But also no one is selling "your book", the product is completely different in literally every conceivable way.
you have never (and no one ever should) own words arranged in a certain way. You own the right to sell a book. Not the words themselves.
meta does bad things and im not a fan, but this really pales in comparison.
It is a different issue if they steal your private data or your power (I mean the electrical power for the computers, in case that isn't already clear).
Making copies of published books, music, etc (and doing what you want with them) is not the bad things.
I wonder if an equivalent to Performance Rights Organizations will emerge as a channel for LLM publishers (so to speak) to pay fees.
Idk if your in the US but you also massively oversimplify in your example, copyright law is waaaaaaaay more complex than that and it would take a set of special circumstances way beyond doing what you say it siphon money from an infringment claim
On the free-information side, I don’t think anyone would argue that AI shouldn’t be allowed to offer a general synopsis of a given book / series. From an author/creator’s POV, it feels like extortion to be able to summarize/recreate any given chapter/subsection to the point that the entire work could be reproduced near-verbatim.
IMO the question is, can we meaningfully draw a line between the two, and if so, how?
Are there other juicy examples where the C-suite can be directly implicated? Always assumed that management knew how to leave instructions vague enough so as to keep their hands clean (a la meddlesome priests). The bad actor was always some middle-manager gone rogue.
The courts have some tough questions to answer here.
If training AI doesn't constitute fair use, you will lose more than you could ever possibly hope to gain. As will the rest of us.
Meanwhile, sublimate your dudgeon towards advocating for free access to the resulting models. That's what's important. Meta is not the company you want to go after here, since they released the resulting model weights.
Unauthorized copying (aka pirating) is definitely a copyright violation.
That appears to be a huge problem with the large models and training. They don't secure legal access to the materials they train on, and thus fail to compensate authors for their work.
AKA students are required to buy or otherwise obtain legal access to their text books(like checking the book out of the library).
Training AI should play the same rules humans students have to follow.
Like the author of this screed, my work went into training every major model. I get paid back every time one of those models helps me learn or do something. The injustice, if it happens, will occur when a few well-heeled players like OpenAI succeed in locking the technology up with regulatory capture or (worse) if a few greedy, myopic assholes render it illegal or uneconomical to continue development by advocating copyright maximalism.
I mean, it’s a serious question; I don’t see this as really connected.
As long as an AI can “understand” the content of a book and spit out a summary of it, or even leverage what it learned to perform further inference, I’d be inclined to say that this is fair use; a human would do the same.
But this has nothing to do with using pirated material for training, especially for some kind of commercial purpose (even if llama is free, they’re building on top of it) - I don’t see why it should be legal.
"Fair use" in copyright law allows limited, specific uses of copyrighted material without permission.
Hence, by definition, not "pirating".
Do you want to severely limit evolution of models by having them pick (and buy) a tiny subset of all books?
Should every training run put money into a pool that gets paid out to every rights holder of every book that has ever been published?
Should Meta buy a physical or electronic copy of every book they want to use for training? That has zero impact on revenue for individual authors.
Would they be paid by word, by token, by book? This makes little sense. We don’t charge people for the knowledge they acquired while going to the library over 50 years, AI just squeezes this into weeks. Our legal framework simply doesn’t fit.
That's not even the real problem. It's a problem, yes, but not the real problem. The problem is that before they could train the model on the book, they had to copy the book from somewhere. Is it ok to make illegal pirated copies of a copyrighted book to train your model? I think that's the issue we are dealing with here.
Whether it is ok to create a derivative work or not is beside the point.
Mind you, it's page 1 and the book is not on page 1.
I'm still angry about how publishers and the Authors Guild sued Google over Google Books. Intellectual property is why we as a society can't have nice things. While I'm not a fan of Meta, their open weight models are probably one of the best things they've ever done, and I'll back big tech over publishers every time.
Might as well say the people who read your books aren’t allowed to teach the concepts or theories. Completely asinine argument. If you don’t want the knowledge to proliferate, then don’t publish. They’re not copying and redistributing.
Meanwhile, jurisdictions outside of us copyright protection will leapfrog us because we can’t get out of our own way.
Let us for a minute accept that it is ok to train on copyrighted materials. I don't believe that but I'll humor you. So let's accept it.
To train on copyrighted materials, they need to purchase the copyrighted materials, correct? If you wanted to train a model on all O'reilly books, you'd purchase the O'reilly books first, wouldn't you?
Do you think it is ok to make illegal pirated copies of the book to do your training?
"Mega can regurgitate virtually any excerpt from any of my books, there for they have stolen them"
versus what is not interesting such as
"my books are in libgen therefore they stole my work, even though I can't find direct evidence of the theft"
>The most damning thing? It appears that Meta knew exactly what they are doing, and chose to proceed anyway.
that is not the most damning thing. It might trigger worse damages or elevation of the severity of an infraction, but it is not evidence of guilt per se, which is what I would call "damning"
#freezuck
