> the whole thing being built on copyright infringement

I am not a lawyer, but am generally familiar with two "is it fair use" tests.

1. Is it transformative?

I take a picture, I own the copyright. You can't sell it. But if you take a copy, and literally chop it to pieces, reforming it into a collage, you can sell that.

2. Does the alleged infringing work devalue the original?

If I have a conversation with ai about "The Lord of the Rings". Even if it reproduces good chunks of the original, it does not devalue the original... in fact, I would argue, it enhances it.

Have I failed to take into account additional arguments and/or scenarios? Probably.

But, in my opinion, AI passes these tests. AI output is transformative, and in general, does not devalue the original.

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taikahessu 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In order for LLM to be useful, you need to copy and steal all of the work. Yes, you can argue you don't need the whole work, but that's what they took and feed it in.

And they are making money off of other people's work. Sure, you can use mental jiujutsu to make it fair use. But fair use for LLMs means you basically copy the whole thing. All of it. It sounds more like a total use to me.

I hope the free market and technology catches up and destroys the VC backed machinery. But only time will tell.

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ragequittah 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I always wonder if anyone out there thinks they're not making money off of other people's work. If you're coding, writing a fantasy novel, taking a photograph or drawing a picture from first principals you came up with yourself I applaud you though.

	▲	taikahessu 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You are absolutely right. Seriously though, I do think that is the case. It would be self-righteous to argue otherwise. It's just the scale and the nature of this, that makes it so repulsive. For my taste, copying something without permission, is stealing. I don't care what a judge somewhere thinks of it. Using someone's good will for profit is disgusting. And I hope we all get to profit from it someday, not just a select few. But that is just my opinion.

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jjwiseman 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And in Bartz v. Anthropic, the court found that Anthropic training their LLMs on books was "highly transformative."

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Madmallard an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What in the mental gymnastics?

They just stole everyone's hard work over decades to make this or it wouldn't have been useful at all.

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idiotsecant 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is a tiresome and well trod road.

The fact of the matter is that for profit corporations consumed the sum knowledge of mankind with the intent to make money on it by encoding it into a larger and better organized corpus of knowledge. They cited no sources and paid no fees (to any regular humans, at least).

They are making enormous sums of money (and burning even more, ironically) doing this.

If that doesn't violate copyright, it violates some basic principle of decency.