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Microsoft’s AI boss thinks it’s perfectly OK to steal content if it’s on the open web
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2024
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Yes, it kind of is. A search engine just looks for keywords and links, and that's all it retains after crawling a site. It's not producing any derivative works, it's merely looking up an index of keywords to find matches.
An LLM can essentially reproduce a work, and the whole point is to generate derivative works. So by its very nature, it runs into copyright issues. Whether a particular generated result violates copyright depends on the license of the works it's based on and how much of those works it uses. So it's complicated, but there's very much a copyright argument there.
My brain also takes information and creates derivative works from it.
Shit, am I also a data thief?
That depends, do you copy verbatim? Or do you process and understand concepts, and then create new works based on that understanding? If you copy verbatim, that's plagiarism and you're a thief. If you create your own answer, it's not.
Current AI doesn't actually "understand" anything, and "learning" is just grabbing input data. If you ask it a question, it's not understanding anything, it just matches search terms to the part of the training data that matches, and regurgitates a mix of it, and usually omits the sources. That's it.
It's a tricky line in journalism since so much of it is borrowed, and it's likewise tricky w/ AI, but the main difference IMO is attribution, good journalists cite sources, AI rarely does.
Derivative works are not copyright infringement. If LLMs are spitting out exact copies, or near-enough-to-exact copies, that’s one thing. But as you said, the whole point is to generate derivative works.
They absolutely are, unless it's covered by "fair use." A "derivative work" doesn't mean you created something that's inspired by a work, but that you've modified the the work and then distributed the modified version.