I just watched some gangsters kidnap someone in broad daylight.

This is satire, right?

That’s possible but it’s not what the authors found.

They spend a fair amount of the conclusion emphasizing how exploratory and ambiguous their findings are. The researchers themselves are very careful to point out that this is not a smoking gun.

I’d say there are two issues with it.

FIrst, it’s a very new article with only 3 citations. The authors seem like serious researchers but the paper itself is still in the, “hot off the presses” stage and wouldn’t qualify as “proven” yet.

It also doesn’t exactly say that books are copies. It says that in some models, it’s possible to extract some portions of some texts. They cite “1984” and “Harry Potter” as two books that can be extracted almost entirely, under some circumstances. They also find that, in general, extraction rates are below 1%.

Sort of.

If you violated laws in obtaining the book (eg stole or downloaded it without permission) it’s illegal and you’ve already violated the law, no matter what you do after that.

If you obtain the book legally you can do whatever you want with that book, by the first sale doctrine. If you want to redistribute the book, you need the proper license. You don’t need any licensing to create a derivative work. That work has to be “sufficiently transformed” in order to pass.

That’s my understanding too. If you obtained them legally, you can use them the same way anyone else who obtained them legally could use them.

If you want to go to the extreme: delete first copy.

You can; as I understand it, the only legal requirement is that you only use one copy at a time.

ie. I can give my book to a friend after I’m done reading it; I can make a copy of a book and keep them at home and at the office and switch off between reading them; I’m not allowed to make a copy of the book hand one to a friend and then both of us read it at the same time.

That’s not what it says.

Neither you nor an AI is allowed to take a book without authorization; that includes downloading and stealing it. That has nothing to do with plagiarism; it’s just theft.

Assuming that the book has been legally obtained, both you and an AI are allowed to read that book, learn from it, and use the knowledge you obtained.

Both you and the AI need to follow existing copyright laws and licensing when it comes to redistributing that work.

“Plagiarism” is the act of claiming someone else’s work as your own and it’s orthogonal to the use of AI. If you ask either a human or an AI to produce an essay on the philosophy surrounding suicide, you’re fairly likely to include some Shakespeare quotes. It’s only plagiarism if you or the AI fail to provide attribution.