Comment by zephen

I cannot disagree, but many who should know better do.

I have seen people argue with a straight face that there are no copyright concerns simply because of the sheer volume of the data that LLMs are trained on.

This makes less than zero sense. If someone has seen code, or heard music, and creates something too similar, it is a copyright violation, even though that person has seen much code or heard much music before. This is why the concept of "clean room" implementation exists, and why the concept of the abstraction-filtration-comparison legal text exists.

LLM proponents will point to the fact that courts have ruled that using copyrighted material for training has been ruled fair use.

This actually makes sense. Just as you can read a book, so can an LLM.

The thing that, AFAIK, hasn't been ruled on yet, is when the LLM regurgitates something that is too close to the book. If a human were to do that it is a clear copyright violation.

To pretend that "dilution is the solution to pollution" in terms of LLM training data, and that anything the LLM produces is original material, is to give LLMs more rights than humans have.