> Is taking the character count of a book copyright infringement? Why is the math behind an LLM different?
I hate arguments like this. Intent, scale, and quantity matter.
If I gently toss a small piece of lead at you, I'm not trying to kill you. If I accelerate it using a rifle, I am.
No, taking the character count of a book is not copyright infringement. Neither is quoting the word "the". Or "the worst". But, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair." definitely is.
The fact that you have to draw a line and exercise some amount of judgement to determine which actions are prohibited does not mean the line doesn't exist.
Likewise, the social context and emergent consequences of a policy matter too.
If LLMs were a niche technology used by a couple of fringe weirdos, who cares, go nuts. But since LLMs are owned by large tech companies and are being used to generate incredible amounts of revenue, they are enacting a large-scale transfer of wealth to the rich whose value is largely derived from the labor of the creative people who authored the data the model is trained on without any consent on their part.
How you can't see that that is somehow different from taking the word count of a file is beyond me.
I hate arguments like this. Intent, scale, and quantity matter.
If I gently toss a small piece of lead at you, I'm not trying to kill you. If I accelerate it using a rifle, I am.
No, taking the character count of a book is not copyright infringement. Neither is quoting the word "the". Or "the worst". But, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair." definitely is.
The fact that you have to draw a line and exercise some amount of judgement to determine which actions are prohibited does not mean the line doesn't exist.
Likewise, the social context and emergent consequences of a policy matter too.
If LLMs were a niche technology used by a couple of fringe weirdos, who cares, go nuts. But since LLMs are owned by large tech companies and are being used to generate incredible amounts of revenue, they are enacting a large-scale transfer of wealth to the rich whose value is largely derived from the labor of the creative people who authored the data the model is trained on without any consent on their part.
How you can't see that that is somehow different from taking the word count of a file is beyond me.