The alleged theft at the heart of ChatGPT

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 10 November 2023

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

When best-selling thriller writer Douglas Preston began playing around with OpenAI's new chatbot, ChatGPT, he was, at first, impressed. But then he realized how much in-depth knowledge GPT had of the books he had written. When prompted, it supplied detailed plot summaries and descriptions of even minor characters. He was convinced it could only pull that off if it had read his books.

Large language models, the kind of artificial intelligence underlying programs like ChatGPT, do not come into the world fully formed. They first have to be trained on incredibly large amounts of text. Douglas Preston, and 16 other authors, including George R.R. Martin, Jodi Piccoult, and Jonathan Franzen, were convinced that their novels had been used to train GPT without their permission. So, in September, they sued OpenAI for copyright infringement.

This sort of thing seems to be happening a lot lately–one giant tech company or another "moves fast and breaks things," exploring the edges of what might or might not be allowed without first asking permission. On today's show, we try to make sense of what OpenAI allegedly did by training its AI on massive amounts of copyrighted material. Was that good? Was it bad? Was it legal?

Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Before we start this episode discusses Google and Spotify which are both corporate sponsors of NPR.
0:08.0	We also discuss open AI. One of open AI's major investors is, which is also a corporate sponsor of NPR.
0:15.4	Here's the show.
0:17.1	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:22.2	Douglas Preston got his big break as a writer when he and his co-author
0:26.1	published their first novel, Relick in 1995.
0:29.7	Relick is about a brain-eating monster loose in a museum,
0:35.0	hunting down and killing people and eating part of their brains.
0:38.0	So it's, you know, you will not see my name on the list of Nobel laureates. That's for sure.
0:45.0	No, Nobel, maybe, but the book was a bestseller, the first of many.
0:50.0	And how many books have you written altogether?
0:52.8	I'm not sure. I think about 40.
0:55.8	Douglas also somehow finds time to write all these articles and books about paleontology and archaeology. He's got a lot of interest, he's a curious guy.
1:05.0	And one day that curiosity led him to start playing around with the tech world's shiny new thing,
1:12.0	artificial intelligence, specifically open AI's chatbot chat
1:16.8	chepity.
1:17.8	Douglas got himself an account and started seeing what this fancy new AI chatbot could do. While we talked he
1:25.0	scrolled back through his history and read me some of his earliest queries.
1:28.0	I had to write a paragraph about the execution of Socrates, please discuss Chopin's piano concerto number one, discuss the transcendental number
1:37.4	E. Okay, so it appeared to know some math and some history and some music, and it didn't take long for Douglas to wonder does it know me
1:47.1	Specifically did Chatsib T know anything about the books he had written so he starts testing it.
1:53.2	Are you familiar with a character called WittleZi in the novel
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in -443 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from NPR, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of NPR and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.