[AlexCoventry]

> You can definitely see how AI companies will be hustling to distinguish this from "we trained on copyrighted documents, and made a general purpose AI, and then people paid to use our AI to compete with the people who owned the documents." It's not quite the same, the connection is less direct, but it's not totally different.

Surely creating a general-purpose AI is transformative, though? Are you anticipating that AI companies will be sued for contributory infringement, because customers are using a general-purpose AI to compete with companies which created parts of the training data?

[llamaimperative]

IMO yes. The entire purpose of copyright law is to protect the incentive to create new material. A huge portion of the value prop of AI is that it captures the incentive normally bound for the creators of the training material (i.e. the whole point is you can ask the AI and not even see, never mind pay, the originator).

[zozbot234]

Ask the AI for what exactly? Factual information? That gets very low protection from a copyright point of view, especially when separate random answers by the AI will routinely show completely different rephrasings of the AI's response - implying that it can generalize well beyond the "expression" contained in any single answer, and effectively reference the underlying facts.

[AlexCoventry]

I'm not a lawyer, but I think the bar for contributory infringement is much higher than that. I think you'd have to find representatives of the defendants actually indicating somehow that people should use it that way. It seems to me that Grokster, etc.'s encouragement of their users to infringe copyright was an important factor in them losing this case, for instance.

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/545/913/

[llamaimperative]

Encouragement is definitely not a required element. https://www.cantorcolburn.com/news-newsletters-387.html