This viewpoint is one widely shared inside the AI community — that AI systems should be able to learn from material just as humans do.
Extrapolated out into some new future a hundred years from now when we have embodied AI humanoids walking alongside us, would it be weird if those humanoids were barred from buying a new book or charged a different rate than the humans they coexist with?
I’m still deciding how I feel about some of this too.
If we are going to afford models like this treatment equivalent to sentient beings in this regard, why not others? In your extrapolation these ai walking among us are property of giant tech companies…
Valid point. And to some extent a lot of existing licensing models cover this for humans too (are you using this thing for yourself, or are you using this thing on behalf of your company).
There will be a lot to figure out over the coming years.
> This viewpoint is one widely shared inside the AI community — that AI systems should be able to learn from material just as humans do.
I'm not even against this to a point. The issue is what comes after. The monetization. The enshitification. The derivatives in place of real creativity.
Even if we could all train evenly, those with money will always win out on the execution. You can't possibly believe just "letting things play out" as they have been so far, but with less copyright guardrails, is the solution here?
It's a straw man though, whether or not AI should be allowed to learn from books is irrelevant to the point that Meta stole tens of thousands of books to accomplish this. A fact that they've admitted to and even had they not would be trivially proven.
They're not being charged, that would be a vast improvement over reality.
At ten dollars per book, that'd just be a few hundred thousand dollars. They spent way more than that training the model, and probably will spend more on legal fees in this case.
But if they had done that, I bet they would have been sued anyway.
Even accepting that, the law should be encouraging creative output by individuals and there is justifiable fear that this will be used to bypass protections designed to reward such behavior.
For a more direct counterexample, I can memorize something and type it back out, but if it is copyrighted the law doesn’t make an exception just because it passed through my head.
The courts have already ruled that training on data is similar to reading it (sufficiently transformative) to be considered fair use, in the same way that I cannot claim a copyright on your brain because you read this comment.
On the other hand, they torrented books and then open sourced LLM weights. No punishment is too severe for that!
If you still don’t understand, I strongly suggest watching Max Headroom, “Lessons”, which you can get here:
I think he’s saying he works for meta and when the company employees committed mass copyright violation that’s ok because once someone read Winnie the Pooh to him at story hour at the library.
Honestly, if people continue to conflate human development with a mega corps trawling copyright material to build a mathematical model and then wrap it up and charge a subscription for it, then there's really not much you, I or anyone else can do to avoid the inevitable fallout and we really deserve everything we get for it.
I agree with you until this part. There comes a time where I don't think I deserve to get my eyes poked out just because other people find that fashionable.
OP is making the spurious argument that technology should have the same ethical entitlements as humans. It's on par with "information wants to be free".
I don't read it as an ethical argument, it's an argument about the purpose of copyright. Copyright is intended to restrict reproduction of a work for the purpose of incentivizing the creation of new works. Copyright is not intended to restrict the transmission of knowledge.
My thoughts as well. I just prefer to remove the nuance on these types of things. If OP wants to draw a line and clearly state "I'm with the corpo robots" that's fine. Just state it plainly so I can proceed accordingly.
Extrapolated out into some new future a hundred years from now when we have embodied AI humanoids walking alongside us, would it be weird if those humanoids were barred from buying a new book or charged a different rate than the humans they coexist with?
I’m still deciding how I feel about some of this too.