Not technically theft unless the public library no longer has the books. Selling something and saying you created it when you didn't is a different five-letter word: fraud.
replyPutting prompts in an LLM and saying you "created" the image or text thereof is fraud.
No, they've merely infringed copyright. Theft is a well understood concept and it does not pertain to information.
replyI don't believe anything is being sold here :)
replyBarrels of tokens sold by thieves that copied every book sure looks like selling to me.
replyAI companies sell access to their models, via subscriptions and ads.
replyPublic libraries don‘t sell anything. Also authors and publishers get payed for having their books in the library (how and how much varies by country). Authors and publishers get nothing for having their books put into AI training data. Hence the former is a public service, and the latter is theft.
deleted
replyOkay, but that's not what happened as far as I'm aware. Who did they sell their copies of the books to?
reply