> A.I. companies have acknowledged in research papers that they rely on shadow libraries. OpenAI's GPT-1 was trained on BookCorpus, which has over 7,000 unpublished titles scraped from the self-publishing platform Smashwords. To train GPT-3, OpenAI said that about 16 percent of the data it used came from two "internet-based books corpora" that it called "Books1" and "Books2." According to a lawsuit by the comedian Sarah Silverman and two other authors against OpenAI, Books2 is most likely a "flagrantly illegal" shadow library.
I suspect they definitely did as this is just an analogy we invented in this thread.
And in real life, I’m guessing that people training LLMs are definitely buying ebooks and not pirating them.