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Comment by jmull | Hacker News Reader

> this quote from the complaint seems obviously false

I notice you go on to provide an argument only for why it might not be true.

Also, seeing the other post on this, I asked chatgpt-4 for a summary of “ The Ruby of Kishmoor” as well, and it provided one to me, though I had to ask twice. I don’t know anything about that book, so I can’t tell if its summary is accurate, but so much for your test.

It seems pretty naive to me to just kind of assume chatgpt must be respecting copyright, and hasn’t scanned copyrighted material without obtaining authorization. Perhaps discovery will settle it, though. Logs of what they scanned should exist. (IMO, a better argument is that this is fair use.)

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The test was whether producing equivalent accuracy and detail for summaries of all books in its training corpus was a feature of ChatGPT's ability to natively generate them from standalone source material or whether Silverman's detailed summary was likely just a "summary of summaries", not whether ChatGPT produced a result at all. From the comment you reference, it failed the test because the result was hallucinated.

You can pick something else that's in the training set that has SparkNotes and many popular reviews to compare. I routinely feed novel data sources into LLMs to test massive context and memory, and none produce anything similar in quality to what is being exhibited.

> IMO, a better argument is that this is fair use

There is no way in Hell that this is fair use!

Fair use defenses rest on the fact that a limited excerpt was used for limited distribution, among other criteria.

For example, if I'm a teacher and I make 30 copies of one page of a 300-page novel and I hand that out to my students, that's a brief excerpt for a fairly limited distribution.

Now if I'm a social media influencer and I copy all 300 pages of a 300-page book and then I send it out to all 3,000 of my followers, that's not fair use!

Also if I'm a teacher, and I find a one-page infographic and I make 30 copies of that, that's not fair use, because I didn't make an excerpt but I've copied 100% of the original work. That's infringement now.

So if LLMs went through en masse in thousands of copyrighted works in their entirety and ingested every byte of them, no copyright judge on the planet would call that fair use.

For reference, the English Wikipedia has a policy that allows some fair-use content of copyrighted works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Non-free_content_cri...

You are assuming the LLM spits out exact copies of everything they’ve read.

It doesn't matter what goes out, it matters what goes in because that's what's required for LLMs to work

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