The thing is, AI is not a “who”, it’s a “what”. A license that permits human beings to read a thing may not be sufficient to authorize AIs to read a thing.
That’s what the legal system needs to thrash out: is feeding information to an AI a separate right that needs to be assigned specifically by contract or license, or is it a subset of the human right to read a published document that the human has legitimate access to? If it is separate, then any work outside the public domain that doesn’t specifically have an authorization for AIs attached is going to be off-limits as training data, because rights not specifically assigned are reserved unto the copyright holder.
Given the speed with which the law typically moves, it’s going to be years before we have an answer.
If that is the case then this is already firmly settled. It is clear that you do not need special authorization to read a book through glasses. You reading a book through any other device would be no different.
“Reading” is the act of viewing the unaltered text. It’s possible for a LLM to have text in its training set that no human has ever viewed in its original form. So no, a LLM is not equivalent to a pair of glasses in this case.
In effect, a LLM is a fancy datanbase that spits back modified subsets of its stored information in response to queries. Does this mean that the original data was “stored in a retrieval system” without permission (specifically forbidden by British copyright law, I believe, and possibly others)? Is the LLM creating “unauthorized derivative works”, which is illegal in many countries? Just where is the line between a derivative work and a work “inspired by” another, but still legal, anyway? Is it the same in every jurisdiction?
I’m not a lawyer, and I have no idea how many worms are going to creep out of this can, but one thing I’m absolutely certain of is that it isn’t going to be simple to sort out, no matter how many people would like it to be or think that “common sense” is on their side.
“Reading” is the act of viewing the unaltered text.
Something “what” cannot do. LLMs have no concept of text, only the physical manifestation of text, applying transformations on that physical manifestation – just like glasses.
Does this mean that the original data was “stored in a retrieval system” without permission
Information is stored within glasses, at least for a short period of time. So, yes, you have created a storage and retrieval system when you use glasses. They would be useless otherwise. If that’s illegal, I hope you have good vision. Except your eye does the same thing, so…
it isn’t going to be simple to sort out
It only needs to be as difficult as we want it to be. And there is no reason to make it difficult.
. . . Wow. I’m going to be polite and assume that you never took physics in high school, instead of failing the unit on optics. Might want to bone up on that before you make an argument that deals with the physics of lenses, just sayin’.
You don’t appear to have much understanding of how the law operates either. It’s always complicated and difficult, and judges take a dim view of people who try to twist words around to mean something other than the contract defines them to mean.
I’m going to be polite and assume that you never took physics in high school
Polite would be to explain yourself, not turn to a silly logical fallacy that adds nothing and is in bad faith. Always telling when this happens.
It’s always complicated and difficult
We can make it difficult. It doesn’t need to be. Especially when there is nothing new here. We’ve been reading books into neural networks for 50-plus years. That we’ve happened to achieved a speed milestone doesn’t change anything legally. It isn’t that a speed limit was violated.
The thing is, AI is not a “who”, it’s a “what”. A license that permits human beings to read a thing may not be sufficient to authorize AIs to read a thing.
That’s what the legal system needs to thrash out: is feeding information to an AI a separate right that needs to be assigned specifically by contract or license, or is it a subset of the human right to read a published document that the human has legitimate access to? If it is separate, then any work outside the public domain that doesn’t specifically have an authorization for AIs attached is going to be off-limits as training data, because rights not specifically assigned are reserved unto the copyright holder.
Given the speed with which the law typically moves, it’s going to be years before we have an answer.
If that is the case then this is already firmly settled. It is clear that you do not need special authorization to read a book through glasses. You reading a book through any other device would be no different.
“Reading” is the act of viewing the unaltered text. It’s possible for a LLM to have text in its training set that no human has ever viewed in its original form. So no, a LLM is not equivalent to a pair of glasses in this case.
In effect, a LLM is a fancy datanbase that spits back modified subsets of its stored information in response to queries. Does this mean that the original data was “stored in a retrieval system” without permission (specifically forbidden by British copyright law, I believe, and possibly others)? Is the LLM creating “unauthorized derivative works”, which is illegal in many countries? Just where is the line between a derivative work and a work “inspired by” another, but still legal, anyway? Is it the same in every jurisdiction?
I’m not a lawyer, and I have no idea how many worms are going to creep out of this can, but one thing I’m absolutely certain of is that it isn’t going to be simple to sort out, no matter how many people would like it to be or think that “common sense” is on their side.
Something “what” cannot do. LLMs have no concept of text, only the physical manifestation of text, applying transformations on that physical manifestation – just like glasses.
Information is stored within glasses, at least for a short period of time. So, yes, you have created a storage and retrieval system when you use glasses. They would be useless otherwise. If that’s illegal, I hope you have good vision. Except your eye does the same thing, so…
It only needs to be as difficult as we want it to be. And there is no reason to make it difficult.
. . . Wow. I’m going to be polite and assume that you never took physics in high school, instead of failing the unit on optics. Might want to bone up on that before you make an argument that deals with the physics of lenses, just sayin’.
You don’t appear to have much understanding of how the law operates either. It’s always complicated and difficult, and judges take a dim view of people who try to twist words around to mean something other than the contract defines them to mean.
Polite would be to explain yourself, not turn to a silly logical fallacy that adds nothing and is in bad faith. Always telling when this happens.
We can make it difficult. It doesn’t need to be. Especially when there is nothing new here. We’ve been reading books into neural networks for 50-plus years. That we’ve happened to achieved a speed milestone doesn’t change anything legally. It isn’t that a speed limit was violated.