zlacker

> A judge willing to commit the Butlerian Jihad[0] might even say that regurgitation does not matter and that all AI outputs are derivative works of the entire training set[1].

A judge can’t “commit” the butlierian jihad. A jihad is a mass event caused by some fraction of the population believing in some cause.

Which kinda gets to a point that seems to be missed. Copyright law is not “intrinsic” - nobody thinks that copyright is a natural law - it is just a pragmatic implementation which balances various public and private goods. If the world changes such that the law no longer does a good job of balancing the various goods, then either the law will get changed or people will ignore the law.

>>richk4+(OP)
Copyright is a unique case in which the law represents a bargain struck in the 1970s that hasn't been updated since. Everyone ignores it because it's nearly impossible to actually enforce copyright on individual infringers. But that doesn't mean copyright is meaningless: any activity which is large enough to be legible[0] to the state will be forced to bend itself to fit within the copyright bargain.

And AI training is extremely legible. This is not like a bunch of people downloading stuff off BitTorrent. All of the large foundation models we use were trained by a large corporation with a source of venture capital funding which could be easily shut off by a sufficiently motivated government. Weights-available and liberally licensed models exist, but most improvements on them are fine-tuning. Anonymous individuals can fine-tune an LLM or art generator with a small amount of data and compute, but they cannot make meaningful improvements on the state of the art.

So our sufficiently motivated copyright judge could at least effectively freeze AI art in time until Big Tech and the MAFIAA agree on how to properly split the proceeds from screwing over individual artists.

"Butlerian Jihad" is a term from a book, so you don't need to take "jihad" literally. However, I will point out that there is a significant fraction of the population that does want to see AI permanently banned from creative endeavors. The loss of ownership over their work from having it be in the training set is a factor, but their main argument is that they specifically want to keep their current jobs as they are. They do not want to be replaced with AI, nor do they want to replace their existing drawing work with SEO keyword stuffed text-to-image prompts.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State

>>kmeist+n9
Butlerian jihad is a good reference point. Something so bad happened that a large enough portion of the population was convinced to destroy thinking machines, and this no-computer norm was held in human society for a crazy long time (been too long for me to remember how long elapsed before Chapterhouse, which I think is the book where thinking machines start returning). It was a core belief of humanity that computers were bad, not a law imposed by a judge or legislature.

So say a US judge did impose severe restrictions on LLMs through US copyright law. The giant companies that are using LLMs will just move to another country. And just like tax law, others will be happy to have them. Would the US start blocking inbound internet traffic from countries that don’t have the same interpretation of copyright? That seems very unlikely.

The point is that the only way LLMs get the butlerian jihad treatment is if the people rise up against them. Right now, that is nowhere close to happening.