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Even as a human, you are not allowed to go to all libraries and bookstores in the world, copy their work, and stockpile it for reading later. This is what all o

Even as a human, you are not allowed to go to all libraries and bookstores in the world, copy their work, and stockpile it for reading later. This is what all of these companies are doing. Comparing AI training to reading is a red herring. The AI training algorithms are not being run on content streamed from the Internet on the fly, which you could maybe defend with this argument. If a company wants to build an internal library for its employees to train and provide them with manuals, the company has to pay for each book they keep in this library. Sure, they only pay once when they acquire the copy, not every time an employee checks out a copy to read. But they still pay. So, even if we accepted 100% that AI training is perfectly equivalent to humans reading text and learning from it, that still wouldn't give any right whatsoever to these companies to create their training sets for free.

ArtTimeInvestor 1y ago
But you can read the books right in the library and learn from them. And you can later tell other humans about what you have learned. Like "Amazing, in a right-angled triangle, the square of the longest side is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides". As AI agents become more and more human-like, they do not need to have "copied books". They just need to learn once. And they can learn from many sources, including from other AI agents. That's why I say it is inevitable that all human knowledge will end up in the "heads" of AI agents. And soon they will create their own knowledge via thinking and experimentation. Knowledge that so far exceeds human knowledge that it will seem funny that we once had a fight over that tiny little bit of knowledge that humans created.
- soco 1y ago
  The point was, they didn't pay and refuse to pay for this. When you go to the library, your membership is paid - by you or by a government subsidy. Yet the richest men in the world what to do away with paying some minute copyright fees, basically asking the government - your taxes - to subsidize them.
- close04 1y ago
  > But you can read the books right in the library and learn from them. You can read some of the books. Natural limitations prevent you from reading any substantial number. And the scale makes all the difference in any conversation. All laws were written accounting for the reality of the time. Humans have a limited storage and processing capacity so laws relied on that assumption. Now that we have systems with far more extensive capabilities in some regards, shouldn't the law follow? When people's right to "bear arms" was enshrined in the US constitution it accounted for what "arms" were at the time. Since then weapons evolved and today you are not allowed to bear automatic rifles or machine guns despite them being just weapons that can fire more and faster. Every time there's a discussion on AI one side relies way too much on the "but humas also" argument and are way too superficial with everything else.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- latexr 1y ago
  > That's why I say it is inevitable that all human knowledge will end up in the "heads" of AI agents. Not “all human knowledge” is digitised and published on the internet.
- cess11 1y ago
  "As AI agents become more and more human-like" That's not going to happen. What is going to happen, is that humans are going to become more "AI agent"-like.
- ggandv 1y ago
  “And soon” Base rate is soon never comes. And soon flying cars, but now Facebook glasses.
- bayindirh 1y ago
  > But you can read the books right in the library and learn from them. How many of them per hour? > And you can later tell other humans about what you have learned. For how long you can retain this information without corruption and without evicting old information? How fast you can tell it, in how many speech streams? To how many people? This "but we modeled them after human brains, they are just like humans" argument is tiring. AI is as much human as an Airbus A380 is a bird.
  - lupusreal 1y ago
    When have libraries ever rate limited people? The only limit to how fast you can flip through books on library shelves is how fast you can physically manage it without damaging the books or trashing their organization.
    - bayindirh 1y ago
      People are rate-limited naturally, and the systems we have built are built upon these natural limits. If your system breaks down when you remove these limits, and things get damaged, you need newer limits to protect what you have built. You can down trees 100x more efficiently, but it proved to be disastrous for the planet, so we enacted more laws and try to control forestation/deforestation by regulations. If AI can ingest things 100x faster, and it damages some things we have built, we have to regulate the process so things doesn't get damaged or the producers are compensated equally to keep livelihoods their livelihoods, instead of bashing writers and content producers like unwanted and unvalued bugs of last century. ...and if things got blurry because of new tech which was unfathomable a century ago, the solution is to add this tech to the regulation so it can be regulated to protect the producers again, not to yell "we're doing something awesome and we need no permission" and trash the place and harm the people who built this corpus. No? However, this is not that profitable, so AI people are pushing back.
      - ethbr1 1y ago
        At root, there is one novel legal and one policy question that need answering: 1. Legally, what is the relationship between copying, compression, and learning? (i.e. what level of lossy compression removes copying obligations) 2. As policy, do we want to establish new rate limits for free use? (since the previous human-physical ones are no longer barriers)
- philistine 1y ago
  The library paid for all their books. Facebook torrented a book list .
- tsimionescu 1y ago
  > But you can read the books right in the library and learn from them. What does this have to do with LLM training? Does OpenAI have a data center in every library, and only process data from that library in that data center? You're not allowed to maintain a personal copy of a book you borrowed from a library, even though you pay a library fee. Neither should OpenAI, especially since they didn't even pay that small fee.
dooglius 1y ago
> Even as a human, you are not allowed to go to all libraries and bookstores in the world, copy their work, and stockpile it for reading later. You are allowed to do this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc.?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,...
- jazzyjackson 1y ago
  That's not a blanket ruling for any kind of copying-all-books, it's a decision that the product Google built out of it's book copying provided a service to the public and didn't threaten the livelihood of the copyright holders. Fair Use is case by case, there is not a ruling yet on whether producing a chatbot that can author competing works for free is Fair Use, personally I'm bearish considering the forth factor, the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
  - dooglius 1y ago
    I am not a lawyer, but I'm assuming that if someone stockpiles for reading later (parent's scenario), without making the copies available to others at all, then that would be covered by the ruling since it's a subset of what Google did.
    - AlotOfReading 1y ago
      You can't subset a fair use argument like that and necessarily get a valid defense out of it. Fair use is essentially arguing "I infringed copyright in one of the narrow ways expressly allowed for the public interest". If you remove the public interest, you probably fail the first pillar. If you were doing something else (e.g. acting as a public archive), you might not need a fair use defense because you'd fall under different rules.
- tsimionescu 1y ago
  That case is entirely irrelevant to what I'm saying for one simple reason: Google had obtained all of the physical books they were scanning legally. They had bought or borrowed at least one physical copy of every book they were scanning. What OpenAI and the others are doing, by contrast, is the equivalent of stealing every book in a book store, making a digital copy, retaining that copy, and returning the original book. This is completely and obviously illegal, and has been tested in court many times - for example in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay_trial https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay_trial .

ArtTimeInvestor 1y ago

But you can read the books right in the library and learn from them. And you can later tell other humans about what you have learned. Like "Amazing, in a right-angled triangle, the square of the longest side is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides". As AI agents become more and more human-like, they do not need to have "copied books". They just need to learn once. And they can learn from many sources, including from other AI agents. That's why I say it is inevitable that all human knowledge will end up in the "heads" of AI agents. And soon they will create their own knowledge via thinking and experimentation. Knowledge that so far exceeds human knowledge that it will seem funny that we once had a fight over that tiny little bit of knowledge that humans created.

soco 1y ago
The point was, they didn't pay and refuse to pay for this. When you go to the library, your membership is paid - by you or by a government subsidy. Yet the richest men in the world what to do away with paying some minute copyright fees, basically asking the government - your taxes - to subsidize them.
close04 1y ago
> But you can read the books right in the library and learn from them. You can read some of the books. Natural limitations prevent you from reading any substantial number. And the scale makes all the difference in any conversation. All laws were written accounting for the reality of the time. Humans have a limited storage and processing capacity so laws relied on that assumption. Now that we have systems with far more extensive capabilities in some regards, shouldn't the law follow? When people's right to "bear arms" was enshrined in the US constitution it accounted for what "arms" were at the time. Since then weapons evolved and today you are not allowed to bear automatic rifles or machine guns despite them being just weapons that can fire more and faster. Every time there's a discussion on AI one side relies way too much on the "but humas also" argument and are way too superficial with everything else.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
latexr 1y ago
> That's why I say it is inevitable that all human knowledge will end up in the "heads" of AI agents. Not “all human knowledge” is digitised and published on the internet.
cess11 1y ago
"As AI agents become more and more human-like" That's not going to happen. What is going to happen, is that humans are going to become more "AI agent"-like.
ggandv 1y ago
“And soon” Base rate is soon never comes. And soon flying cars, but now Facebook glasses.
bayindirh 1y ago
> But you can read the books right in the library and learn from them. How many of them per hour? > And you can later tell other humans about what you have learned. For how long you can retain this information without corruption and without evicting old information? How fast you can tell it, in how many speech streams? To how many people? This "but we modeled them after human brains, they are just like humans" argument is tiring. AI is as much human as an Airbus A380 is a bird.
- lupusreal 1y ago
  When have libraries ever rate limited people? The only limit to how fast you can flip through books on library shelves is how fast you can physically manage it without damaging the books or trashing their organization.
  - bayindirh 1y ago
    People are rate-limited naturally, and the systems we have built are built upon these natural limits. If your system breaks down when you remove these limits, and things get damaged, you need newer limits to protect what you have built. You can down trees 100x more efficiently, but it proved to be disastrous for the planet, so we enacted more laws and try to control forestation/deforestation by regulations. If AI can ingest things 100x faster, and it damages some things we have built, we have to regulate the process so things doesn't get damaged or the producers are compensated equally to keep livelihoods their livelihoods, instead of bashing writers and content producers like unwanted and unvalued bugs of last century. ...and if things got blurry because of new tech which was unfathomable a century ago, the solution is to add this tech to the regulation so it can be regulated to protect the producers again, not to yell "we're doing something awesome and we need no permission" and trash the place and harm the people who built this corpus. No? However, this is not that profitable, so AI people are pushing back.
    - ethbr1 1y ago
      At root, there is one novel legal and one policy question that need answering: 1. Legally, what is the relationship between copying, compression, and learning? (i.e. what level of lossy compression removes copying obligations) 2. As policy, do we want to establish new rate limits for free use? (since the previous human-physical ones are no longer barriers)
philistine 1y ago
The library paid for all their books. Facebook torrented a book list .
tsimionescu 1y ago
> But you can read the books right in the library and learn from them. What does this have to do with LLM training? Does OpenAI have a data center in every library, and only process data from that library in that data center? You're not allowed to maintain a personal copy of a book you borrowed from a library, even though you pay a library fee. Neither should OpenAI, especially since they didn't even pay that small fee.

dooglius 1y ago

> Even as a human, you are not allowed to go to all libraries and bookstores in the world, copy their work, and stockpile it for reading later. You are allowed to do this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc.?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,...

jazzyjackson 1y ago
That's not a blanket ruling for any kind of copying-all-books, it's a decision that the product Google built out of it's book copying provided a service to the public and didn't threaten the livelihood of the copyright holders. Fair Use is case by case, there is not a ruling yet on whether producing a chatbot that can author competing works for free is Fair Use, personally I'm bearish considering the forth factor, the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
- dooglius 1y ago
  I am not a lawyer, but I'm assuming that if someone stockpiles for reading later (parent's scenario), without making the copies available to others at all, then that would be covered by the ruling since it's a subset of what Google did.
  - AlotOfReading 1y ago
    You can't subset a fair use argument like that and necessarily get a valid defense out of it. Fair use is essentially arguing "I infringed copyright in one of the narrow ways expressly allowed for the public interest". If you remove the public interest, you probably fail the first pillar. If you were doing something else (e.g. acting as a public archive), you might not need a fair use defense because you'd fall under different rules.
tsimionescu 1y ago
That case is entirely irrelevant to what I'm saying for one simple reason: Google had obtained all of the physical books they were scanning legally. They had bought or borrowed at least one physical copy of every book they were scanning. What OpenAI and the others are doing, by contrast, is the equivalent of stealing every book in a book store, making a digital copy, retaining that copy, and returning the original book. This is completely and obviously illegal, and has been tested in court many times - for example in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay_trial https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay_trial .