Comment by latexr

The thought experiment falls apart immediately by the mere fact that—even given all the other fantastical abilities such as perfect memory and impossible lifespan—you can still only answer one question at a time. As has been repeated ad nauseam, scale puts an hard stop on the comparison of LLMs to humans.

Let’s switch up your scenario. Let’s say the subject isn’t a human with machine-like qualities but instead a computer with human-like limitations. All the books were fed to that one computer, and for technical reasons it cannot be duplicated and can only answer one question at a time. Suddenly the infringement isn’t as problematic and the ways to commercially exploit that data are minimal.

Furthermore, even with perfect memory it would take time to read all those books, you’d never keep up with everything released in a single year. Nor would you be able to reproduce everything perfectly due to required time and lack of ability (perfectly recalling a painting or photograph does not mean you have the skills to make an exact copy).

All these comparisons are silly and useless anyway (though in your particular case I think you are arguing in good faith). Computers are not human. If a person was caught killing animals of an endangered species and used as a defence “but what about the natural predators in that habitat? I’m just doing the same as them”, we’d rightfully see through the bullshit and scoff at such an obviously flawed comparison.