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Comment by aussieguy1234 | Hacker News Reader

Well, to become an expert in any topic, humans have to go to university and read textbooks as a part of the course. Do these humans owe anything to the authors, other than the purchase price of the books? Why should it be any different for AI LLMs/reasoning engines?

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An LLM isn’t a human brain and it’s almost always a mistake to think of it as one.

The LLM is more akin to a search engine with a much more advanced interface. If Google published the entirety of a book without having the rights they’d be taken to court too.

Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying they’re the same, I think there are convincing arguments to be made either way. I just don’t think the comparison to a human brain is the right one.

which, for anybody following along at home, is related to something that happened back in 2015.

Google was trying to digitize the world's books and got sued for it.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/10/16/449172748...

a LLM is closer to a very primitive brain than a search engine. A search engine can't make mistakes, it output data verbatim, it may not be able to find something, but it's never making mistakes. A LLM have an input, and an output, which can wildly differ, it can respond to your demands, even trigger other software with relevant data.

It's way closer to a primitive brain than to a search engine.

I still don't see why the person or company who owns the LLM would owe the book author anything more than the price of the book. Its not like the LLM is going to output or reproduce the book in its entirety. You'll ask a relevant question, it will answer based on the data it has, not just whats in that book.

Same as if you ask a human a relevant question about a book they read. Like an LLM, they can't print you a full copy of that book. They can only answer the question based on their knowledge of the book and other things.

For one thing, a single humans knowledge cannot be scaled to serve hundreds of millions of users simultaneously.

Pretty sure you answered that in your response.

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