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
You’re making an indie movie on your iPhone with friends. You sell one ticket. You now owe: Apple, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s estate (inventor of the camera), every cinematographer who first devised the type of shots you’re using, the writers since the beginning of time that created the types of story elements in the script, the mathematicians and scientists that developed lense technology, the car manufacturers that aided your ability to transport you to the set, the guy who’s YouTube tutorial you watched to figure out lighting, etc, etc, etc.
Your black and white framing appears to provide a clear ethical framework until you dig a millimeter into it. The reality is that society only exists because of the work that all of the individuals within it produce. Things like copyright are an adapter to our capitalistic economy to ensure people’s work that can be copied, are protected enough that they have the opportunity to make money off of it. It exists so somebody else can’t immediately turn around and sell the same book someone else wrote, or just change a few words and do as such. This protection was meant to last 15 to 20 years. Then enter the public domain for anyone to copy and rewrite as they please.
Current copyright is an utter bastardization of its intended use. Massive corporations are trying to act like they’re fighting for the little guy to own their IP forever. But they buy up all that IP for pennies compared to how they turn around and commoditize it. Then they own all of what society produces in perpetuity. They can sit on their dragon hoards and laugh as they gobble up any new creation that strays too close. And people wonder why everything is a sequel of a sequel of a sequel owned by massive corporations.
I was trying to keep it simple.
I would have paid them by purchasing the iphone and whatever software I used. I paid for the car that transported me. I would have paid for my education. People can also give their work away for free if they want, or be compensated by ads as in the case of Youtube or FOSS.
What do you think ChatGPT is trying to do? It’s already being used to churn out shitloads of garbage content. They’re not making things better.
By that rationalization, OpenAI is paying their Internet bill, and for a copy of Dune, so they’re free to use any content they acquired to make their product better. Your original argument wasn’t akin to, “Shouldn’t someone using an iPhone pay for one?” It was “Shouldn’t Apple get a cut of everything made with the iPhone?”
You could make the argument that people use ChatGPT to churn out garbage content, sure, but a lot of cinephiles would accuse your proverbial indie movie of being the same and blame Apple for creating the iPhone and enabling it. If you want to make that argument, go ahead. But don’t pretend it has anything to do with people getting paid fairly for what they made.
ChatGPT is enabling people to make more things, easier, to get paid. And people, as always, are relying on everything that was created before them as a basis for their work. Same as when I go to school and the professor shows me lots of different works to learn from. The thousands of students in that class didn’t pay for any of that stuff. The professor distilled it and presented it and I paid him to do it.
The problem is that they didn’t pay for the content they’ve acquired and they’re selling it to others. The creators are not being compensated and may not want to participate in AI development at all. If the creators agree to it then fine but most do not. Just look at what’s happening with art. People are scraping all of an artists work to create AI pictures in their style and impersonate them. That’s not okay.
If Apple (or any metaphorical creator you want to insert in here) doesn’t want you using their product to make your movie, too bad. You bought their product. Even if millions of people end up watching your movie, they can’t turn around and ask for any more. You acquired their product fairly like anybody else. Your transaction is done. If they don’t like it, they should ask every person who’s ever made or contributed to any version of the components in their device and see how they feel about it.
Now people using ChatGPT to impersonate artists shouldn’t do that. But those individual people should be prosecuted. Nobody’s confused that Andy Warhol might be quickly painting the pictures and sending them over in the DALL-E chat and you can’t honestly make the argument that people aren’t buying Stephen King books because they can type “Write me a Stephen King novel” into the prompt generator.