LLMs are absolutely trained on FOSS software, including GPL’d stuff. Accelerating software development is also a large part of how they are making money. I believe training on GPL’d software and then charging for access is copyright infringement, but it doesn’t really matter because entities supposed to be enforcing copyright are paid for by the same billionaires who run the AI companies, so literally nothing will happen.
Copyright protects the expression itself, not the ideas, facts, patterns, grammar, writing styles, or knowledge learned from that expression. Humans learn from copyrighted books, articles, movies, and music every day. Nobody claims that someone who read 10,000 copyrighted novels is committing copyright infringement every time they sit down and write a new story.
That’s the part I keep seeing people ignore.
If learning from copyrighted material is infringement, then every author, journalist, musician, engineer, and artist on the planet is infringing copyright because they all learned their craft from copyrighted works created by other people.
The real question is whether an AI is reproducing copyrighted content, not whether it learned from copyrighted content. Those are two completely different issues.
You don’t get to argue that learning is legal when humans do it and suddenly becomes theft when a machine does it. Either learning from publicly available information is allowed, or it isn’t. The standard cannot magically change because you dislike the technology.
Ok. Fine. Sure.
Not sure though what this has to do with llm companies making money. Since they write their own code and llms are trained on data… Like wikipedia.
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LLMs are absolutely trained on FOSS software, including GPL’d stuff. Accelerating software development is also a large part of how they are making money. I believe training on GPL’d software and then charging for access is copyright infringement, but it doesn’t really matter because entities supposed to be enforcing copyright are paid for by the same billionaires who run the AI companies, so literally nothing will happen.
This argument has never made much sense to me.
Copyright protects the expression itself, not the ideas, facts, patterns, grammar, writing styles, or knowledge learned from that expression. Humans learn from copyrighted books, articles, movies, and music every day. Nobody claims that someone who read 10,000 copyrighted novels is committing copyright infringement every time they sit down and write a new story.
That’s the part I keep seeing people ignore.
If learning from copyrighted material is infringement, then every author, journalist, musician, engineer, and artist on the planet is infringing copyright because they all learned their craft from copyrighted works created by other people.
The real question is whether an AI is reproducing copyrighted content, not whether it learned from copyrighted content. Those are two completely different issues.
You don’t get to argue that learning is legal when humans do it and suddenly becomes theft when a machine does it. Either learning from publicly available information is allowed, or it isn’t. The standard cannot magically change because you dislike the technology.