LLMs don’t learn, and they’re not people. Applying the same logic doesn’t make much sense.

AI can “learn” from and “read” a book in the same way a person can and does

This statement is the basis for your argument and it is simply not correct.

Training LLMs and similar AI models is much closer to a sophisticated lossy compression algorithm than it is to human learning. The processes are not at all similar given our current understanding of human learning.

AI doesn’t reproduce a work that it “learns” from, so why would it be illegal?

The current Disney lawsuit against Midjourney is illustrative - literally, it includes numerous side-by-side comparisons - of how AI models are capable of recreating iconic copyrighted work that is indistinguishable from the original.

If a machine can replicate your writing style because it could identify certain patterns, words, sentence structure, etc then as long as it’s not pretending to create things attributed to you, there’s no issue.

An AI doesn't create works on its own. A human instructs AI to do so. Attribution is also irrelevant. If a human uses AI to recreate the exact tone, structure and other nuances of say, some best selling author, they harm the marketability of the original works which fails fair use tests (at least in the US).

My interpretation was that AI companies can train on material they are licensed to use, but the courts have deemed that Anthropic pirated this material as they were not licensed to use it.

In other words, if Anthropic bought the physical or digital books, it would be fine so long as their AI couldn't spit it out verbatim, but they didn't even do that, i.e. the AI crawler pirated the book.

Make an AI that is trained on the books.

Tell it to tell you a story for one of the books.

Read the story without paying for it.

The law says this is ok now, right?

As long as they don't use exactly the same words in the book, yeah, as I understand it.

True. And I will be happy if someone sue them and the judge say the same thing.

If I understand correctly they are ruling you can by a book once, and redistribute the information to as many people you want without consequences. Aka 1 student should be able to buy a textbook and redistribute it to all other students for free. (Yet the rules only work for companies apparently, as the students would still be committing a crime)

Well, it would be interesting if this case would be used as precedence in a case invonving a single student that do the same thing. But you are right

You can “use” them to learn from, just like “AI” can.

What exactly do you think AI does when it “learns” from a book, for example? Do you think it will just spit out the entire book if you ask it to?

Your very first statement calling my basis for my argument incorrect is incorrect lol.

LLMs “learn” things from the content they consume. They don’t just take the content in wholesale and keep it there to regurgitate on command.

On your last part, unless someone uses AI to recreate the tone etc of a best selling author *and then markets their book/writing as being from said best selling author, and doesn’t use trademarked characters etc, there’s no issue. You can’t copyright a style of writing.

But I thought they admitted to torrenting terabytes of ebooks?

It cant speak or use any words without it being someone elses words it learned from? Unless its giving sources everything is always from something it learned because it cannot speak or use words without that source in the first place?

This was my understanding also, and why I think the judge is bad at their job.

Even if we accept all your market liberal premise without question... in your own rhetorical framework the Disney lawsuit should be ruled against Disney.

If a human uses AI to recreate the exact tone, structure and other nuances of say, some best selling author, they harm the marketability of the original works which fails fair use tests (at least in the US).

Says who? In a free market why is the competition from similar products and brands such a threat as to be outlawed? Think reasonably about what you are advocating... you think authorship is so valuable or so special that one should be granted a legally enforceable monopoly at the loosest notions of authorship. This is the definition of a slippery-slope, and yet, it is the status quo of the society we live in.

On it "harming marketability of the original works," frankly, that's a fiction and anyone advocating such ideas should just fucking weep about it instead of enforce overreaching laws on the rest of us. If you can't sell your art because a machine made "too good a copy" of your art, it wasn't good art in the first place and that is not the fault of the machine. Even big pharma doesn't get to outright ban generic medications (even tho they certainly tried)... it is patently fucking absurd to decry artist's lack of a state-enforced monopoly on their work. Why do you think we should extend such a radical policy towards... checks notes... tumblr artists and other commission based creators? It's not good when big companies do it for themselves through lobbying, it wouldn't be good to do it for "the little guy," either. The real artists working in industry don't want to change the law this way because they know it doesn't work in their favor. Disney's lawsuit is in the interest of Disney and big capital, not artists themselves, despite what these large conglomerates that trade in IPs and dreams might try to convince the art world writ large of.

Not at all true. AI doesn’t just reproduce content it was trained on on demand.

Does buying the book give you license to digitise it?

Does owning a digital copy of the book give you license to convert it into another format and copy it into a database?

Definitions of "Ownership" can be very different.

I suppose someone could develop an LLM that digests textbooks, and rewords the text and spits it back out. Then distribute it for free page for page. You can't copy right the math problems I don't think.. so if the text wording is what gives it credence, that would have been changed.

Well to be honest lemmy is less prone to knee-jerk reactionary discussion but on a handful of topics it is virtually guaranteed to happen no matter what, even here. For example, this entire site, besides a handful of communities, is vigorously anti-AI; and in the words of u/jsomae@lemmy.ml elsewhere in this comment chain:

"It seems the subject of AI causes lemmites to lose all their braincells."

I think there is definitely an interesting take on the sociology of the digital age in here somewhere but it's too early in the morning to be tapping something like that out lol

Some communities on this site speak about machine learning exactly how I see grungy Europeans from pre-18th century manuscripts speaking about witches, Satan, and evil... as if it is some pervasive, black-magic miasma.

As someone who is in the field of machine learning academically/professionally it's honestly kind of shocking and has largely informed my opinion of society at large as an adult. No one puts any effort into learning if they see the letters "A" and "I" in all caps, next to each other. Immediately turn their brain off and start regurgitating points and responding reflexively, on Lemmy or otherwise. People talk about it so confidently while being so frustratingly unaware of their own ignorance on the matter, which, for lack of a better comparison... reminds me a lot of how historically and in fiction human beings have treated literal magic.

That's my main issue with the entire swath of "pro vs anti AI" discourse... all these people treating something that, to me, is simple & daily reality as something entirely different than my own personal notion of it.

I am educated on this. When an ai learns, it takes an input through a series of functions and are joined at the output. The set of functions that produce the best output have their functions developed further. Individuals do not process information like that. With poor exploration and biasing, the output of an AI model could look identical to its input. It did not "learn" anymore than a downloaded video ran through a compression algorithm.

The judge isn't saying that they learn or that they're people. He's saying that training falls into the same legal classification as learning.