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.

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.

If what you are saying is true, why were these ‘AI’s” incapable of rendering a full wine glass? It ‘knows’ the concept of a full glass of water, but because of humanities social pressures, a full wine glass being the epitome of gluttony, art work did not depict a full wine glass, no matter how ai prompters demanded, it was unable to link the concepts until it was literally created for it to regurgitate it out. It seems ‘AI’ doesn’t really learn, but regurgitates art out in collages of taken assets, smoothed over at the seams.

If a human did that it’s still plagiarism.

"Fair use" is the exact opposite of what you're saying here. It says that you don't need to ask for any permission. The judge ruled that obtaining illegitimate copies was unlawful but use without the creators consent is perfectly fine.

It can, the only thing stopping it is if it is specifically told not to, and this consideration is successfully checked for. It is completely capable of plagiarizing otherwise.

Formatting thing: if you start a line in a new paragraph with four spaces, it assumes that you want to display the text as a code and won't line break.

This means that the last part of your comment is a long line that people need to scroll to see. If you remove one of the spaces, or you remove the empty line between it and the previous paragraph, it'll look like a normal comment

With an empty line of space:

1 space - and a little bit of writing just to see how the text will wrap. I don't really have anything that I want to put here, but I need to put enough here to make it long enough to wrap around. This is likely enough.

2 spaces - and a little bit of writing just to see how the text will wrap. I don't really have anything that I want to put here, but I need to put enough here to make it long enough to wrap around. This is likely enough.

3 spaces - and a little bit of writing just to see how the text will wrap. I don't really have anything that I want to put here, but I need to put enough here to make it long enough to wrap around. This is likely enough.

4 spaces -  and a little bit of writing just to see how the text will wrap. I don't really have anything that I want to put here, but I need to put enough here to make it long enough to wrap around. This is likely enough.

Oh I agree it should be, but following the judges ruling, I don't see how it could be. You trained an LLM on textbooks that were purchased, not pirated. And the LLM distributed the responses.

(Unless you mean the human reworded them, then yeah, we aren't special apparently)

Why would it be plagiarism if you use the knowledge you gain from a book?

You can digitize the books you own. You do not need a license for that. And of course you could put that digital format into a database. As databases are explicit exceptions from copyright law. If you want to go to the extreme: delete first copy. Then you have only in the database. However: AIs/LLMs are not based on data bases. But on neural networks. The original data gets lost when "learned".

Yes, on the second part. Just rearranging or replacing words in a text is not transformative, which is a requirement. There is an argument that the ‘AI’ are capable of doing transformative work, but the tokenizing and weight process is not magic and in my use of multiple LLM’s they do not have an understanding of the material any more then a dictionary understands the material printed on its pages.

An example was the wine glass problem. Art ‘AI’s were unable to display a wine glass filled to the top. No matter how it was prompted, or what style it aped, it would fail to do so and report back that the glass was full. But it could render a full glass of water. It didn’t understand what a full glass was, not even for the water. How was this possible? Well there was very little art of a full wine glass, because society has an unspoken rule that a full wine glass is the epitome of gluttony, and it is to be savored not drunk. Where as the reference of full glasses of water were abundant. It doesn’t know what full means, just that pictures of full glass of water are tied to phrases full, glass, and water.