Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

The problem with this thinking is that hundreds of thousands of teachers who spent years writing great, useful books and sharing knowledge and wisdom probably won't sue a billion dollar company for stealing their work. What they'll likely do is stop writing altogether.

I'm against Anthropic stealing teacher's work and discouraging them from ever writing again. Some teachers are already saying this (though probably not in California).

They won't be needed anymore, once singularity is reached. This might be their thought process. This also exemplifies that the loathed caste system found in India is indeed in place in western societies.

There is no equality, and seemingly there are worker bees who can be exploited, and there are privileged ones, and of course there are the queens.

:D

Note: My definition of singularity isn't the one they use in San Francisco. It's the moment founders who stole the life's work of thousands of teachers finally go to prison, and their datacentres get seized.

If you care so little about writing that AI puts you off it, TBH you're probably not a great writer anyhow.

Writers that have an authentic human voice and help people think about things in a new way will be fine for a while yet.

That will be sad, although there will still be plenty of great people who will write books anyway.

When it comes to a lot of these teachers, I'll say, copyright work hand in hand with college and school course book mandates. I've seen plenty of teachers making crazy money off students' backs due to these mandates.

A lot of the content taught in undergrad and school hasn't changed in decades or even centuries. I think we have all the books we'll ever need in certain subjects already, but copyright keeps enriching people who write new versions of these.

You can bet that this never gonna happen...

Yeah, people will still want to write. They might need new ways to monetize it... that being said, even if people still want to write they may not consider it a viable path. Again, have to consider other monetization.

> They won't be needed anymore, once singularity is reached.

And it just so happens that that belief says they can burn whatever they want down because something in the future might happen that absolves them of those crimes.

When the rich and powerful face zero consequences for breaking laws and ignoring the social contracts that keep our society functioning, you wind up with extreme overcorrections. See Luigi.

How extreme is that, really? Not to justify murder: that is clearly bad. But "killing one man" is evidently something we, as a society, consider an "acceptable side-effect" when a corporation does it -- hell, you can kill thousands and get away scot-free if you're big enough.

Luigi was peanuts in comparison.

“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”

- Mark Twain

Stealing? In what way?

Training a generative model on a book is the mechanical equivalent of having a human read the book and learn from it. Is it stealing if a person reads the book and learns from it?

> The problem with this thinking is that hundreds of thousands of teachers who spent years writing great, useful books and sharing knowledge and wisdom probably won't sue a billion dollar company for stealing their work. What they'll likely do is stop writing altogether.

I think this is a fantasy. My father cowrote a Springer book about physics. For the effort, he got like $400 and 6 author copies.

Now, you might say he got a bad deal (or the book was bad), but I don't think hundreds of thousands of authors do significantly better. The reality is, people overwhelmingly write because they want to, not because of money.

Depends on how closely that person can reproduce the original work without license or attribution

It actually depends on whether or not they reproduce it and especially what they do with the copy after making it.

> In what way?

Downloading the book without paying for it, which is more or less what the judge said.

But a language model is not a person, it’s a copy machine with a blender inside.

Photocopying books in their entirety for commercial use is absolutely illegal.