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Can someone give me a legal answer to this? People, from early school, all the way up to university, use copyrighted materials to learn various topics and obta

Can someone give me a legal answer to this? People, from early school, all the way up to university, use copyrighted materials to learn various topics and obtain degrees. This trains our brains using the work of others. The same is true as we navigate life. We learn various skills and subjects consuming the work of others. And, yes, in the case of most people, we use that training to pursue various careers, obtain work and get paid for it. How can there be a claim of infringement on the part of LLM's and not on every person who has ever used a book, website, article, video or publication to learn something?

famouswaffles 3y ago
This is an argument yes. A model could certainly be considered transformative enough to be fair use.
blharr 3y ago
I am not a lawyer. But isn't this quite simple? Copyrighted materials are either licensed specifically for a human or it's implied that a human will use them to learn. Naturally, human memory is going to distort and change that information over time. But as soon as you use it in an AI, which has superhuman capabilities of memory, that would go out the window.
- robomartin 3y ago
  > Copyrighted materials are either licensed specifically for a human or it's implied that a human will use them to learn. I don't think that's a part of copyright law at all. Maybe in the future, not today. Which makes sense, since these laws precede AI by a long time.
palata 3y ago
Because humans are not machines. Otherwise we would send machines to prison when they kill someone, right? I see it like this: Say you write a book. I assume you would find it obvious that I am not allowed to copy your book, replace your name by mine, and sell it, right? That's the point of copyright. Now say I don't just copy-paste your book, but I run it through a software that replaces some words with synonyms (without losing quality or meaning), and I sell it all the same. Are you fine with that? I would tend to say that I am still abusing your copyright on your book. Generative AIs can do exactly that, and the people using generative AIs don't have a simple way to check if the output they got is a slightly-modified copy of copyrighted material or not. All we know is that the AI is a machine taking the words in your book, processing them automatically, and generating a new text. Those are not humans who learned about the world and write down their thoughts, but machines that copy-pasted-and-modified words.

famouswaffles 3y ago

This is an argument yes. A model could certainly be considered transformative enough to be fair use.

blharr 3y ago

I am not a lawyer. But isn't this quite simple? Copyrighted materials are either licensed specifically for a human or it's implied that a human will use them to learn. Naturally, human memory is going to distort and change that information over time. But as soon as you use it in an AI, which has superhuman capabilities of memory, that would go out the window.

robomartin 3y ago
> Copyrighted materials are either licensed specifically for a human or it's implied that a human will use them to learn. I don't think that's a part of copyright law at all. Maybe in the future, not today. Which makes sense, since these laws precede AI by a long time.

palata 3y ago

Because humans are not machines. Otherwise we would send machines to prison when they kill someone, right? I see it like this: Say you write a book. I assume you would find it obvious that I am not allowed to copy your book, replace your name by mine, and sell it, right? That's the point of copyright. Now say I don't just copy-paste your book, but I run it through a software that replaces some words with synonyms (without losing quality or meaning), and I sell it all the same. Are you fine with that? I would tend to say that I am still abusing your copyright on your book. Generative AIs can do exactly that, and the people using generative AIs don't have a simple way to check if the output they got is a slightly-modified copy of copyrighted material or not. All we know is that the AI is a machine taking the words in your book, processing them automatically, and generating a new text. Those are not humans who learned about the world and write down their thoughts, but machines that copy-pasted-and-modified words.