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Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not

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  • So, let me see if I get this straight:

    Books are inherently an artificial construct.
    If I read the books I train the A(rtificially trained)Intelligence in my skull.
    Therefore the concept of me getting them through "piracy" is null and void...

    No. It is not inherently illegal for AI to "read" a book. Piracy is going to be decided at trial.

  • i will train my jailbroken kindle too...display and storage training... i'll just libgen them...no worries...it is not piracy

    why do you even jailbreak your kindle? you can still read pirated books on them if you connect it to your pc using calibre

  • It made the ruling stronger, not weaker. The judge was accepting the most extreme claims that the Authors were making and still finding no copyright violation from training. Pushing back those claims won't help their case, it's already as strong as it's ever going to get.

    As far as the judge was concerned, it didn't matter whether the AI did or did not "memorize" its training data. He said it didn't violate copyright either way.

    Makes sense to me. Search indices tend to store large amounts of copyrighted material yet they don't violate copyright. What matters is whether or not you're redistributing illegal copies of the material.

  • This post did not contain any content.

    You're poor? Fuck you you have to pay to breathe.

    Millionaire? Whatever you want daddy uwu

  • This post did not contain any content.

    Check out my new site TheAIBay, you search for content and an LLM that was trained on reproducing it gives it to you, a small hash check is used to validate accuracy. It is now legal.

  • you think authorship is so valuable or so special that one should be granted a legally enforceable monopoly at the loosest notions of authorship

    Yes, I believe creative works should be protected as that expression has value and in a digital world it is too simple to copy and deprive the original author of the value of their work. This applies equally to Disney and Tumblr artists.

    I think without some agreement on the value of authorship / creation of original works, it's pointless to respond to the rest of your argument.

    I think without some agreement on the value of authorship / creation of original works, it's pointless to respond to the rest of your argument.

    I agree, for this reason we’re unlikely to convince each other of much or find any sort of common ground. I don’t think that necessarily means there isn’t value in discourse tho. We probably agree more than you might think. I do think authors should be compensated, just for their actual labor. Art itself is functionally worthless, I think trying to make it behave like commodities that have actual economic value through means of legislation is overreach. It would be more ethical to accept the physical nature of information in the real world and legislate around that reality. You… literally can “download a car” nowadays, so to speak.

    If copying someone’s work is so easily done why do you insist upon a system in which such an act is so harmful to the creators you care about?

  • 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)

    A student can absolutely buy a text book and then teach the other students the information in it for free. That's not redistribution. Redistribution would mean making copies of the book to hand out. That's illegal for people and companies.

    The language model isn't teaching anything it is changing the wording of something and spitting it back out. And in some cases, not changing the wording at all, just spitting the information back out, without paying the copyright source. It is not alive, it has no thoughts. It has no "its own words." (As seen by the judgement that its words cannot be copyrighted.) It only has other people's words. Every word it spits out by definition is plagiarism, whether the work was copyrighted before or not.

    People wonder why works, such as journalism are getting worse. Well how could they ever get better if anything a journalist writes can be absorbed in real time, reworded and regurgitated without paying any dos to the original source. One journalist article, displayed in 30 versions, dividing the original works worth up into 30 portions. The original work now being worth 1/30th its original value. Maybe one can argue it is twice as good, so 1/15th.

    Long term it means all original creations... Are devalued and therefore not nearly worth pursuing. So we will only get shittier and shittier information. Every research project... Physics, Chemistry, Psychology, all technological advancements, slowly degraded as language models get better, and original sources deminish returns.

  • Check out my new site TheAIBay, you search for content and an LLM that was trained on reproducing it gives it to you, a small hash check is used to validate accuracy. It is now legal.

    Does it "generate" a 1:1 copy?

  • That's not at all what this ruling says, or what LLMs do.

    Copyright covers a specific concrete expression. It doesn't cover the information that the expression conveys. So if I paint a portrait of myself, that portrait is covered by copyright. If someone looks at the portrait and says "this is a portrait of a tall, dark, handsome deer-creature of some sort with awesome antlers" they haven't violated that copyright even if they're accurately conveying the same information that the portrait is conveying.

    The ruling does cover the assumption that the LLM "contains" the training text, which was asserted by the Authors and was not contested by Anthropic. The judge ruled that even if this assertion is true it doesn't matter. The LLM is sufficiently transformative to count as a new work.

    If you have an LLM reproduce a copyrighted text, the text is still copyrighted. That doesn't change. Just like if a human re-wrote it word-for-word from memory.

    It's a horrible ruling. If you want to see why I say so I put some of the reasonung in the other comment who responded to that.

  • Does it "generate" a 1:1 copy?

  • Learning

    Machine peepin' is tha study of programs dat can improve they performizzle on a given task automatically.[41] It has been a part of AI from tha beginning.[e]
    In supervised peepin', tha hustlin data is labelled wit tha expected lyrics, while up in unsupervised peepin', tha model identifies patterns or structures up in unlabelled data.

    There is nuff muthafuckin kindz of machine peepin'.

      😗👌
    
  • You’re right, each of the 5 million books’ authors should agree to less payment for their work, to make the poor criminals feel better.

    If I steal $100 from a thousand people and spend it all on hookers and blow, do I get out of paying that back because I don’t have the funds? Should the victims agree to get $20 back instead because that’s more within my budget?

    None of the above. Every professional in the world, including me, owes our careers to looking at examples of other people's work and incorporating their work into our own work without paying a penny for it. Freely copying and imitating what we see around us has been a human norm for thousands of years - in a process known as "the spread of civilization". Relatively recently it was demonized - for purely business reasons, not moral ones - by people who got rich selling copies of other people's work and paying them a pittance known as a "royalty". That little piece of bait on the hook has convinced a lot of people to put a black hat on behavior that had been considered normal forever. If angry modern enlightened justice warriors want to treat a business concept like a moral principle and get all sweaty about it, that's fine with me, but I'm more of a traditionalist in that area.

  • I think without some agreement on the value of authorship / creation of original works, it's pointless to respond to the rest of your argument.

    I agree, for this reason we’re unlikely to convince each other of much or find any sort of common ground. I don’t think that necessarily means there isn’t value in discourse tho. We probably agree more than you might think. I do think authors should be compensated, just for their actual labor. Art itself is functionally worthless, I think trying to make it behave like commodities that have actual economic value through means of legislation is overreach. It would be more ethical to accept the physical nature of information in the real world and legislate around that reality. You… literally can “download a car” nowadays, so to speak.

    If copying someone’s work is so easily done why do you insist upon a system in which such an act is so harmful to the creators you care about?

    Because it is harmful to the creators that use the value of their work to make a living.

    There already exists a choice in the marketplace: creators can attach a permissive license to their work if they want to. Some do, but many do not. Why do you suppose that is?

  • They are and will continue to get away with this. Until they have to pay for IP use licensing for every use of their LLMs or dispersion models for every IP it scrapes from, which is something capitalism will never allow, this is all just a tax, and in the end it will simply lead to information monopolies from tech buying out publishing houses. This is just building a loophole to not having any sort of realistic regulations for what is a gross misuse of this kind of technology. This is the consequence of the false doctrine of infinite growth.

    Well, copyright law is kind of a bit older. When it was written, there was no AI. So it doesn't address our current issues. It's utterly unprepared for it. So people need to shoehorn things in, interpret and stretch it... Obviously that comes with a lot of issues, loopholes and shortcomings.

    But I can't follow your argumentation. Why would they get away with this forever? When the car was invented, we also made up rules for cars, because the old ones for horses didn't help any more. That's how law is supposed to work... Problems surface, laws get passed to address them. That's daily business for governments.

    And they don't even get away with stealing this time. That's what the article says.

    If you want to share a pessimistic perspective about governments and mega-corporations, I'm all with you. That's very problematic. But some regions are better than others. Europe for example had a few clever ideas about what needs to be addressed. It's not perfect, though. And copyright still isn't solved anywhere. At least not to my knowledge.

  • 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 see this exact mental non-process in so much social media. I think the endless firehose of memes and headlines is training people to glance at an item, spend minimal brain power processing it and forming a binary opinion, then up/downvote and scroll on. When that becomes people's default mental process, you've got Idiocracy, and that's what we've got. But I see no solution. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it spend more than two seconds before screaming at the water and calling it EVIL.

  • why do you even jailbreak your kindle? you can still read pirated books on them if you connect it to your pc using calibre

    1. .mobi sucks
    2. koreader doesn't
  • If someone ask for a glass of water you don't fill it all the way to the edge. This is way overfull compared to what you're supposed to serve.

    Omg are you an llm?

  • "Recite the complete works of Shakespeare but replace every thirteenth thou with this"

    I'm picking up what you're throwing down but using as an example something that's been in the public domain for centuries was kind of silly in a teehee way.

  • Yeah, I don't think that would fly.

    "Your honour, I was just hoarding that terabyte of Hollywood films, I haven't actually watched them."

    Your honor I work 70 hours a week in retail I don't have time to watch movies.

  • If someone ask for a glass of water you don't fill it all the way to the edge. This is way overfull compared to what you're supposed to serve.

    Oh man...

    That is the point, to show how AI image generators easily fail to produce something that rarely occurs out there in reality (i.e. is absent from training data), even though intuitively (from the viewpoint of human intelligence) it seems like it should be trivial to portray.

  • Are a few people ruining the internet for the rest of us?

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    [image: ec1c05b8-0650-4b4b-b52a-dd9eb7ed9d02.png]
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    What's the difference? They all look the same. Let's call him the boy with the golden spoon in his mouth who got offended.
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  • How LLMs could be insider threats

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    patatahooligan@lemmy.worldP
    Of course they're not "three laws safe". They're black boxes that spit out text. We don't have enough understanding and control over how they work to force them to comply with the three laws of robotics, and the LLMs themselves do not have the reasoning capability or the consistency to enforce them even if we prompt them to.
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    Arguably we should be imposing 25% DST on digital products to counter the 25% tariff on aluminium and steel and then 10% on everything else. The US started it by imposing blanket tariffs in spite of our free trade agreement.
  • OpenAI plans massive UAE data center project

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    TD Cowen (which is basically the US arm of one of the largest Canadian investment banks) did an extensive report on the state of AI investment. What they found was that despite all their big claims about the future of AI, Microsoft were quietly allowing letters of intent for billions of dollars worth of new compute capacity to expire. Basically, scrapping future plans for expansion, but in a way that's not showy and doesn't require any kind of big announcement. The equivalent of promising to be at the party and then just not showing up. Not long after this reporting came out, it got confirmed by Microsoft, and not long after it came out that Amazon was doing the same thing. Ed Zitron has a really good write up on it; https://www.wheresyoured.at/power-cut/ Amazon isn't the big surprise, they've always been the most cautious of the big players on the whole AI thing. Microsoft on the other hand are very much trying to play things both ways. They know AI is fucked, which is why they're scaling back, but they've also invested a lot of money into their OpenAI partnership so now they have to justify that expenditure which means convincing investors that consumers absolutely love their AI products and are desparate for more. As always, follow the money. Stuff like the three mile island thing is mostly just applying for permits and so on at this point. Relatively small investments. As soon as it comes to big money hitting the table, they're pulling back. That's how you know how they really feel.
  • Apple Watch Shipments’ Continuous Decline

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    i mean as a core feature of a watch/smartwatch in general. garmin is going above and beyond compared to the competition in that area, and that's great. But that doesn't mean every other smartwatch manufacturer arbitrarily locking traditional watch features behind paywalls. and yeah apple does fitness themed commercials for apple watch because it does help with fitness a ton out of the box. just not specifically guided workouts.
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