Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement

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I mean I’m no lawyer but this doesn’t strike me as a great example for infringement? Detailed summaries of books sounds like textbook transformative use. Especially in Silverman’s case, reducing her book to “facts” while eliminating artistic elements of her prose make it that much less of a direct substitute for the original work.

This is actually quite interesting, as it's drawing a distinction between training material that can be accessed by anybody with a web browser (like anybody's blog), vs. training material that was "illegally-acquired... available in bulk via torrent systems."

I don't think there's any reason why this would be a relevant legal distinction in terms of distributing an LLM -- blog authors weren't giving consent either.

However, I do wonder if there's a legal issue here in using pirated torrents for training. Is there any legal basis for saying fair use permits distributing an LLM trained on copyrighted material, but you have to purchase all the content first to do so legally if it's only available for sale? E.g. training on a blog post is fine because it's freely accessible, but Sarah Silverman's book is not because it's never been made available for free, and you didn't pay for it?

Or do the courts not really care at all how something is made? If you quote a passage from a book in a freelance article you write, nobody ever asks if you purchased the book or can prove you borrowed it from a library or a friend -- versus if you pirated a digital copy.

Haven't read the complaint, but there might be an argument that OpenAI used stolen works to train their data, and as such fair use doesn't apply.

I severely doubt that the spiders which crawled the data would go to the trouble of dereferencing and downloading torrents.