I would love to see the source on this one. It sounds fascinating.

I agree. It really doesn’t look like AI is the thing that broke. More like the education system, or something about social media.

As a civil matter, the publishing houses are more likely to get the full money if anthropic stays in business (and does well). So it might be bad, but I’m really skeptical about bankruptcy (and I’m not hearing anyone seriously floating it?)

Plantifs made that argument and the judge shoots it down pretty hard. That competition isn’t what copyright protects from. He makes an analogy with teachers teaching children to write fiction: they are using existing fantasy to create MANY more competitors on the fiction market. Could an author use copyright to challenge that use?

Would love to hear your thoughts on the ruling itself (it’s linked by reuters).

Depends on the content and the method. There are tons of ways to encrypt data, and under relevant law they may still count as copies. There are certainly weaker NN models where we can extract a lot of the training data, even if it’s not easy, from the model parameters (even if we can’t find a prompt that gets the model to regurgitate).

I also read through the judgement, and I think it’s better for anthropic than you describe. He distinguishes three issues:

A) Use any written material they get their hands on to train the model (and the resulting model doesn’t just reproduce the works).

B) Buy a single copy of a print book, scan it, and retain the digital copy for a company library (for all sorts of future purposes).

C) Pirate a book and retain that copy for a company library (for all sorts of future purposes).

A and B were fair use by summary judgement. Meaning this judge thinks it’s clear cut in anthropics favor. C will go to trial.

I’m still looking for a good reason to believe critical thinking and intelligence are taking a dive. It’s so very easy to claim the kids aren’t all right. But I wish someone would check. An interview with the gpt cheaters? A survey checking that those brilliant essays aren’t from people using better prompts? Let’s hear from the kids! Everyone knows nobody asked us when we were being turned into ungrammatical zombies by spell check/grammar check/texting/video content/ipads/the calculator.