Its probably 100x more than it would have cost to do it legitimately, so seems like reasonable damages to me

That depends on the answer to a question that hasn't been answered yet.

Is what an AI does similar to a human reading a book, and adding it to their knowledge? Or is it similar to a human plagiarizing a book? If it's the second, for at least some books, no, the damages are not reasonable. They are far too small.

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keeda 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> That depends on the answer to a question that hasn't been answered yet.

It has been answered in a sense, because the courts (so far) have ruled that training is Fair Use. Whether this is similar to a human learning from a book was not quite the question being answered, but AFAICT there is no other relevant doctrine under Copyright law to address it, largely because the question didn't even exist until LLMs came along.

Also, these are not damages, it's a settlement i.e. a negotiated agreement between both parties.

Relevant sub-thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997766

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marcus_holmes 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Good question. Can you ask an LLM to repeat the entire contents of a novel, word-for-word, and read that instead of the original book? I haven't tried it, but I would guess it would not be able to do this.

Can you ask it questions about the book and expect it to get them right? Yeah, probably. Same as if I read the book and you asked me questions about it. The LLM would probably answer those questions better than I could, and about every single book in its training data, but still same-same.

I don't think this is plaguarism.

	▲	greyw 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If you ask me to repeat the contents of a novel I read line by line I can do it too. Is this fair use? Do I have to pay someone?