OpenAI has been accused by many parties of training its AI on copyrighted content sans permission. Now a new paper by an AI watchdog organization makes the serious accusation that the company increasingly relied on non-public books it didn’t license to train more sophisticated AI models.
AI models are essentially complex prediction engines. Trained on a lot of data — books, movies, TV shows, and so on — they learn patterns and novel ways to extrapolate from a simple prompt. When a model “writes” an essay on a Greek tragedy or “draws” Ghibli-style images, it’s simply pulling from its vast knowledge to approximate. It isn’t arriving at anything new.
While a number of AI labs including OpenAI have begun embracing AI-generated data to train AI as they exhaust…