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
So if I watch all Star Wars movies, and then get a crew together to make a couple of identical movies that were inspired by my earlier watching, and then sell the movies, then this is actually completely legal.
It doesn’t matter if they stole the source material. They are selling a machine that can create copyright infringements at a click of a button, and that’s a problem.
This is not the same as an artist looking at every single piece of art in the world and being able to replicate it to hang it in the living room. This is an army of artists that are enslaved by a single company to sell any copy of any artwork they want. That army works as long as you feed it electricity and free labor of actual artists.
Theft actually seems like a great word for what these scammers are doing.
If you run some open source model on your own machine, that’s a different story.
You’ve made a lot of confident assertions without supporting them. Just like an LLM! :)
LLM are just text predictions based on what people would say in available digital works (like comments). Its honestly a fascinating glimpse in online sociology.
Right. Who needs expert opinions if an LLM can produce similarly convincing garbage?
Isn’t your first point just false? Just because you drew a movies logo your self doesnt mean you aren’t profiting off their IP. They would surely have you taken down.
Now, if you changed things enough to be sufficiently different from their movie and its IP, they would have no grounds to do so. Just copying everything, however, would not fly.
We’re not just doing this for the money.
We’re doing it for a shitload of money!
I feel like you’re catching on.