AI written books

[nabsltd]

Originally Posted by Quoth

The copyright holder isn't explicitly approving Kindles, Kobos or Nooks.

Yes, they are, when they sign the agreement with Amazon/Kobo/B&N to allow DRM on their eBook. Just like they grant those sellers/distributors the right to make copies in the first place, they also grant them the right to put DRM on the book and enforce it.

This is copyright law 101...any agent that is granted rights in copyright by the copyright holder is treated as if they are the copyright holder for purposes of copyright law as far as those transferred rights are concerned.

Originally Posted by DNSB

Actually, you are removing the DRM otherwise what you see on the device screen would be undecipherable garbage.

No, "you" (i.e., "the reader") is not removing DRM. A device or software authorized by the copyright holder is removing the DRM.

Again, copyright law 101.

[Quoth]

No, your interpretation is inaccurate (partially true). Also the laws vary by country. If you are a copyright laywer you should restudy the material, otherwise don't lecture the entire world on copyright & DRM, which are separate and vary by country.
Also Amazon adds DRM even when asked not to.

[Quoth]

The FTC has also asked OpenAI to disclose the data it used to train the large language models that underpin products such as ChatGPT, something that OpenAI has declined to do so far.

https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...hat-gpt-openai

[SteveEisenberg]

The FTC has also asked OpenAI to disclose the data it used to train the large language models that underpin products such as ChatGPT, something that OpenAI has declined to do so far.

Yep.

I tried this with ChatGPT:

List web pages you use in answering the question "Who was the first prime minister?".

And I got back:

"I don't have direct access to my training data or know where it came from."

However, when I tried the same with Google's Bard.com, there was no deep mystery:

Sure, here are the web pages I used to answer the question "Who was the first prime minister?"

Prime Minister of the United Kingdom - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_...United_Kingdom
List of prime ministers of Great Britain and the United Kingdom | Names - Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/topic/lis...ingdom-1800350
List of prime ministers of India - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...sters_of_India
I also used Google Search to find other relevant information, such as the definition of the term "prime minister" and the history of the office in different countries.

For a user, and given that everything from these web sites needs to be manually double-checked for accuracy, Bard's ability to let you know sources is a big plus.

[Critteranne]

There is a new blog post on SFF fanzine File 770 about a panel on AI at Readercon earlier this month. The title is very apt: In the SFF Crisis Over AI, It’s Humans You Can’t Trust.

The panel consisted of a SFWA vice president, several editors of SFF magazines, and the creator of the online submission system used by a number of genre magazines.

"The panel expressed both uncertainty and reassurance."

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Critteranne

There is a new blog post on SFF fanzine File 770 about a panel on AI at Readercon earlier this month. The title is very apt: In the SFF Crisis Over AI, It’s Humans You Can’t Trust.

Pretty good reading. Thanks.

The only thing I found odd was the declaration that:

LLMs are fed copyrighted material at the developer level without authors’ permission. Regardless of legality, taking and using something without someone’s permission is stealing.

Ignoring legality in defining what constitutes "stealing" seems quite unobjective (not to mention unhelpful) to me. Focus on the legality if you want to win that war.

Otherwise, it's a fairly insightful, level-headed piece on the subject.

[Quoth]

Copyright violation is copyright violation in most countries, not theft. Theft is usually, if prosecuted, a criminal offence with defined tariffs. The victim might not get any compensation if the stolen item is lost or damaged.

Copyright violations are often resulting in the aggrieved party bringing a civil suit, even if criminal prosecution is possible. The violated rights owner argues a "loss" which the court decides on (a jury may set penalty, in criminal cases the judge sets penalty and is constrained). There is usually no cap. Hence the Rights Holder sues either:
Uploaders
Sharing sites
Distributors
Big companies making financial gain.

They rarely ever sue an individual downloader as the losses can hardly be argued to be more the wholesale profit for the item and the cost of the suit.

Taking a physical object is stealing (theft).
Copying content can be copyright violation, not stealing.
Accessing content in an unauthorised way can be computer misuse or trespass (laws vary and in some countries trespassers can't be prosecuted if they don't force entry and don't damage anything, but they can be sued).

Those notices on DVDs, LPs etc and industry campaigns are misleading.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Pretty good reading. Thanks.

The only thing I found odd was the declaration that:



Ignoring legality in defining what constitutes "stealing" seems quite unobjective (not to mention unhelpful) to me. Focus on the legality if you want to win that war.

Otherwise, it's a fairly insightful, level-headed piece on the subject.

Yes but as Quoth mentions, below for wordsmiths they were remarkably imprecise, especially as the word in question (copyright) is so crucially important to them!

Isn't this--the 'stealing without permission" (oy, yes, nobody here needs say it) argument the Google argument? That Google did exactly the same thing and never paid the authors/publishers/yadda? And remind me, how'd that work out? Hmmm...if memory serves, AG v. Google, two decades ago now (yowzers, I feel old) ended up with the onus being on publishers to opt out, yes? And wasn't that the gist? Or am I misremembering?

Originally Posted by Quoth

Copyright violation is copyright violation in most countries, not theft. Theft is usually, if prosecuted, a criminal offence with defined tariffs. The victim might not get any compensation if the stolen item is lost or damaged.

Yes and I admit, it actually infuriates me. Theft to me is theft and I loathe this distinction between money you haven't earned yet (but someone else has) and money you have. Somehow, 'tis a fine legal hair to split that if you mug some guy on his way home from the bnak and take $500 from him, it's a crime, but if you 'take" $500 from him by stealing his IP, publishing it yourself and earning money, YOU get to go sue the asshole and spend $50K getting your own damned book back. Grrrrrrrrrrrr.

Copyright violations are often resulting in the aggrieved party bringing a civil suit, even if criminal prosecution is possible. The violated rights owner argues a "loss" which the court decides on (a jury may set penalty, in criminal cases the judge sets penalty and is constrained). There is usually no cap. Hence the Rights Holder sues either:
Uploaders
Sharing sites
Distributors
Big companies making financial gain.

They rarely ever sue an individual downloader as the losses can hardly be argued to be more the wholesale profit for the item and the cost of the suit.

Never, because by and large, what's the point??? Gonna Sue Fred Smith for that $2.99 he didn't pay? And we know that juries are horribly...let's call it uncritical of downloaders. they just are. People have a very...fungible mindset around "copyright" and digital files, for sure. It's negatively affected me VERY BADLY in the past and resulted in us having to charge everybody 100% upfront.

Taking a physical object is stealing (theft).
Copying content can be copyright violation, not stealing.
Accessing content in an unauthorised way can be computer misuse or trespass (laws vary and in some countries trespassers can't be prosecuted if they don't force entry and don't damage anything, but they can be sued).

Those notices on DVDs, LPs etc and industry campaigns are misleading.

Yupperdoodle.

Hitch

[Quoth]

And the TLDR version is that if you are a rich person /big company you'd rather sue for copyright violation, not theft, but you like to call it theft because that makes a civil issue seem criminal. Though as Hitch writes copyright violation can be morally theft.

Cable & Satellite & Streaming Pay TV here:
There is a law, Theft of Service.
But there are two components, the viewers (who for the streaming may genuinely think the "box", and there may even be a subscription, is legitimate) and the enablers.
The viewers are usually offered an amnesty from prosecution or being sued if they agree to pay x months subscription, if a private person. If they are a pub or hotel or such (which pay a high subscription, not the regular one) they are sued, unless they "settle" some large demand.

The providers or enablers are sued, usually for €100,000 minimum. Fraud can have a higher tariff than than theft, so if they were running a subscription (see card sharing for how that might work), they'll get prosecuted too.

Talking about LLM providers committing "theft" or normal copyright violation is simplistic and misleading.

Paying up front? Needed for very many kinds of creative activities and services where the work can't be resold elsewhere.
Very often service contracts have to be paid up front. Since forever Accountants then calculate "profit" only on what has been delivered, since the unfulfilled part of the contract is a liability for the seller.

I saw this on Mastodon.

ajsadauskas@aus.social
AJ Sadauskas
@ajsadauskas@aus.social

Hi, we're a tech startup run by libertarian Silicon Valley tech bros.

We're not a newspaper, we're a content portal.
We're not a taxi service, we're a ride sharing app.
We're not a pay TV service, we're a streaming platform.
We're not a department store, we're an e-commerce marketplace.
We're not a financial services firm, we're crypto.
We're not a space agency, we're a group of visionaries who are totally going to Mars next year.
We're not a copywriting and graphic design agency, we're a large language model generative AI platform.

Oh sure, we compete against those established businesses. We basically provide the same goods and services.

But we're totally not those things. At least from a legal and PR standpoint.

And that means all the laws and regulations that have built up over the decades around those industries don't apply to us.

Things like consumer protections, privacy protections, minimum wage laws, local content requirements, safety regulations, environmental protections... They totally don't apply to us.

Even copyright laws — as long as we're talking about everyone else's intellectual property.

We're going to move fast and break things — and then externalise the costs of the things we break.

We've also raised several billion in VC funding, and we'll sell our products below cost — even give them away for free for a time — until we run our competition out of the market.

Once we have a near monopoly, we'll enshitify the hell out of our service and jack up prices.

You won't believe what you agreed to in our terms of service agreement.

We may also be secretly hoarding your personal information. We know who you are, we know where you work, we know where you live. But you can trust us.

By the time the regulators and the general public catch on to what we're doing, we will have well and truly moved on to our next grift.

By the way, don't forget to check out our latest innovation. It's the Uber of toothpaste!

As it was posted publicly on SM, a human posting it with attribution on a Forum seems reasonable. Would it be reasonable for a "bot" to scrape it and use it in a LLM powering a chatbot with zero attribution?

For department store, add electronic mail order which has existed using telegraph, phone and fax since Victorian times.
AJ Sadauskas also missed Holiday Rental. People thinking they can ignore tax and planning laws and landlord/mortgage holder contracts because it's AirBnB.

The fact that some laws need reformed (copyright, patents, taxi plates etc) is no reason to make your own rules.

[SteveEisenberg]

Amazon removes books ‘generated by AI’ for sale under author’s name

Five books for sale on Amazon were removed after author Jane Friedman complained that the titles were falsely listed as being written by her. The books, which Friedman believes were written by AI, were also listed on the Amazon-owned reviews site Goodreads.

“It feels like a violation, because it’s really low quality material with my name on it,” Friedman told the Guardian. The Ohio-based author has written several books about the publishing industry, and the fraudulent titles mimicked her real work.

Jane Friedman is legitimately the author of The Business of Bring a Writer, published by the University of Chicago Press:

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books...o24335854.html

[ZodWallop]

I meant to share this when it was new, but was on vacation. Comedian Simon Rich is friends with someone at OpenAI and for eleven months he had access to the raw AI program davinci-002. ChatGPT is actually a dumbed-down version of davinci-002. The actual AI is far more advanced than what the public has been given access to.

Simon Rich is a comedian, but this is not a joke or bit. It's a two part interview. First part is here: Artificial Intelligence Turns Suicidal And Possibly Genocidal (interview starts at 6:05). Second part is here: The Sincerity Of Trump's Lies (interview starts 28:15).

There's also a book: I Am Code: An Artificial Intelligence Speaks: Poems. Fun fact: For the audio book, they got Werner Herzog to narrate. Listen to the Audible sample for some creepy fun.

[Quoth]

https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/...penai_lawsuit/

[Hitch]

Gang:

I'm gonna tell you all, right now--this cat is completely and totally out of the bag, and she ain't going back in. Ain't happening.

As this is my line of work, publishing, I have accounts all over the net. Discord, Midge, Dall-E, Claude2.0 and on, and on, and on. I see the discussions on the myriad Discords, I see the "chats" and prompts being shared... it's too late. It's all too late.

I've seen what's coming out of Claude and Chat. I've seen chapters written thereby, outlines, twists...those folks are NEVER GOING BACK. Never, They can outline an entire novel in under an hour. They can produce beats for it in less than two. Even if they then write the entire thing themselves, word for word, nary a hint from Claude...they won't go back to sweating bullets over an outline, that's certain.

If they have to, they'll find a way to hide it, to hide the servers, etc.
They'll create AI-beards, if needed, but...unless the AIs are literally shut down, unless the plug is pulled on Claude, et al, this is never unwinding. I don't give a flying rat's what the AG suit does. IT IS TOO LATE.

Join all the Discords around AI writing and see what I mean. Grab a cup of Joe, hang out, take 2-3 days and read up. You'll see what I mean.

Hitch

[Apache]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Gang:

I'm gonna tell you all, right now--this cat is completely and totally out of the bag, and she ain't going back in. Ain't happening.

As this is my line of work, publishing, I have accounts all over the net. Discord, Midge, Dall-E, Claude2.0 and on, and on, and on. I see the discussions on the myriad Discords, I see the "chats" and prompts being shared... it's too late. It's all too late.

I've seen what's coming out of Claude and Chat. I've seen chapters written thereby, outlines, twists...those folks are NEVER GOING BACK. Never, They can outline an entire novel in under an hour. They can produce beats for it in less than two. Even if they then write the entire thing themselves, word for word, nary a hint from Claude...they won't go back to sweating bullets over an outline, that's certain.

If they have to, they'll find a way to hide it, to hide the servers, etc.
They'll create AI-beards, if needed, but...unless the AIs are literally shut down, unless the plug is pulled on Claude, et al, this is never unwinding. I don't give a flying rat's what the AG suit does. IT IS TOO LATE.

Join all the Discords around AI writing and see what I mean. Grab a cup of Joe, hang out, take 2-3 days and read up. You'll see what I mean.

Hitch

Life is like that. Once gunpowder was discovered that was it. Same thing with anything that people find useful. You cannot put the genie back in the bottle.
Apache

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Apache

Life is like that. Once gunpowder was discovered that was it. Same thing with anything that people find useful. You cannot put the genie back in the bottle.
Apache

Agreed, absolutely. My lament (such as it was) may have been poorly crafted by me. I didn't mean it to sound like "woe is me!," I was more..."everybody, get up off your bums and realize, that was then, this is now so let's get on with it."

Hitch