Copyright means you're not allowed to copy something without permission.
It's that simple. There is no "Yes but you still have your book" argument, because copyright is a claim on commercial value, not a claim on instantiation.
There's some minimal wiggle room for fair use, but clearly making an electronic copy and creating a condensed electronic version of the content - no matter how abstracted - and using it for profit is not fair use.
but is training an AI copying? And if so, why isn't someone learning from said work not considered copying in their brain?
If the AI produces chunks of training set nearly verbatim when prompted, it looks like copying.
> And if so, why isn't someone learning from said work not considered copying in their brain?
Well, their brain, while learning, is not someone's published work product, for one thing. This should be obvious.
But their brain can violate copyright by producing work as the output of that learning, and be guilty of plagiarism, etc. If I memorise a passage of your copyrighted book when I am a child, and then write it in my book when I am an adult, I've infringed.
The fact that most jurisdictions don't consider the work of an AI to be copyrightable does not mean it cannot ever be infringing.
That does not make the model copyright violation itself.
But an LLM doesn't just enable direct duplication, it (well its model) contains it.
If software had a meaningful distribution cost or per-unit sale cost, a blank tape tax would be very appropriate for LLM sales.
But instead OpenAI is operating a for-pay duplication service where authors don't get a share of the proceeds -- it is doing the very thing that copyright laws were designed to dissuade by giving authors a time-limited right to control the profits from reproducing copies of their work.
If you transcode a CD to mp3 and build a business around selling these files without the author's permission you'd be in big legal problems.
Tech products that "accidentally" reproduce materials without the owners' permission (e.g. someone uploading La La Land into YouTube) have processes to remove them by simply filling a form. Can you do that with ChatGPT?
It's legal for you to possess a single joint. It's not legal for you to possess a warehouse of 400 tons of weed.
The line between legal and not legal is sometimes based on scale; being able to ingest a single book and learn from it is not the same scale as ingesting the entire published works of mankind and learning from it.
I am stating what is, right now.
I thought the weed example made that clear.
Let me clarify: the state of things, as they stand, is that the entire justice system, legislation and courts included, takes scale into account when looking at the line dividing "legal" from "illegal".
There is literally no defense of "If it is legal at qty x1, it is legal at any qty".
Excelent. Then the next question is where (in which jurisdiction) are you describing the law? And what are your sources? Not about the weed, i don’t care about that. Particularly the “being able to ingest a single book and learn from it is not the same scale as ingesting the entire published works of mankind and learning from it”.
The reason why i’m asking is because you are drawing a paralel between criminal law and (i guess?) copyright infringement. The drug posession limits in many jurisdictions are explicitly written into the law. These are not some grand principle of laws but the result of explicit legislative intent. The people writing the law wanted to punish drug peddlers without punishing end users. (Or they wanted to punish them less severly or differently.) Are the copyright limits you are thinking about similarly written down? Do you have case references one can read?
I did not make the point that there is a written law specifically for copyright violations at scale (although many jurisdictions do have exemptions at small scale written into law).
I will try to clarify once again: there is no defence in law that because something is allowed at qty X1, it must be allowed at any qty.
This is the defence that was originally posted that I replied to, it is the one that is not valid because courts regularly consider the scale of an activity when determining the line between allowed and not allowed.