The Generative AI Battle Has a Fundamental Flaw; Wired, July 25, 2023

  WILL BEDINGFIELD, Wired; The Generative AI Battle Has a Fundamental Flaw

"At the core of these cases, explains Sag, is the same general theory: that LLMs “copied” authors’ protected works. Yet, as Sag explained in testimony to a US Senate subcommittee hearing earlier this month, models like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 do not “copy” work in the traditional sense. Digest would be a more appropriate verb—digesting training data to carry out their function: predicting the best next word in a sequence. “Rather than thinking of an LLM as copying the training data like a scribe in a monastery,” Sag said in his Senate testimony, “it makes more sense to think of it as learning from the training data like a student.”...

Ultimately, though, the technology is not going away, and copyright can only remedy some of its consequences. As Stephanie Bell, a research fellow at the nonprofit Partnership on AI, notes, setting a precedent where creative works can be treated like uncredited data is “very concerning.” To fully address a problem like this, the regulations AI needs aren't yet on the books."