Say a Dan Brown book enters the public domain. Then every Dan Brown book enters the public domain, as he uses more or less the same structure for every book, with different details.

Gonna be a messy time when we catch up to that can down the road.

This. Many people act as if copyright is eternal and never expiring and that fair use does not exist, but that is not (or was not) the intention. They have time limits, and fair use mean you can use content without permission and in ways the creator "did not intend".

And to your point, we cannot copyright style, only the exact content itself.

Can parent rounded corners though.

Hey, that technology took 10 years to develop.

That’s just so dumb though. You can write a book “like Dan brown” and it’s fine. It’s absolute nonsense to imply that ai can’t generate something unless there’s something similar enough that’s open. Anyone can claim that a book is like another book because that’s a dumb and pointlessly subjective metric.

I'm not sure how you inferred "metric" from my comment, only that Dan Brown's scaffolding was apparent when I read three or four of his novels in quick succession. Such patterns are equivalent to artists' signature techniques and lend themselves to transfer learning, like generating an image in the style of starry night. This is more one-shot examples versus measurement or a loss function.

You said if one book enters public domain then every book effectively enters public domain from a plausible deniability angle of using the one relevant book. But that makes no sense at all. Because anyone can write a book in the style of Dan Brown without infringing on his IP. You don’t need Starry Night to teach a model to make works like Starry Night. You just need a work like Starry Night. And if you want to argue that the machine can learn style better than humans for text, then how is this ever going to hold up in court as “too similar to the style”?

Got it. So we are effectively agreeing!

I do not think so? For one I think there is no can to kick down the road at all because the effect you say isn’t real

The copyright system has been broken for a long time. AI is just making the system’s inadequacy more obvious.

Just look at YouTube copyright strike and understand how screwed up the enforcement of a law like this is going to be.

Tom Scott did a piece on it that’s worth watching:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU

Unlike in the real world, when it's sonor extremely difficult to prove that you have never seen a given a copyrighted work, is sort of questions seems quite practical to resolve here? Keeping complete records of what went into training an LLM sounds like what we already do?

I doubt this once Bloomberg, Netflix, and Hollywood fully jump abroad the AI train.

They'll probably just lobby to change the laws, seeing this happen already.

It’s not so hypothetical. They’re already stealing copyrighted works and putting them in the AI’s. I put a list of them with their licenses in the “Proving Wrongdoing” section of my article:

http://gethisword.com/tech/exploringai/index.html

I also put a copyright proposal in there which should work for all the competing interests. I mean, people will still be greedy. Yet, I think it’s a win to allow all copyrighted works to be used for training while restricting only the outputs to only the degree we do for people.

Personally, I really hope the law allows GPT4-style AI’s to be built legally and affordable. If so, there’s so many benefits to be gained in businesses we can start, augmenting workers to improve work/life/productivity balance, and non-profit projects.

Plus, whichever countries don’t do it will be left behind in this area by the countries that make AI training easier. Japan is the only one I’ve heard made it legal to use copyrighted works for data-science models. I don’t know that you can distribute them like The Pile or Common Crawl, though. If you scraped or bought it yourself, Japan is the closest thing I know to being legal under copyright law.