Technology

It's the defacto term for how we fit a statistical model to data, unrelated to any copyright concepts. I'm pretty sure we called it "training" back in 1997 when I was doing neural networks at uni, and it's probably been used well before then too.

Neural nets are based on the concept of Hebbian learning (from the 1930s), because they are trying to mimic how a biological neural network learns.

This concept of training/learning has persisted because it's a good analogy of what we are trying to do with these statistical models, even if they aren't strictly neural networks.

How do we "know" anything where the answers are just being made up as part of humanity's collective cultural game of Calvinball?

Courts in various jurisdictions will make various rulings. Judges will interpret them in various ways. Legislators will chime in with new legislation and new treaties. Internet arguments will churn away with a whole range of assumptions about what is true or false that may or may not have anything to do with reality.

I present my opinion here. I feel it is well informed and I can back it up in various ways when challenged. But nobody "knows" anything because these aren't laws of physics or math that we're talking about here.

Or did you mean whether we know if a copy of the book is embedded in the model? That can be more objectively tested, at least.

AFAIK it takes these large bodies of text and rather than digesting them and keeping it in some sort of database, rather it holistically (and i'm generalising here), see how often certain words are strung together and taking note of that. Let's call them weights.

Then users can prompt something and the 'magic' here is that it is able to pick out words of different weights based on the prompt. Be it, are you writing an angry email to your boss, a code in python, or structure for a book.

But it is unable to recreate the book from a prompt.
People who know the topic more intimately please correct me if I am wrong .

Perhaps, but that's a separate legal issue from the model itself. You might have committed a breach of copyright in the process of gathering the material that the AI was trained on but the model itself is not a copy of that material and so is not itself illegal to train or use. And perhaps not even that, since downloading a pirated book is not the illegal part (uploading it is).

As you say, there's some untested legal waters here. But it seems likely to me that the best that Silverman will accomplish is some nibbling and quibbling around the edges.

It’s difficult to tell to what extent books are encoded into the model. The data might be there in some abstract form or another.

This is a court case so the accusers are going to have to prove it.

The evidence provided is that ChatGPT can produce two-page summaries of the books. The summaries are of unknown accuracy, I haven't read the books myself so I have no idea how much of those summaries are hallucinations. This is very weak.

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