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One failing of mine is that I spend so much time focused on how we’re nearing total destruction via climate change, that I don’t give enough attention to how we’re doing so through the rapid developments in artificial intelligence. Allow me to remedy that. Earlier this year Meta (the artist formerly known as Facebook) released LLaMA, which stands for Large Language Model Meta AI. From what my Luddite brain can gather, the program is essentially Meta’s version of ChatGPT. The software is “trained” in how to respond by being given texts to absorb. Well funny story, it seems Meta has admitted to feeding LLaMA literary works that are copyrighted, and the authors are not happy. Michael Chabon and David Henry Hwang are among a slew of writers who have filed a class action lawsuit against Meta for copyright infringement:
Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Chabon and Tony-winning playwright David Henry Hwang are among a group of writers that filed a class action lawsuit against Meta in San Francisco federal court for having “copied and ingested” their works to train LLaMA AI platform.
Plaintiffs also including authors Matthew Klam, Rachel Louise and Ayelet Waldman are seeking class action status for the suit, which says their copyrighted books appear in the dataset that Meta has admitted to using to train LLaMA.
“Plaintiffs and Class members did not consent to the use of their copyrighted books as training materials for LLaMA,” said the group, which filed a similar suit last week against ChatGPT parent OpenAI.
Comedian Sarah Silverman sued Meta and OpenAI this summer for copyright infringement.
As AI grows, so do lawsuits by the creative community against its large language model. That’s an AI software program designed to produce convincingly natural text in response user prompts. “Rather than being programmed in the traditional manner [by engineers creating reams of code], a large language model is “trained” by copying massive amounts of text and extracting expressive information from it. The body of text is referred to as the training dataset,” explained the suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California where the Facebook parent is based. Meta released LLaMA in Feb. of 2023.
Plaintiffs, however, have copyrights for their books and written works “and never consented to their use as training materials for LLaMA.” The works of Chabon (Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union), of Hwang (M. Butterfly, Chinglish, Yellow Face, Golden Child) and works by other plaintiffs “include copyright-management information that provides information about the copyrighted work, including the title of the work, its ISBN or copyright registration number, the name of the author, and the year of publication.”
Plaintiffs alone “have been and remain the holders of the exclusive rights under the Copyright Act of 1976… to reproduce, distribute, discplay, or license the reproduction, distribution, and/or display the works identified.”
A couple weeks ago Carina covered The New York Times considering filing a similar lawsuit against OpenAI. I don’t think I can improve upon her comments on the potential danger this technology presents, so I’m gonna try a different angle here. If AI wants to learn how to “produce convincingly natural text” and how to extract expressive language from original works, it can go to school like the rest of us. Seriously, have it enroll in public school and build a solid foundation. I’d love to see AI suffer sit through hours of English language grammar lessons without shorting a circuit. Should it prove competent enough the AI can then go to college, become an English major, sign up for a seminar and find a professor to mentor its thesis paper.
I jest, but underneath it all I despair over our culture’s obsession with shortcuts. Everything in the description of LLaMA’s “training process” — and remember it’s being trained to be on par with, you know, us humans — sounds like a massive shortcut. Hopefully, it’s also an illegal shortcut that Zuck will have to pay for. Dearly.
