copyright infringement is not theft, even if right holders often claim it is.
replypart of the definition of theft is that the original owner is deprived of it, which does not apply to copyright infringement.
You can only argue with damages from the perspective of potential profits, still not theft though.
So having tons of AIs quoting various literary works and reproducing knock-offs of them has a positive effect on those books' sales?
replyI think you're wrong: there is absolutely damage to the authors and publishers from what the AI companies have done.
If you steal an unpopular product from a store, the damage is also only to "potential profits", so how does that differ? It's entirely possible no one would have purchased the product and it would have eventually been discarded/destroyed.
replyOr with services, if a barber cuts your hair and then you run away without paying them, do you not consider that theft, even though there's no change in ownership occurring?
Moreover, reading a copyrighted book and learning from it is not theft.
replyGenerating a set of weights is not learning.
replywould you say that airplanes don't fly because they don't flap their wings? it's possible to achieve the same things with different approaches.
replyThat is a strong statement. I guess you are telling Machine Learning to go fuck itself.
replyNo, Machine Learning is an unfortunate name for a well documented process for creating black-box classifiers. The process is good, the name is not.
replyAnd what, to your mind, would classify something as learning? I assume that your position is not the hard "only humans/living creatures can learn"
replyGreat! Neither is distillation then.
replyNever said it was.
Still, understanding to what extent the ability of Chinese labs to keep up to western models with much less compute needs to be understood.
replyMachines are not humans.
replyReread my comment and look for a value judgement on my part. The final sentence is probably a good clue as to my opinion.
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