[samatman]

What AI does is much more like the Old Masters approach of going to a museum and painting a copy of a painting by some master whose technique they wish to learn. This has always been both legal, and encouraged.

Or borrowing a thick stack of books from the library, reading them, and using that knowledge as the basis for fiction. That's a transformative work, and those are fine as well.

My take is that training AI models is a bespoke copyright situation which our laws were never designed to handle, and finding an equitable balance will take new law. But as it stands, it's both legal and encouraged for a human to access a Web site (thereby making a copy) and learn from the contents of that website.

That is, fundamentally, what happens when an LLM is trained on corpus data. The difference in scale becomes a difference in kind, but as I said, our laws at present don't really account for that, because they weren't designed to.

LLMs sometimes plagiarize, which is not ok, but most people, myself included, wouldn't consider the dilemma satisfactorily resolved if improvements in the technology meant that never happened. Outside of that, we're talking about a new kind of transformative work, and those are legal.

[pvaldes]

> This has always been both legal, and encouraged.

Not always. The copy must be easily identifiable as copy. An exact reproduction can't have the same dimensions as the original for example.

Drawing just a person or a detail of the picture, or redoing the picture in a different context or style, is encouraged.

Selling a full scale photo of the picture is forbidden. The copyright of famous art belongs to the museum.

[samatman]

The second example is better than the first, yes. I was thinking about the process more than the fact that painting a study produces a work, and a derived one at that, so more normal copyright considerations apply to the work itself.

> An exact reproduction can't have the same dimensions as the original

This is a rule, not a law, and a traditional and widespread one. Museums don't want to be involved in someone selling a forgery, so that rule is a way of making it unlikely. But the difference between "if you do this a museum will kick you out" and "this is illegal" is fairly sharp.

> The copyright of famous art belongs to the museum.

Not in a great number of cases it doesn't, most famous art is long out of copyright and belongs to the public domain. Museums will have copyright on photos of those works, and have been known to fraudulently claim that photos taken by others owe a license fee to the museum, but in the US at least this isn't true. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/museum-paintings-copyright_b_...

[1oooqooq]

Nice scapegoating Anthropomorphized.

Correct analogy is like someone taking pictures of the paintings, going home and applying a photoshop filter, erasing the original signature and adding theirs.

The law already covers that very much so.