Paying the price of one copy does not imply that you can use it for training, right ?
My instinct/gut says that an AI model is a derivative work from the training data (in that it quite literally takes training data to produce a new creative output, with the "human addition" being the selection of training data to use), but there's not really clear judgements on it either way for the time being, which leaves room to argue.
The actual methodology used ("isn't an LLM like a computer reading a book for yourself?") is an irrelevant distraction in this regard. Computers aren't people and don't get that sort of protection; they're ultimately tools programmed to do things by humans and as a rule we hold humans responsible when those tools do something bad/wrong. "Computer says no" works on the small scale, but in cases like this, it's not really an adequate defense.
But it's not just supervised training. Maybe a model trained on reasoning traces and RLHF is not a mere derivative of the training set. All recent models are being trained on self generated data produced with reward or preference models.
When a model trains on a piece of text it won't derive gradients from the parts it knows, it will only absorb the novel parts. So what it takes from each example depends on the ordering of training examples. It is a process of diffing between model and text, could be seen as a form of analysis not simple memorization.
Even if it is infringement to train on protected works, the model size is 100x up to 1000x smaller than the training set, it has no space to memorize it.
The larger the training set, the less impact any one work has. It is de minimis use, paradoxically, the more you take the less you imitate.
That should matter when estimating damages.
This would automatically outlaw any new use of information (eg music sampling) by default.
If all novel uses were banned from the outset, cultural progress would suffer immeasurably.
What I think will suffer more is the bank accounts of AI corporations.
Because "content owners to say what can and cannot be done with their data" is quite broad.
If we want to use data owned by others and make money with it, we can do two things:
(1) just grab the data
(2) ask the content owners
I think what is fair is closer to (2) than to (1). Especially since the data was originally intended for human consumption. What you call "training" is what another person might call "mechanized processing", and would not fall within fair use of the data.
> If we want to use data owned by others and make money with it [...] ask the content owners
So is it "no commercial use without permission" you're arguing for?
> mechanized processing
Or are you arguing that training should fall under the existing mechanical license provisions for songs? I don't think you are, because those licenses are compulsory, and you seem to want an element of choice for the copyright holder.
Ok, put the chatbots aside for the moment. If [brand new use] for a book is invented, and I buy a copy of that book and want to do [that new thing] with it, should the copyright holder of that book be able to block me?
They lose that right as soon as they sell it to other people.
No, you can't sell a book to someone and then sue anyone who reads the book, upside down.
That would be ridiculous. If you don't want someone reading your book upside down, or training on it, then don't sell books.
This is a bit like saying that taking a holiday picture of someone, and putting a surveillance camera on the street are the same thing.
I think many books actually prohibit the storage into an information retrieval system and AI can be considered a form of that.
No I don't. Because a human is choosing to enact the training regardless.
Just like if a human held a book up to a rock. It would be ridiculous that an author could ban a human from "training" a rock from a book. Its their book, and they can show it to a rock if they want!
Turns out, nope, that's not ok.
No that distribution.
So my point stands. If you sell someone a book, you can't just put arbitrary restrictions on it. You cannot ban someone from training a model on it, nor ban you ban someone freak reading it upside down, or showing it to a rock.
You tried to claim that basically any restriction can be put on how something is used. Thats simply not true. Distribution is a specific carve out that has regulations on it.
But someone absolutely could train a model, as well as read it upside, or show it to a rock.