[buredoranna]

> the whole thing being built on copyright infringement

I am not a lawyer, but am generally familiar with two "is it fair use" tests.

1. Is it transformative?

I take a picture, I own the copyright. You can't sell it. But if you take a copy, and literally chop it to pieces, reforming it into a collage, you can sell that.

2. Does the alleged infringing work devalue the original?

If I have a conversation with ai about "The Lord of the Rings". Even if it reproduces good chunks of the original, it does not devalue the original... in fact, I would argue, it enhances it.

Have I failed to take into account additional arguments and/or scenarios? Probably.

But, in my opinion, AI passes these tests. AI output is transformative, and in general, does not devalue the original.

[taikahessu]

In order for LLM to be useful, you need to copy and steal all of the work. Yes, you can argue you don't need the whole work, but that's what they took and feed it in.

And they are making money off of other people's work. Sure, you can use mental jiujutsu to make it fair use. But fair use for LLMs means you basically copy the whole thing. All of it. It sounds more like a total use to me.

I hope the free market and technology catches up and destroys the VC backed machinery. But only time will tell.

[ragequittah]

I always wonder if anyone out there thinks they're not making money off of other people's work. If you're coding, writing a fantasy novel, taking a photograph or drawing a picture from first principals you came up with yourself I applaud you though.

[taikahessu]

You are absolutely right.

Seriously though, I do think that is the case. It would be self-righteous to argue otherwise. It's just the scale and the nature of this, that makes it so repulsive. For my taste, copying something without permission, is stealing. I don't care what a judge somewhere thinks of it. Using someone's good will for profit is disgusting. And I hope we all get to profit from it someday, not just a select few. But that is just my opinion.

[IcyWindows]

This kind of thinking seems like a road for people to have to pay a license for the rest of their life after going to school for the knowledge they "stole" from their textbooks.

[taikahessu]

Except the school paid royalties for that specific book. Every book. The money was distributed. Writers, publishers and so on. The normal stuff.

Or if you had to buy the book yourself, same thing, distributed, royalties paid.

[IcyWindows]

So your complaint is that they didn't pay for training data by buying every book found online?

That does seem more reasonable, but makes public libraries also evil.

[ragequittah]

I understand but I think this will be quite a quaint idea soon in all honesty. Imagine these things are able to progress the world of science, math, physics, and whatever else (they already are) and we stopped them because someone didn't make enough royalties first. That to me would be more repulsive. We stop/slow the progress of all humanity because there wasn't enough temporary gain for x individual who wrote y book. And if it all turns out to be bogus nonsense then I doubt x individual who wrote y book loses much in the process anyway.

[taikahessu]

Yeah, it's not an easy puzzle piece. How far are we going to go in the name of science and progress again? Are you buying it, that it's all for the greater good? Quite a lot of money involved here. Everyone wants a piece of it. But I digress. Dropping the big bomb, stealing the lands and riches of the natives, using slaves and colonies to power the whole civilization into a new era might be powerful and efficient. But it doesn't make it right. I don't buy the narrative. Do no evil until you can no longer say no?

[ragequittah]

I think comparing intellectual property theft to slavery and stealing land is where I start leaning towards the argument being absurd. The stolen books are still on store shelves. People are likely still buying them at about the same rate as before.

And as far as it being for the greater good that seems to be the promise of many of these companies. What will inevitably get in the way is greed and money, the very same reasons we're arguing about IP theft. Good or bad I see no way out of this but through at this point.

[jjwiseman]

And in Bartz v. Anthropic, the court found that Anthropic training their LLMs on books was "highly transformative."

[verve_rat]

The US is not the only legal jurisdiction these services are being sold in.

[idiotsecant]

This is a tiresome and well trod road.

The fact of the matter is that for profit corporations consumed the sum knowledge of mankind with the intent to make money on it by encoding it into a larger and better organized corpus of knowledge. They cited no sources and paid no fees (to any regular humans, at least).

They are making enormous sums of money (and burning even more, ironically) doing this.

If that doesn't violate copyright, it violates some basic principle of decency.

[michaelmrose]

You are assuming intellectual property has intrinsic basis when it's at best functional not foundational. It's only useful if the net value to society is positive which is extremely dubious.

[idiotsecant]

I'm assuming human creativity has intrinsic value, or what's the point of being human?

[michaelmrose]

You are assuming that somehow human creativity was born with intellectual property and will somehow die with it. It's just not so.

[idiotsecant]

Ok captain pedant, instead of making vague handwavey negations exclusively how about you say something.

[michaelmrose]

Intellectual property is supposed to feed creativity by securing for creators exclusive rights to benefit from their creation. It mostly feeds uncreative leaches whose business it is to own things in exchange for crumbs for the creativity and drags down both the inherent enjoyment of the fruits of creativity and even its creation. It belonged in the bin back when we first thought of it as is only going to be more unfit for purpose as time goes on.

[Madmallard]

What in the mental gymnastics?

They just stole everyone's hard work over decades to make this or it wouldn't have been useful at all.

[NewsaHackO]

That's a statement. The comment you are replying to had actual reasoning behind his claim. Do you have any actual reasoning behind yours?

[Madmallard]

Let's not ignore the entirety of reality and what has been going on for the last few years to defend a pestilence on mankind you probably have stock invested in. I'm not going to acknowledge how insane of an argument that is you're making. It's like you heard of zero leaks, zero law suits, zero open source complaints. Zero anything. Just either intentionally or unintentionally astroturfing.

Thanks.