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

1. Criticizes a highly useful technology 2. Matches a potentially-outdated, strict interpretation of copyright law

My opinion: I think using copyrighted data to train models for sure seems classically illegal. Despite that, Humans can read a book, get inspiration, and write a new book and not be litigated against. When I look at the litany of derivative fantasy novels, it's obvious they're not all fully independent works.

Since AI is and will continue to be so useful and transformative, I think we just need to acknowledge that our laws did not accomodate this use-case, then we should change them.

I understand people who create IP of any sort being upset that software might be able to recreate their IP or stuff adjacent to it without permission. It could be upsetting. But I don't understand how people jump to "Copyright Violation" for the fact of reading. Or even downloading in bulk. The Copyright controls, and has always controlled, creation and distribution of a work. In the nature even of the notice is embedded the concept that the work will be read.

Reading and summarizing have only ever been controlled in western countries via State's secrets type acts, or alternately, non-disclosure agreements between parties. It's just way, way past reality to claim that we have existing laws to cover AI training ingesting information. Not only do we not, such rules would seem insane if you substitute the word human for "AI" in most of these conversations.

"People should not be allowed to read the book I distributed online if I don't want them to."

"People should not be allowed to write Harry Potter fanfic in my writing style."

"People should not be allowed to get formal art training that involves going to museums and painting copies of famous paintings."

We just will not get to a sensible societal place if the dialogue around these issues has such a low bar for understanding the mechanics, the societal tradeoffs we've made so far, and is able to discuss where we might want to go, and what would be best.

The article specificaly talks about the creation and distribution of a work. Creation and distribution of a work alone is not a copyright violation. However, if you take in input from something you don't own, and genAI outputs something, it could be considered a copyright violation.

Let's make this clear; genAI is not a copyright issue by itself. However, gen AI becomes an issue when you are using as your source stuff you don't have the copyright or license to. So context here is important. If you see people jumping to copyright violation, it's not out of reading alone.

> "People should not be allowed to read the book I distributed online if I don't want them to."

This is already done. It's been done for decades. See any case where content is locked behind an account. Only select people can view the content. The license to use the site limits who or what can use things.

So it's odd you would use "insane" to describe this.

> "People should not be allowed to write Harry Potter fanfic in my writing style."

Yeah, fan fiction is generally not legal. However, there are some cases where fair use covers it. Most cases of fan fiction are allowed because the author allows it. But no, generally, fan fiction is illegal. This is well known in the fan fiction community. Obviously, if you don't distribute it, that's fine. But we aren't talking about non-distribution cases here.

> "People should not be allowed to get formal art training that involves going to museums and painting copies of famous paintings."

Same with fan fiction. If you replicate a copyrighted piece of art, if you distribute it, that's illegal. If you simply do it for practice, that's fine. But no, if you go around replicating a painting and distribute it, that's illegal.

Of course, technically speaking, none of this is what gen AI models are doing.

> We just will not get to a sensible societal place if the dialogue around these issues has such a low bar for understanding the mechanics

I agree. Personifying gen AI is useless. We should stick to the technical aspects of what it's doing, rather than trying to pretend it's doing human things when it's 100% not doing that in any capacity. I mean, that's fine for the the layman, but anyone with any ounce of technical skill knows that's not true.