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

  • CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    12 days ago

    Like fuck it is. An LLM “learns” by memorization and by breaking down training data into their component tokens, then calculating the weight between these tokens.

    But this is, at a very basic fundamental level, how biological brains learn. It’s not the whole story, but it is a part of it.

    there’s no actual intelligence, just really, really fancy fuzzy math.

    You mean sapience or consciousness. Or you could say “human-level intelligence”. But LLM’s by definition have real “actual” intelligence, just not a lot of it.

    Edit for the lowest common denominator: I’m suggesting a more accurate way of phrasing the sentence, such as “there’s no actual sapience” or “there’s no actual consciousness”. /end-edit

    an LLM would learn “2+2 = 4” by ingesting tens or hundreds of thousands of instances of the string “2+2 = 4” and calculating a strong relationship between the tokens “2+2,” “=,” and “4,”

    This isn’t true. At all. There are math specific benchmarks made by experts to specifically test the problem solving and domain specific capabilities of LLM’s. And you can be sure they aren’t “what’s 2 + 2?”

    I’m not here to make any claims about the ethics or legality of the training. All I’m commenting on is the science behind LLM’s.

    • Eccitaze@yiffit.netEnglish
      01·
      12 days ago

      Get a load of this maroon, they think LLMs are actually sapient! Thanks, I needed that laugh.