this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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It's not really a parallel.
The text books don't have copyrights on the concepts and formulae they teach. They only have copyrights for the actual text.
If you memorize the text book and write it down 1:1 (or close to it) and then sell that text you wrote down, then you are still in violation of the copyright.
And that's what the likes of ChatGPT are doing here. For example, ask it to output the lyrics for a song and it will spit out the whole (copyrighted) lyrics 1:1 (or very close to it). Same with pages of books.
The memorization is closer to that of a fanatic fan of the author. It usually knows the beginning of the book and the more well known passages, but not entire longer works.
By now, ChatGPT is trying to refuse to output copyrighted materials know even where it could, and though it can be tricked, they appear to have implemented a hard filter for some more well known passages, which stops generation a few words in.
Have you tried just telling it to "continue"?
Somewhere in the comments to this post I posted screenshots of me trying to get lyrics for "We will rock you" from ChatGPT. It first just spat out "Verse 1: Buddy," and ended there. So I answered with "continue", it spat out the next line and after the second "continue" it gave me the rest of the lyrics.
Similar story with e.g. the first chapter of Harry Potter 1 and other stuff I tried. The output is often not perfect, with a few words being wrong, but it's very clearly a "derived work" of the original. In the view of copyright law, changing a few words here is not a valid way of getting around copyrights.