I can't post someone else's book on my website and charge 5 bucks to read it.

No, but you can read someone else's book and then later write a book inspired by theirs and sell that.

Which is what ai does, as far as I know.

I'm not trying to argue with the rest of your comment, but that middle part looks like false equivalency to me. "I can do this but not that, so why would ai developers be allowed to do this completely different thing" just has no logic to it.

The AI isn't redistributing copies of even sections of the book, it just learnt from it. It's like when you read books and gain an understanding of how they are structured and such and then you write your own book based on what you've learnt from reading books.

Are the AIs reprinting? Seems like they are quoting, and when there’s not verbatim content whatever’s coming out is a derivative work transformed by combination with the rest of the training set and the prompt.

Like, have we seen a chatbot post a passage of a story or textbook without it being in a context like “hey quote me some of that story or textbook”?

It exists. It is copyright. We just haven't seen the ends of the current batch of lawsuits just yet.

Yeah, I'm not sure how I feel about it... But I somehow instinctively feel that a human being "inspired" by other works is different to a neural network being trained on a novel. I don't know that I can articulate specifically why one feels okay and the other doesn't... But that's how it feels to me.

There are already laws regarding producing works too similar to copyrighted material.

Production is infringement, not training.

If I feed all of Stephen King into a LLM such that it learns what well written horror narratives looks like, and it produces a story with original and different plot elements distinct from copyrighted works, that's fine.

If it starts writing about killer clowns thwarted by child orgies in the sewers then you might have an infringement problem.

And ironically, the best tool for protecting copyrighted material from infringement is going to be...LLMs (acting in a discriminator role comparing indexed copy to protected works).

If 'training' ends up successfully labeled as infringement we're going to end up with much worse long term outcomes in jurisdictions that honor that ruling than we otherwise would.

This is the longer tail masses adopting MPAA math in trying to tally potential losses and in the efforts to protect the status quo are shooting themselves in the foot on laying claim to the future of the industry, inevitably leading to being left out of the next round of growth.

Also, from an 'infringenent' standpoint it just means we'll see less open models and more closed ones which ends up using other jurisdictional models to launder copyrighted materials for synthetic training data.

This is beyond dumb.

What do they mean train? If by reading then how can that be wrong. But if copying the text and using it as it's own works that would be wrong.

After reading the article the authors are fucking stupid. Makes me not want to support their books. If you get mad because AI read you book then they could sue if someone asked me about the authors books and I wrote a description of what I read.

I really need you to read this: https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/

Well of course, putting it on the open internet is very intentionally making it available for everyone to see. If you don't want everyone to see it, don't put it on the open internet. The issue is what people do with it, not whether they can access it. Copyright forbids distributing copyrighted data. The entire point of that it is so that you can make it available to be seen but protected from people copying it. However, there is no distribution or storage of copyrighted material with an LLM - there is no copy. I think OpenAI will be OK, but these things are never certain when the big lawyers are let loose.

Distributing the training dataset, though, that could well be a problem.