You're missing the point. This is the crux of munificent's argument IMO (and I've made variations of it as well)
> We have copyright and intellecual property law already, of course, but those were designed presuming a human might try to profit from the intellectual labor of others.
You getting a summary of a copyrighted work from a friend is necessarily limited by the number of friends you have, the amount of time they have to read stuff and talk to you, and so on. Machines (and AIs) don't have any limitations.
Yes, true. But does that really shift the argument much? An AI is like the most well-read book nerd you’ve ever met. The AI has read everything. They still won’t recite Harry Potter for you at full length and reading what the original author wrote is part of the pleasure.
Sure, we could change current law, but I think that only forces an AI company to buy one copy of every book. I don’t think it gives any sort of royalty stream to anyone beyond that. Copyright is literally the right to make copies. Once I have acquired a copy, I can read it, summarize it, transform it, etc. in myriad ways.
Not true. You can photocopy pages from a book you own for your own use. You can make copies of purchased software as a backup. What you can’t do is make copies and give them to all your friends or sell them to the public.
"U.S. copyright law provides copyright owners with the following exclusive rights: Reproduce the work in copies"
This doesn't differentiate between partial and complete copies.
> You can make copies of purchased software as a backup
This is true. They had to write out that exception for digital media. And the key is "backup". You can't run or use multiple copies if you only own one.
While the rules for fair use are not black and white, one of the primary tests is whether the copying impairs the market for the work. If you want to copy pages of a book to mark them up, for instance, so your original copy stays clean, that would generally fall under fair use. You aren’t selling the copy or the original. You aren’t giving one or the other to other people, thereby eliminating a potential sale. You are copying some pages, not the entire work, cover to cover. As you say, you wouldn’t get in trouble for it in any case, but I’m pretty sure that it would be covered under fair use. But yea, if you photocopy a book and give it to your friend, that’s illegal.
1) Quantity is its own quality: Scale makes a difference
2) The tools themselves automate tasks and consolidate their outputs. The “sale” of a piece of content, and its consumption, shifts away from the people producing it
Example: We have entire networks and systems that depended on consumption occurring on the site itself. News websites, or indie sites depend on ad revenue.
Does a literal book nerd profit megacorporations when they bring up books to you? While burning through a household worth of energy in the process?
Also, I’d like to talk with such book nerd because they’d have opinions on books, potentially if I brought up something I have read we could exchange thoughts about it, they could make recommendations for me based on their complex experiences instead of statistics from Reddit comments. An LLM can do none of those, while also doing the former. It’s a lose-lose.
Also, a book nerd doesn’t take roughly ~all human created text to train to produce meaningful results. It’s just such a misplaced analogy and people have been making it ever since OpenAI announced chatgpt for the first time - why do people think “an LLM is just a human who read a lot”
> Megacorporations making profit is not some evil that needs to be stopped.
Externalities are a thing. It's not about the profit per se, but about how (a) the making of that profit might negatively impact others, and (b) the deployment of that profit in pursuit of rent-seeking and other antisocial behavior in order to insure its continued existence might also negatively impact others.
> We have copyright and intellecual property law already, of course, but those were designed presuming a human might try to profit from the intellectual labor of others.
You getting a summary of a copyrighted work from a friend is necessarily limited by the number of friends you have, the amount of time they have to read stuff and talk to you, and so on. Machines (and AIs) don't have any limitations.