264
To skirt copyright law, Anthropic bought and destroyed millions of physical books to train its "Claude" LLM (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world
23 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 27 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Yeah, this is on the way of being a win. In this case they actually bought the books, which has been one of the biggest issues with LLMs. There's certainly more discussion to be had around how they use the materials in the end, but this is a step in the right direction.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
    •
  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    To a certain extent I agree, but you can buy a book and still commit copyright infringement by copying its contents (for use other than personal use)

    If this would go to court, it would depend on whether training an LLM model is more akin to copying or learning. I can see arguments for either interpretation, but I suspect that the law would lean more toward it being copying rather than learning

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    There's already been a summary judgment in this case ruling that the AI training activity was not by itself copyright violation.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    This isn't an automatic complete win for them.

    Being allowed to train under fair use rules doesn't mean you're protected if your LLM still regurgitates content.

    https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/nyt-to-start-searching-deleted-chatgpt-logs-after-beating-openai-in-court/

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    The lawsuit between NYT and OpenAI is still ongoing, this article is about a court order to "preserve evidence" that could be used in the trial. It doesn't indicate anything about how the case might ultimately be decided.

    Last I dug into the NYT v. OpenAI case it looked pretty weak, NYT had heavily massaged their prompts in order to get ChatGPT to regurgitate snippets of their old articles and the judge had called them out on that.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent