>We will take it, we won't pay for it, and we will use it to replace you and make ourselves rich

The whole point of fair use (which courts have so far ruled AI training is) is that you don't have to ask for permission or pay them for it.

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palmotea 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The whole point of fair use (which courts have so far ruled AI training is) is that you don't have to ask for permission or pay them for it.

Is that settled law? I doubt it.

And IMHO, AI training violates the spirit of fair use. It's not really a method of criticism or commentary. It's a system to use people's own work to undermine their ability to economically subsist on that work.

Though how about this for a proposed exception: you can AI train on anything as fair use: only if release your model and weights public domain open source.

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dragonwriter 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Is that settled law?

It seems to be the fairly consistent approach of trial courts addressing the question under different soecific fact patterns in different contexts; its not “settled law” in the sense of nationally binding precedent (which would take either a Supreme Court ruling kr separate appellate rulings in every circuit).

> And IMHO, AI training violates the spirit of fair use. It's not really a method of criticism or commentary.

Plenty of transformative uses that have been held to be fair use are not criticism or commentary, and AI training is a transformative use where, for any individual work used, the end product is both a very different class of work and the used work indiviudally has very small impact on the final work.

> It's a system to use people's own work to undermine their ability to economically subsist on that work.

Courts seem to disagree that this is generally the case with AI training as such. (And AI training being fair use would not make the use of models to create works that would otherwise be infringing copies with that function through inference any less infringing.)

> Though how about this for a proposed exception: you can AI train on anything as fair use: only if release your model and weights public domain open source.

You are, of course, free to try to convince Congress to amend copyright law to apply that rule (though since the current statutory form of the fair use rule is itself a legislative adoption that follows pre-existing court rulings on fair use as a Constitutional limit on the copyright power stemming from the First Amendment, Congress may not actually have the power to narrow it that way.)

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gruez 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>Is that settled law? I doubt it.

That just seems like a cope unless you have actual evidence that the lower/appellate courts have misruled. And no, "I don't like the ruling because [all the reasons AI is bad]" doesn't count, you need actual legal justifications, preferably from legal experts. Not to mention that even if the supreme court ruled on it, it's not really "settled", eg. Roe. v. Wade and Humphrey's Executor v. United States being overturned

	▲	palmotea 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> That just seems like a cope unless you have actual evidence that the lower/appellate courts have misruled. No, it means lower court judges get overruled all the time and it's not like the courts and law always functions as some dispassionate applicators of some fixed framework. It's not settled until the process gets worked much farther than it probably has.

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selectodude 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

When you realize that LLMs are “just” extremely efficient lossy data compression, it’s hard for me to see how it’s anything other than taking people’s shit, putting it into a gigantic zip file, and letting people search against it.

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gruez 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Wait till you hear about Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc. (2007) and Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. (2015), both of which ruled that lossy and verbatim copies (respectively) are allowed for for-profit use.

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selectodude 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Too late. Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. is a good one too because Internet Archive got the exact opposite outcome in court for doing the exact same thing. I recognize the bullshit, I just call it out to keep myself sane.

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gruez 12 hours ago | parent [-]

>Internet Archive got the exact opposite outcome in court for doing the exact same thing

No, it's not the same thing. Contrary to what many people think, "fair use" isn't something you can invoke to do whatever copyright infringement you want. The judge is supposed to consider several factors, one of which is whether the work was "transformative". In google's case it was offering search results. Internet archive was operating a "digital library" (aka. a filesharing site). Whatever you hate about AI companies sucking up electricity and displacing jobs, they're certainly more transformative (and arguably more transformative than even google search) than whatever the internet archive was doing.

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selectodude 12 hours ago | parent [-]

That’s not true. 1. Libraries have used Authors Guild as legal cover to lend out ebooks for paper books that they own. 2. Google provided access to the whole book, that’s why they got sued.

If I run a book through AES, that’s pretty transformative too!

	▲	gruez 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>1. Libraries have used Authors Guild as legal cover to lend out ebooks for paper books that they own And has this been tested in court? After all, you see people uploading tv shows on youtube, then pasting a snippet of fair use in the description. That doesn't make it true. If anything, the unfavorable ruling for internet archive suggests libraries were incorrect with their interpretation of the law. >2. Google provided access to the whole book, that’s why they got sued. No it didn't. From wikipedia: "For works still under copyright, Google scanned and entered the whole work into their searchable database, but only provided "snippet views" of the scanned pages in search results to users."