Comment by organsnyder
6 months ago
The difference here is that an LLM is a mechanical process. It may not be deterministic (at least, in a way that my brain understands determinism), but it's still a machine.
What you're proposing is considering LLMs to be equal to humans when considering how original works are created. You could make the argument that LLM training data is no different from a human "training" themself over a lifetime of consuming content, but that's a philosophical argument that is at odds with our current legal understanding of copyright law.
That's not a philosophical argument at odds with our current understanding of copyright law. That's exactly what this judge found copyright law currently is and it's quoted in the article being discussed.
Thanks for pointing that out. Obviously I hadn't read the whole article. That is an interesting determination the judge made:
> Alsup ruled that Anthropic's use of copyrighted books to train its AI models was "exceedingly transformative" and qualified as fair use, a legal doctrine that allows certain uses of copyrighted works without the copyright owner's permission.
There are still questions: is an AI a 'user' in the copyright sense?
Or even, is an individual operating within the law as fair use, the same as a voracious all-consuming AI training bot consuming everything the same in spirit?
Consider a single person in a National Park, allowed to pick and eat berries, compared to bringing a combine harvester to take it all.