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Comment by whynotminot | Hacker News Reader

This viewpoint is one widely shared inside the AI community — that AI systems should be able to learn from material just as humans do.

Extrapolated out into some new future a hundred years from now when we have embodied AI humanoids walking alongside us, would it be weird if those humanoids were barred from buying a new book or charged a different rate than the humans they coexist with?

I’m still deciding how I feel about some of this too.

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If we are going to afford models like this treatment equivalent to sentient beings in this regard, why not others? In your extrapolation these ai walking among us are property of giant tech companies…

Valid point. And to some extent a lot of existing licensing models cover this for humans too (are you using this thing for yourself, or are you using this thing on behalf of your company).

There will be a lot to figure out over the coming years.

> This viewpoint is one widely shared inside the AI community — that AI systems should be able to learn from material just as humans do.

I'm not even against this to a point. The issue is what comes after. The monetization. The enshitification. The derivatives in place of real creativity.

Hardware and algorithms keep getting 10x better in this space with a regular cadence.

The only way to prevent the things you are worried about is to let anyone train a model, and then compete to make the best product.

The enshittifying monopolies and big copyright holders are the only ones that would benefit from locking down training data or regulating AI compute.

Even if we could all train evenly, those with money will always win out on the execution. You can't possibly believe just "letting things play out" as they have been so far, but with less copyright guardrails, is the solution here?

It's a straw man though, whether or not AI should be allowed to learn from books is irrelevant to the point that Meta stole tens of thousands of books to accomplish this. A fact that they've admitted to and even had they not would be trivially proven.

They're not being charged, that would be a vast improvement over reality.

At ten dollars per book, that'd just be a few hundred thousand dollars. They spent way more than that training the model, and probably will spend more on legal fees in this case.

But if they had done that, I bet they would have been sued anyway.

I think that part is maybe missed here — “why didn’t you pay for it?”

“Because you wouldn’t have sold it to me. Or even if you would have, you would have put such onerous terms on it that I’d rather take this path.”

(Not saying this makes it right)

Buying a single copy of a work does not grant you a license to duplicate or distribute that work.

So just buying copies wouldn’t have helped them.

But they are not duplicating or distributing it. The whole point is that the AI is just reading and learning from it, just like a human would do.

Even accepting that, the law should be encouraging creative output by individuals and there is justifiable fear that this will be used to bypass protections designed to reward such behavior.

For a more direct counterexample, I can memorize something and type it back out, but if it is copyrighted the law doesn’t make an exception just because it passed through my head.

If the AI is able to type back out a duplicate of the training data, then I agree that's copyright infringement. If it just learns from the data like a human with normal memory reading a large amount of material, then I don't see it. That's normally the case. There have been experiments where someone managed to make an AI spit out near-copies, but it's not the default situation and seems preventable.

I do agree that we should encourage human creativity. But if AI isn't making copies, and the output of AI isn't awarded copyright (as is currently the case) then I think humans still have sufficient reward.

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