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points by alistairSH 2 days ago | 0 comments
Distinction without a difference. They pirated books for the purpose of using them to train their models.

The noteworthy thing here, IMO, is the judge seems to have explicitly stated that using legally-acquired works to train AI models falls under fair use.

[–] kenmacd 2 days ago
I think it's a significant distinction. The original title implies that the training was illegal when the court actually found that the training was fair use. It implies that Anthropic was required to ask the professors for permission to train on their books.

What the actual ruling found was that the professors should have been paid some tens of dollars for 1 copy of their book.

(Whether you agree with it or not is another matter)

[–] lambdaone 2 days ago
Copyright maximalists would argue that even making a copy in RAM would be copyright infringement.
[–] opello 2 days ago
Which seems to open the door to arguments like: I'm not consuming pirated media, I'm studying it for my aspiring content creation pivot!
[–] HotHotLava 2 days ago
How does it open the door to that? That's literally the argument that was rejected by saying the fair use defense only counts for the legally-acquired media.
[–] opello 2 days ago
I think I skipped past this part of the article:

> While blocking the piracy of work to train AI

when I read the quote:

> “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different,”

That's my mistake.

I went back and read the actual opinion, and while I'm disappointed that training an LLM is fair-use transformative, I'm hopeful about a trial on the subject of the pirated copies. But I'm also worried that the argument seems like it might succeed if such training is "one-shot" without the central library or repository of intermediate copies. And that doesn't seem like a good outcome. But maybe my pessimism here is also misplaced.

[–] tmtvl 1 day ago
It's like fan fiction: sneaking into theatre to watch a movie without paying for admission is illegal, but writing fan fiction about the movie and publishing it on AO3 is legal.