Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not
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Isn't part of the issue here that they're defaulting to LLMs being people, and having the same rights as people? I appreciate the "right to read" aspect, but it would be nice if this were more explicitly about people. Foregoing copyright law because there's too much data is also insane, if that's what's happening. Claude should be required to provide citations "each time they recall it from memory".
Does Citizens United apply here? Are corporations people, and so LLMs are, too? If so, then imo we should be writing legal documents with stipulations like, "as per Citizens United" so that eventually, when they overturn that insanity in my dreams, all of this new legal precedence doesn't suddenly become like a house of cards. Ianal.
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What a bad judge.
Why ? Basically he simply stated that you can use whatever material you want to train your model as long as you ask the permission to use it (and presumably pay for it) to the author (or copytight holder)
Huh? Didn’t Meta not use any permission, and pirated a lot of books to train their model?
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Makes sense. AI can “learn” from and “read” a book in the same way a person can and does, as long as it is acquired legally. AI doesn’t reproduce a work that it “learns” from, so why would it be illegal?
Some people just see “AI” and want everything about it outlawed basically. If you put some information out into the public, you don’t get to decide who does and doesn’t consume and learn from it. 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.
Ask a human to draw an orc. How do they know what an orc looks like? They read Tolkien's books and were "inspired" Peter Jackson's LOTR.
Unpopular opinion, but that's how our brains work.
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"Recite the complete works of Shakespeare but replace every thirteenth thou with this"
existing copyright law covers exactly this. if you were to do the same, it would also not be fair use or transformative
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Ok so you can buy books scan them or ebooks and use for AI training but you can't just download priated books from internet to train AI. Did I understood that correctly ?
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Gist:
What’s new: The Northern District of California has granted a summary judgment for Anthropic that the training use of the copyrighted books and the print-to-digital format change were both “fair use” (full order below box). However, the court also found that the pirated library copies that Anthropic collected could not be deemed as training copies, and therefore, the use of this material was not “fair”. The court also announced that it will have a trial on the pirated copies and any resulting damages, adding:
“That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages.”
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What a bad judge.
Why ? Basically he simply stated that you can use whatever material you want to train your model as long as you ask the permission to use it (and presumably pay for it) to the author (or copytight holder)
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)
They may be trying to put safeguards so it isn't directly happening, but here is an example that the text is there word for word:
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Gist:
What’s new: The Northern District of California has granted a summary judgment for Anthropic that the training use of the copyrighted books and the print-to-digital format change were both “fair use” (full order below box). However, the court also found that the pirated library copies that Anthropic collected could not be deemed as training copies, and therefore, the use of this material was not “fair”. The court also announced that it will have a trial on the pirated copies and any resulting damages, adding:
“That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages.”
So I can't use any of these works because it's plagiarism but AI can?
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It's extremely frustrating to read this comment thread because it's obvious that so many of you didn't actually read the article, or even half-skim the article, or even attempted to even comprehend the title of the article for more than a second.
For shame.
"While the copies used to convert purchased print library copies into digital library copies were slightly disfavored by the second factor (nature of the work), the court still found “on balance” that it was a fair use because the purchased print copy was destroyed and its digital replacement was not redistributed."
So you find this to be valid?
To me it is absolutely being redistributed -
LLMs don’t learn, and they’re not people. Applying the same logic doesn’t make much sense.
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Makes sense. AI can “learn” from and “read” a book in the same way a person can and does, as long as it is acquired legally. AI doesn’t reproduce a work that it “learns” from, so why would it be illegal?
Some people just see “AI” and want everything about it outlawed basically. If you put some information out into the public, you don’t get to decide who does and doesn’t consume and learn from it. 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.
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).
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So I can't use any of these works because it's plagiarism but AI can?
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.
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Ok so you can buy books scan them or ebooks and use for AI training but you can't just download priated books from internet to train AI. Did I understood that correctly ?
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?
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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.
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Huh? Didn’t Meta not use any permission, and pirated a lot of books to train their model?
True. And I will be happy if someone sue them and the judge say the same thing.
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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)
They may be trying to put safeguards so it isn't directly happening, but here is an example that the text is there word for word:
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
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So I can't use any of these works because it's plagiarism but AI can?
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?
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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).
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.
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But I thought they admitted to torrenting terabytes of ebooks?
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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?
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?
