1. Is it true that LLMs / AI Companies have used copyrighted material for training?
2. Is it possible to estimate how much of copyrighted material has been used?
👤 muzani Accepted Answer ✓
1. Yes, but it's hard to prove. There are active lawsuits. Some of it has been under "fair use" but at the billion dollar scale, you have to really ask whether it's fair. Also anecdotally, an author friend lamented that her publisher sold the legal rights to use it... it was all perfectly legal but many authors do not agree to this.
2. This is harder as a lot of them don't disclose training sets.
👤 dialup_sounds
I think what you're looking for is not "copyrighted material" but material that's both 1) used without permission and 2) outside the scope of fair use.
There's no easy answer there, hence New York Times v. OpenAI.
👤 marstall
pretty much everything newer than ~70 years old on the internet is copyrighted, because copywright occurs automatically when you create something (in the US at least). So the answer to #1 is yes.