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
Maybe if you would pay for training data they would let you use copyright data or something?
Had the company paid for the training data and/or left it as voluntary, there would be less of a problem with it to begin with.
Part of the problem is that they didn’t, but are still using it for commercial purposes.
Their business strategy is built on top of assumption they won’t. They don’t want this door opened at all. It was a great deal for Google to buy Reddit’s data for some $mil., because it is a huge collection behind one entity. Now imagine communicating to each individual site owner whose resources they scrapped.
If that could’ve been how it started, the development of these AI tools could be much slower because of (1) data being added to the bunch only after an agreement, (2) more expenses meaning less money for hardware expansion and (3) investors and companies being less hyped up about that thing because it doesn’t grow like a mushroom cloud while following legal procedures. Also, (4) the ability to investigate and collect a public list of what sites they have agreement with is pretty damning making it’s own news stories and conflicts.