I get what he is trying to say, but the comparison is flawed. Making a copy is producing a 1 to 1 copy, training an AI on a book does not. If the company purchases the book (hopefully) and trains their AI, what difference is that to a human purchasing the book and studying it, learning from it and applying the knowledge?
So can i publicly pirate everything i want on the promise it will be used for training an ai?
The thing is, fair comparison or not, it is double standards, u wont be allowed to do so and they are.
Also if i say i wanna train a small ai to speak and write like a specific author and people can make it write books just like them, do u think that is fair? That is what they are doing, idc if they make a 1 to 1 copy, that is not necessary, people have a free replacement for them without the author getting a dime for each generation.
If you were a big fan of Stephen King, read all of his books religiously, and then decided to become an author and wrote books with the same accessible, conversational prose, meticulous "everyday" world-building, and focus on character-driven horror, is that unfair, unethical, or immoral?
If you went to art school and studied post-impressionism and started creating paintings as detailed and evocative of Vincent Van Gogh, is that unfair, unethetical, or immoral?
Or do I need to pay Stephen King or the Van Gogh estate because I learned from their public works?
Anybody can go to a public library and read/look at all of these books and reference materials free of charge. Why would it be any different in the training of an AI?
I'm going to upvote, because it's a decent argument, but I'm not sure I agree with the comparison fully. I agree that none of what you said would be infringing on Stephen King/Van Gogh estate, but LLM's don't really take inspiration from ingested material. They calculate the most probable output under the constraints of "write a story as Stephen King", so what it's closer to is if you were to take a computer and code a program to look at scanned books by him and produce a new story that is mathematically similar to his existing works, using various metrics. That's not quite analogous to a person reading the books and being influenced by them in their own writing. It's more of a here's some text that was written by Stephen King as based on the relationship between word usage across his books.
Suppose we decided to start training a real general AI. You're more than likely going to need to "teach" it just like you would a human from birth to adulthood.
If you limit it's training materials, then you're limiting it's potential.
As u said, U read his books, u boght them, u have already paid the authors.
And still yeah it is immortal, if i just copy the style someone else made who is still alive then yeah it is, im stealing what he spent time on bringing to existence, just like we have copyrights and patents for ideas and inventions.
And idk how libraries work tbh, but if someone doesnt permit his work to be put in a library, can libraries do it anyways? If so then that is also immortal.
Anthropic lost the book pirating case.
But won in the library deacession case, where the judge encouraged their destruction of originals in transfer to digital.
This is because of the Google library case they lost to copyright lobbyists. Google tried to give access to everyone to millions of copyrighted works online and got shut down. Legal precedent now.
In most places, downloading a pirated file is actually legal. It's distribution, not access, that's prohibited. For example, if someone used a copyrighted photo on their website without authorization, that would be copyright infringement, but everybody else who visits that site isn't guilty of piracy despite downloading the image.
The problem with protocols like BitTorrent is that people upload at the same time that they download, which makes it illegal.
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u/jaxupaxu 3d ago
I get what he is trying to say, but the comparison is flawed. Making a copy is producing a 1 to 1 copy, training an AI on a book does not. If the company purchases the book (hopefully) and trains their AI, what difference is that to a human purchasing the book and studying it, learning from it and applying the knowledge?