The problem is that "harm" as defined by copyright law is strictly limited to loss of sales due to breach of that copyright; it makes no allowment (that I know of) to livelihoods lost by the theft of the work indefinitely, as AI boosters suggest their tools can do (replace people). The way this court case is going, it's an uphill battle for the plaintiffs to prove concrete harm in that very narrow context, when the real harm is the potential elimination of their future livelihoods through theft, rather than immediately tangible harms.

As a (creative) friend of mine flatly said, they refuse to use an LLM until it can prove where it learned something from/cite its original source. Artists and creatives can cite their inspirational sources, while LLMs cannot (because their developers don't care about credit, only output) by design. To them, that's the line in the sand, and I think that's a reasonable one given that not a single creative in my circles has been cut payment from these multi-billion-dollar AI companies for the unauthorized use of their works in training these models.

> Meta did pirate the works but may be entitled to use them under fair use

What fair use? Were the books promised to them by god or something?

Firstly, no kidding, of course it's "illegal" and "Piracy".

Secondly, there's an argument that the infringement happens only when the LLM produces output based in part of whole on the source material.

In other words, training a model is not infringing in itself. You could "research" with it. But selling the output as "from your model" is highly suspect. Your business is then based on selling something based other people's work, that you do not have rights to.

I think there's a really fundamental misunderstanding of the playing field in this case. (Disclaimer that my day job is 'author', and I'm pro-piracy.)

We need to frame this case - and ongoing artist-vs-AI-stuff -using a pseudoscience headline I saw recently: 'average person reads 60k words/day'.

I won't bother sourcing this, because I don't think it's true, but it illustrates the key point: consumers spend X amount of time/day reading words.

> It seems like the authors are setting up for failure by making the case about whether the AI generation hinders the market for books. AI book writing is such a tiny segment what these models do that if needed Meta would simply introduce guard rails to prevent copying the style of an author and continue to ingest the books.

and from the article:

> When he turned to the authors’ legal team, led by high-profile attorney David Boies, Chhabria repeatedly asked whether the plaintiffs could actually substantiate accusations that Meta’s AI tools were likely to hurt their commercial prospects. “It seems like you’re asking me to speculate that the market for Sarah Silverman’s memoir will be affected,” he told Boies. “It’s not obvious to me that is the case.”

The market share an author (or any other artist type) is competing with for Meta is not 'what if an AI wrote celebrity memoirs?'. Meta isn't about to start a print publishing division.

Authors are competing with Meta for 'whose words did you read today?' Were they exclusively Meta's - Instagram comments, Whatsapp group chat messages, Llama-generated slop, whatever - or did an author capture any of that share?

The current framing is obviously ludicrous; it also does the developers of LLMs (the most interesting literary invention since....how long ago?) a huge disservice.

Unfortunately the other way of framing it (the one I'm saying is correct) is (probably) impossible to measure (unless you work for Meta, maybe?) and, also, almost equally ridiculous.

Do you not understand that "fair use" is not some copyright free-for-all which lets you use works wholesale without attribution as if they were suddenly public domain?

To make fair use of a book's passage, you have to cite it. The except has to be reasonably small.

Without fair use, it would not be possible to write essays and book reviews that give quotes from books. That's what it's for. Not for having a machine read the whole book so it can regurgitate mashups of any part of it without attribution.

Making a parody is a kind of fair use, but parodies are original expression based on a certain structure of the work.

> but may be entitled to use them under fair use.

Why? Was it legal for me to download copyrighted songs from Limewire as "fair use"? Because a few people were made examples of.

I'm a musician, so 80% of the music I listen to is for learning so it's fair use, right? ;)

Yes, current AI video/text product is inferior at this time. Youtube is full of all genres of inferior products - at this time! The ramp of improvement is quite steeply pointing upwards. This is retrospective of the days of spinning jennies and knitting/weaving machines that soon made manual products un-economic - that said, excellent craft/art product endured on a smaller scale. AI is also taking a toll on the movie arts, staring at the low end and climbing the same incremental improvement rungs. All the special effects(SFX) are in a similar boat. Prop rentals are hit hard. 100 high res photos of an old Studio Tv camera - all angles/sizes/lighting can be added to an AI prop library and with a green screen insert the prop can manifest as a true object in any aspect. There can be many. It still takes people to cull the hallucinations - a declining problem. Same with actors. They can be patterned after a famous actor - with likeness fees, or created de-novo. All the classic aspects of a studio production suffer the same incremental marginalisation - in 5 years = what will remain? - what new tech will emerge? I feel that many forks will emerge, all fighting for a place in the sun = some will be weeded out, some will flower - but at a very high pace. The old producers/directors/writers - the whole panoply of what makes a major studio will be scattered like dried bread crumbs,

The RIAA lawyers never had to demonstrate that copying a DVD cratered the sales of their clients. They just got high penalties for infringers almost by default.

Now that big capital wants to steal from individuals, big capital wins again.

(Unrelatedly, has Boies ever won a high profile lawsuit? I remember him from the Bush/Gore recount issue, where he represented the Democrats.)

Just look at the state of the music industry.

Can you share more about how you sample books with AI?

The good news is that the internet is, fundamentally and in a way that no legacy state can alter, not a place where IP is cognizable.

You are free to copy bytes as you see fit, and the internet treats them identically whether they are random noise or whether a codec can turn them into music, film, books, or whatever inspires you.

The problem is that some humans, justifying their behavior by claiming it as "official", may act out with violence against you if they (rightly or wrongly, that's important to note) perceive that your actions are causing the internet to copy bytes to which they object.

Enduring nonviolence is likely yet ahead as consensus grows over the end of the legitimacy of these legacy states.

I hope you don't think I'm snarky because I'm serious. If you're an American citizen you can homestead in Alaska and cut yourself off from all this if you like.

edit: i'm serious. many americans would be much happier taking this option if they knew it existed. i may take it myself

I think that argument is further hampered (taylor being an exception) by the fact that most pop stars already don't write their own songs. If people like Max Martin can pump out multiple hit songs for multiple groups, it kinda shows that who wrote the song doesn't matter.

Has making music for a living ever not been tough?

counterpoint: Gorillaz is a band specifically designed around the idea that the artist doesn't have to exist in order to do all of the things you mention above. Gorillaz has an image, a style, a mythos, all of that. Granted, when they started at the time (2000) there needed to be human creativity in order to create all of that but with AI everything about this can now be generated. I suspect it won't be long before all of our theorizing goes out the window because someone actually did create an act where everything, the music, the stage show, interviews, looks, all of it, is just AI-generated. That's when we'll get dollar votes on whether AI can actually generate a meaningful musical experience that people want to have.