OpenAI's justification for why training data is fair use, not infringement [pdf]
Summary of their arguments for why training on copyrighted datasets is OK:<p>(1) Training AI systems on large copyrighted datasets constitutes fair use under current copyright law. They believe it is highly transformative, does not harm the market for the original works, and serves a different purpose than the original works.<p>(2) If it were an infringement, it would severely hinder AI progress, which has many societal benefits. Copyright law should promote creativity and innovation.<p>(3) Other legal tools like infringement suits on AI outputs, anti-scraping laws, etc can address valid concerns instead of rigid copyright laws.<p>Expanding on (1), they say:<p>(1.a) The corpora used for training are not made publicly accessible - they are only consumed by machines during training. So authors do not lose any potential audience.<p>(1.b) The outputs of AI systems do not regenerate significant portions of the original works verbatim. The systems learn general patterns, not the specific expression of any particular work.<p>(1.c) Well-constructed AI systems do not overfit on any particular work. Each work contributes very minimally to the overall model.<p>---<p>I think we should not be stopping progress, but this document 100% minimizes the impact&#x2F;harm.<p>Soon AI writers and programmers will be so good, that even if they do not reproduce copyright content verbatim, they will be able to replace large % of the future work of the people that produced the copyrighted content the AI was trained on. This seems like a clear harm.<p>Given that the datasets are the product of the whole population, the whole population should be able to reap the benefits. As things are heading, only the largest corporations will be able to squeeze profit from the most powerful models.<p>This goes against (1.a), if one company can use the data for training, it should be made easily accessible to everyone.<p>Side note for (1.b), many companies implement this as a dumb filter on top of the LLM output, making sure that no N character substring appears in some copyrighted text.