Human time is inherently valuable, computer time is not.
The issue with LLMs is that they allow doing things at a massive scale which would previously be prohibitively time consuming. (You could argue but them how much electricity is worth one human life?)
If I "write" a book by taking another and replacing every word with a synonym, that's obviously plagiarism and obviously copyright infringement. How about also changing the word order? How about rewording individual paragraphs while keeping the general structure? It's all still derivative work but as you make it less detectable, the time and effort required is growing to become uneconomical. An LLM can do it cheaply. It can mix and match parts of many works but it's all still a derivative of those works combined. After all, if it wasn't, it would produce equally good output with a tiny fraction of the training data.
The outcome is that a small group of people (those making LLMs and selling access to their output) get to make huge amounts of money off of the work of a group that is several orders of magnitude larger (essentially everyone who has written something on the internet) without compensating the larger group.
That is fundamentally exploitative, whether the current laws accounted for that situation or not.
I see elements of that here. Buying copyrighted works not to be exposed and be inspired, nor to utilize the aithor's talents, but to fuel a commercialization of sound-a-likes.
Keep in mind, the Authors in the lawsuit are not claiming the _output_ is copyright infringement so Alsup isn't deciding that.
You're referencing Midler v Ford Motor Co in the 9th circuit. This case largely applies to California, not the whole nation. Even then, it would take one Supreme Court case to overturn it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_Mouse#Walt_Disney_Produ...
I'm on the Air Pirates side for the case linked, by the way.
However, AI is not a parody. It's not adding to the cultural expression like a parody would.
Let's forget all the law stuff and these silly hypotheticals. Let's think of humanity instead:
Is AI contributing to education and/or culture _right now_, or is it trying to make money? I think they're trying to make money.
Says who?
> Is AI contributing to education and/or culture _right now_, or is it trying to make money?
How on earth are those things mutually exclusive? Also, whether or not it's being used to make money is completely irrelevant to whether or not it is copyright infringement.
Artists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAG-AFTRA
> How on earth are those things mutually exclusive?
Put those on a spectrum and rethink what I said.
> completely irrelevant to whether or not it is copyright infringement
_Again_, leave aside law minutiae and hypotheticals.
> Artists.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAG-AFTRA
Do you have a link that has their stance on how AI is harming culture? The best I could find is https://www.sagaftra.org/contracts-industry-resources/member...
I can't find anything in there or its linked articles about culture. I do find quite a bit about synthetic performers and digital replicas and making sure that people who do voice acting don't have their performance used to generate material that is done at a discounted rate and doesn't reimburse the performer.
https://www.sagaftra.org/ongoing-fight-ai-protections-makes-...
> Protective A.I. guardrails for actors who work in video games remain a point of contention in the Interactive Media Agreement negotiations which have been ongoing from October 2022 until last month’s strike. Other A.I.-related panels Crabtree-Ireland participated in included a U.S. Department of Justice and Stanford University co-hosted event about promoting competition in A.I., as well as a Vanderbilt University summit on music law and generative A.I. SAG-AFTRA Executive Vice President Linda Powell discussed the interactive negotiations and A.I.’s many implications for creatives during her keynote speech at an Art in the Age of A.I. symposium put on by Villa Albertine at the French Embassy.
> She said A.I. represents “a turning point in our culture,” adding, “I think it’s important that we be participants in it and not passengers in it ... We need to make our voices known to the handful of people who are building and profiting off of this brave new world.”
This doesn't indicate that its good or bad, but rather that they want to make sure that people are in control of it and people are compensated for the works that are created from their performance.
How many copies? They're not serving a single client.
Libraries need to have multiple e-book licenses, after all.
It changes the definition of what a "legal copy" is but the general idea that the copy must be legal still stands.
Personally I like to frame most AI problems by substituting a human (or humans) for the AI. Works pretty well most of the time.
In this case if you hired a bunch of artists/writers that somehow had never seen a Disney movie and to train them to make crappy Disney clones you made them watch all the movies it certainly would be legal to do so but only if they had legit copies in the training room. Pirating the movies would be illegal.
Though the downside is it does create a training moat. If you want to create the super-brain AI that's conversant on the corpus of copyrighted human literature you're going to need a training library worth millions