[triceratops]

> Have you never been to a public library and read a book while sitting there without checking it out?

See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43355723. If OpenAI built a robot that physically went into libraries, pulled books off shelves by itself, and read them...that's so cool I wouldn't even be mad.

[dylan604]

What about checking out eBooks? If you had an app that checked those out and scanned it at robot speed vs human feed, that would be the same thing. The idea that reading something that does not belong to you directly means stealing is just weird and very strained.

theGoogs essentially did that by having the robot that turned each page and scanned the pages. that's no different than having the librarian pull material for you so that you don't have to pull the book from the shelf yourself.

There's better arguments to make on why ClosedAI is bad. Reading text it doesn't own isn't one of them. How they acquired the text would be a better thing to critique. There's laws for that in place now that does not require new laws to be enacted.

[triceratops]

> If you had an app that checked those out and scanned it

You mean...made a copy? Do you really not see the problem?

> How they acquired the text would be a better thing to critique

Well...yeah that's what I said in the comment that started this discussion branch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43355147

This isn't about humans or robots reading books. It's that robots are allowed to violate copyright law to read the books, and us humans are not.

[ben_w]

> You mean...made a copy? Do you really not see the problem?

In precisely the same way as a robot scanning a physical book is.

If this is turned into a PDF and distributed, it's exactly the legal problem Google had[0] and that Facebook is currently fighting due to torrenting some of their training material[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43125840

If the tokens go directly into training an AI and no copies are retained, that's like how you as a human learn — except current AI models are not even remotely as able to absorb that information as you, and they only make up for being as thick as a plank by being stupid very very quickly.

> It's that robots are allowed to violate copyright law to read the books, and us humans are not.

More that the copyright laws are not suited to what's going on. Under the copyright laws, statute and case law, that existed at the time GPT-3.5 was created, bots were understood as the kind of thing Google had and used to make web indexes — essentially legal, with some caveats about quoting too much verbatim from news articles.

(Google PageRank being a big pile of linear algebra and all, and the Transformer architecture from which ChatGPT get's the "T" being originally a Google effort to improve Google Translate).

Society is currently arguing amongst itself if this is still OK when the bot is a conversational entity, or perhaps even something that can be given agency.

You get to set those rules via your government representative, make it illegal for AI crawlers to read the internet like that — but it's hard to change the laws if you mistake what you want the law to be, with what the law currently is.

[dylan604]

but you keep saying to read the books. there is no copyright violation to read a book. making copies starts to get into murky grounds, but does not immediately mean breaking the law.

[triceratops]

You might be thinking of someone else.