She’s suing for copyright infringement, basically, not the LLM emulating her style.
The LLMs read books from her and many, many others that they didn’t buy, because unauthorized copies had been uploaded to the web (happens to every popular book).
Honestly, I don’t know if she has a case. Going after the people who illegally uploaded her book would be the proper route, but that’s always nearly impossible.
Long and short, LLMs benefited from illegal copies.
I see a lot of people claim the training model included copyrighted works particularly books because it can provide a summary of it. But it can provide a summary of visual media too, and no one is claiming it’s sitting there watching films.
If the argument is it has quite a detailed knowledge of the book, that’s not convincing either. All it needs is a summary and it can make up the blanks, and get it close enough we can’t tell the difference. Nothing is original.
If you upload an illegal copy of a book and I download it, not realizing or caring that it’s pirated, and then I re-upload it elsewhere, you and I have both committed copyright infringement. This feels like the same thing.
I suspect the case will depend largely on whether the ways that the models were trained using her works qualify as fair use.
Your example is faulty. If you upload an illegal copy of a book and I read it then tell people all about it, I am not committing copyright infringement
If you use that illegal copy to create a work, then your copy infringes copyright (unless it falls under fair use). LLMs don’t count as people in any legal sense, and training them doesn’t have a legal status comparable to a real person reading books.
She’s suing for copyright infringement, basically, not the LLM emulating her style.
The LLMs read books from her and many, many others that they didn’t buy, because unauthorized copies had been uploaded to the web (happens to every popular book).
Honestly, I don’t know if she has a case. Going after the people who illegally uploaded her book would be the proper route, but that’s always nearly impossible.
Long and short, LLMs benefited from illegal copies.
I see a lot of people claim the training model included copyrighted works particularly books because it can provide a summary of it. But it can provide a summary of visual media too, and no one is claiming it’s sitting there watching films.
If the argument is it has quite a detailed knowledge of the book, that’s not convincing either. All it needs is a summary and it can make up the blanks, and get it close enough we can’t tell the difference. Nothing is original.
If you upload an illegal copy of a book and I download it, not realizing or caring that it’s pirated, and then I re-upload it elsewhere, you and I have both committed copyright infringement. This feels like the same thing.
I suspect the case will depend largely on whether the ways that the models were trained using her works qualify as fair use.
Your example is faulty. If you upload an illegal copy of a book and I read it then tell people all about it, I am not committing copyright infringement
If you use that illegal copy to create a work, then your copy infringes copyright (unless it falls under fair use). LLMs don’t count as people in any legal sense, and training them doesn’t have a legal status comparable to a real person reading books.