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A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

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Re: A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

#171

Post by bonoboTP »

ethbr1 wrote: post #169
bonoboTP wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's different but not in ways that make such interventions irrelevant e.g. why would we only care about lost sales? If copyright has been violated as a necessary means to generate new value, haven't the content creators earned this value? Indeed the company should purchase the books. If they obtain copies in a process that violates copyright, then that's indeed a violation of copyright. The current decision does n…

Anthropic apparently did it both ways. After realizing that pirating mass quantities of books for training wasn't a great legal look, it hired someone previously responsible for Google Books, who in turn contacted publishers about mass licensing their content for training use. However, that option was ultimately not pursued as instead... >> Anthropic spent many millions of dollars to purchase millions of print books,…

Yes. And from the article "That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages." Sounds reasonable (except for the "stole" and "theft" language -- a copyright violation is a copyright violation, not theft, not stealing).

If the actual model was trained from the unauthorized copies, and then they post-hoc bought the books, that doesn't retroactively cancel the initial copyright violation. As I understand they did not retrain the model using the OCR'd scans

Re: A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

#172

Post by bonoboTP »

ethbr1 wrote: post #168
bonoboTP wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand your sense of justice in cheering on David against Goliath. But the equation is not so clear. The common person is sometimes on this side, sometimes on that side. Copyright can also be weaponized by megacorps against normal people (copying Disney movie DVDs) and LLMs can also be in the hands of the decentralized public (llama ecosystem). The house thing is a bit offtopic because to be considered for copy…

The "fairness" argument is weaker than the "sustainable creation" one. If LLMs could create quality literature, or social media create in-depth reporting, then I'd have no problem with the tide of technological progress flowing. Unfortunately, recent history has shown that it's trivial for the market to cannibalize the financial model of creators without replacing it . And as a result, society gets {no more that thin…

I guess the optimistic take would be that we will get novel, insightful synthesis of disparate fields of knowledge that no human so far was ever able to hold in their mind to contemplate their interrelations. And this will elevate the human spirit etc. The equivalent to the take that the Internet will bring peoples together and foster better understanding and love between people who so far were not in dialogue and this will bring peace and an understanding or how similar we all are etc etc. Not exactly how it played out in the end though. Or how social media and web 2.0 will bring enhanced democracy and transparency and clarity and that the common person will have a voice and so on.

So I'm not exactly naive, but we should then discuss this instead of the red herring of copyright.

Re: A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

#173

Post by gbacon »

kccqzy wrote: post #153
gbacon wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is the victim, and how was that person not made whole?

The copyright holder. That person was not made whole because of the time value of money. I stole $1000 from you in January and returned it to you in June: why should you happily give me a zero interest loan?

No royalty contract is getting an author a thousand bucks per sale. If you have to wildly exaggerate to make your point, then the point isn’t compelling.

Books have a resale market. Every “lost sale” isn’t necessarily of a new purchase from a bookstore or Amazon.

Copyright has a place. Rent-seeking authors attacking LLM owners is not a sympathetic case. Said authors are demanding to have their ideas relegated to unknown backwaters. It makes the authors worse off. It makes the community poorer. Cui bono?

Re: A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

#174

Post by shagie »

alganet wrote: post #140
fallingknife wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not adding to the cultural expression like a parody would. Says who? > Is AI contributing to education and/or culture _right now_, or is it trying to make money? How on earth are those things mutually exclusive? Also, whether or not it's being used to make money is completely irrelevant to whether or not it is copyright infringement.

> Says who? Artists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAG-AFTRA > How on earth are those things mutually exclusive? Put those on a spectrum and rethink what I said. > completely irrelevant to whether or not it is copyright infringement _Again_, leave aside law minutiae and hypotheticals.

> > Says who?

> Artists.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAG-AFTRA

Do you have a link that has their stance on how AI is harming culture? The best I could find is https://www.sagaftra.org/contracts-industry-resources/member...

I can't find anything in there or its linked articles about culture. I do find quite a bit about synthetic performers and digital replicas and making sure that people who do voice acting don't have their performance used to generate material that is done at a discounted rate and doesn't reimburse the performer.

https://www.sagaftra.org/ongoing-fight-ai-protections-makes-...

> Protective A.I. guardrails for actors who work in video games remain a point of contention in the Interactive Media Agreement negotiations which have been ongoing from October 2022 until last month’s strike. Other A.I.-related panels Crabtree-Ireland participated in included a U.S. Department of Justice and Stanford University co-hosted event about promoting competition in A.I., as well as a Vanderbilt University summit on music law and generative A.I. SAG-AFTRA Executive Vice President Linda Powell discussed the interactive negotiations and A.I.’s many implications for creatives during her keynote speech at an Art in the Age of A.I. symposium put on by Villa Albertine at the French Embassy.

> She said A.I. represents “a turning point in our culture,” adding, “I think it’s important that we be participants in it and not passengers in it ... We need to make our voices known to the handful of people who are building and profiting off of this brave new world.”

This doesn't indicate that its good or bad, but rather that they want to make sure that people are in control of it and people are compensated for the works that are created from their performance.

Re: A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

#175

Post by healsdata »

gbacon wrote: post #3

The HN crowd dislikes brick-and-mortar landlords but often sides with charging rent for certain bits. Which side will prevail? Interesting excerpt: > “We will have a trial on the pirated copies used to create Anthropic’s central library and the resulting damages,” Judge Alsup wrote in the decision. “That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the…

> Which side will prevail?

They aren't sides of the same coin, so neither? They have as much in common as a balloon full of helium and the an opossum.

Folks try to create a false equivalency between landlords and creatives, but they aren't remotely the same. I generally consider this to be a bad faith argument by people who just want free things. (The argument against landlords isn't free housing, even though the argument against copyright is piracy)

Landlords have something with a limited supply and rent it to other people for their use. Access to the particular something is necessary on the residential side and generally important on the commercial side.

Copyrighted works haven't had a limited supply since around 1440 and are a couple rungs higher on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Copyright laws are, by their nature, intended to simulate the market effects of a limited supply as to incentivize people to create those works.

Have laws and vultures created perverse incentives in both markets? Absolutely. Are there both good and bad landlords and copyright holders? Absolutely.

But we could address the flaws in one without even thinking to talk about the other.

Re: A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

#176

Post by munificent »

bonoboTP wrote: post #162
munificent wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your parent comment, you argued what people would do in practice. Now you have shifted to talking about what is legal or not to do. I'm not a legal scholar, so I'm not qualified or interested in arguing about whether Cliff Notes is fair use. But I do care about how people behave, and I'm pretty sure that Cliff Notes and LLMs lead to fewer books being purchased, which makes it harder for writers to do what they do.…

It surely matters whether people actually use the thing for copyright violations or not. Summaries are not even copyright violations so that's irrelevant. Long verbatim copies would be, but one would have to demonstrate that this use case is significant, convenient enough to provide a viable alternative to otherwise obtaining the particular text chunk etc. ---- > But for authors of newer technical material, yes, I th…

> Alright, you're now arguing for some new regulations though

No, I'm not. I'm not talking about law at all. You talked about what reasonable people do and I'm also talking about what people do.

> I observe that many academics already put their technical books online for free.

As do I, which is why the LLMs are trained on it and are able to so effectively regurgitate it.

> I doubt it's a hugely lucrative thing in the first place.

This is true in many cases, but you might be surprised.

Re: A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

#177

Post by kccqzy »

gbacon wrote: post #173
kccqzy wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The copyright holder. That person was not made whole because of the time value of money. I stole $1000 from you in January and returned it to you in June: why should you happily give me a zero interest loan?

No royalty contract is getting an author a thousand bucks per sale. If you have to wildly exaggerate to make your point, then the point isn’t compelling. Books have a resale market. Every “lost sale” isn’t necessarily of a new purchase from a bookstore or Amazon. Copyright has a place. Rent-seeking authors attacking LLM owners is not a sympathetic case. Said authors are demanding to have their ideas relegated to unkn…

We are not talking about a single sale. We are talking about millions of books.

Re: A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

#178

Post by AnthonyMouse »

layer8 wrote: post #93
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't distribute the copyrighted works, but that isn't inherently the same thing as the model. It's sort of like distributing a compendium of book reviews. Many of the reviews have quotes from the book. If there are thousands of reviews, you could potentially reconstruct the whole book, but that's not the point of the thing and so it makes sense for the infringing thing to be "using it to reconstruct the whole bo…

The premise was that the model is able to reproduce the memorized text, and that what saved Anthropic was them having server-side filtering to avoid reproducing that text. So the presumption is that without those filters, the model would be able to reproduce text substantial enough to constitute a copyright violation (otherwise they wouldn’t need the filter argument). Distributing a “machine” producing such output wo…

> Distributing a “machine” producing such output would constitute copyright infringement.

This is the thing you haven't established.

Any ordinary general purpose computer is a "machine" that can produce copyrighted text, if you tell it to. But isn't it pretty important whether you actually do that with it or not, since it's a general purpose tool that can also do a large variety of other things?

Re: A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

#179

Post by klabb3 »

growse wrote: post #64
klabb3 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But those training the LLMs are still using the works, and not just to discuss them, which I think is the point of fair use doctrine. Worse, they’re using it for massive commercial gain, without paying a dime upstream to the supply chain that made it possible. If there is any purpose of copyright at all, it’s to prevent making money from someone’s else’s intellectual work. The entire thing is based on economic prag…

> Worse, they’re using it for massive commercial gain, without paying a dime upstream to the supply chain that made it possible. If there is any purpose of copyright at all, it’s to prevent making money from someone’s else’s intellectual work. This makes no sense. If I buy and read a book on software engineering, and then use that knowledge to start a career, do I owe the author a percentage of my lifetime earnings?…

> If I buy and read a book on software engineering

You're comparing that you as an individual purchase one copy of a book to a multi-billion dollar company systematically ingesting them for profit without any compensation, let alone proportional?

> do I owe the author a percentage of my lifetime earnings?

No, but you are a human being. You have a completely different set of rights from a corporation, or a machine. For very good reason.

Re: A federal judge sides with Anthropic in lawsuit over training AI on books

#180

Post by zeven7 »

ethbr1 wrote: post #166
comex wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. In this case, the plaintiffs alleged that Anthropic's LLMs had memorized the works so completely that "if each completed LLM had been asked to recite works it had trained upon, it could have done so", "almost verbatim". The judge assumed for the sake of argument that the allegation was true, and ruled that the conduct was fair use anyway due to the existence of an effective filter. Therefore there was no…

Wouldn't a model that can recite training data verbatim be larger than necessary? Exact text isn't coming from nowhere, no matter how efficiently the bits are encoded, and the same effectiveness should be achievable by compressing those portions of the model.

Maybe we are all just LLMs. If the books were written by a language producing algorithm in a human mind, maybe there’s not as much raw data there as it seems, and the total information can in fact be stored in a surprisingly small set of weights.
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