depression /cognitive behavioral therapy ai chat bot, charged $20 a month for it, and then it just basically ran you through the exact methods from the feeling good book?

prepend• 3 years ago

This happens all the time with “self help” tiktokers and YouTubers and whatnot that are just recycling others ideas and content.

How would you like to stop this? It doesn’t violate copyright unless they read the book verbatim. I guess ideas could be patented as a utility method by the author and it would prevent someone else from doing that method for 20 years.

Mostly this is just the way things were designed and I think that it’s good in the sense that the purpose of creation is to further human experience, not maximize creator revenue.

SilasX2• 3 years ago

That was the business model of Joyable, except it charged more and had a human periodically sanity-check your progress on the exercises.

DANmode• 3 years ago

People and information want to be free.

I'm sure the author would have no problem with everyone in the world receiving a free summary — once they know they've been fed and cared for.

nicenewtemp845• 3 years ago

Burns was a working professional before writing the book. If he wanted to release the book for free, he would have. If he wanted to provide summaries of it online, he would have. If he wanted to discuss the book online for free, he would have and does. But I don't think it being fed into a questions and answer service is something he really wanted.

leobg• 3 years ago

Bird also said it was usually easy to tell what a large language model such as ChatGPT has been trained on, because “you can ask it”.

So what does that mean? They literally asked “Did you read book X during training”?

Sounds like they’re fools. Desperate fools, most likely.

than3• 3 years ago

They don't have much of an argument, a lot of their material is full of doublespeak narratives, and watered down information. Characteristics which any computer will fail at utilizing properly.

Pearson taking legal action over use of its textbooks to train language models

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