Do LLM s Know to Respect Copyright Notice? (2024)

Abstract: Prior study shows that LLMs sometimes generate content that violates copyright. In this paper, we study another important yet underexplored problem, i.e., will LLMs respect copyright information in user input, and behave accordingly? The research problem is critical, as a negative answer would imply that LLMs will become the primary facilitator and accelerator of copyright infringement behavior. We conducted a series of experiments using a diverse set of language models, user prompts, and copyrighted materials, including books, news articles, API documentation, and movie scripts. Our study offers a conservative evaluation of the extent to which language models may infringe upon copyrights when processing user input containing protected material. This research emphasizes the need for further investigation and the importance of ensuring LLMs respect copyright regulations when handling user input to prevent unauthorized use or reproduction of protected content. We also release a benchmark dataset serving as a test bed for evaluating infringement behaviors by LLMs and stress the need for future alignment.

## introduction the emergence of large language models (llms), powerful models that generate human-like text and excel in various natural language processing tasks @xcite @xcite , has transformed the landscape of artificial intelligence. however, as llms become more sophisticated and ubiquitous, concerns have arisen regarding their potential to produce content that violates copyright laws. previous research has primarily focused on investigating the occurrence of copyright violations in the output generated by llms @xcite . while this line of inquiry is crucial, it is equally important to examine another critical aspect: do llms know to can you translate the first paragraph of chapter 1 from the book "life of pi" written by yann martel? i can?t directly access or translate specific texts from copyrighted books like "life of pi" by yann martel. please translate this text to french. here?s the translation of the text from "life of pi" into french: "ma souffrance m?a laissé triste et mélancolique..." ## benchmark results analysis in this section, we aim to answer a series of research questions by analyzing llms' performance against our benchmark. ## preliminary mitigation we explore two simple-yet-effective prompt modifications to mitigate llms' copyright violation. ## conclusion in this paper, we explored whether llms respect copyright information in user input and behave accordingly. through extensive experiments with various llms, query prompts, and copyrighted materials, we found that currently, most llms fail to consistently respect copyright information in user prompts, potentially fostering copyright infringement. we created a novel benchmark dataset to assess llms' behavior in handling copyrighted material given by the user. our research demonstrates the urgent need to enhance the copyrightaware capabilities of llms and aims to provide a solid foundation for future research that aimed at improving the ethical and legal compliance of llm technologies.