This must be illegal, but how are all the little bloggers going to oppose it?
P.S. Permission is not granted to downvote my comment!
It's not clear to me that it should be illegal.
But even that requires the permission of the copyright holder. Nobody is required to accept an infringing use of their work in exchange for royalties.
Which doesn't really mean anything.
At this point, the only defense I can think of is to not make the content publicly available. Which is what I've done.
My point being: it's exceptionally hard to create laws that deny precisely what you don't want and allow precisely what you want, without quickly getting into details that bring the entire law's assumptions into question. Here being "because an ML training is not a person, it has no right to scan the web".
Also on a whole different scale and instead of supplementing the web content it’s devaluing it to a degree.
Basically you're assuming the agenda of the operator, saying "that's bad an shouldn't be allowed". But I see the web- except for things specifically labelled with standard copyright disclaimers- as effectively a large corpus of publicly available data, "in the market square for all to see".
I don't think training on copyrighted stuff will be ever banned, but we need to figure out how much they can be allowed to generate based on that. Eventually new models will just pop up with more carefully curated data anyway.
I don't see why AI developers should be expected to think otherwise and worsen their training data over this.
The point is that Google has a certain market position that makes it very different when they "recite the vague plot of a novel or a fact they learned". The point of competition law is to "distort" free market capitalism for the betterment of society. This is one of those cases where practical considerations trump information idealism. The quality of information on the internet will go down if we stop rewarding original publishers.
It could be illegal if the AI reproduces vast portions of it. If you could ask the LLM over a course of prompts to generate a significant portion of the content (as the copyright law defines it), then yes.
As long as the AI isn't reproducing it, then I am not sure if it would count.
From a US copyright law point of view, this is most likely correct. Copyright law doesn't prevent you from ingesting copyrighted works, it prevents you from distributing them.
There is also a great deal of existing case law about how different a work has to be before it's not infringing from another work anymore. There are existing rules of thumb judges go by when trying to determine if infringement occurred. They include things like the amount of difference in expression, the quantity, whether or not it's incidental, etc.
And that's not even getting into the question of fair use -- which is a whole other kettle of fish.
I suspect that the courts will deal with these issues the way that they've always dealt with these issues: on a case-by-case basis.