Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, and Richard Kadrey are suing OpenAI and Meta over violation of their copyrighted books. The trio says their works were pulled from illegal “shadow libraries” without their consent.
It’s simple: if you have to pay “copyright holders” for anything you use your AI training on, there can be no AI training. They need to ingest all the data they can to become better and it would cost dozen of billions if you had to pay every single piece of content. So we have to pick between a future in which “copyright holders” fight to get their $ or a future where we can push AI to enter a new era
I really don’t think it should be considered copyright infringement to simply ingest data. It doesn’t infringe on copyright for a person to read a book, why should it matter if it’s a simple program or an AI doing it?
That said, if the AI produces something in the exact words or style of a creator without attribution, just like with a person, then it should count as copyright infringement.
It’s all about perceived harm. A creator is not harmed by an AI reading their works. But they are harmed when the AI can produce their style to potentially take business away from them.
If it isn’t copyright infringement to read a book and apply those ideas to make a product (which it isn’t), then it isn’t copyright infringement to train an LLM with the info in a piece of media.
Pretty cut and dry.
