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Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

Training models is fair use, and i think the courts will agree with that. Saying its based on theft is not so cut and dry as youre making it out.

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Those would have to be some rather corrupt courts to agree to such theft. What's next? Agreeing that if you are out on the street it's fair game to be robbed?

Your definition of theft doesn't necessarily match the legal definition. It still remains to be seen whether training foundation models is fair use or not, and it's disingenuous to suggest otherwise.

Downloading copyrighted material and using it, let alone for comercial purposes, is theft. I am not allowed to download movies or music. Nor am i allowed to resell them if i did download them. Which is what openai did for some of its content. It is appalling that some people defend their crime. Not sure for what reason.

It's more complicated than that, though. If they did in fact use pirated content to train their models, that's almost certainly illegal. It's still not well understood whether they used illegal sources or not, and that should be determined in court.

Inference is where things get more muddled. If I download a pirated copy of La La Land, that's illegal. However, if I watch it and then explain the plot of the movie to you in detail, that's fair use. It remains an open question whether or not inference via an LLM represents fair use or not.

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