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The problem is that "harm" as defined by copyright law is strictly limited to loss of sales due to breach of that copyright; it makes no allowment (that I know

The problem is that "harm" as defined by copyright law is strictly limited to loss of sales due to breach of that copyright; it makes no allowment (that I know of) to livelihoods lost by the theft of the work indefinitely, as AI boosters suggest their tools can do (replace people). The way this court case is going, it's an uphill battle for the plaintiffs to prove concrete harm in that very narrow context, when the real harm is the potential elimination of their future livelihoods through theft, rather than immediately tangible harms. As a (creative) friend of mine flatly said, they refuse to use an LLM until it can prove where it learned something from/cite its original source. Artists and creatives can cite their inspirational sources, while LLMs cannot (because their developers don't care about credit, only output) by design. To them, that's the line in the sand, and I think that's a reasonable one given that not a single creative in my circles has been cut payment from these multi-billion-dollar AI companies for the unauthorized use of their works in training these models.

tedivm 1y ago
Github does give free copilot access to open source developers it considers important enough (which is a pretty low bar). While not the same as actually paying, it's the only example I can think of where the company that used people's copyrighted material actually gave something back to those people.
- _aavaa_ 1y ago
  What you’re describing is the Extend phase of Microsoft’s plan.
- mistrial9 1y ago
  the educated and erudite can wait in line near the Castle; every day due to the grace of our masters, unused bread from the master's table is available without prejudice. These people can have a fine life, and the people are fulfilled.
- bgwalter 1y ago
  They want to track and utilize the new code that those developers are writing. And they want to keep them on GitHub. And they want to claim in potential lawsuits: "See, those developers themselves have used CoPilot, so they approve the copyright infringement."
subscribed 1y ago
Your friend might want to check Perplexity.
- lopis 1y ago
  While Perplexity is able to show sources for the information it shows, the language part, and the body of text upon which it was trained, is a black box, and sources are not given, nor typically desirable as a user.
lopis 1y ago
> Artists and creatives can cite their inspirational sources Even humans have a lot of internalized unconscious inspirational sources, but I get your point.
msabalau 1y ago
AI Boosters can suggest whatever nonsense strikes their fancy, and creatives can give into fear for no reason, but the best estimates we have from the BLS is that the there are careers and ongoing demand for artists, writers, photographers. Regardless, deep learning models are valuable because they generalize within the training data to uncover patterns and features and relationships that are implicit, rather (simply) present with the data. While they can return things that happen to be within the training set, there is no reason to believe that any particular output is literally found there or is something that could be attributable, or that a human would ever attribute. Human artists also make meaning from the broad texture of their life experiences and general diffuse unattributable experience of culture. Sure, this is something a random artist is unlikely to know, but if they are simply refusing to pick up a useful tools that can't give credit--say avoiding LLMs for brainstorming, or generative selection tools for visual editing, or whatever, their particular careers will be harmed by their incurious sentimentality, and other human artists will thrive because they know that tools are just tools, and it is the humans using the tools that make meaning that people care about.
ijk 1y ago
A difficult, but not intractable problem: OLMoTrace claims to be able to trace from output to training data in seconds [1]. Notably, it can do this because OLMo itself was intentionally designed to be open and transparent [2]; it was trained on 4.6 trillion tokens of entirely open data (which you can download yourself) [3]. There's nothing stopping Meta or OpenAI from creating a similar tool, other than the obvious detail of that showing their exact training data. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.07096 https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.07096 [2] https://allenai.org/blog/olmotrace https://allenai.org/blog/olmotrace [3] https://huggingface.co/datasets/allenai/olmo-mix-1124 https://huggingface.co/datasets/allenai/olmo-mix-1124
- stego-tech 1y ago
  I love it! Keeping this in my back pocket the next time someone claims that keeping accounting of training data and sourcing it isn't feasible or technically possible.
immibis 1y ago
Well, no, because all those file-sharing users used to get fined $250,000 or whatever, which is obviously much greater than the amount they would have paid for whatever they downloaded.

tedivm 1y ago

Github does give free copilot access to open source developers it considers important enough (which is a pretty low bar). While not the same as actually paying, it's the only example I can think of where the company that used people's copyrighted material actually gave something back to those people.

_aavaa_ 1y ago
What you’re describing is the Extend phase of Microsoft’s plan.
mistrial9 1y ago
the educated and erudite can wait in line near the Castle; every day due to the grace of our masters, unused bread from the master's table is available without prejudice. These people can have a fine life, and the people are fulfilled.
bgwalter 1y ago
They want to track and utilize the new code that those developers are writing. And they want to keep them on GitHub. And they want to claim in potential lawsuits: "See, those developers themselves have used CoPilot, so they approve the copyright infringement."

subscribed 1y ago

Your friend might want to check Perplexity.

lopis 1y ago
While Perplexity is able to show sources for the information it shows, the language part, and the body of text upon which it was trained, is a black box, and sources are not given, nor typically desirable as a user.

lopis 1y ago

> Artists and creatives can cite their inspirational sources Even humans have a lot of internalized unconscious inspirational sources, but I get your point.

msabalau 1y ago

AI Boosters can suggest whatever nonsense strikes their fancy, and creatives can give into fear for no reason, but the best estimates we have from the BLS is that the there are careers and ongoing demand for artists, writers, photographers. Regardless, deep learning models are valuable because they generalize within the training data to uncover patterns and features and relationships that are implicit, rather (simply) present with the data. While they can return things that happen to be within the training set, there is no reason to believe that any particular output is literally found there or is something that could be attributable, or that a human would ever attribute. Human artists also make meaning from the broad texture of their life experiences and general diffuse unattributable experience of culture. Sure, this is something a random artist is unlikely to know, but if they are simply refusing to pick up a useful tools that can't give credit--say avoiding LLMs for brainstorming, or generative selection tools for visual editing, or whatever, their particular careers will be harmed by their incurious sentimentality, and other human artists will thrive because they know that tools are just tools, and it is the humans using the tools that make meaning that people care about.

ijk 1y ago

A difficult, but not intractable problem: OLMoTrace claims to be able to trace from output to training data in seconds [1]. Notably, it can do this because OLMo itself was intentionally designed to be open and transparent [2]; it was trained on 4.6 trillion tokens of entirely open data (which you can download yourself) [3]. There's nothing stopping Meta or OpenAI from creating a similar tool, other than the obvious detail of that showing their exact training data. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.07096 https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.07096 [2] https://allenai.org/blog/olmotrace https://allenai.org/blog/olmotrace [3] https://huggingface.co/datasets/allenai/olmo-mix-1124 https://huggingface.co/datasets/allenai/olmo-mix-1124

stego-tech 1y ago
I love it! Keeping this in my back pocket the next time someone claims that keeping accounting of training data and sourcing it isn't feasible or technically possible.

immibis 1y ago

Well, no, because all those file-sharing users used to get fined $250,000 or whatever, which is obviously much greater than the amount they would have paid for whatever they downloaded.