I mean the act of reproducing the copyrighted material is what is illegal. LLMs I've used for coding has outputted exact copyrights for code verbatim into my code before. When that happens it feels kind of fishy to be honest.

It would hardly make a dent. And if you hired hundreds of savants, the knowledge would still be spread over hundreds of separate minds.

And even if we grant that those savants are also very skilled at creating "market substitutes" based on their training that are capable of competing with the original works, their maximum creative output would only be a relatively small number of new works, because they can only work at human speed.

I don't think anyone is arguing that the consumption is illegal. It's the reproduction that is illegal.

Read a book, that's fine. Write a book, that's fine. Read a book and then write a book that is 99.9% the same as the book that you read and sell it for profit without a license from the original author, that's infringement.

>The problem is producing the copyrighted work, not processing it beforehand.

the distinction isn't particularly clear cut with an open source model. If it is able to reproduce copyright protected work with high fidelity such that the works produced would be derivative, that's like trying to get around laws against distribution of protected works by handing them to you in a zip file.

It's a kind of copyright washing to hand you the data as a binary blob and an algorithm to extract them out of it. That wouldn't really fly with any other technology.

And that's really where a lot of the value is mind you, these models are best thought of as lossily compressed versions of their input data. Otherwise Facebook ought to be perfectly fine to train them on public domain data.

I did some quick googling and most of cliffs notes guides are on public domain works so no problem there, they've also paid to license content, and also have been protected by fair use as parody

But machines don't do things. People do things, and they use tools/machines to do those things more easily or efficiently.

The issue is certainly not so simple. But it seems to me, purely theoretically, that the rules don't necessarily have to be the same for living people and non-living machines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48029673

There's nothing in the law to support your argument either. The law however does say, very unambiguously, that copying without permission isn't allowed . There aren't exceptions for "training" just because it's superficially similar to a human activity (reading a book). A human isn't allowed to hand-copy Harry Potter. Even if they bought all the Harry Potter books.