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 Matches a potentially-outdated, strict interpretation of copyright law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.

abstracting llms from their operators and owners and possible (and probable) ends and the territories they trample upon is nothing short of eye-popping to me. how utterly negligent and disrespectful of fellow people must one be at the heart to give any credence to such arguments

It's that the space of intellectual property LAW does not handle the robust capabilities of LLMs. Legislators NEED to pass laws to reflect the new realities or else all prior case law relies on human analogies which fail in the obvious ways you alluded to.

If there was no law governing the use of death stars and mass murder, and the only legal analogy is to environmental damage, then the only crime the legal system can ascribe is mass environmental damage.

I think you're overstating the legal uniqueness of LLMs. They're covered just fine by the existing legal precedents around copyrighted and derived works, just as building a death star would be covered by existing rules around outer space use and WMDs. Pretending they should be treated differently is IMO the entire lie told by the "AI" companies about copyright.

The google news snippets case is, in my non-lawyer opinion, the most obvious touch point. And in that case, it was decided that providing large numbers of snippets in search results was non-infringing, despite being a case of copying text from other people at-scale... And the reasons this was decided are worth reading and internalizing.

There is not an obvious right answer here. Copyright rules are, in fact, Calvinball, and we're deep in uncharted territory.

Their weights are derived from copyrighted works. Evaluating them preserves the semantic meaning and character of the source material. And the output directly competes against the copyrighted source materials.

The fact they're smudgy and non-deterministic doesn't change how they relate to the rights of authors and artists.

That sounds like you're arguing that they should be legal. Copyright law protects specific expressions, not handwavy "smudgy and non-deterministic" things.

And yet collage artists do that all the time.

Yoinnking their up and mass producing slop sure is a line to cross, though.