Comment on Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not

• isVeryLoud@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  My interpretation was that AI companies can train on material they are licensed to use, but the courts have deemed that Anthropic pirated this material as they were not licensed to use it.

  In other words, if Anthropic bought the physical or digital books, it would be fine so long as their AI couldn’t spit it out verbatim, but they didn’t even do that, i.e. the AI crawler pirated the book.

  source

  • devils_advocate@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Does buying the book give you license to digitise it?

    Does owning a digital copy of the book give you license to convert it into another format and copy it into a database?

    Definitions of “Ownership” can be very different.

    source

    • VoterFrog@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      It seems like a lot of people misunderstand copyright so let’s be clear: the answer is yes. You can absolutely digitize your books. You can rip your movies and store them on a home server and run them through compression algorithms.

      Copyright exists to prevent others from redistributing your work so as long as you’re doing all of that for personal use, the copyright owner has no say over what you do with it.

      You even have some degree of latitude to create and distribute works from those with a violation only occurring when you distribute something pretty damn close to a copy of the original. Some examples: create a word cloud of a book, analyze the tone of news article to help you trade stocks, produce an image containing the most prominent color in every frame of a movie, or create a search index of the words found on all websites on the internet.

      You can absolutely do the same kinds of things an AI does with a work as a human.

      source
    • Enkimaru@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      You can digitize the books you own. You do not need a license for that. And of course you could put that digital format into a database. As databases are explicit exceptions from copyright law. If you want to go to the extreme: delete first copy. Then you have only in the database. However: AIs/LLMs are not based on data bases. But on neural networks. The original data gets lost when “learned”.

      source

      • nednobbins@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        If you want to go to the extreme: delete first copy.

        You can; as I understand it, the only legal requirement is that you only use one copy at a time.

        ie. I can give my book to a friend after I’m done reading it; I can make a copy of a book and keep them at home and at the office and switch off between reading them; I’m not allowed to make a copy of the book hand one to a friend and then both of us read it at the same time.

        source

        • -> View More Comments
    • booly@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Does buying the book give you license to digitise it?

      Does owning a digital copy of the book give you license to convert it into another format and copy it into a database?

      Yes. That’s what the court ruled here. If you legally obtain a printed copy of a book you are free to digitize it or archive it for yourself. And you’re allowed to keep that digital copy, analyze and index it and search it, in your personal library.

      Anthropic’s practice of buying physical books, removing the bindings, scanning the pages, and digitizing the content while destroying the physical book was found to be legal, so long as Anthropic didn’t distribute that library outside of its own company.

      source
• nednobbins@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  That’s not what it says.

  Neither you nor an AI is allowed to take a book without authorization; that includes downloading and stealing it. That has nothing to do with plagiarism; it’s just theft.

  Assuming that the book has been legally obtained, both you and an AI are allowed to read that book, learn from it, and use the knowledge you obtained.

  Both you and the AI need to follow existing copyright laws and licensing when it comes to redistributing that work.

  “Plagiarism” is the act of claiming someone else’s work as your own and it’s orthogonal to the use of AI. If you ask either a human or an AI to produce an essay on the philosophy surrounding suicide, you’re fairly likely to include some Shakespeare quotes. It’s only plagiarism if you or the AI fail to provide attribution.

  source
• Enkimaru@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Why would it be plagiarism if you use the knowledge you gain from a book?

  source
• FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  You can “use” them to learn from, just like “AI” can.

  What exactly do you think AI does when it “learns” from a book, for example? Do you think it will just spit out the entire book if you ask it to?

  source

  • gaja@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I am educated on this. When an ai learns, it takes an input through a series of functions and are joined at the output. The set of functions that produce the best output have their functions developed further. Individuals do not process information like that. With poor exploration and biasing, the output of an AI model could look identical to its input. It did not “learn” anymore than a downloaded video ran through a compression algorithm.

    source

    • Enkimaru@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      You are obviously not educated on this.

      It did not “learn” anymore than a downloaded video ran through a compression algorithm. Just: LoLz.

      source

      • hoppolito@mander.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        I am not sure what your contention, or gotcha, is with the comment above but they are quite correct. And additionally chose quite an apt example with video compression since in most ways current ‘AI’ effectively functions as a compression algorithm, just for our language corpora instead of video.

        source

        • -> View More Comments
      • gaja@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        I’ve hand calculated forward propagation (neural networks). AI does not learn, its statically optimized. AI “learning” is curve fitting. Human learning requires understanding, which AI is not capable of.

        source

        • -> View More Comments
  • DeathsEmbrace@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It cant speak or use any words without it being someone elses words it learned from? Unless its giving sources everything is always from something it learned because it cannot speak or use words without that source in the first place?

    source

    • nednobbins@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      prompt: Make up a word that is not found anywhere on the internet. If I do a search for that word, it should not exist. Provide example usage.

      Qwen3-235B-A22B:

      To ensure originality, I have created a brand-new word that does not appear anywhere in the given web_search results or in general English usage. Virethra (pronounced: vye-RETH-ruh)

      Part of speech: noun

      Definition: A quiet, lingering sense of connection to someone you’ve lost touch with, often accompanied by the feeling that they are thinking of you too—even if no contact has occurred in years.

      Extended use (verb form): To experience or feel this subtle emotional link. Example Sentences:

      Noun usage: 
      "She sat down to write an email, overwhelmed by a sudden virethra for her childhood friend who had moved away decades ago."  
      
      Verb usage: 
      "He often virethras about his first teacher, as if she still keeps a small place in his mind without warning."  
      
      Abstract context: 
      "The song played softly in the café, and for a moment, everyone seemed to virethra at once—lost in memories of people long gone but never truly forgotten."  
      

      source

      • kux@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Make up a word that is not found anywhere on the internet

        Returns word that is found on the internet as a brand of nose rings, as a youtube username, as an already made up word in fantasy fiction, and as a (ocr?) typo of urethra

        source

        • -> View More Comments