Comment by dbmnt
3 days ago
Imagine a super intelligent speed reading human in a library. If they read all the books and are able to understand, conceptualize and summarize that knowledge for others, is it theft? The books weren't stolen, after all, just read. The knowledge in the books wasn't taken away; it's still there for others to read.
I personally do not believe knowledge can be stolen.
> Imagine a super intelligent speed reading human in a library.
If human abilities were different then human laws would be different. We don't have speed limits for joggers but we do for cars because their abilities are materially different.
Machines aren’t humans. Your first have to argue that an analogy between machine and human even makes any kind of sense.
That‘s the magic trick you are doing with your analogy. You just assume that human/machine analogy is true.
It’s a point made in bad faith, easily refuted with: “great, let a human read the books”
we quickly learn what “inequality” means, since the computer has more access rights than people
This is not the correct analogy, because we know that they explicitly used a huge ammount of pirated books and other works.
I would argue annas archive is a pretty good library.
Is that super speed reading human going to then make itself available to instantly-ish answer any and every possible question from anyone with a paid subscription?
This argument is pretty lame.
Yes, we call those people “consultants”.
I've yet to meet a consultant that was anything near what was on their CV
So I guess not dissimilar to an LLM
I'm spiritually sympathetic to your final sentence, but intellectual property law is not.
There are already a bunch of replies pointing out ways in which your metaphor breaks down, but here's another: the super intelligent speed reading human is not a "work" (in the sense of "derivative work").
Also, if I'm understanding your position, why wasn't your scenario about the human pirating the books and then reading them? It should make no difference if you really believe knowledge can't be stolen; both situations should be equivalent.
I hear you on IP law, but how it applies to AI training is far from settled.
I don't believe we should have software patents, and I am highly skeptical of the US copyright system in general.
As for why I didn't use a piracy analogy: humans don't need to pirate books to access them for free. They can just go to the library. That is exactly my point. Reading books isn't a crime. Why would we stop an AI from reading publicly available material just because it's automated and upsets the commercial status quo?
You can read up anything and everything about a patent, but still not be allowed to reproduce it.
The moment the LLMs ingested any code under GNU General Public License or similar licenses and reuse it without making the produced product available under the same terms...
Reading this comment is like visiting a care home for dementia patients
They didn't just "read" the books. They scanned every single page of every single book in the library, then took the scans home.
Are humans allowed to do that?
Yes!
Creating personal copies of copyrighted works are allowed. (Also, libraries really don't mind if you take pictures of the content of works they have.)
Well LLMs dont make personal copies they make commercial copies.
1 reply →
What do you mean with "then took the scans home"? Anthropic et al didn't buy all the books in the world and kept them for themselves.
Correct, they torrented them. I just wanted to stick to the library analogy of the parent comment.
Therein lies the rub: they didn't buy them... They pirated digital copies of them.
See, e.g.: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/libge...
By extension, do also believe this super intelligent human should have no human rights and be enslaved by Anthropic for profit?
After you can run his clones on some amount of electricity, sure.
Imagine a super greedy company putting every bit information they can, willingly and maliciously hiding the origin of training data, into a computer and reselling that data. Such wow. Much shittie metaphor.
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