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> What I am saying is that I am allowed as a human to ingest copyrighted material, learn from it, form mental abstractions and use those learnings to generate new art. Why then, would I be forbidden from externalising some of that process into an artificial system that operates on similar principles.

For the same reason you aren't allowed to make unlimited photocopies of a library book.

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Where I think this analogy breaks down is that these models are not simply copying / memorizing the training data. They are using the data to fit a model, highly compressing the specifics while holding on to general patterns and abstractions.

I really feel like "reading lots of books" is a better analogy. (Of course its not perfect, since these systems can scale way past the number of books a human can read).

This analogy doesn't hold. The human equivalent of a photocopier is scribing a copy of a book. Scribing 100 copies and distributing those is just as illegal as creating and distributing photocopies.

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