Unpopular Opinion

I agree with some other comments that this is a question of public domain vs. copyright. However, even copyright has exceptions, notably fair use in the US.

TL;DR: If I can create art imitating [insert webcomic artist here] based on fair use, or use their work for artistic inspiration, it's legal, but when a machine does it, it's illegal?

One of the chief AI critics, Sarah Andersen, made a claim 9 months ago that when AI generated the following output for "Sarah Andersen comic", it clearly imitated her style, and if any AI company is to be believed, it's going to get more accurate with later models, possibly creating a believable comic including text.

Regardless of how accurately the AI can draw the comics (as long as they aren't effectively identical to a single specific comic of hers), shouldn't this just qualify as fair use? I can imitate SA's style too and make a parody comic, or even just go the lazy way and change some text like alt-right "memers" did (politics and unfunniness aside, I believe the comic should be legal if they replaced "© Sarah Andersen" with "Parody of comic by Sarah Andersen"). As long as the content is distributed as "homage", "parody", "criticism" etc., doesn't directly harm the Sarah Andersen's financial interests, and makes it clear that the author is clearly not her, I think there should be no issue even if it features likeness of trademarked characters, phrases and concepts.

Makes me ashamed there is a book by her in my house (my sister received it as a gift).

It would be nice if the AI industry had one big positive effect by finally reigning in the overboarding copyright laws.

Here’s an analogy that can be used to test this idea.

Let’s say I want to write a book but I totally suck as an author and I have no idea how to write a good one. To get some guidelines and inspiration, I go to the library and read a bunch of books. Then, I’ll take those ideas and smash them together to produce a mediocre book that anyone would refuse to publish. Anyway, I could also buy those books, but the end result would still be the same, except that it would cost me a lot more. Either way, this sort of learning and writing procedure is entirely legal, and people have been doing this for ages. Even if my book looks and feels a lot like LOTR, it probably won’t be that easy to sue me unless I copy large parts of it word for word. Blatant plagiarism might result in a lawsuit, but I guess this isn’t what the AI training data debate is all about, now is it?

However, if I pirated those books, that could result in some trouble. However, someone would need to read my miserable book, find a suspicious passage, check my personal bookshelf and everything I have ever borrowed etc. That way, it might be possible to prove that I could not have come up with a specific line of text except by pirating some book. If an AI is trained on pirated data, that’s obviously something worth the debate.

This is not an opinion. You have made a statement of fact. And you are wrong.

At law, something being publicly available does not mean it is allowed to be used for any purpose. Copyright law still applies. In most countries, making something publicly available does not cause all copyrights to be disclaimed on it. You are still not permitted to, for example, repost it elsewhere without the copyright holder's permission, or, as some courts have ruled, use it to train an AI that then creates derivative works. Derivative works are not permitted without the copyright holder's permission. Courts have ruled that this could mean everything an AI generates is a derivative work of everything in its training data and, therefore, copyright infringement.

"Statistiac" of course. And yes I would

I don't get the AI hate.

As long as it's licensed as Creative Common of some sort. Copyrighted materials are copyrighted and shouldn't be used without concent , this protect also individuals not only corporations. (Excuse my English)

Edit: Your argument about probability and parameter size is inapplicable in my mind. The same can be said about jpeg lossy compression.

Generally the argument isn't public vs. private, it's public domain vs. copyright.

You want to train an LLM using the contents of Project Gutenberg? Great, go for it!

You want to train an LLM using bootlegged epubs stolen from Amazon? Now that's a different deal.