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.

You could honestly say the same about most “teaching” that a student without a real comprehension of the subject does for another student. But ultimately, that’s beside the point. Because changing the wording, structure, and presentation is all that is necessary to avoid copyright violation. You cannot copyright the information. Only a specific expression of it.

There’s no special exception for AI here. That’s how copyright works for you, me, the student, and the AI. And if you’re hoping that copyright is going to save you from the outcomes you’re worried about, it won’t.

Makes sense to me. Search indices tend to store large amounts of copyrighted material yet they don’t violate copyright. What matters is whether or not you’re redistributing illegal copies of the material.

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.

It seems like a lot of people misunderstand copyright so let’s be clear: the answer is yes. You can absolutely digitize your books. You can rip your movies and store them on a home server and run them through compression algorithms.

Copyright exists to prevent others from redistributing your work so as long as you’re doing all of that for personal use, the copyright owner has no say over what you do with it.

You even have some degree of latitude to create and distribute transformative works with a violation only occurring when you distribute something pretty damn close to a copy of the original. Some perfectly legal examples: create a word cloud of a book, analyze the tone of news article to help you trade stocks, produce an image containing the most prominent color in every frame of a movie, or create a search index of the words found on all websites on the internet.

You can absolutely do the same kinds of things an AI does with a work as a human.

Wikipedia has a whole list of citations on this very sentence lol.

There is near unanimous consensus among economists that tariffs are self-defeating and have a negative effect on economic growth and economic welfare

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff

Tariffs are a net negative. Always. The things produced will not be competitive on the global market, if they were, we’d already be making them. The higher prices always destroy more jobs than they create. Retaliatory tariffs destroy even more jobs. The higher prices drive down demand and make the working class consumer poorer. Always.

There’s no economic upside to tariffs, over any time horizon. They create a small number of jobs in a specific sector at a very expensive cost. Some politicians might decide that the enormous economic cost is worth it for other reasons, but a net positive they are not.

Just because it’s a manipulation doesn’t mean it’s always avoidable, though. Like Lex Luthor manipulates Superman by putting Lois Lane’s life in danger. Letting Lois die isn’t typically a real option. He’s got no choice but to play the game because he’s a moral person.

Are we supposed to just let LGBTQ people die so we can make inroads on the class war? I don’t like it, but that’s not a real option either.

ITT: A bunch of people who have never heard of information theory suddenly have very strong feelings about it.