Is it legal to teach kids and authors to write, by having them read lots of books?
Reading a lot is a well-known strategy to become better at writing. Thus, I argue that any reasonably skilled LLM that use the scraped text as input, but not produce verbatim copies, should not be considered as violating IP law.
cratermoon•7mo ago
That 'reasonably skilled LLM' is bearing a lot of the load.
LLMs aren't 'skilled'. An LLM is a mathematical and computational construction, created through a mathematical transformation of input text and tokens.
The people creating those models are using the text, not reading it, and no one is truly "reading" or "learning" from it.
akagusu•7mo ago
I think the real question is if it is legal to use unlicensed (not paid or pirated) copyrighted works to trains LLMs.
Because if they rule that is legal, I think the same principle should apply to humans as well.
Flundstrom2•7mo ago
Reading a lot is a well-known strategy to become better at writing. Thus, I argue that any reasonably skilled LLM that use the scraped text as input, but not produce verbatim copies, should not be considered as violating IP law.
cratermoon•7mo ago