Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI

> “What about the next Taylor Swift?” he asked, arguing that a “relatively unknown artist” whose work was ingested by Meta would likely have their career hampered if the model produced “a billion pop songs” in their style.

I have this debate with a friend of mine. He's terrified of AI making all of our jobs obsolete. He's a brilliant musician and programmer both, so he's both enthused and scared. So let's go with the Swift example they use.

Performance Artists have always tried to cultivate an image, an ideal, a mythos around the character(s). I've observed that as the music biz has gotten more tough, that the practice of selling merch at shows has ramped up. Social media is monetized now. There's been a big diversification in the effort to make more money from everything surrounding the music itself. So too will it be with artists.

You're starting to see this already. Artists which got big not necessarily because of the music, but because of the weird cult of personality they built. One who comes to minds is Poppy, who ironically enough built a cult of personality around her being a fake AI bot...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppy_(singer)

You've definitely got counter-examples like Hatsune Miku - but the novelty of Miku was because of the artificiality (within a culture that, like, really loves robots and shit). AI pop stars will undoubtedly produce listenable records and make some money, but I don't expect that they will be able to replace the experience of fans looking for a connection with an artist. Watch the opening of a Taylor Swift concert, and you'll probably get it.

Fair use allows for certain uses of copyrighted works without a specific license for those works. One of the major criterion is how transformative the work is and an LLM model is very different from the original work so it seems likely that criterion at least is met.

Firstly, no kidding, of course it's "illegal" and "Piracy".

Secondly, there's an argument that the infringement happens only when the LLM produces output based in part of whole on the source material.

In other words, training a model is not infringing in itself. You could "research" with it. But selling the output as "from your model" is highly suspect. Your business is then based on selling something based other people's work, that you do not have rights to.

I think there's a really fundamental misunderstanding of the playing field in this case. (Disclaimer that my day job is 'author', and I'm pro-piracy.)

We need to frame this case - and ongoing artist-vs-AI-stuff -using a pseudoscience headline I saw recently: 'average person reads 60k words/day'.

I won't bother sourcing this, because I don't think it's true, but it illustrates the key point: consumers spend X amount of time/day reading words.

> It seems like the authors are setting up for failure by making the case about whether the AI generation hinders the market for books. AI book writing is such a tiny segment what these models do that if needed Meta would simply introduce guard rails to prevent copying the style of an author and continue to ingest the books.

and from the article:

> When he turned to the authors’ legal team, led by high-profile attorney David Boies, Chhabria repeatedly asked whether the plaintiffs could actually substantiate accusations that Meta’s AI tools were likely to hurt their commercial prospects. “It seems like you’re asking me to speculate that the market for Sarah Silverman’s memoir will be affected,” he told Boies. “It’s not obvious to me that is the case.”

The market share an author (or any other artist type) is competing with for Meta is not 'what if an AI wrote celebrity memoirs?'. Meta isn't about to start a print publishing division.

Authors are competing with Meta for 'whose words did you read today?' Were they exclusively Meta's - Instagram comments, Whatsapp group chat messages, Llama-generated slop, whatever - or did an author capture any of that share?

The current framing is obviously ludicrous; it also does the developers of LLMs (the most interesting literary invention since....how long ago?) a huge disservice.

Unfortunately the other way of framing it (the one I'm saying is correct) is (probably) impossible to measure (unless you work for Meta, maybe?) and, also, almost equally ridiculous.

I think that argument is further hampered (taylor being an exception) by the fact that most pop stars already don't write their own songs. If people like Max Martin can pump out multiple hit songs for multiple groups, it kinda shows that who wrote the song doesn't matter.

Has making music for a living ever not been tough?