The ability to ask people what is contained within a book isn't obviously copyright infringement.

Merely summarizing info and attributing it to the source is the basic element of learning, for both machines and human beings.

These suits are necessary becsuse it's not clear where the line is, and if ChatGPTs functions actually cross it.

What is clear is that OpenAI is doing its best to avoid infringing anyone's copyright even if it is trivial for them to do so. They have the training data so they can simply output it word for word bypass the LLM. They don't do that and further restrain their LLM from making too long recitations.

If you can trick / manipulate the LLM into giving you too much then I say that infringement is on you.

I think it's important to distinguish between content and presentation. Most books don't offer entirely new content, but (at best) give some novel way of presenting old content. Consider a modern retelling of Greek Mythology. The stories weren't the original contribution by the author (but by the Ancient Greeks), but the particular way they tell it may be. So ChatGPT telling people about its "content" is unproblematic if it's just telling people how the story goes, and only potentially problematic if it's effectively quoting from the book or mimicking its presentation. (And we all know that if ChatGPT is good at one thing, it's paraphrase or re-expressing the same ideas in substantially different ways, so even if ChatGPT literally copies a book's presentation/wording, that would probably have happened by accident rather than necessity)

The vast majority of publications (especially those of a explanatory nature) do not contribute original content/information. The exceptions are things like research articles/monographs, historical records, government reports. But copyright infringement doesn't apply here because these things weren't published with a profit motive but precisely to publicize the information as widely as possible. The only problem area I can think of involves books published by commercial publishers which promise 'exclusive peek' into the life of some famous person (think biographies of celebrities or books like Fire and Fury). In that kind of case there is indeed original content, and revealing it in detail will arguably mean less sales for the authors/publishers.

I can also go to the Wikipedia article about any book of note and get a plot or other summary and other information about the book. If that’s the reason for buying the book, “the author got robbed.”

If you ask a human questions about a book, thereby avoiding having to buy the book for class, did you rob the author?

What sort of questions? How would you know what to ask it, unless maybe you have another source for the book?

Curiously, when I ask GPT-4 about some well-known but under-copyright book, it says it can't answer because of the copyright. For well-known books out of copyright such as Alice in Wonderland, it can recite passages but tends to get lost and start reciting another section or book at some point. Would be real frustrating to use as a substitute.

This reminds me of the tenuous RIAA claim that every pirated piece of media represented a lost sale back when they were suing their customers in the 2000s.

Are copyright holders being robbed by professors that answer their students' questions?

Don't teachers do the same?

- Trained their minds on existing books

- Tutor the next generation of students

- Give classes on book contents

- Answer questions about those books

The book publishing industry didn't go out of business because there are teachers answering questions. To the contrary, it benefited book sales, because most people aren't good self-learners.

What's wrong with having a machine do the same?