I think the headline is a bit misleading. Mets did pirate the works but may be entitled to use them under fair use. 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…
The problem is that "harm" as defined by copyright law is strictly limited to loss of sales due to breach of that copyright; it makes no allowment (that I know of) to livelihoods lost by the theft of the work indefinitely, as AI boosters suggest their tools can do (replace people). The way this court case is going, it's an uphill battle for the plaintiffs to prove concrete harm in that very narrow context, when the r…
Regardless, deep learning models are valuable because they generalize within the training data to uncover patterns and features and relationships that are implicit, rather (simply) present with the data. While they can return things that happen to be within the training set, there is no reason to believe that any particular output is literally found there or is something that could be attributable, or that a human would ever attribute. Human artists also make meaning from the broad texture of their life experiences and general diffuse unattributable experience of culture.
Sure, this is something a random artist is unlikely to know, but if they are simply refusing to pick up a useful tools that can't give credit--say avoiding LLMs for brainstorming, or generative selection tools for visual editing, or whatever, their particular careers will be harmed by their incurious sentimentality, and other human artists will thrive because they know that tools are just tools, and it is the humans using the tools that make meaning that people care about.