Those claiming AI training on copyrighted works is “theft” misunderstand key aspects of copyright law and AI technology. Copyright protects specific expressions of ideas, not the ideas themselves. When AI systems ingest copyrighted works, they’re extracting general patterns and concepts - the “Bob Dylan-ness” or “Hemingway-ness” - not copying specific text or images.
This process is akin to how humans learn by reading widely and absorbing styles and techniques, rather than memorizing and reproducing exact passages. The AI discards the original text, keeping only abstract representations in “vector space”. When generating new content, the AI isn’t recreating copyrighted works, but producing new expressions inspired by the concepts it’s learned.
This is fundamentally different from copying a book or song. It’s more like the long-standing artistic tradition of being influenced by others’ work. The law has always recognized that ideas themselves can’t be owned - only particular expressions of them.
Moreover, there’s precedent for this kind of use being considered “transformative” and thus fair use. The Google Books project, which scanned millions of books to create a searchable index, was ruled legal despite protests from authors and publishers. AI training is arguably even more transformative.
While it’s understandable that creators feel uneasy about this new technology, labeling it “theft” is both legally and technically inaccurate. We may need new ways to support and compensate creators in the AI age, but that doesn’t make the current use of copyrighted works for AI training illegal or unethical.
For those interested, this argument is nicely laid out by Damien Riehl in FLOSS Weekly episode 744. https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly/episodes/744
Ok, ignore this specific company and technology.
In the abstract, if you wanted to make artificial intelligence, how would you do it without using the training data that we humans use to train our own intelligence?
We learn by reading copyrighted material. Do we pay for it? Sometimes. Sometimes a teacher read it a while ago and then just regurgitated basically the same copyrighted information back to us in a slightly changed form.
We are human beings. The comparison is false on it’s face because what you all are calling AI isn’t in any conceivable way comparable to the complexity and versatility of a human mind, yet you continue to spit this lie out, over and over again, trying to play it up like it’s Data from Star Trek.
This model isn’t “learning” anything in any way that is even remotely like how humans learn. You are deliberately simplifying the complexity of the human brain to make that comparison.
Moreover, human beings make their own choices, they aren’t actual tools.
They pointed a tool at copyrighted works and told it to copy, do some math, and regurgitate it. What the AI “does” is not relevant, what the people that programmed it told it to do with that copyrighted information is what matters.
There is no intelligence here except theirs. There is no intent here except theirs.
If you fundamentally do not think that artificial intelligences can be created, the onus is on yo uto explain why it’s impossible to replicate the circuitry of our brains. Everything in science we’ve seen this far has shown that we are merely physical beings that can be recreated physically.
Otherwise, I asked you to examine a thought experiment where you are trying to build an artificial intelligence, not necessarily an LLM.
Or you are over complicating yourself to seem more important and special. Definitely no way that most people would be biased towards that, is there?
Oh please do go ahead and show us your proof that free will exists! Thank god you finally solved that one! I heard people were really stressing about it for a while!
“I don’t know how this works but it’s math and that scares me so I’ll minimize it!”
And that’s all paid for. Think how much just the average high school graduate has has invested in them, ai companies want all that, but for free
It’s not though.
A huge amount of what you learn, someone else paid for, then they taught that knowledge to the next person, and so on. By the time you learned it, it had effectively been pirated and copied by human brains several times before it got to you.
Literally anything you learned from a Reddit comment or a Stack Overflow post for instance.
If only there was a profession that exchanges knowledge for money. Some one who “teaches.” I wonder who would pay them