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
I’ll train my AI on just the bee movie. Then I’m going to ask it “can you make me a movie about bees”? When it spits the whole movie, I can just watch it or sell it or whatever, it was a creation of my AI, which learned just like any human would! Of course I didn’t even pay for the original copy to train my AI, it’s for learning purposes, and learning should be a basic human right!
That would be like you writing out the bee movie yourself after memorizing the whole movie and claiming it is your own idea or using it as proof that humans memorizing a movie is violating copyright. Just because an AI is violating copyright by outputting the whole bee movie, it doesn’t mean training the AI on copyright stuff is violating copyright.
Let’s just punish the AI companies for outputting copyright stuff instead of for training with them. Maybe that way they would actually go out of their way to make their LLM intelligent enough to not spit out copyrighted content.
Or, we can just make it so that any output made by an AI that is trained on copyrighted stuff cannot be copyrighted.
I don’t think that’s a feasible dream in our current system. They’ll just lobby for it, some senators will say something akin to “art should have been always a hobby, not a profession”, then make adjustments for the current copyright laws so that they can be copyrighted.
If the solution is making the output non-copyrighted it fixes nothing. You can sell the pirating machine on a subscription. And it’s not like Netflix where the content ends when the subscription ends, you have already downloaded all the not-copyrighted content you wanted, and the internet would be full of non-copyrighted AI output.
Instead of selling the bee movie, you sell a bee movie maker, and a spiderman maker, and a titanic maker.
Sure, file a copyright infringement each time you manage to make an AI output copyrighted content. Just run it on a loop and it’s a money making machine. That’s fine by me.
Yeah, because running the AI also have some cost, so you are selling the subscription to run the AI on their server, not it’s output.
I’m not sure what is the legality of selling a bee movie maker, so you’d have to research that one yourself.
It’s not really a money making machine if you lose more money running the AI on your server farm, but whatever floats your boat. Also, there are already lawsuits based on outputs created from chatgpt, so it is exactly what is already happening.
Yeah, making sandwiches also costs money! I have to pay my sandwich making employees to keep the business profitable! How do they expect me to pay for the cheese?
EDIT: also, you completely missed my point. The money making machine is the AI because the copyright owners could just use them every time it produces copyright-protected material if we decided to take that route, which is what the parent comment suggested.
They should pay for the cheese, I’m not arguing against that, but they should be paying it the same amount as a normal human would if they want access to that cheese. No extra fees for access to copyrighted material if you want to use it to train AI vs wanting to consume it yourself.
And I didn’t miss your point. My point was that the reality is already occurring since people are already suing OpenAI for ChatGPT outputs that the people suing are generating themselves, so it’s no longer just a hypothetical. We’ll see if it is a money making machine for them or will they just waste their resources from doing that.
Media is not exactly like cheese though. With cheese, you buy it and it’s yours. Media, however, is protected by copyright. When you watch a movie, you are given a license to watch the movie.
When an AI watches a movie, it’s not really watching it, it’s doing a different action. If the license of the movie says “you can’t use this license to train AI, use the other (more expensive) license for such purposes”, then AIs have extra fees to access the content that humans don’t have to pay.
Both humans and AI consume the content, even if they do not do so in the exact same way. I don’t see the need to differentiate that. It’s not like we have any idea of the mechanism by which humans consume a content to make the differentiation in the first place.
Don’t need to get philosophical about what is the difference between human and AI learning.
“Consumed by AI” and “consumed by a human” are two distinct use cases that can have different terms in a license.
In the meantime I’ll introduce myself into the servers of large corporations and read their emails, codebase, teams and strategic analysis, it’s just learning!
Education is a basic human right (except maybe in Usa, then it should be one there)
Yeah. A human right.
I am thrilled to see the output you get!