Copyright is complicated and apparently a lot of people don’t understand the role that it plays in the grand scheme of things. Rather than get into the details of the law, it makes a lot more sense to simply look at how the courts have consistently ruled in the past.
Taking that approach, it becomes clear that in order to win a copyright case such as this, the authors will need to prove that through the use of their work in training AI, they are being deprived of money that they would otherwise earn from their work if it weren’t for the use of their work in training the AI.
That would require a lot more than the answers that any AI provides.
The additional absurdity is that in reality, these authors likely benefit from the AI while suffering no losses. No one is ever going to substitute a few paragraphs for a novel. But a few paragraphs may very well send a person looking for more information and possibly lead to the purchase of a book.
To add to the silliness of these lawsuits, I have to ask…What is the purpose of publishing something if there’s no desire for that information to be used by the masses?
AI uses the information from books fed to it the same way that people do. It’s amazing to think about all of the books that I’ve read and the lessons learned, the way that my reactions and behavior have been molded through the years by the books that I’ve read. Coming from the other direction, who would I be if I hadn’t read the books that have filled such a large part of my life?
How different would my children be? Suppose I spoke a few sentences to my child from a book that I can’t remember anything else about. Years later, my child’s recall of it then led to better decisions throught life. If those decisions combined to turn her into a billionaire later in life, and in a book she wrote those sentences as she remembered me saying them, would the original author who earned only $65,000 in royalties be entitled to her fortune?
Using that information to “teach” AI is no different than using it to teach children. It’s used in the same way. If you publish something on the internet that is freely available to the public, then you can expect it to be used like this. It doesn’t matter if it’s used by an AI or a person. But having it within that sphere of influence is more valuable to the author than harmful.
If an author doesn’t want their content to be utilized in such fashion and wants to keep their ideas and existence hidden from public view, the best thing to do is to not publish. If they’re published, the author has likely already been or is being paid for the work produced and if it was chosen to teach an AI, they should be proud that their work was so well regarded. They should be excited that their work is being promoted at zero cost.