Comment by dns_snek
12 hours ago
> That’s clearly below the proportionality threshold for copyright to matter.
This type of reasoning keeps coming up with seemingly zero consideration for why copyright actually exists. The goal of copyright, under US law, is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts".
The goal of companies creating these LLMs is to supersede the use of source material they draw from, like books. You use an LLM because it has all the answers without having to spend the money compensating the original authors, or put in the work digesting it yourself, that's their entire value proposition.
Their end game is to create a product so good that nobody has a reason to ever buy a book again. A few hours after you publish your book, the LLM will gobble it up and distribute the insights contain within to all of their users for free, "it's fair use", they say. There won't be any economic incentive to write books at that point, and so "the progress of science and useful arts" will crawl to a halt. Copyright defeated.
If LLM companies are allowed to produce market substitutes of original works then the goal of copyright is being defeated on a technicality and this ought to be a discussion about whether copyright should be abolished completely, not a discussion about whether big tech should be allowed to get away with it.
> The goal of companies creating these LLMs is to supersede the use of source material they draw from, like books.
Nobody is going to stop buying Harry Potter books because they can get an LLM to spit out ~50 words from one of the books. The proportionality factor is very clearly relevant here.
> If LLM companies are allowed to produce market substitutes of original works
Did Meta publish a book written by an LLM?
> The goal of copyright, under US law, is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts".
I would consider training LLMs to be very much in line with those goals.
Quoting Judge Alsup from his recent ruling in Bartz v. Anthropic.
> Instead, Authors contend generically that training LLMs will result in an explosion of works competing with their works — such as by creating alternative summaries of factual events, alternative examples of compelling writing about fictional events, and so on. This order assumes that is so (Opp. 22–23 (citing, e.g., Opp. Exh. 38)). But Authors’ complaint is no different than it would be if they complained that training schoolchildren to write well would result in an explosion of competing works. This is not the kind of competitive or creative displacement that concerns the Copyright Act. The Act seeks to advance original works of authorship, not to protect authors against competition.