I wonder if hallucinated copyright claims (esp. like the ZDF one at the bottom of the OP) will be introduced as evidence in one of the court cases against "big AI"
"Big AI" is transparent and open about the fact they use all sorts of copyrighted material to train the data. How would "we see an exact chunk of text from our copyrighted material" add to that?
It appears they have not been training on the official studio subtitle files, but on community transcriptions/translations commonly distributed with torrents.
So not only are they training on copyrighted material, but they didn't even pay for it once, and then they didn't even do minimal data cleaning before training. Which, by the way, is the type of cleaning their LLMs could have done.
This is the key part. And it's not certain this happened. Not defending AI data gobbling, but if we truly and honestly want to fight big-AI use of content, we cannot just presume bad faith. OpenSubtitles.org has a large dataset that is "public". It is be a dataset perfectly suitable, intended for, and therefore used for, training and data analysis.
Their main defence is that it's fair use because it's transformative (like a human reading a book, getting inspired, and writing something of their own) and not a copypaste illegal distribution (like a human scanning that book and selling it themselves).
Having models hallucinate copyright notices shows that some content is being copypasted as is, which kind of goes against the transformative argument.
(Note: I think that trying to litigate AI with current copyright laws is weird. They were created before LLMs were even imagined, so of course they can't handle them clearly. New laws are needed around this, not trying to bend over backwards to think about what a lawmarker a century ago would have thought about how transformative a thing they couldn't have imagined is.)
> which kind of goes against the transformative argument.
Indeed a good example. We've seen several examples of code snippets where this happens too, mentioned on HN.
But it does not prove that they infringed copyright by ingesting "illegal" stuff, as GP tried to argue. Seeing a verbatim string only "proves" that it came from a specific source. But not if this source was illegally acquired, which was my point.
