If including a copyrighted work in an AI training corpus is theft because of its influence on some artificial neural net, then so is viewing it by a human being, whose memory is now somehow the property of the copyright holder, an absurd conclusion.

There's a massive jump in that logic, which is basically equating a large neural net to being exactly the same as a singular human being. If you ask me that is clearly not the case. They operate in entirely different ways and have very different properties.

>There's a massive jump in that logic, which is basically equating a large neural net to being exactly the same as a singular human being.

It does not assume that.

Are you willing to give up this point of view the first time you fail a Turing test? It seems only fair.

Your premise that a neural net is equivalent to a human brain seems much more absurd.

You wouldn't look at a car.

Well if we're concluding that training a neural net and a human mind forming memories is exactly the same thing, I'm looking forward to all their defenders agreeing that the neural nets should be held criminally responsible every time they generate an image deemed unlawful in certain jurisdictions...

Otherwise there's obviously a legally relevant distinction between a human mind which is ascribed agency to decide if and how to use its memories of copyrighted material, and importing into an information retrieval system which can't help but spit out transformations of parts of its inputs on demand, (including lossy representations of the Getty watermark if it's fed enough Getty material, or an exact facsimile of an image if that's all it's trained on...)

Humans are not treated the same as machines and business ventures. Many things are illegal for the latter and are not thought crimes for the former.

Copying is not theft in general as you don't take anything away from anybody

>>Copying is not theft in general as you don't take anything away from anybody

That's a perfect oxymoron.

The major corps and tech companies loved to claim otherwise for years as it suited their interests.

Fair use. (Even if the creator doesn't like that)

Theft has specific meaning in law, and it's reserved for physical property (or unique digital assets and financial instruments like bonds).

Copyright uses infringement, which is not theft: it's non-rivalrous, and it contains a number of exceptions.