No because we are people and the laws differ for people, corporations, and machines.
Either it is theft or not theft. Why would you stealing from me deserve an exception, but when a group of people in an organization you may refer to as a corporation steal from me, you want them to pay me? Do as I say, not as I do or something like that?
Of course exceptions can be carved out, but they cannot be just, inherently. The problem is that we have allowed our ruling maniacs to create a fiction that organizations are people, which not only have more rights, and less responsibilities, and even less consequences/penalties; but also confers upon the individuals that make up the corporate person rather extreme super powers like being able to commit crimes up to outright murder, and there not only are effectively zero consequences for or to them but in most cases today they immensely profit from it and then shield that money from the victims seeking justice.
The underlying issue, why I am not settled on this matter, is that it is inherently contradictory because the facts and underlying assumptions are all so distorted and perverted that there is no good answer to be had and it's really just a matter of rule of power, feigning rule of law.
Which system of justice works like this? The law, uniformly applied, is a steamroller. That's why we have courts, to allow people to explain their actions (justify them).
Because the goal of laws is to improve human flourishing, not to be consistent. Laws are not strictly based on some sort of virtue ethics, they are often practical ways to accomplish the task of improving human lives. If having "applies to X but not Y and maybe Z depending on some criteria" accomplishes that then... that's the whole point.
> but they cannot be just, inherently
That's sort of an absurdly strong assertion. Why would exceptions not be "just"? "Killing someone is wrong, except in the case where it is strictly necessary to save lives in self defense" etc are generally consider just exceptions. This seems trivial. Very few people hold to an actual system of ethics that does not take context into account...
You're just falling into the trap of anthropomorphizing the phrase "training" in the context of LLMs, which is not the same things as what humans do. There is no evidence they are the same thing and there is nothing to support the notion that what an LLM does when it "trains" on a book is equivalent to a human reading it.
Yes, for some texts that's possible. But for the vast majority, it is not.
The New York Times lawsuit is resting on the point that large chunks of undigested articles can be vomited out. OpenAI tried to have the lawsuit thrown out but the courts permitted it to continue.
The Times... alleged that OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot had produced near-verbatim replicas of copyrighted articles, that the chatbots generated hallucinated content falsely attributed to the Times, ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_v._Microsof...
> had produced near-verbatim replicas
Since most users of LLMs are not using them to run around copyright and this copyright stuff is aggressively trained out of models or blocked whenever possible, the models themselves are still transformative works not intended to facilitate infringement.
That's exactly what they've done in a number of the lawsuits, so I'm not sure why you think that hasn't occurred.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671
The point is that for most texts, it is not possible. It's not able to recall what I wrote on Geocities in 1995, even though there's a good chance it was trained on it.
Or is it simply that the correct prompt hasn't been written for all possible cases?
I also fail to see the difference if logic/harnessing is added around a vector database that can output the complete corpus, but simply is instructed not to.
It very clearly is still compressing the information into the vector weights, and then recovering that information, thus the information is encoded.
Why is a vector database somehow completely different from maintaining a library of the text itself?
LLMs are obviously capable of producing "exact" phrases as well. Ask it to give you famous quotes, it can do it. Ask it to read a paper for you and cite it, it can do it.
I wouldn't bet on that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_Soup_Cans
Here's a highly compressed representation of The Lord of The Rings (all three volumes):
1
Obviously, fidelity when uncompressing it is not great, but I can assure you it was lossily compressed from the original text. Is it infringing the original's copyright? I have to assume you'd agree that the answer is "no".
If I had compressed it by removing the letters x y and z, I'd agree with you that my "compressed" version is infringing.
So what we've got here is a spectrum with two ridiculous extremes, and a question: When has the artifact been compressed so heavily that it no longer infringes the copyright of the original?
I suggest "irretrievability" is a pretty good threshold for that question. Otherwise you're into "we know it infringes our copyright. Don't ask us to prove it, we just know it, ok?"
Given the sheer volume of text that an LLM gets trained on, and how small the output is, it seems obvious that 99% of it can no longer be recovered - the process is "lossy" to the point of irretrievability, and only a statistical smear is left behind. That's why I think only the copyright claims that can show infringement in court (Harpy Potter, et al.) have merit. And a court will still have to decide "how much is too much" but at least there's case law for that.
(Incidentally, I compressed the Mona Lisa to a single pixel. It was #3D3526).
I've tried my best to show where I think you're wrong. I think all that's left is arguing over the exact definitions of "recoverable" and "irretrievable". As I said, the courts will have to decide that.
Regardless, the argument that LLM output is or is not subject to copyright based on information theory is entirely defeated by what I've said.
Point an LLM at the conversation and ask it to ELI5 the competing arguments.
> Information entropy. The amount of data an LLM ingests cannot be compressed to the size of the weights even at maximum theoretical compression.
That's one hell of a compression ratio, if it can do what you claim.
To prove distribution of copyrighted materials it would have to be practical and actually used in the wild by people to circumvent copyright and generate copies of those works. Again, I can't prove a negative, but that isn't the standard, and nobody has shown a practical exploit here.
My assumption is that multiple copies in the training data "wear a deeper groove". I believe those are infringing, and should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. But the vast majority of text doesn't wear that groove.
(Edit: Think it was this one https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671)
What if they retouch a photo you've taken as a political message? Does it matter if the do it with Sharpie, Photoshop, or by feeding it into an LLM?
When you publish, you give up some control over your work. Other people are allowed to do things with it and IMO it does not matter if it's in their head, on paper, or in a computer.
Quit trying to make AIs human, people who are trying to make AI human keep forgetting that humanized AI's have only the morals relevant to their mission, there is no profit in humanizing AI's because if we continue on this track of humanizing AI's, we being stupid humans will grant them civil rights expecting these new AI's with rights will somehow respect our rights and thats a fundamental misunderstanding of how AI'S actually work.
I’m guessing you have some kind of imagined idea of some small author being compensated handsomely for his book and all future earnings that could have come from it. Reality though is that between the attorneys that will run away with some high triple digit millions and the corporations that own the rights to the subject works, there will be measly “checks” for any actual person that created anything, i.e., an artist or author.
In an odd way, this whole case is really just “capitalism” cannibalizing itself, i.e., publishers greedily and also in a terrified manner trying to steal away as much capital from the technological shift to AI as possible in order to either create a buffer or fund their transformation to adapt to what AI means to the very nature of writing itself, let alone publishing.
I suspect human writing could survive, but I don’t see any room for publishers.