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by dragonwriter 529 days ago
> If the resulting AI models are protected by copyright that invalidates the claim that AI models being trained on copyrighted materials is fair-use analogous to human beings becoming educated by exposure to copyrighted materials.

No one training (foundation) models makes that fair use argument by analogy, they make arguments that addresses the specific statutory and case law criteria for fair use (abd frequently focus on the transformative character of the use); its true that the analogy to a learning human argument is frequently made in internet fora by AI enthusiasts who aren't the people training models on vaat scraped datasets. That argument is bunk for a number of reasons, but most critically the fact that a human learning from material isn’t fair use, because a human brain isn’t treated as a fixed medium, so learning in a human brain isn’t legally a copy or derivative work that would violate copyright without the fair use exception, so it's not a use to which fair use analysis even applies, so you can't argue anything is fair use by analogy to that. But its moot to any argument for hypocrisy by the big model makers, because they aren’t using that argument to start with.