Those claiming AI training on copyrighted works is "theft" misunderstand key aspects of copyright law and AI technology. Copyright protects specific expressions of ideas, not the ideas themselves. When AI systems ingest copyrighted works, they're extracting general patterns and concepts - the "Bob Dylan-ness" or "Hemingway-ness" - not copying specific text or images.
This process is akin to how humans learn by reading widely and absorbing styles and techniques, rather than memorizing and reproducing exact passages. The AI discards the original text, keeping only abstract representations in "vector space". When generating new content, the AI isn't recreating copyrighted works, but producing new expressions inspired by the concepts it's learned.
This is fundamentally different from copying a book or song. It's more like the long-standing artistic tradition of being influenced by others' work. The law has always recognized that ideas themselves can't be owned - only particular expressions of them.
Moreover, there's precedent for this kind of use being considered "transformative" and thus fair use. The Google Books project, which scanned millions of books to create a searchable index, was ruled legal despite protests from authors and publishers. AI training is arguably even more transformative.
While it's understandable that creators feel uneasy about this new technology, labeling it "theft" is both legally and technically inaccurate. We may need new ways to support and compensate creators in the AI age, but that doesn't make the current use of copyrighted works for AI training illegal or unethical.
For those interested, this argument is nicely laid out by Damien Riehl in FLOSS Weekly episode 744. https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly/episodes/744
I never fully figured out how the people who are against AI companies using copyrighted content on the training data fit that in with their general attitude towards online piracy. Seems contradictory to be against one but not another.
Is the pirate valued at $100,000,000,000? Will the pirate ever make enough of a dent to be considered a rounding error in a $100bn valuation? Is the pirate even attempting to turn a profit?
If the training data was for personal consumption, knock yourself out. When you try to say you're worth billions but can't afford to pay for the material? Fuck all the way off. I'm sure fucknuts at the top of this is gonna get a fat fucking pay day, so scrape a few fucking zeros off their quartly bonus and pay the people actually making the fucking content you are ABSOLUTELY going to turn around and try to make a profit off of.
Don't forget that the pirates usually don't say "art should have been just a weekend hobby, not a profession".