ninetyninenine parent
Agreed. If I memorize a book and I am deployed into the world to talk about what I memorized that is not a violation of copyright. Which is reasonable logically because essentially this is what an LLM is doing.
You can talk about it, but you can't sell tickets to an event where you recite from memory all the poems written by someone else without their permission.
LLMs may sometimes reproduce exact copies of chunks of text, but I would say it also matters that this is an irrelevant use case that is not the main value proposition that drives LLM company revenues, it's not the use case that's marketed and it's not the use case that people in real life use it for.
It might be different if you are a commercial product which couldn’t have been created without incorporating the contents of all those books.
Humans, animals, hardware and software are treated differently by law because they have different constraints and capabilities.
But a commercial product is reaching parity with human capability.
Let's be real, Humans have special treatment (more special than animals as we can eat and slaughter animals but not other humans) because WE created the law to serve humans.
So in terms of being fair across the board LLMs are no different. But there's no harm in giving ourselves special treatment.
Generative AIs are very different from humans because they can be copied losslessly and scaled tremendously, and also have no individual liability, nor awareness of how similar their output is to something in their training material. They are very different in constraints and capabilities from humans in all sorts of ways. For one, a human will likely never reproduce a book they read without being aware that that’s what they are doing.