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
First off, this been bothering you for a month? O.o
Secondly, I personally can’t steal a single book, popular or not.
I am arguing in good faith. The training data obviously has copyrighted works in it.
These companies are being treated differently than if you personally used copyrighted works without paying.
https://www.copyright.com/blog/heart-of-the-matter-copyright-ai-training-llms-executive-summary/
Using Copyrighted Works in LLMs LLMs use massive amounts of textual works—many of which are protected by copyright. To do this, LLMs make copies of the works they rely on, which involves copyright in several ways, such as:
Using copyright-protected material in the training datasets of LLMs without permission can result in the creation of unauthorized copies: copies generated during the training process and copies in the form of representations of the training data embedded within the LLM after training. This creates potential copyright liability.
Outputs—the material generated by AI systems like LLMs—may create copyright liability if they are the same or too similar to one of the copyrighted works used as an input unless there is an appropriate copyright exception or limitation.