Some people say “it’s OK to ingest copyrighted material automatically at scale, since it’s for learning purposes”. They use two kinds of arguments for this.

Argument A:

A1. It’s a basic human right to be able to learn from things you see. You browse the Internet, you read some source code, you learn. Doesn’t matter what’s the license, you are free to do this.

A2. It’s called “machine learning”, so the machine does the same.

A3. Machine learning can use any content its operators can get a hold of.

This is obviously wrong, because machine is being assigned human rights. We can argue about what exactly are pre-requisites for something to be granted human rights—it’s maybe not a specific physiology (some might say certain smart non-humanoid animals deserve it), but it’s pretty certainly sentience and consciousness. Meanwhile, the whole reason AI tech is big is that there is supposed to no sentient being who would understand (and therefore deserve any right to be treated well and get rewarded). If you take that away and grant AI human rights, then there is no point in this tech.

So, either the machine has human-level sentience and is being forced to work (which humans famously tend to consider “slavery”), born and killed on demand, etc., or the machine is not learning in the sense under consideration because it’s an unthinking tool for its human operator.

Which brings us to argument B:

B1. It’s a basic human right to be able to learn from things you see. You browse the Internet, you read source code, you learn. Doesn’t matter what’s the license, you are free to do this.

B2. If you use a computer or [insert technology] to learn, that’s OK.

B3. An LLM is just another instance of that technology. You use LLM and you learn.

This is wrong for slightly more subtle reasons, but on bright side there’s multiple of them.

First, it’s not clear that someone learns while using Copilot to produce a work for them. If I asked Copilot to write me a Fibonacci number generator, have I learned how to write it? If I ask Midjourney to draw me 2055 Los Angeles skyline in the style of Picasso, did I learn how to draw?

Second, and this is a crucial fallacy, making a computer famously does not require ingesting all of the copyrighted material you can subsequently access through that computer. Said computer can exist just fine without it; the LLMs, however, cannot.

The inputs (knowledge and parts) required to produce the computer you’re using were largely obtained through ordinary ways (patents licensed, hardware paid for), whereas the inputs required to produce an LLM have been, some would say, effectively stolen.

I think one difference is that you are seeing things as defaulting to “not allowed to use the work for whatever purpose, and the only reason it is ok for people to look at it to learn from it, is because they have a human right to do so, which overrides the default”, while I would view things as “by default you can do what you want with the media, provided that it doesn’t go against a particular law (such as rules against distributing copies of it or substantial portions of it, etc.)” .

So, I think linking things to “it is a basic human right” is a mistake.

The argument is not “it is a human right that this can be done, therefore it is allowed.” The argument is “this does not violate any of the rules that could potentially forbid it.” .

> one difference is that you are seeing things as defaulting to “not allowed to use the work for whatever purpose, and the only reason it is ok for people to look at it to learn from it, is because they have a human right to do so, which overrides the default”

I think in law the default is “can use as allowed by the owner”. If the owner doesn’t specify, then the default is something like “can’t distribute”.

This is thanks to the idea of property, and more specifically intellectual property responsible for a lot of innovation (including computing and LLMs themselves).

If you think some sort of intellectual property communism—you make stuff, but you don’t get to own it, and you get what you are given—is best, then fair enough, that’s your opinion.

While I don’t think a full intellectual-property-communism (as you phrase it) would be best, but I do think something a bit closer to it than we currently have would likely be better. (Mostly reducing copyright lengths a decent bit, closer to what they were in the early years of the US.) I think I agree that if implemented correctly, it can be a net benefit in promoting innovation/production-of-good-things. (I also think the existence of trademark law and patent laws are also good, though they may also have some flaws.)

Hm, in terms of defaults, my understanding is that, “by default you can do what you like with whatever data, but because copyright laws create copyrights, you are forbidden from distributing copies of a work which is under copyright, or distributing (or publicly performing) things which are substantially based on such a work, unless you you are doing so in accordance with permission from the copyright holder.”. So, because the law only restricts the distribution/public-performance of copies of the work or of portions of the work or of derivative works that are substantially based on the work, copyright doesn’t let the copyright owner dictate what can be done with the work outside of how the permission they may grant to distribute or perform things based on the work can include conditions. My impression is that if you aren’t distributing or performing the work or a derivative work, then copyright doesn’t restrict what you can do (outside of those things) with the work. Furthermore, my impression is that “derivative work” does not encompass everything that is in any way based on the work, but only things satisfying certain conditions about like, substantial similarity, and whether it also competes with the original work (but I think that last bit is an established and repeated precedent, rather than a law?).

Though, I’m not very well versed in law, and I don’t know how this fits in with a license to use a piece of software! I suspect that software is a special case, and that if it were not special-cases, that software licenses wouldn’t legally need to be agreed to, in order to be allowed to run the software? But that’s just a guess, and if I’m wrong about that then it would suggest that I’m wrong about the other thing?

As a side note: I think that property is a much more natural concept than intellectual property. The way I see it, IP was created by states, but property more generally makes sense outside of states (I don’t say that it predated them because I don’t know; I’m far from a historian.).

> My impression is that if you aren’t distributing or performing the work or a derivative work, then copyright doesn’t restrict what you can do (outside of those things) with the work

LLM operators like ClosedAI are distributing derivative works at scale commercially.

Only in a sense of “derivative work” which is rather broad, and which I don’t think copyright law restricts (though this still needs to be settled by the courts). To be a copyright violation, it doesn’t suffice that the one work had a causal influence on the other work.

There is a test that I think is called a “three pronged test” with the 3 prongs being (iirc) something like:

1) substantial similarity: is the allegedly infringing work substantially similar to the work which it is allegedly infringing

2) Was there an actual causal influence by the work that was alleged infringed on, on the work that allegedly infringed?

3) Could the allegedly infringing work act as a substitute (economically) for the work allegedly being infringed on?

The third prong seems satisfied. The first one does not. The second one also seems satisfied but I’m less confident that I’m remembering the idea correctly (though I could be wrong about the three of them as a whole).