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
The push to require paying to read content that is shared openly on the web is designed to drive a feasibility wedge between large and small operations.
It means that a small handful of organizations will actually have the funds to be able to buy enough training data, and that all other smaller AI ventures will be illegal.
This is designed to concentrate AI power into a few hands.
Think critically about the narratives being fed to you. AIs must be allowed to read the web, because if they are not then we will have a unipolar AI ecosystem and the future of humanity will be extremely dark.
We need a multipolar AI ecosystem and the only way to do that is to have lots of small players making their own AI.
If we have a multipolar AI ecosystem, then AI will be forced to play nice because of the effects of parity, and therefore AI will develop along a prosocial, negotiating, respectful path.
Unipolar AI will be tyrannical, cruel, and evil. Unipolar AI will be the result of making it illegal to train AI on web content.
Please see past the propagandistic narrative. Today it is OpenAI that is fighting for this right. Tomorrow it will be smaller players. That is a good thing. That is what we want.
Okay.