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Comment by GeoAtreides | Hacker News Reader

Ah yes, humans and LLMs are exactly the same, learning the same way, reasoning the same way, they're practically indistinguishable. So that's why it makes sense to equate humans reading books with computer programs ingesting and processing the equivalent of billions of books in literal days or months.

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While I agree with your sentiment in general, this thread is about the legal situation and your argument is unfortunately not a legal one.

“A person is fundamentally different from an LLM” does not need a legal argument and is implied by the fact that LLMs do not have human rights, or even anything comparable to animal rights.

A legal argument would be needed to argue the other way. This argument would imply granting LLMs some degree of human rights, which the very industry profiting from these copyright violations will never let happen for obvious reasons.

The other problem with the legal argument that it's "just like a person learning" is that corporations whose human employees have learned what copyrighted characters look like and then start incorporating them into their art are considered guilty of copyright violation, and don't get to deploy the "it's not an intentional copyright violation from someone who should have known better, it's just a tool outputting what the user requested" defence...

Exactly.

Also, it is only a matter of time until one of those employees (thanks to free will and agency) will whistleblow, it doesn’t scale, etc.

Frankly, the fact that such a big segment of HN crowd unthinkingly buys big tech’s double standard (LLMs are human when copyright is concerned, but not human in every other sense) makes me ashamed of the industry.

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