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634

Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not (aifray.com)

submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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(page 6) 12 comments

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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...

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (4 children)

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.

I feel that's a good start. Now we need some more clear regulation on what fair use is and what transformative work is and what isn't. And how that relates to AI. I believe as it's quite a disruptive and profitable business, we should maybe make those companies pay some extra. Not just what I pay for a book. But the first part, that "stealing" can't be "fair" is settled now.

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[–] [email protected] 307 points 5 days ago (16 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 124 points 5 days ago

Ah the old “owe $100 and the bank owns you; owe $100,000,000 and you own the bank” defense.

[–] [email protected] 161 points 5 days ago

Funny how that kind of thing only works for rich people

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[–] [email protected] 149 points 5 days ago (11 children)

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. 👌

[–] [email protected] 48 points 5 days ago (2 children)

And thus the singularity was born.

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[–] [email protected] 122 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (27 children)

And this is how you know that the American 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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

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 there are conflicting federal court rulings.

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[–] [email protected] 73 points 5 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 53 points 5 days ago (1 children)

You're right. When you're doing it for commercial gain, it's not fair use anymore. It's really not that complicated.