> Remember the whole point of fair use is to benefit society by allowing reuse of material in ways that don't directly copy large portions of the material verbatim.

That's a rather bastardized and twisted representation of copyright and fair use.

The "whole point" of copyright was to promote the authorship of original creative works by legally protecting the financial income of those authors. The "whole point" of fair use was to make exceptions in cases where it's clear that the usage doesn't result in a market substitute and deprive original authors of their income.

The end-goal of LLMs is to ingest all of that original content and reproduce it with expert-level accuracy, promising to be the know-all, end-all product. If wildly optimistic predictions of LLM proponents turn out to be correct then they will never buy a book again, they will have no reason to. And this is precisely what the copyright was designed to protect authors against.

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CamperBob2 3 days ago | parent [-]

If wildly optimistic predictions of LLM proponents turn out to be correct then they will never buy a book again, they will have no reason to. And this is precisely what the copyright was designed to protect authors against.

And under those circumstances, your opinion is that copyrighted books should continue to exist, with full legal protection?

How could anyone, including the authors, possibly benefit from an obsolete paradigm like that? At that hypothetical point, your attachment to legacy copyright law would arguably hold back human progress as a whole, not just impede a few greedy corporations from training models on illegally-downloaded books.

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dns_snek 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Sure, but copyright was designed to accomplish clearly defined goals and LLMs clearly undermine those goals. The motivation and spirit of the law are extremely plainly stated, you don't need to be a legal expert to understand it.

We should absolutely have a discussion about modernizing copyright (and patent!) protections. But it has to be done through a democratic process, companies shouldn't be allowed to just ignore laws that are inconvenient to their business model.

> At that hypothetical point, your attachment to legacy copyright law would arguably hold back human progress as a whole

There won't be any progress if nobody is getting paid for their work. Either copyright stands and LLMs aren't allowed to train without compensation, or they get an exemption and there will be nothing left to train on in a few years.

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alfalfasprout 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

You say it's human progress. Many, many others would disagree.

	▲	CamperBob2 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		If it happens, it won't matter what we think. If it doesn't happen, it won't matter what we think. (I think it's simply too early to tell, but it's fun to think about what will have to change if the AI cheerleaders turn out to be correct.)