The Impact of Copyrighted Material on Large Language Models: A Norwegian Perspective

Abstract: The use of copyrighted materials in training LLMs raises critical legal and ethical questions. This paper presents a framework for and the results of empirically assessing the impact of publisher-controlled copyrighted corpora on the performance of generative LLMs for Norwegian. When evaluated on a diverse set of tasks, we found that adding both books and newspapers to the data mixture of LLMs tend to improve their performance, while the addition of fiction works seems to be detrimental. Our experiments could inform the creation of a compensation scheme for authors whose works contribute to AI development.