This is sad for open source AI, piracy for the purpose of model training should also be fair use because otherwise only the big companies who can afford to pay off publishers like Anthropic will be able to do so. There is no way to buy billions of books just for model training, it simply can't happen.
Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
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Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
#22It will be interesting to see how this impacts the lawsuits against OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft. Will they quickly try to settle for billions as well? It’s not precedent setting but surely it’ll have an impact.
I’m sure this’ll be misreported and wilfully misinterpreted because of the current fractious state of the AI discourse, but given the lawsuit was to do with piracy, not the copyright-compliance of LLMs, and in any case, given they settled out of court, thus presumably admit no wrongdoing, conveniently no legal precedent is established either way.
I would not be surprised if investors made their last round of funding contingent on settling this matter out of court precisely to ensure no precedents are set.
Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
#23To be very clear on this point - this is not related to model training. It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use, but the pirating of the books is the issue at hand here, and is what Anthropic “whoopsied” into in acquiring the training data. Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine. Rainbows End was prescient in many ways.
It is related to scalable mode training, however. Chopping the spine off books and putting the pages in an automated scanner is not scalable. And don't forget about the cost of 1) finding 2) purchasing 3) processing and 4) recycling that volume of books.
I guess companies will pay for the cheapest copies for liability and then use the pirated dumps. Or just pretend that someone lent the books to them.
Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
#24To be very clear on this point - this is not related to model training. It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use, but the pirating of the books is the issue at hand here, and is what Anthropic “whoopsied” into in acquiring the training data. Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine. Rainbows End was prescient in many ways.
I guess they must delete all models since they acquired the source illegally and benefitted from it, right? Otherwise it just encourages others to keep going and pay the fines later.
Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
#25To be very clear on this point - this is not related to model training. It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use, but the pirating of the books is the issue at hand here, and is what Anthropic “whoopsied” into in acquiring the training data. Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine. Rainbows End was prescient in many ways.
> Rainbows End was prescient in many ways.
Agreed. Great book for those looking for a read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/102439.Rainbows_End
The author, Vernor Vinge, is also responsible for popularizing the term 'singularity'.
Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
#26This is sad for open source AI, piracy for the purpose of model training should also be fair use because otherwise only the big companies who can afford to pay off publishers like Anthropic will be able to do so. There is no way to buy billions of books just for model training, it simply can't happen.
This implies training models is some sort of right.
Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
#27To be very clear on this point - this is not related to model training. It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use, but the pirating of the books is the issue at hand here, and is what Anthropic “whoopsied” into in acquiring the training data. Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine. Rainbows End was prescient in many ways.
I guess they must delete all models since they acquired the source illegally and benefitted from it, right? Otherwise it just encourages others to keep going and pay the fines later.
In a prior ruling, the court stated that Anthropic didn't train on the books subject to this settlement. The record is that Anthropic scanned physical books and used those for training. The pirated books were being held in a general purpose library and were not, according to the record, used in training.
Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
#28This is sad for open source AI, piracy for the purpose of model training should also be fair use because otherwise only the big companies who can afford to pay off publishers like Anthropic will be able to do so. There is no way to buy billions of books just for model training, it simply can't happen.
This implies training models is some sort of right.
No, it implies that having the power to train AI models exclusively consolidated into a handful of extremely powerful companies is bad.
Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
#29Re: Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
#30To be very clear on this point - this is not related to model training. It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use, but the pirating of the books is the issue at hand here, and is what Anthropic “whoopsied” into in acquiring the training data. Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine. Rainbows End was prescient in many ways.
Google scanned many books quite a while ago, probably way more than LibGen. Are they good to use them for training?