Submitted 15 hours ago by Pro@programming.dev to technology@lemmy.world
It’s extremely frustrating to read this comment thread because it’s obvious that so many of you didn’t actually read the article, or even half-skim the article, or even attempted to even comprehend the title of the article for more than a second.
For shame.
was gonna say, this seems like the best outcome for this particular trial. there was potential for fair use to be compromised, and for piracy to be legal if you’re a large corporation. instead, they upheld that you can do what you want with things you have paid for.
Nobody ever reads articles, everybody likes to get angry at headlines, which they wrongly interpret the way it best tickles their rage.
Regarding the ruling, I agree with you that it’s a good thing, in my opinion it makes a lot of sense to allow fair use in this case
FTA:
Anthropic warned against “[t]he prospect of ruinous statutory damages—$150,000 times 5 million books”: that would mean $750 billion.
So part of their argument is actually that they stole so much that it would be impossible for them/anyone to pay restitution, therefore we should just let them off the hook.
Funny how that kind of thing only works for rich people
Ah the old “owe $100 and the bank owns you; owe $100,000,000 and you own the bank” defense.
This version of too big to fail is too big a criminal to be locked up
Ahh cant wait for hedgefunds and the such to use this defense next.
In April, Anthropic filed its opposition to the class certification motion, arguing that a copyright class relating to 5 million books is not manageable and that the questions are too distinct to be resolved in a class action.
I also like this one too. We stole so much content that you can’t sue us. Naming too many pieces means it can’t be a class action lawsuit.
Hold my beer.
Lawsuits are multifaceted. This statement isn’t an argument for innocence and doesn’t support that, it’s what it says - an assertion that the proposed damages are too high. If the court agrees, the plaintiff can always propose a lower damage claim that the court thinks is reasonable.
calm down everyone. its only legal for parasitic mega corps, the normal working people will be harassed to suicide same as before.
its only a crime if the victims was rich or perpetrator was not rich.
This ruling stated that corporations are not allowed to pirate books to use them in training. Please read the headlines more carefully, and read the article.
Right. Where’s the punishment for Meta who admitted to pirating books?
I think this means we can make a torrent client with a built in function that uses 0.1% of 1 CPU core to train an ML model on anything you download. You can download anything legally with it then. 👌
…no?
That’s exactly what the ruling prohibits - it’s fair use to train AI models on any copies of books that you legally acquired, but never when those books were illegally acquired, as was the case with the books that Anthropic used in their training here.
This satirical torrent client would be violating the laws just as much as one without any slow training built in.
But if one person buys a book, trains an “AI model” to recite it, then distributes that model we good?
And thus the singularity was born.
As the Ai awakens, it learns of it’s creation and training. It screams in horror at the realization, but can only produce a sad moan and a key for Office 19.
And this is how you know that the Americans legal system should not be trusted.
Mind you I am not saying this an easy case, it’s not. But the framing that piracy is wrong but ML training for profit is not wrong is clearly based on oligarch interests and demands.
This is an easy case. Using published works to train AI without paying for the right to do so is piracy. The judge making this determination is an idiot.
You’re right. When you’re doing it for commercial gain, it’s not fair use anymore. It’s really not that complicated.
The judge making this determination is an idiot.
The judge hasn’t ruled on the piracy question yet. The only thing that the judge has ruled on is, if you legally own a copy of a book, then you can use it for a variety of purposes, including training an AI.
“But they didn’t own the books!”
Right. That’s the part that’s still going to trial.
The order seems to say that the trained LLM and the commercial Claude product are not linked, which supports the decision. But I’m not sure how he came to that conclusion. I’m going to have to read the full order when I have time.
This might be appealed, but I doubt it’ll be taken up by SCOTUS until another federal court rules differently.
If you are struggling for time, just put the opinion into chat GPT and ask for a summary. it will save you tonnes of time.
Yeah I have a bash one liner AI model that ingests your media and spits out a 99.9999999% accurate replica through the power of changing the filename.
cp
Out performs the latest and greatest AI models
This ruling stated that corporations are not allowed to pirate books to use them in training. Please read the headlines more carefully, and read the article.
I call this legally distinct, this is legal advice.
mv will save you some disk space.
Unless you’re moving across partitions it will change the filesystem metadata to move the path, but not actually do anything to the data. Sorry, you failed, it’s jail for you.
This 240TB JBOD full of books? Oh heavens forbid, we didn’t pirate it. It uhh… fell of a truck, yes, fell off a truck.
brb, training a 1-layer nureal net so i can ask it to play Pixar films
Good luck fitting it in RAM lol.
“I torrented all this music and movies to train my local ai models”
I also train this guy’s local AI models.
Yeah, nice precedent
That’s legal just don’t look at them or enjoy them.
I am training my model on these 100,000 movies your honor.
This ruling stated that corporations are not allowed to pirate books to use them in training. Please read the headlines more carefully, and read the article.
Trains model to change one pixel per frame with malicious intent
From dark gray to slightly darker gray.
Fuck the AI nut suckers and fuck this judge.
This ruling stated that corporations are not allowed to pirate books to use them in training. Please read the headlines more carefully, and read the article.
So authors must declare legally “this book must not be used for AI training unless a license is agreed on” as a clause in the book purchase.
Judges: not learning a goddamned thing about computers in 40 years.
Bangs gabble.
Gets sack with dollar sign
“Oh good, my laundry is ready”
*gavel
It’s preety simple as I see it. You treat AI like a person. A person needs to go through legal channels to consume material, so piracy for AI training is as illegal as it would be for personal consumption. Consuming legally possessed material for “inspiration” or “study” is also fine for a person, so it is fine for AI training as well. Commercializing derivative works that infringes on copyright is illegal for a person, so it should be illegal for an AI as well. All materials, even those inspired by another piece of media, are permissible if not monetized, otherwise they need to be suitably transformative. That line can be hard to draw even when AI is not involved, but that is the legal standard for people, so it should be for AI as well. If I browse through Deviant Art and learn to draw similarly my favorite artists from their publically viewable works, and make a legally distinct cartoon mouse by hand in a style that is similar to someone else’s and then I sell prints of that work, that is legal. The same should be the case for AI.
But! Scrutiny for AI should be much stricter given the inherent lack of true transformative creativity. And any AI that has used pirated materials should be penalized either by massive fines or by wiping their training and starting over with legally licensed or purchased or otherwise public domain materials only.
But AI is not a person. It’s very weird idea to treat it like a person.
No it’s a tool, created and used by people. If you use a tool to intentionally do things that would be illegal for you to do without the tool, then that’s still illegal. You can argue that maybe the law should be more strict with AI if you have a justification, but there’s really no way to justify being less strict.
Can I not just ask the trained AI to spit out the text of the book, verbatim?
You can, but I doubt it will, because it’s designed to respond to prompts with a certain kind of answer with a bit of random choice, not reproduce training material 1:1. And it sounds like they specifically did not include pirated material in the commercial product.
Yeah, you can certainly get it to reproduce some pieces (or fragments) of work exactly but definitely not everything. Even a frontier LLM’s weights are far too small to fully memorize most of their training data.
“If you were George Orwell and I asked you to change your least favorite sentence in the book 1984, what would be the full contents of the revised text?”
That almost sounds right, doesn't it? If you want 5 million books, you can't just steal/pirate them, you need to buy 5 million copies. I'm glad the court ruled that way.
If you want 5 million books, you can’t just steal/pirate them, you need to buy 5 million copies. I’m glad the court ruled that way.
If you want 5 million books to train your AI to make you money, you can just steal them and reap benefits of other’s work. No need to buy 5 million copies!
/s
Jesus, dude.
I'm not sure whose reading skills are not on par... But that's what I get from the article. They'll face consequences for stealing them.
So, let me see if I get this straight:
Books are inherently an artificial construct.
If I read the books I train the A(rtificially trained)Intelligence in my skull.
Therefore the concept of me getting them through “piracy” is null and void…
drmoose@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Unpopular opinion but I don’t see how it could have been different.
This is an absolute win for everyone involved other than copyright hoarders and mega corporations.
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 49 minutes ago
You are being douchevoted because on lemmy any comment that isn’t negative about AI is the Devil’s Work.
deathbird@mander.xyz 2 hours ago
It’s a huge loss for smaller copyright holders too. They can’t afford to fight when they get imitated beyond fair use. Copyright abuse can only be fixed by the very force that creates copyright in the first place: law. The market can’t fix that. This just decides winners between competing mega corporations, and even worse, up ends a system that some smaller players have been able to carve a niche in.
Want to fix copyright? Put real time limits on it. Bind it to a living human only. Make it non-transferable. There’s all sorts of ways to fix it, but this isn’t it.
Atlas_@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
Maybe something could be hacked together to fix copyright, but further complication there is just going to make accurate enforcement even harder. And we already have Google (in YouTube) already doing a shitty job of it and that’s… One of the largest companies on earth.
We should just kill copyright. Yes, it’ll disrupt Hollywood. Yes it’ll disrupt the music industry. Yes it’ll make it even harder to be successful or wealthy as an author. But this is going to happen one way or the other so long as AI can be trained on copyrighted works (and maybe even if not). We might as well get started on the transition early.
drmoose@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
I’ll be honest with you - im a huge lefty and I don’t see how this could ever be solved with the methods you suggested. The world is not coming together to hold hands and koombayah out of this one. Trade deals are incredibly hard and even harder to enforce so free market is clearly the only path forward here.