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

(www.businessinsider.com)
417 points pyman | 2 comments | 07 Jul 25 09:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.612s | source
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ramon156 ◴[07 Jul 25 10:42 UTC] No.44488798[source]▶
Pirate and pay the fine is probably hell of a lot cheaper than individually buying all these books. I'm not saying this is justified, but what would you have done in their situation?

Sayi "they have the money" is not an argument. It's about the amount of effort that is needed to individually buy, scan, process millions of pages. If that's done for you, why re-do it all?

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pyman ◴[07 Jul 25 10:59 UTC] No.44488900[source]▶
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).

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NoMoreNicksLeft ◴[07 Jul 25 16:28 UTC] No.44491995[source]▶
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?

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1. coffeefirst ◴[08 Jul 25 01:33 UTC] No.44496171[source]▶
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.

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2. NoMoreNicksLeft ◴[08 Jul 25 06:16 UTC] No.44497560[source]▶
>But a language model is not a person, it’s a copy machine with a blender inside.

I do not know what a person is, but I've met many people dimwitted enough that they might just be a meat LLM. LLMs aren't artificial intelligence (or even anything close), but they definitely aren't "copy machines with a blender inside"... and suggesting that they are marks you one of the dimwits I just mentioned.

Copyright maximalists are enemies of mankind.

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

Non sequitur. This isn't "photocopying books" or anything even slightly similar. Your arguments are disingenuous.