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
Sometimes I’ve noticed Google’s AI overview is a nearly word for word copy of the highest reddit result, or any result.
I mean, that’s because googles AI over view is designed to summarize search results on a topic. On one hand that reduces the degree to which it will simply hallucinate, on the other sometimes the top search result is already as concise as it can be at the target grade level of writing.
God its so useless
The only times I’ve had it be remotely helpful is when you want something specific that’s going to appear near the top of search results and is also likely to be buried in a bunch of irrelevant faff. Which is to say that occasionally “search for X and summarize the top result” is a useful tool but not often enough for them to front and center it like they do.
For example recipes. You can’t copyright a recipe, so recipes tend to be buried in a lot of crap that isn’t the actual recipe.