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ChatGPT seems to be trained on copyrighted books like Harry Potter

A test to see whether ChatGPT has memorised the contents of copyrighted material suggests it was trained on passages from Harry Potter, Game of Thrones and many other novels

By Chris Stokel-Walker

5 May 2023

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published in 1997

Zety Akhzar/Shutterstock

ChatGPT and its successor GPT-4 appear to have memorised details from vast numbers of copyrighted books, posing questions about the legality of how these large language models (LLMs) are created.

Both artificial intelligences were developed by private firm OpenAI and trained on huge amounts of data, but exactly which texts make up this training data is unknown. To find out more, David Bamman at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues looked at whether the AIs were able to …

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