Those claiming AI training on copyrighted works is “theft” misunderstand key aspects of copyright law and AI technology. Copyright protects specific expressions of ideas, not the ideas themselves. When AI systems ingest copyrighted works, they’re extracting general patterns and concepts - the “Bob Dylan-ness” or “Hemingway-ness” - not copying specific text or images.
This process is akin to how humans learn by reading widely and absorbing styles and techniques, rather than memorizing and reproducing exact passages. The AI discards the original text, keeping only abstract representations in “vector space”. When generating new content, the AI isn’t recreating copyrighted works, but producing new expressions inspired by the concepts it’s learned.
This is fundamentally different from copying a book or song. It’s more like the long-standing artistic tradition of being influenced by others’ work. The law has always recognized that ideas themselves can’t be owned - only particular expressions of them.
Moreover, there’s precedent for this kind of use being considered “transformative” and thus fair use. The Google Books project, which scanned millions of books to create a searchable index, was ruled legal despite protests from authors and publishers. AI training is arguably even more transformative.
While it’s understandable that creators feel uneasy about this new technology, labeling it “theft” is both legally and technically inaccurate. We may need new ways to support and compensate creators in the AI age, but that doesn’t make the current use of copyrighted works for AI training illegal or unethical.
For those interested, this argument is nicely laid out by Damien Riehl in FLOSS Weekly episode 744. https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly/episodes/744
Many people quote this part saying that this is not the case and this is the main reason why the argument is not valid.
Let’s take a step back and not put in discussion how current “AI” learns vs how human learn.
The key point for me here is that humans DO PAY (or at least are expected to…) to use and learn from copyrighted material. So if we’re equating “AI” method of learning with humans’, both should be subject to the the same rules and regulations. Meaning that “AI” should pay for using copyrighted material.
Do we expect people to pay to learn from copyrighted but freely accessible works?
In general — yes. Most of the time they do so by subjecting their eyeballs or ears to ads. Do you think it’s a good idea to flood AI models with ads as well?
don’t humans normally use adblockers? Or the library?
The vast majority do not. We’re in a pretty tech savvy bubble here on Lemmy.
Point is that accessing a website with an adblocker has never been considered a copyright violation.
Thanks to everyone that has replied, all fair points. When you use (read, view, listen to…) copyrighted material you’re subject to the licensing rules, no matter if it’s free (as in beer) or not.
This means that quoting more than what’s considered fair use is a violation of the license, for instance. In practice a human would not be able to quote exactly a 1000 words document just on the first read but “AI” can, thus infringing one of the licensing clauses.
Some licensing on copyrighted material is also explicitly forbidding to use the full content by automated systems (once they were web crawlers for search engines)
Basically all these possibilities or actual licensing infringements would require a negotiation between the involved parties.
You’ve got that backwards. Copyright protects the owner’s right to distribution. Reading, viewing, listening to a work is never copyright infringement. Which is to say that making it publicly available is the owner exercising their rights.
Only on very specific circumstances, with some particular coaxing, can you get an AI to do this with certain works that are widely quoted throughout its training data. There may be some very small scale copyright violations that occur here but it’s largely a technical hurdle that will be overcome before long (i.e. wholesale regurgitation isn’t an actual goal of AI technology).
Again, copyright doesn’t govern how you’re allowed to view a work. robots.txt is not a legally enforceable license. At best, the website owner may be able to restrict access via computer access abuse laws, but not copyright. And it would be completely irrelevant to the question of whether or not AI can train on non-internet data sets like books, movies, etc.
While I am generally in the “copyright doesn’t matter when it comes to AI” camp, I also work in advertising. Most people do not use ad blockers.
This is an interesting point that I haven’t previously considered.
The library is legally allowed to hand out the books. However they are not allowed to replicate them and you are not allowed to borrow them with the goal to scan and copy it.
It depends on the purpose of the model I suppose
This is interesting. It seems a fair resolution would be to pay the content owner what they would have made in ad revenue.
As long as the AI is not reproducing original works to the extent that it violates fair use, I don’t think copyright laws really apply. But there’s definitely lost revenue.