If I understand correctly they are ruling you can by a book once, and redistribute the information to as many people you want without consequences. Aka 1 student should be able to buy a textbook and redistribute it to all other students for free. (Yet the rules only work for companies apparently, as the students would still be committing a crime)
They may be trying to put safeguards so it isn’t directly happening, but here is an example that the text is there word for word:
If I understand correctly they are ruling you can by a book once, and redistribute the information to as many people you want without consequences. Aka 1 student should be able to buy a textbook and redistribute it to all other students for free. (Yet the rules only work for companies apparently, as the students would still be committing a crime)
A student can absolutely buy a text book and then teach the other students the information in it for free. That’s not redistribution. Redistribution would mean making copies of the book to hand out. That’s illegal for people and companies.
The language model isn’t teaching anything it is changing the wording of something and spitting it back out. And in some cases, not changing the wording at all, just spitting the information back out, without paying the copyright source. It is not alive, it has no thoughts. It has no “its own words.” (As seen by the judgement that its words cannot be copyrighted.) It only has other people’s words. Every word it spits out by definition is plagiarism, whether the work was copyrighted before or not.
People wonder why works, such as journalism are getting worse. Well how could they ever get better if anything a journalist writes can be absorbed in real time, reworded and regurgitated without paying any dos to the original source. One journalist article, displayed in 30 versions, dividing the original works worth up into 30 portions. The original work now being worth 1/30th its original value. Maybe one can argue it is twice as good, so 1/15th.
Long term it means all original creations… Are devalued and therefore not nearly worth pursuing. So we will only get shittier and shittier information. Every research project… Physics, Chemistry, Psychology, all technological advancements, slowly degraded as language models get better, and original sources deminish returns.
If I understand correctly they are ruling you can by a book once, and redistribute the information to as many people you want without consequences. Aka 1 student should be able to buy a textbook and redistribute it to all other students for free. (Yet the rules only work for companies apparently, as the students would still be committing a crime)
Well, it would be interesting if this case would be used as precedence in a case invonving a single student that do the same thing. But you are right
This was my understanding also, and why I think the judge is bad at their job.
I suppose someone could develop an LLM that digests textbooks, and rewords the text and spits it back out. Then distribute it for free page for page. You can’t copy right the math problems I don’t think… so if the text wording is what gives it credence, that would have been changed.
If a human did that it’s still plagiarism.
Oh I agree it should be, but following the judges ruling, I don’t see how it could be. You trained an LLM on textbooks that were purchased, not pirated. And the LLM distributed the responses.
(Unless you mean the human reworded them, then yeah, we aren’t special apparently)
Yes, on the second part. Just rearranging or replacing words in a text is not transformative, which is a requirement. There is an argument that the ‘AI’ are capable of doing transformative work, but the tokenizing and weight process is not magic and in my use of multiple LLM’s they do not have an understanding of the material any more then a dictionary understands the material printed on its pages.
An example was the wine glass problem. Art ‘AI’s were unable to display a wine glass filled to the top. No matter how it was prompted, or what style it aped, it would fail to do so and report back that the glass was full. But it could render a full glass of water. It didn’t understand what a full glass was, not even for the water. How was this possible? Well there was very little art of a full wine glass, because society has an unspoken rule that a full wine glass is the epitome of gluttony, and it is to be savored not drunk. Where as the reference of full glasses of water were abundant. It doesn’t know what full means, just that pictures of full glass of water are tied to phrases full, glass, and water.
Yeah, we had a fun example a while ago, let me see if I can still find it.
We would ask to create a photo of a cat with no tail.
And then tell it there was indeed a tail, and ask it to draw an arrow to point to it.
It just points to where the tail most commonly is, or was said to be in a picture it was not referencing.
Edit: granted now, it shows a picture of a cat where you just can’t see the tail in the picture.
