You have to admit that "downloading every book ever written for free from a repository of books that is itself illegal to compile and to run, in order to write a text generation tool" being legal is at least unintuitive, to put it mildly.
Anthropic did pay more than a billion: https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/nx-s1-5529404/anthropic-settl...
And is now buying up a lot of books (controversially, as scanning involves cutting their spines) because that's what the law deems the legal method: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthrop...
We know that models like Deepseek are trained on copyrighted books too: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20957
The looser use of IP (eg, any characters/celebrities in AI video models) is increasingly mentioned as an advantage of overseas models.
Buying a book doesn't make it legal to publish lossy compressed copies of it.
Also, the vast majority of authors whose work was copied against their wishes didn't receive any of that fine.
It sounds like your argument is that they paid a fine for breaking the law, and therefore it is okay they reap the benefits of breaking the law and are allowed to continue to do so?
> The looser use of IP (eg, any characters/celebrities in AI video models) is increasingly mentioned as an advantage of overseas models.
UHmmm you remember when Sam Altman changed his profile pic to look like a Disney version of his own face? Yeah neither do I.
Clearly US AI models are playing loose with the use of overseas IP just as much, and even publicly flaunting it, as if US-based IP is more worthy of protection but Gibli can suck it.
I'm guessing the Sam avatar was related to OpenAI's deal with disney to use their characters: https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/
It's true that "in the style of" (eg. Ghibli) is not currently legally protected, only actual character IP or using the Ghibli name. That's not inconsistent with US IP treatment.
Just like I can learn from a book and nobody can make that illegal, so can other people transformative do the same with computers.
Fair use is fair use.
In any case, online debate is not always about changing the mind of the single person you engaged with. To some degree, its performative debate so that other readers may be influenced by your ideas.
>To some degree, its performative debate
No offense intended, and I'm certainly guilty of this myself at times, but this is a pretty gross way to talk to other people. It's certainly antisocial on the individual level and I think it's also pretty destructive on the community level- I look to Twitter as a case study here, which flipped from a left to a right-wing echo chamber without ever touching anything in between, which I blame on the design, algorithm, and culture being built around performance. Dunks are not truth-seeking behavior, but they perform very well.
"Just like I can learn from a book" - ok. Are you allowed to go to libgen and download a book in order to learn from it, because learning is a fair use?