alt Hacker News>People might quote Harry Potter a lot, but they don’t quote the entire thing over and over, chapter and verse, on hundreds of thousands of different websites.
I'm fairly certain I could find the entire thing in plain text in multiple places online. A quick google gives the philosophers stone as the second result in pdf format on the internet archive but i'm sure with a bit of looking i'd bump into a lot of plaintext copies.
They might have taken measures to prevent this from being anywhere their training data (i think it would be fairly easy and something they'd likely do) but if they at any point failed for a book or so that they didn't consider wouldn't my original question stand?
You’re missing the point. An LLM is not going to memorise a whole book just because it’s seen a few copies. An LLM might be able to memorise the Bible in particular simply because Bible quotes are everywhere. There is a vast difference between being able to find a handful of copies online and having it constantly quoted everywhere that humans communicate. Bible quotes get literally everywhere. People put them on bumper stickers, tattoo themselves with it, put it in their email signatures, etc. Bible quotes are so omnipresent, they have become part of our language – a lot of idioms people use every day come from the Bible.
The Bible isn’t just a book, it’s been a massive part of human culture for millennia, to the point of it shaping language itself. LLMs might be able to memorise the Bible, but it’s not because they can memorise books, it’s because the Bible is far more than just a book.