Just forget for a second that this has anything to do with AI specifically: I wonder how it could possibly fall under fair use to grind up hundreds of thousands of pieces of copyrighted content, and then use that data to create software that you then profit from.

The question, as I see it, is if simply mashing all this intellectual property together -- and deriving a series of weights for an AI model from that -- somehow makes it not theft simply because all the content is smashed into one big pile of pink goo in which no single piece of content is recognizable.

Anthropic paid 1.5bil to settle not because they trained an LLM, but because they literally torrented an enormous corpus of training data from piracy websites like a late 00s college student downloading porn. It was just straight up run of the mill piracy.

There's worse things he could be doing with his time.

There's no benefit in him doing so. He likely makes more money working on any other project than ASOIAF and it's probably more fun for him to not have to worry about the fanbase.

It's hard to finish something that wasn't meant to finish ;)

You think AI is the biggest business of your time? 😆

Clearly more egregious than said generation making the same shitty joke for 10 years every time his name is mentioned

The joke is the book has likely been finished for years. He is just sitting on it to troll people after his death.

Yes and no - there's so much GoT fan content out there that they could theoretically pick up on the key names and places without the books

That said, I'd be willing to bet these shitty AI companies went the extra mile to pirate these books to train their LLMs, because copyright law is only for the poors.

I generally despise LLMs, but I'd be intrigued to see LLMs be the thing that reigns in copyright law a little bit because it's gotten too out of hand.

And nobody has to like him for abandoning his series. He deserves all the criticism he gets.

Your favorite thing you wanted to happen has happened, Everyone lived the way you wanted them to ever-after. The End.

• Every LLM generated story

Anything would be better than an LLM by virtue of the fact that a human wrote it.

Why would one hate a book?

At this point it's not in his best interest to finish it. It's analogous to the situation Valve carved for themselves with Half Life 3.

Create enough build up, and then have to delay it for one reason or another and... you're now trapped in a loop of more expectation, meaning the product must be better, meaning you're not confident to release it as is, so now more expectation builds up, and the loop repeats until you know that no matter what you release the public won't be satisfied enough, because reality can't possibly match their expectations, and you're no longer free to be creative because of the lingering expectations.

When that happens it's literally your best move to not release the thing.

But just imagine a world where he somehow manages to kill one of the big IRL villains of our time! It could only get better if he manages to take out some billionaires in the process

Yea, it is a "hot take". Artists need some kind of protection for their work, too. The problem is the in parts ridiculous implementations often pushed by big corpo IP holders.

Copyright is essential to creative output. Authors and creators need to be able to profit from their work. However, having a copyright for almost 200 years is completely ridiculous. In fact I think the lifetime of the author might be a bit of a stretch in and of itself. Their descendents collecting paychecks on the back of their work for multiple generations is ridiculous and it stifles creativity by walling off whole worlds of ideas. The original copyright laws, in the US at least, were only for about 25 years.

Did he bang your mom or something?