The courts are going to rule in favor of these authors if they have a basic understanding of what’s happening.
They actually are not that different from Photoshop. Regarding providing you copyrighted materials, if you instruct it to generate something someone else already copyrighted, perhaps by using a feature meant to reproduce existing art style, you will generate an infringing work.
As for "ingesting of other copyrighted works to work optimally", you don't know what goes into designing and building Photoshop - how many third-party datasets or copyrighted assets, which get embedded deep into the application in a form that the end-user cannot discover or consume. You don't know, and it doesn't matter, because Adobe using copyrighted materials in building Photoshop does not propagate copyright claims to you the user/renter of Photoshop. Same can be argued about LLMs - copyrighted inputs from training set get sufficiently blended when turned into weights that you, the end user, should be shielded from any IP claims related to the training data.
(Yes, the last point enables "copyright laundering", but I'm not convinced this is a problem - not compared to regulatory environment trying to prevent it.)
And why is it that I pay OpenAI to generate data based off books it stole for free when I had to pay money for the same book.
I know what I am actually paying for is the model obviously but it just feels extra wrong to be paying a company for a service it’s built using pirated content.
Or you just go to the local library. Or you borrow it from a friend. Or you stand in B&N and read it in the store.
You're arguments are not great.
Photoshop now has generative AI features that leverage language models as well as training on imagery, so this is literally false when discussing Photoshop as it currently exists.
If and when someone tries to profit off an AI work that would be copyright infringement if a human had made it, it should be copyright infringement of an AI does it also.
1) I’m generally copyleft and would argue that copyright as we know it is nonsensical in the digital era and needs to be entirely rebuilt to make any sense whatsoever. And that as is it harms the commons more than it protects creators. So yeah a fileserver has always been a game changer just like the printing press was and we’re far behind as a society, legally.
2) When a computer system does reproduce copyrighted content verbatim, it’s infringement the same as if a human did it from memory. That wasn’t my point. My point was that use of copyrighted content to train the model is fair use because it’s no different from a human consuming the content and committing it to memory.
The act of getting heaps of copyrighted media for commercial use without paying clearely breaks copyright
This LLMs are not trained on the radio, especially not exclusively.
Edit0: Did you get access to this book that inspired you legally, as in at a library, during a class, or having bought it yourself? Was it fair use?
Because none of those look like getting heaps of copyrighted stuff for free and claiming you didn't.
If instead you stole the book - then yes, this is similar. I don't care what you do with it - can't steal it and assume you are respecting copyright.
If OpenAI rented all humanity’s media from a library and used them to train an AI model then that seems 100% ethical to me.
Now if you ask the model to recite the script to Breaking Bad and it does so perfectly and I think that grants me copyright authority over it then we’re going to have problems. It’s just not the model or tool’s problem.
How about you?
This is the point
Similar, if all the books used to train a model are available in the library, so long as someone rents the books, then they can be used to train a model.
The question was directed at you. I don’t know why you’re repeating it back to me like I didn't know what I was asking…
OTOH are copyright abolitionists who are offended by the notion that their freedom to copy and modify code on their own harddisk could be restricted by a mere "license", to them the notion of intellectual property is poppycock. The Strong Copylefties consider GPL a necessary evil, a way to use their enemies' tools against them, to spread their ideals of free culture amidst a corporatist hellscape.
Or it could merely be someone taking the naïve reading of "anti-copyright"
And yet, presumably we agree that a simple file server that serves up exact copies of copyrighted work does constitute copyright infringement. What's the difference? You could also say "what's really happening is that the file server has much better memory than humans." Duh!
It sounds like you're saying that, because an AI model is a very convoluted and sometimes inaccurate way to implement a computer system that sometimes serves up exact copies of copyrighted works, it's not copyright infringement when that computer system does serve up an exact copy of a copyrighted work. I'm not quite understanding the argument.