US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

The required reasoning is not very deep though: If an AI reads 100 scientific papers and churns out a new one, it is plagiarism.

If a savant has perfect recall, remembers text perfectly and rearranges that text to create a marginally new text, he'd be sued for breach of copyright.

Only large corporations get away with it.

Plagiarism is not an issue of copyright law, it's an entirely separate system of rules maintained by academia. The US Copyright Office has no business having opinions about it. If a AI^W human reads 100 papers and then churns out a new one this is usually called research.

That's not logical. If the savant has perfect recall and makes minor edits they are like a digital copy and aren't really like a human, neural network or by extension any other ML model that isn't over-fitted.

If AI really could "churn out a new scientific paper" we would all be ecstatically rejoicing in the dawning of an age of AGI. We are nowhere near that.

It reminds me of the old joke.

"To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research."

We're relatively close already https://openreview.net/pdf?id=12T3Nt22av And we don't need anything even close to AGI to achieve that.

> If a savant has perfect recall, remembers text perfectly and rearranges that text to create a marginally new text, he'd be sued for breach of copyright.

Any suits would be based on the degree the marginally new copy was fair use. You wouldn't be able to sue the savant for reading and remembering the text.

Using AI to creat marginally new copies of copyrighted work is ALREADY a violation. We don't need a dramatic expansion of copyright law that says that just giving the savant the book to real is a copyright violation.

Plagarism and copyright are two entirely different things. Plagarism is about citations and intellectual integrity. Copyright is a about protecting economic interests, has nothing to to with intellectual integrity, and isn't resolved by citing the original work. In fact most of the contexts where you would be accused of plagarism, would be places like reporting, criticism, education or research goals make fair use arguments much easier.

Only when those papers are referenced

Please argue in good faith. A new research paper is obviously materially different from "rearranging that text to create a marginally new text".

Plagiarism isn't illegal, has nothing to do with the law.

The comment is responding to this line:

> If an AI reads 100 scientific papers and churns out a new one, it is plagiarism.

That is a specific claim that is being directly addressed and pretty clearly qualifies as "good faith".

"Rearranging text" is not what modern LLMs do though, unless you specifically ask them to.

Plagarism is often illegal. If you use plagarism to obtain a financial or other benefit, that can be fraud.

My understanding — LLMs are nothing at all like a "savant with perfect recall".

More like a speed-reader who retains a schema-level grasp of what they’ve read.

> If a savant has perfect recall

AI don’t have perfect recall.

> Plagiarism is not an issue of copyright law, it's an entirely separate system of rules maintained by academia. The US Copyright Office has no business having opinions about it. If a AI^W human reads 100 papers and then churns out a new one this is usually called research.

If you draw a Venn Diagram of plagiarism and copyright violations, there's a big intersection. For example: if I take your paper, scratch off your name, make some minor tweaks, and submit it; I'm guilty of both plagiarism and copyright violation.

That further drives the point that the issue is not what the AI is doing but what people using it are doing.

I didn't make this claim. Feel free to bring a cogent argument to a commenter who did.

Having actually done research and published scientific papers, the key limitation is experimentation. Review papers are useful, and AI is useful, but creating new knowledge is more useful. I haven't had much luck using LLMs to extrapolate well beyond their knowledge domain.

Is reading and memorizing a copyrighted text a breach of copyright? I.e. is creating a copy of the text in your mind a breach of copyright or fair fair use? Is it a breach of copyright if a digital “mind” similarly memorizes copyrighted text? Or is it only a breach of copyright to output and publish that memorized text?

What about loosely memorizing the gist of a copyrighted text. Is that a breach or fair use? What if a machine does something similar?

This falls under a rather murky area of the law that is not well defined.

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>I didn't make this claim

???

Did you not literally comment the following?

>A new research paper is obviously materially different from "rearranging that text to create a marginally new text".

What did you mean by that, if that's not your claim?

I made that comment, but the bit in quotes is not my claim. I was quoting a grandparent post. If you read from the top, the quotation marks and general flow of the thread should make this clear.

You were supposed to keep reading past the first sentence, instead of trying to refute the first thing you saw that you found disagreeable. By doing so, you missed the point that plagiarism is substantively different from copyright infringement.

I certainly don't see much value in AI generated papers myself, I just object to the claim that the mere act of reading a large number of existing papers before writing yours is inherently plagiarism.

Einstein once said "the key to genius is to hide your sources well"

And honestly there is truth to it. Some people (at work, in rea life, wherever) might come off very inteligent but the moment they say "oh I just read that relevant fact on reddit/twitter/news site 5 minutes ago" you realize they are just like you and repeating relevant information that was consumed recently.