No one is memorizing a book for the purpose of regurgitating it to someone that wants to read it without paying for it.
It's a thought experiment that only works if you don't think about it.
If you design a black box using copyrighted text that can parrot the text back, it _must_ break copyright by definition.
Theoretically a person who read and memorized a book and then typed out copies for people would be violating the copyright, but so few people can do that, and it's so cumbersome that it just doesn't matter much. The copyright holder could sue if they found out the person were distributing copies, but it's just not realistic. Certainly not for a large number of books.
But AI memorization scales, and it's possible to have an AI write out unlimited copies of different books to a large number of people. And how did the AI get a full copy in the first place?
And how’s that working out, considering the submission we’re on?
> how is the fact that the possibly have portions of copyrighted works "memorized", however do not reproduce it breaking copyright law?
I can’t believe this needs to be repeated so often, but machines are not people. Memorising a book is not the same thing as copying a PDF.
Furthermore, it’s not about the LLM training, it’s about how the companies who make them got the data in the first place.
>Furthermore, it’s not about the LLM training, it’s about how the companies who make them got the data in the first place.
This conflating two different issues, though. I agree that whether or not using copyrighted material to create the models is still an open question. But someone using hundreds of prompts to extract a paragraph of a well-known work (and some additional nonverbatim equivalents) is not the AI company breaking copyright in and of itself. In fact, the books they used were extremely common (GOT, The Hobbit, Harry Potter); AI companies could make the argument that the books were not even directly trained on, but in user-generated posts made online about the material.