ChatGPT's knowledge of copyrighted novels highlights legal uncertainty of AIStokel-Walker, C. (2023, May 13). New Scientist, 258(3438), 13.
David Bamman at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues looked at whether the AIs were able to fill in missing details from a selection of almost 600 fiction books, drawn from sources such as nominees for the Pulitzer prize between 1924 and 2020, and The New York Times's bestsellers lists over the same time period. The researchers say this suggests the AIs were trained on significant proportions of both books. "The results of this paper confirm that ChatGPT and GPT-4 are more familiar with books that more frequently appear online and that this may have implications in terms of how literary taste reflects and reinforces social inequalities," says Florence Smith Nicholls at Queen Mary University of London.