> Personally I like to frame most AI problems by substituting a human (or humans) for the AI. Works pretty well most of the time.
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.
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.