← Back to context

Comment by gruez

1 day ago

>Nope. Copyright is a thing, licenses are a thing. Both are completely ignored by LLM companies, which was already proven in court,

...the same courts that ruled that AI training is probably fair use? Fair use trumps whatever restrictions author puts on their "licenses". If you're an author and it turned out that your book was pirated by AI companies then fair enough, but "I put my words out into the world as a form of sharing" strongly implied that's not what was happening, eg. it was a blog on the open internet or something.

I never understand why anyone wants authors to not be able to enforce copyright and licensing laws for AI training. Unless you are Anthropic or OAI it seems like a wild stance to have. It’s good when people are rewarded for works that other people value. If trainers don’t value the work, they shouldn’t train on it. If they do, they should pay for it.

  • My own view is, I thought we were all agreed that the idea that Microsoft can restrict Wine from even using ideas from Windows, such that people who have read the leaked Windows source cannot contribute to Wine, was a horrible abuse of the legal system that we only went along with under duress? Now when it's our data being used, or more cynically when there's money to be made, suddenly everyone is a copyright maximalist.

    No. Reading something, learning from it, then writing something similar, is legal; and more importantly, it is moral. There is no violation here. Copyright holders already have plenty of power; they must not be given the power to restrict the output of your brain forever more for merely having read and learnt. Reading and learning is sacred. Just as importantly, it's the entire damn basis of our profession!

    If you do not want people to read and learn from your content, do not put it on the web.

    • > No. Reading something, learning from it, then writing something similar, is legal; and more importantly, it is moral.

      Machines aren’t human. Don’t anthropomorphize them. The same morals and laws don’t apply.

    • If you want people to read and learn from each other, you should incentivize people to make content worth reading and learning from. Making LLM training a viable loophole for copyright law means there won’t be incentives to produce such work.

      2 replies →

    • Re-reading your comment, I think we’re both generally anti-corporate-fuckery. I view the current batch of copyright pearl clutching to be an argument about if VCs are allowed to steal books to make their chatbots worth talking to, and the Wine/MSoft debate about if it should be legal to engage in anticompetitive behavior by restrictive use of copyright. In both of these cases the root of the issue isn’t really the copyright as an abstract- it’s the bludgeoning of the person with less money by use of overwhelming legal costs to have a day in court.

      1 reply →

  • >I never understand why anyone wants authors to not be able to enforce copyright and licensing laws for AI training.

    Fair use is part of "copyright and licensing laws".

    • Would using an actors face and voice as training data be fair use?

      What it the model then creates a virtual actor that is very close to the real actor?

      5 replies →