> My question (probably not original) is this: which biological neural network was not trained on copyrighted material from other artists? Which guitarist never listened to classic rock bands? Which painter never looked at Monet? Nearly all successful artists publicly recognize the influence of prior art on their development and style (and the rest are lying).

Those successful artists accessed their training data through legitimate means (please hold your 'well actually' replies about some artist using bittorrent here and there). They didn't all pirate, on a historic, industrial scale, every scrap of creative work that they saw in their lives. That's the key distinction.

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clarkmoody 2 hours ago | parent [-]

So you agree with the quoted line from the article, that LLM training is predicated on large-scale theft?

	▲	mullingitover 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Absolutely. It was a straight-up smash and grab operation, and everyone knows it. It's important to frame these discussions in human terms. "Intellectual property" is a human invention and the rights associated with it are the results of negotiations between concerned parties. There was no negotiation with the training of the models, though. So no transaction happened, one group is profiting handsomely and whole classes of society which involuntarily had their labor taken are now being harmed. There's no need to get it twisted, it's frankly quite black and white. The only question is how we'll ensure that the economics are corrected going forward to prevent further harm.