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The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates

Those claiming AI training on copyrighted works is “theft” misunderstand key aspects of copyright law and AI technology. Copyright protects specific expressions of ideas, not the ideas themselves. When AI systems ingest copyrighted works, they’re extracting general patterns and concepts - the “Bob Dylan-ness” or “Hemingway-ness” - not copying specific text or images.

This process is akin to how humans learn by reading widely and absorbing styles and techniques, rather than memorizing and reproducing exact passages. The AI discards the original text, keeping only abstract representations in “vector space”. When generating new content, the AI isn’t recreating copyrighted works, but producing new expressions inspired by the concepts it’s learned.

This is fundamentally different from copying a book or song. It’s more like the long-standing artistic tradition of being influenced by others’ work. The law has always recognized that ideas themselves can’t be owned - only particular expressions of them.

Moreover, there’s precedent for this kind of use being considered “transformative” and thus fair use. The Google Books project, which scanned millions of books to create a searchable index, was ruled legal despite protests from authors and publishers. AI training is arguably even more transformative.

While it’s understandable that creators feel uneasy about this new technology, labeling it “theft” is both legally and technically inaccurate. We may need new ways to support and compensate creators in the AI age, but that doesn’t make the current use of copyrighted works for AI training illegal or unethical.

For those interested, this argument is nicely laid out by Damien Riehl in FLOSS Weekly episode 744. twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly/episodes/744

macrocephalic ,

It’s an interesting area. Are they suggesting that a human reading copyright material and learning from it is a breach?

uriel238 ,
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I personally am down for this punch-up between Alphabet and Sony. Microsoft v. Disney.

🍿

overload ,

Surely it’s coming. We have The music publishing cartel vs Suno already.

TunaCowboy ,

I wouldn’t say I’m on OAI’s side here, but I’m down to eliminate copyright. New economic models will emerge, especially if more creatives unionize.

randon31415 ,

I finally understand Trump supporters “Fuck it, burn it all to the ground cause we can’t win” POV. Only instead of democracy, it is copyright and instead of Trump, it is AI.

roofuskit ,

The Times’ lawyers must be chuffed reading this.

xenomor , (edited )

This take is correct although I would make one addition. It is true that copyright violation doesn’t happen when copyrighted material is inputted or when models are trained. While the outputs of these models are not necessarily copyright violations, it is possible for them to violate copyright. The same standards for violation that apply to humans should apply to these models.

I entirely reject the claims that there should be one standard for humans and another for these models. Every time this debate pops up, people claim some province based on ‘intelligence’ or ‘conscience’ or ‘understanding’ or ‘awareness’. This is a meaningless argument because we have no clear understanding about what those things are. I’m not claiming anything about the nature of these models. I’m just pointing out that people love to apply an undefined standard to them.

We should apply the same copyright standards to people, models, corporations, and old-school algorithms.

Imgonnatrythis ,

I hear you about the cheese bro.

wesker ,
@wesker@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

You drank the kool-aid.

finley ,

“but how are we supposed to keep making billions of dollars without unscrupulous intellectual property theft?! line must keep going up!!”

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