Yes, that is interesting. It sounds like he was aware of the theoretical possibility of a book being regurgitated verbatim. Do you know if he was aware it had been done? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49000742

If he was not aware, I wonder if he still would have described the process as "exceedingly transformative" had he been aware.

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FeepingCreature 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Note that they're testing for 100-word passages. This is a level of memorization that avid readers can credibly also reach.

Note also that Sonnet 3.7 had to be jailbroken.

Note also that they got high memorization for a few books that were widely quoted. The books in question can probably also be "retrieved" by putting phrase prefixes into Google, which is probably why Sonnet 3.7 knows them with the precision of a fanboy. Material being widely repeated in the training set is a well-known cause of memorization.

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globular-toast 2 hours ago | parent [-]

No "avid reader" could recall anywhere near that much text. That takes dedicated effort to commit to memory. Copyright was never meant to stop people copying books anyway, it was meant to stop machines (ie. printing presses) copying them.

Edit: Apologies, I misread it as "100 pages". My point about copyright still stands, though.

	▲	FeepingCreature an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I disagree that avid readers cannot complete entire passages from books they've read several times when fed a prefix.
	▲	JAlexoid an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I used to use the initial letters of a whole paragraph from Lord of The Rings as my password. Some of us have a good enough memory.