It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use, but the pirating of the books is the issue at hand here, and is what Anthropic “whoopsied” into in acquiring the training data.
Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine.
Rainbows End was prescient in many ways.
I'm so over this shift in America's business model.
Original Silicon Valley model, and generally the engine of American innovation/growth/wealth equality for 200 years: Come up with a cool technology, build it in your garage, get people to fund it and sell it because it's a better mousetrap.
New model: Still come up with a cool idea, still get it funded and sold, but the idea involves committing crime at a staggering scale (Uber, Google, AirBnB, all AI companies, long list here), and then paying your way out of the consequences later.
Look some of these laws may have sucked, but having billionaires organize a private entity that systematically breaks them and gets off with a slap on the wrist, is not the solution. For one thing, if innovation requires breaking the law, only the rich will be able to innovate because only they can pay their way out of the law. For another, obviously no one should be able to pay their way out of following the law! This is basic "foundations of society" stuff that the vast majority of humans agree on in terms of what feels fair and just, and what doesn't.
Go to a country which has really serious corruption problems, like is really high on the corruption index, and ask the people there what they think about it. I mean I live in one and have visited many others so I can tell you, they all hate it. It not only makes them unhappy, it fills them with hopelessness about their future. They don't believe that anything can ever get better, they don't believe they can succeed by being good, they believe their own life is doomed to an unappealing fate because of when and where they were born, and they have no agency to change it. 25 years ago they all wanted to move to America, because the absence of that crushing level of corruption was what "the land of opportunity" meant. Now not so much, because America is becoming more like their country.
This timeline ends poorly for all of us, even the corrupt rich who profit from it, because in the future America will be more like a Latin American banana republic where they won't be able to leave their compounds for fear of getting Luigi'ed. We normal people get poverty, they get fear and death, everyone loses. The social contract is collapsing in front of our eyes.
So exactly when was there “wealth equality” in the US? Are you glossing over that whole segregation, redlining, era of the US?
And America was built on slavery and genocide.
You realize there are countries that are even worse to their citizens right? Like I'm really asking, why do so many people online seek to eliminate all conversation that isn't a simple and un-nuanced condemnation of America?
I am able to have criticisms of America while also thinking there are good things about it and that there are also worse places, but some people seem incapable of holding those three ideas in their heads simultaneously. Especially the idea that there actually are countries worse than the US, they just can't fathom that it seems, or don't consider it a fact that should receive any attention.
Right this very second, the same Republican Party who fights tooth and nail for the right to bare arms is trying not to let transgender people carry guns.
Which industrial country has a higher rate of incarceration than the US? A higher infant mortality rate? Less people covered by health insurance? A lower life expectancy?
There is absolutely no objective quality of life measurement that you can name where the median American citizen is better off than a country in Europe or in Canada or the UK.
I mean we all hate slavery, there was a funny bit about that in Bad Teacher, but not every discussion has to be about it