Comment by GuB-42

Anthropic and others harvest source code from around the internet based on the idea of fair use. The big idea behind fair use is that you are not using the copyrighted material to compete against its owner.

For example, by distributing cracked software, you compete against the official channels, so, not fair use. Quoting a book in an article won't make the people who would buy the book go with the article instead, so, fair use. AI companies argue that training is fair use because their model is a completely different product than what they are scraping. A LLM that has read the Harry Potter novels is not a substitute for the Harry Potter novels.

But all these rewrites make the fair use argument flimsy. These models are used to make knockoffs of the products that are part of their training data set, at least in part. Not fair. It is in their best interest to limit the amount of knockoffs their models are used to produce. Imagine if they had to compensate the people they took the work from...

In addition, if fuels their argument of "we are making sure our models are only used to make safe and innovative content, unlike these bad open models that are used to make dangerous knockoffs".