AI Books4 Dataset for training LLMs further

https://old.reddit.com/r/datasets/comments/1cvi151/ai_books4_dataset_for_training_llms_further/

by ImperiumOfMan • 2 years ago

46 48 2 years ago

old.reddit.com

The copyright situation around all this is very... interesting. Pretty clear that this dataset is not legal but what about resulting models? What if the texts actually where bought 'properly'?

sp3322• 2 years ago

Buying a copy of the book would not give you any copyright license. You could only make copies for personal use.

CaptainFever• 2 years ago

If you are in a jurisdiction with TDM exceptions, buying a personal copy does allow you to train on it.

DeathArrow2• 2 years ago

If you steal a PC and use it to build a very successful app, would that app be legal? Would the use of the said app by third parties be legal?

chasd00• 2 years ago

The race is on to figure out a way to get LLMs to produce content to be used for training other LLMs in a satisfactory way. Eventually the dataset question will get figured out in the courts but if there’s a technique to generate more training data in an automated way then the court decision doesn’t matter.

Edit: also, I don’t believe court decisions can be enforced retroactively so existing LLMs would be safe but I’m most definitely not a lawyer.

zaptheimpaler5• 2 years ago

Very cool. Guess you can just pirate 400K books stealing millions from authors as long as its a "dataset for LLMs" instead of a regular old piracy dump. No doubt there are books in there that took decades of experience to write and knowledge that took a lifetime to learn. Stealing is just OK as long as its for AI lol, and as we devalue writing we guarantee the quality of writing will continue to degrade.

freefaler3• 2 years ago

Hmm... but the whole internet is also indexed by Google and they make a lot of money out of the content.

Should they pay too?

If this was enforced would there be search engines?

sp3322• 2 years ago

It's different for websites because they are intentionally served up for free. Google had a very hard time getting a license to even index book contents. And there's an ongoing tension with paywalled websites. They do pay for some news sites, in the Google News Showcase.

hawski2• 2 years ago

One of the reasons behind the backlash against Google's AMP was that they would contain the full experience. You are on a Google's OS (at least significant amount of users are), on a Google browser, using a Google search service and from there you go to Google servers to get the content. The main difference is the last step.

hawski2• 2 years ago

The Pirate Bay should consider rebranding as The Dataset Bay.

I am sure there are wild times ahead. At some time it will become outlawed in the way regular piracy is. Not because of book authors or publishers, but either because of Hollywood or AI safety being used by bigtech to limit competition.

Workaccount22• 2 years ago

I don't know if there is a lot of confusion, purposely misleading deception, or both, but I cannot grasp the argument for "training on copyrighted data is a violation of copyright".

What I can grasp is "output of copyrighted data is violation of copyright", and the fix seems to be a straight forward dumb software contentID filter on the output.

michaelt• 2 years ago

The argument is "An artist getting inspired by a work and creating something similar is allowed, but photocopying, photographing a painting or statue, or using samples in music-making can be fraught with legal problems.

One of the major dividing lines between legal and illegal is whether it's a purely mechanical process, or done by human hands. The training of LLMs and diffusion models is a purely mechanical process, more like photocopying or photographing than an artist gaining inspiration"

dialup_sounds• 2 years ago

The confusion seems to be on your part, because that's not the argument being made here.

The argument is that the 400k books being shared here are themselves copyrighted works that the poster probably does not have the right to be distributing, and that is not very nice of them.

"It's just a dataset, bro!" being used to bulldoze people's rights to their own work might have negative consequences.

hunswer• 2 years ago

So if I break into one of these llm shops and download their models’ weights they will totally be cool with me distributing them publically?

zaptheimpaler5• 2 years ago

This isn't a model trained on the books, it is the complete text of the books themselves with the label "dataset" slapped on it. Calling it a dataset doesn't make it not piracy.

PeterStuer• 2 years ago

Probably copyright infringement in some jurisdictions, but it's not 'stealing'. Let's not confuse terms with specific meaning.

zaptheimpaler5• 2 years ago

I don't think you understand what stealing means if you are unable to recognize that distributing free digital copies of paid books without agreed upon renumeration to the owners is stealing. It may or may not also be copyright infringement in a legal sense, but it sure is stealing in a common sense.

bilsbie• 2 years ago

Wait until you find out about libraries. Free books that humans are using to train the LLM’s in their heads.

bayindirh4• 2 years ago

How many books a human can read, understand, tokenize, memorize in 15 minutes, 15 days, 15 months, 15 years?

What's the rate of forgetting for the ingested material for human brain?

zaptheimpaler5• 2 years ago

Libraries pay authors for their copies.

harshreality5• 2 years ago

What do you think the market is for people who want to read books or articles condensed into lines of text suitable for model training?

I think it's 0. Maybe a handful if pirate libraries of readable ebooks and papers didn't already exist, but even a handful of copyright violators wouldn't be a serious commercial threat to the publishers.

So far, governments have been unable to do anything about pirate libraries. Complaining about AI datasets, poorly formatted for human consumption, seems misplaced.

Criticizing this as "stealing" or "piracy" is a vote for a future where only big tech, or the major publishers themselves, can train models on good datasets. Nobody else will have the money or market power to license that much material.

zaptheimpaler5• 2 years ago

The market for the entire contents of say OpenAI's entire codebase mangled and corrupted at parts might be 0 as well, doesn't make it not stealing. When NVIDIA's or Samsung's IP was leaked including binary firmware that is hard to read and understood by very few, that doesn't magically mean stealing and releasing it became legal.

DeathArrow2• 2 years ago

It's kind of a grey area. It's sci-hub allowing to read articles for free a bad thing? Is it legal?

There's not always going to be a correspondence between what is wrong from a legal pov and what is wrong from a moral pov.

bayindirh4• 2 years ago

How many books you can read and remember exactly as is, plus reproduce remix the text as is?

What's this number for an LLM?

closetkantian• 2 years ago

Can anyone me one tell me how big this is in GB?

simongr3dal• 2 years ago

Around 250GB, several terabytes once uncompressed I assume.

crtasm• 2 years ago

libstc2.jsonl.zst 231 GB

yareal• 2 years ago

This is simply piracy. This reads exactly like a scene release of any pirated material.

harshreality5• 2 years ago

Scene releases are in human-consumable formats.

Books as lines of text are not human-consumable (by reasonable humans).

There's a strong case for sharing this being fair use, even if distributing hundreds of thousands of ebooks would ordinarily violate copyright.

I don't know what OpenAI's training corpus is or how they got it, but in case anyone has forgotten, Google has its own license-free collection of scanned books. It had already run that through OCR (and probably periodically re-OCRs) to generate its google books indexes, so there is no copyright argument against Google's book-trained AI models (assuming they train on books).

An argument that Books4 is piracy is an argument for an oligopoly on good AI models.

bayindirh4• 2 years ago

There's a strong case for sharing this being fair use, even if distributing hundreds of thousands of ebooks would ordinarily violate copyright.

If you're using the resulting model trained with this for (academic) research (independently or at a university), that's true. If you're earning money with the model (cough chatGPT, Bard, Gemini, et. al cough), that's false.

Edit: Original version of the above paragraph started as "If you're doing...", making the below comment true. Edit is made to clarify the point further.

fancyfredbot3• 2 years ago

Where did this come from? Even if assembled from multiple sources the full text for 400k books and 6M other publications would be very hard to get.

Did someone hack an e-book store? Or somehow extract data from Google books?

freefaler3• 2 years ago

From all the e-books available on the webs... Check annas-archive.org for example.

fancyfredbot3• 2 years ago

Wow so this is actually just a tiny subset of what was already openly available. I'm still interested in how all of this was gathered together though - looks like Anna's Archive got the books from other large datasets, but I'm still confused about the ultimate origin of the data.

bnj• 2 years ago

That’s some really nice intellectual property they have there.

Be a shame if someone thought about it.

squigz• 2 years ago

[removed]

https://web.archive.org/web/20240519104217/https://old.reddi...

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:a904e660355c49006b2e7d43893d31bf3c2be9cc&dn=libstc2.jsonl.zst&tr=udp://tracker.opentrackr.org:1337/announce&tr=https://tracker1.ctix.cn:443/announce&tr=udp://open.demonii....

More than 400,000 fiction and non-fiction book full-texts. Multiple languages, curated, deduplicated.
More than 6,000,000 scholarly publications, magazines, and manuals full-texts. Multiple languages, curated, deduplicated.
150,000,000 metadata records

mannyv• 2 years ago

It's strange that you could actually use these datasets to poison other people's LLMs - since there's no way you could go through everything and vet all the data in the dataset.

AI Books4 Dataset for training LLMs further

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