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Comment by petilon | Hacker News Reader

I disagree that LLM models are the product of enormous quantities of copyright infringement.

The recent announcement that AI-assisted research produced a counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture--a long-standing open problem in algebraic geometry--shows the original value AI can create. The result was not copied from a textbook; it emerged from AI learning from existing material, much as a human does, and then applying that knowledge in a new way. If that's a violation of copyright, then a human doing the exact same thing would be a copyright violation too. But it isn't.

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If you re-read your comment, you will find that your second paragraph is not evidence for the claim you make in your first paragraph. In fact, your first paragraph is just false.

Let me explain it this way: If it is legal for a human to learn from a book, then disseminate the knowledge, then it is legal for a machine to do so. You may think this is not right because a machine does it at a much larger scale, but if so laws need to be updated. As it stands now there is no law that says if a human does X it is not a copyright violation but if a machine does the same X it is copyright violation.

> If it is legal for a human to learn from a book...

True, if the human's access to the book was legal

A great deal of training was on the open web, no one should complain.

But at least Meta and Anthropic were caught red handed taking copyrighted works, illegally, for training

I think international IP laws are too strick and onerous, but they were broken to train these models

Yup if a machine kills a human it's not the machine's fault; it's the human's. Humans doing the exact same thing as machines aren't 1:1.

If it is legal for a human to do something then it is legal for a machine to do it too. Are there any counter examples to that?

The GDPR gives you the right not to be subject to automated decisions, so there are cases where a human can make a decision and a machine cannot.

Get elected president?

Lethal self defense?

The didn’t pay for the books.

It’s massive copyright infringement.

The human buys the books.

Did they borrow the book? If I learn from a borrowed book is that copyright infringement?

It's worth keeping in mind the purpose of copyright. It's a pragmatic tool to encourage investment in creative work for the benefit of everybody/consumers. We may be entering a time where there's less need to incentivize people to write books. At least not non-fiction books which are simply a collection of existing knowledge presented in an a way that's suitable for human readers. A lot of the value those authors provided can now be done by AI. Yes, the AI trained on their work, but now that it's here, we don't need new non-fiction authors quite as much as we used to.

I wouldn't want to live in a world where technology or general people's wellbeing was held back by obsolete laws that ended up lingering on just to protect undeserving special people at the expense of the rest of society. Remember guilds for tradesmen? They were also a monopoly given by the government to special people. They had their purpose but nowadays we have different ways to keep tradesmen working effectively like license requirements and insurance.

Just to be clear, I think we do still need copyright, but that we might be in a transition period where it has to be redesigned to adapt to AI.

I don’t think it’s been common to write non fiction for money for decades. What they are doing is killing off the real motivation to do it, which is recognition and attribution.

We will all be sorry when professionally written and edited works disappear. An author has a reputation and the incentive to protect that reputation keeps standards high.

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