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Comment by gpm | Hacker News Reader

No. It means that if they are doing something that is prohibited by copyright law (without a license) then it needs to be CC-BY-SA.

The only theory under which training this sort of model is remotely legal is that doing so is not prohibited by copyright law in the first place. If that theory is correct they don't need a license, and they don't need to abide by any terms of licenses that they were granted without asking.

If that theory is incorrect, they have to comply with the stackoverflow license, but they also have to not use any of the (massive amounts) of unlicensed training data they are using, and comply with the numerous incompatible licenses other sources of training data are licensed under. In other words it's impossible to do this.

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If ‘reading something and using the content to update your Bayesian priors about the world’ is a breach of copyright, then reading things is a breach of copyright. The tricky new world that the LLM opens up is that it lets you distribute an exact copy of the result of having read the thing. That’s something you can’t do with a human mind (although it’s sort of the job description of a ‘teacher’).

Humans and machines are distinct with respect to copyright law. A human memorizing a book is legal. A machine scanning a book is creating a new copy and is in (at least some cases) illegal. It is not obvious that just because humans are allowed to learn from things that machines also are.

I tend to favour the view that in this case it is legal (by way of the de minimis doctrine), but I don't think it's a trivial question.

A human memorizing a book is legal; a human reciting that book aloud for an audience is not (performances of plays require licenses to the performing rights of a work, for example).

Distribution is when the issue arises - not consumption and construction of a mental model.

I acknowledge the parallels are imperfect and this all needs to be worked out in court. But it’s possible that at the pace LLMs are developing, by the time courts start addressing these questions we’ll already be questioning whether the distinction between machines and people is as big as we thought.

brb, acquiring the necessary license to read my son a bedtime story.

You (typically) need a license to publicly perform a work, not to read it your son.

That's not likely to be true. An AI can create a work that is infringing, a picture of a Marvel character, for example. But that doesn't make the AI or its weights or its training an infringement.

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