AI and Copyright: Are Your Research Papers Training Large Language Models?
Academic publishers are licensing access to their research papers for use in training artificial intelligence (AI) models, sparking debate over copyright and authors’ consent. With AI’s reliance on massive datasets, research papers are considered valuable for their dense and structured information, but questions around fairness and legality remain unresolved.
Important Points:
- Publishers like Taylor & Francis and Wiley have made multimillion-dollar deals with tech companies to provide data for AI model training.
- AI developers rely on massive datasets, including academic papers, to train large language models (LLMs), often without transparency about the sources.
- Proving whether specific papers were used in training LLMs is technically challenging but possible through methods like membership inference attacks and copyright traps.
- Litigation, including lawsuits from The New York Times against OpenAI, could set legal precedents for how copyrighted material is used in AI training.
- Some academics support the use of their work for AI training, but concerns remain about fairness, attribution, and potential job threats in creative industries.
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