Protecting Copyrighted Material with Unique Identifiers in Large Language Model Training

A primary concern regarding training large language models (LLMs) is whether they abuse copyrighted online text. With the increasing training data scale and the prevalence of LLMs in daily lives, two problems arise: \textbf{1)} false positive membership inference results misled by similar examples; \textbf{2)} membership inference methods are usually too complex for end users to understand and use. To address these issues, we propose an alternative \textit{insert-and-detect} methodology, advocating that web users and content platforms employ \textbf{\textit{unique identifiers}} for reliable and independent membership inference. Users and platforms can create their identifiers, embed them in copyrighted text, and independently detect them in future LLMs. As an initial demonstration, we introduce \textit{\textbf{ghost sentences}} and a user-friendly last-$k$ words test, allowing end users to chat with LLMs for membership inference. Ghost sentences consist primarily of unique passphrases of random natural words, which can come with customized elements to bypass possible filter rules. The last-$k$ words test requires a significant repetition time of ghost sentences~($\ge10$). For cases with fewer repetitions, we designed an extra perplexity test, as LLMs exhibit high perplexity when encountering unnatural passphrases. We also conduct a comprehensive study on the memorization and membership inference of ghost sentences, examining factors such as training data scales, model sizes, repetition times, insertion positions, wordlist of passphrases, alignment, \textit{etc}. Our study shows the possibility of applying ghost sentences in real scenarios and provides instructions for the potential application.