Those claiming AI training on copyrighted works is “theft” misunderstand key aspects of copyright law and AI technology. Copyright protects specific expressions of ideas, not the ideas themselves. When AI systems ingest copyrighted works, they’re extracting general patterns and concepts - the “Bob Dylan-ness” or “Hemingway-ness” - not copying specific text or images.
This process is akin to how humans learn by reading widely and absorbing styles and techniques, rather than memorizing and reproducing exact passages. The AI discards the original text, keeping only abstract representations in “vector space”. When generating new content, the AI isn’t recreating copyrighted works, but producing new expressions inspired by the concepts it’s learned.
This is fundamentally different from copying a book or song. It’s more like the long-standing artistic tradition of being influenced by others’ work. The law has always recognized that ideas themselves can’t be owned - only particular expressions of them.
Moreover, there’s precedent for this kind of use being considered “transformative” and thus fair use. The Google Books project, which scanned millions of books to create a searchable index, was ruled legal despite protests from authors and publishers. AI training is arguably even more transformative.
While it’s understandable that creators feel uneasy about this new technology, labeling it “theft” is both legally and technically inaccurate. We may need new ways to support and compensate creators in the AI age, but that doesn’t make the current use of copyrighted works for AI training illegal or unethical.
For those interested, this argument is nicely laid out by Damien Riehl in FLOSS Weekly episode 744. https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly/episodes/744
So, is the Internet caring about copyright now? Decades of Napster, Limewire, BitTorrent, Piratebay, bootleg ebooks, movies, music, etc, but we care now because it’s a big corporation doing it?
Just trying to get it straight.
There is a kernal of validity to your point, but let’s not pretend like those things are at all the same. The difference between copyright violation for personal use and copyright violation for commercialization is many orders of magnitude.
People don’t like when you punch down. When a 13 year old illegally downloaded a Limp Bizkit album no one cared. When corporations worth billions funded by venture capital systematically harvest the work of small creators (often with appropriate license) to sell a product people tend to care.
Personally for me its about the double standard. When we perform small scale “theft” to experience things we’d be willing to pay for if we could afford it and the money funded the artists, they throw the book at us. When they build a giant machine that takes all of our work and turns it into an automated record scratcher that they will profit off of and replace our creative jobs with, that’s just good business. I don’t think it’s okay that they get to do things like implement DRM because IP theft is so terrible, but then when they do it systemically and against the specific licensing of the content that has been posted to the internet, that’s protected in the eyes of the law
Kill a person, that’s a tragedy. Kill a hundred thousand people, they make you king.
Steal $10, you go to jail. Steal $10 billion, they make you Senator.
If you do crime big enough, it becomes good.
No, no it doesn’t.
It might become legal, or tolerated, or the laws might become unenforceable.
But that doesn’t make it good, on the contrary, it makes it even worse.
That’s their point.
What about companies who scrape public sites for training data but then publish their trained models open source for anyone to use?
That feels a lot more reasonable and fair to me personally.
If they still profit from it, no.
Open models made by nonprofit organisations, listing their sources, not including anything from anyone who requests it not to be included (with robots.txt, for instance), and burdened with a GPL-like viral license that prevents the models and their results from being used for profit… that’d probably be fine.
The Internet is not a person
People on Lemmy. I personally didn’t realize everyone here was such big fans of copyright and artificial scarcity.
The reality is that people hate tech bros (deservedly) and then blindly hate on everything they like by association, which sometimes results in dumbassery like everyone now dick-riding the copyright system.
The reality is that people hate the corporations using creative peoples works to try and make their jobs basically obsolete and they grab onto anything to fight against it, even if it’s a bit of a stretch.
I’d hate a world lacking real human creativity.
Me too, but real human creativity comes from having the time and space to rest and think properly. Automation is the only reason we have as much leisure time as we do on a societal scale now, and AI just allows us to automate more menial tasks.
Do you know where AI is actually being used the most right now? Automating away customer service jobs, automatic form filling, translation, and other really boring but necessary tasks that computers used to be really bad at before neural networks.
And some automation I have no problems with. However, if corporations would rather use AI than hire creatives, the creatives will have to look for other work and likely won’t have a space to express their creativity, not at work nor during leisure time (no time, exhaustion, etc.). Something should be done so it doesn’t go there. Preemptively. Not after everything’s gone to shit. I don’t see the people defending AI from the copyright stuff even acknowledging the issue. Holding up the copyright card, currently, is the easiest way to try an avoid this happening.