Senate Bill Would Ban Use Of Personal Data And Copyrighted Works In LLM Training Data

Highlights

• A proposed Senate bill would impose civil liability for the use of potentially copyrightable works to train large language models (LLMs).
• Potential civil penalties for violations include treble damages, punitive damages and attorney's fees.
• The legislation establishes a private right of action for any individual whose copyrightable works are used in training LLMs.

To be effective, LLM artificial intelligence (AI) systems require an extensive combination of data in a process known as "training." An early step in training any LLM is providing a corpus of training materials that serve as the base of knowledge the LLM can draw from in response to user prompt. The LLM statistically maps relationships between relevant parts of the training data, algorithmically assigns weights to the relevance of the material, and generates outputs by synthesizing available data.