Your last sentence is a non-sequitur.
Q: Why do you think X is Y? A: < 10 minute exposition that doesn't address the question > ... therefore Y.
Sorry for off-topic, but I love that expression.
> I don’t understand how this can be true if set 2 contains a complete copyrighted work (say, a book) that the copyright owner hasn’t approved for such distribution.
Everything you're saying could be true, but also meaningless.
Meaningless in what sense? In my personal opinion, here are some meaningful things:
- Economic meaning: Is the Pile making anyone suffer, in an intellectually honest sense? No. Is the way it is being used making anyone suffer? No. Would anyone use the Pile if they had to pay for it? No. Would some tiny amount of money paid for it matter? No, not to anyone. The Pile is but one of many things that are going on in this pareto-inefficient world that we gain little economically by fucking with.
- Meaning in the sense of human progress. Is the Pile sincerely, substantively helping advance creative and scientific progress? Yes. Can the progress it promotes coexist peacefully, in this current status quo, with selling books on Amazon, which can also advance progress? Yes. Is there any evidence that this non-economic progress, such as sharing important stories or points of view meaningfully through text content, is harmed by the Pile? No.
The following ways of looking at this issue are meaningless:
- Psychological meaning is meaningless. Feelings that are more strongly felt by more favored parties, like beloved authors versus impetuous programmers, are not more valid. Stakeholders like authors merely exercising their collective bargaining power over something that doesn't actually make them worse off is meaningless too. Social media drama also doesn't matter.
These are just opinions. I don't go out there and say I'm a lawyer, and I'm not running for Congress, and neither are you. It's crazy to me, because when you look critically at what dog you personally have in this race, like of course you want the status quo where The Pile exists, and you and the only agitators in all of this - authors' guild authors - gain nothing from nearly every dead-on-arrival framework like "Compensation, Credit and Consent" or whatever, BESIDES meaningless psychological satisfaction of winning social media arguments and flexing the favorability of authors over programmers. Imagine if we ran the whole country this way! It's radioactive.
So this isn't a non-sequiter. Supporting the status quo, in this particular case, is the succinct way of saying everything here: that you can be right in ways that don't at all matter, which is okay, but you should have the insight or maybe if you are a programmer or an author or actually you are running for Congress, you have the duty to understand this stuff.
No, and a class action lawsuit against that practice doesn't make anyone better beyond "meaningless psychological satisfaction". But it's still something we do as a society, for good reasons, right?
Here, you have a number of commercial entities that are poised to make a ton of money off individually small but entirely non-consensual contributions of other people. You also have a "data laundering" industry where the datasets of webpages, books, and images are published by notionally non-profit entities that are in one way or another bankrolled by the commercial players, keeping their hands clean.
Framing the debate as being about "human progress" is sort of goofy in that world. We're not talking about academics tinkering with wacky ideas. We're talking about an industry that takes your work without asking and monetizes it. Yes, the sum of it is greater than the component pieces, but that doesn't mean you get to do whatever you want.
No. Nobody cares.
> But it's still something we do as a society, for good reasons, right?
I really don't think whatever you're talking about matters. I don't think anyone cares about class action lawsuits over pennies except assholes. But I enjoy that you are reading these comments.
I also think you are ascribing way too much meaning to the legal process. Process and procedure matter to lawyers. There are places where you can never get relief from the law, and there is no process and procedure, but oftentimes, people will concede that they are governed by rules and laws.
In the US the starkest example was probably the BP oil spill, where they had video of oil coming out of the thing, there was nothing to investigate, and in 15m a meeting between political and business executives concluded that the fine would be large but not ruin BP. The next 2 years of process for that disaster were meaningless under the same framework of meaning I gave you. It provided psychological satisfaction to all sorts of people, maybe especially to the people who had to feel good about taking a big check from BP for destroying the ecosystem except by fishing instead of by extracting oil. But it didn't matter, they could have also not done 2 years of process and nothing would change.
> Here, you have a number of commercial entities that are poised to make a ton of money off individually small but entirely non-consensual contributions of other people.
The Pile is doing the exact opposite, and unauthorized but nonetheless legal use of copyrighted material for LLM training is the only way you will see a world where non-commercial entities, such as authors, can use the technology for free, in whatever way they choose it to be aligned, under whatever rules.
The DMCA already made movie piracy cost $100,000 a pop more than 2 decades ago, and yet here we are. Who. Cares. Did any of it work? You can find lots of bad guys in movie piracy, and extremely few good guys, and it turns out none of it matters. Surely if we can tolerate them we can tolerate the Pile.
> We're not talking about academics tinkering with wacky ideas.
You might mean that they specifically are not graduate students or professors at Universities, sure, but they are all Ivory tower, bone dry Ivy League or adjacent academics. Some of the people at the very top may have dropped out of Stanford or Harvard or whatever, and some of them may have some nuanced or fringe beliefs about specific journeys through learning for specific people, but they are very much the kind of person who would be called "academic," as an insult, by a layperson.
This is just to say that you are immediately reaching for the good versus bad people appeals. Like it's the same shit, it's the same energy as saying the authors are right and the weirdos are wrong. You have some favorable idea in your head of nice humanities PhDs, and yes, they are nice, and this disfavorable view of mean compsci bachelors, but does it matter? In a real sense they are cut from a similar cloth, but in the imaginary setup in your head they're different.
> We're talking about an industry that takes your work without asking and monetizes it.
This is the same appeal. Authors Guild is the industry. Writers Guild is the industry. You are mixing up your antagonists and protagonists. You need to get an independent opinion, colorfully we could call it a "contrarian" one, about who all these people really are. And then you'll see, man, it's not so black and white, and I wonder why people are arguing about this shit that does not matter. If you are a guilded writer, I will tell you now, you are wasting your time worrying about this stuff, because monetizing via traditional publishing or screenplays has been bad forever, and the Pile changes nothing.
Do you really expect anyone to engage with you in good faith if you feel this way?
Copyright law isn't perfect, but most of the great creative works from the last few centuries wouldn't exist if their authors didn't have legal protections allowing them to monetize their work. Redistributing existing media without worrying about copyright might be great in the short term, but the next century of art will probably look pretty barren if that becomes the status quo.
Maybe we'll reach a point where the benefits of training AI outweigh the benefits of all human creative output. But you don't need to be a stooge of some author's guild to not feel like we're there today.
The first agitators were Free Software developers, namely the Software Freedom Conservatory and Hector Martin, who pointed out that GitHub's proprietary cloud hosted code completion LLM was trained on shittons of GPL code and regurgitated a lot of it[0]. The only reason why book authors, visual artists, and so on are suing AI companies is because the Free Software people - who otherwise oppose software copyrightability - wrote the rhetorical framework that everyone else is using.
[0] My favorite example is that commenting "evil floating point level bit hack" produces the entire Quake lighting function. Or at least it did until Microsoft specifically filtered that phrase out from code completion.