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Meta admits using pirated books to train AI, but won't pay for it
(www.techspot.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
No worries, you've been very respectable. My feelings weren't particularly hurt, I just felt the need to call it out.
Personally, I'm against downvoting things merely because they are wrong. If someone says something that's wrong, it may well be a commonly held misconception, and downvoting it also demotes any correction that has been given, which means other people who hold the misconception are less likely to be corrected.
And that's beside the fact that I don't really think I'm completely wrong here :o)
To be a little more specific, I don't want to go down the route of blaming AI itself for copyright infringement. That is to say, whether or not AI is bound by laws the way that humans are. I think it is only worthwhile considering whether the AI developer and/or the users are infringing copyright through their creation or use of AI. In particular, I think the legal or philosophical question of whether AI is affected by laws in the same way humans are is pointless when we're just talking about LLM's and not a true Artificial Intelligence.
Yes absolutely, the LLM itself does not include copyrighted works. That's not what I'm arguing. The two issues I take are with the database of information the LLM is trained on. This database does contain copyrighted works, AI developers admit that it does, but they claim it is fair use research. I disagree with this claim, to use the terminology from one of your links their "research" is not "scholarly" - it is commercial product development.
The other issue is that the LLM can reproduce copyrighted work. While I agree with you in some sense that the user of the LLM is instructing it to infringe copyright, and thus the user is responsible, in another sense I think the developer is also responsible because they have given the tool the capability to do this. This is perhaps not a strong argument, particularly when the developers have made efforts to fix these "bugs" as they come to light.
However my most important point is that the developers have infringed copyright by building a training database full of copyrighted works, which the LLM was then trained on. The LLM itself isn't copyright infringement, but they infringed copyright to develop it.