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Comment by jameshart | Hacker News Reader

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’).

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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.

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.

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