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
I love that the collectivist ideal of sharing all that we’ve created for the betterment of humanity is being twisted into this disgusting display of corporate greed and overreach. OpenAI doesn’t need shit. They don’t have an inherent right to exist but must constantly make the case for it’s existence.
The bottom line is that if corporations need data that they themselves cannot create in order to build and sell a service then they must pay for it. One way or another.
I see this all as parallels with how aquifers and water rights have been handled and I’d argue we’ve fucked that up as well.
They do, though. They purchase data sets from people with licenses, use open source data sets, and/or scrape publicly available data themselves. Worst case they could download pirated data sets, but that’s copyright infringement committed by the entity distributing the data without the legal authority.
Beyond that, copyright doesn’t protect the work from being used to create something else, as long as you’re not distributing significant portions of it. Movie and book reviewers won that legal battle long ago.
Training data IS a massive industry already. You don’t see it because you probably don’t work in a field directly dealing with it. I work in medtech and millions and millions of dollars are spent acquiring training data every year. Should some new unique IP right be found on using otherwise legally rendered data to train AI, it is almost certainly going to be contracted away to hosting platforms via totally sound ToS and then further monetized such that only large and we’ll funded corporate entities can utilize it.