I don’t think parent anthropomorphizing anything. The ones who anthropomorphize are saying that machines should be covered by fair use, because they have similarities with humans.
This is not about the rights of a machine but about how one human product is consumed by another human product. This is just a commercial supply chain: if you make a model, you need human data. You generally need to compensate your suppliers of “raw material”.
Its not the tool that is covered by fair use. It is the creation of the tool that is covered by fair use.
Is the tool itself supposed to be a copyright violation or is it a tool facilitating copyright violation by producing violating output?
The later is something that can be tested because we have processes to compare works of art for it. If it is shown that LLMs produce mostly infringing art then we can and should ban or heavily regulate them. If not then not.
> It is the creation of the tool that is covered by fair use.
Copyright doesn’t restrict creation of something, it restricts (mainly) commercial distribution. Research, education and journalism etc are largely unaffected, and would still be.
That said, I believe that selling access to the tool to the public already violates the copyright of the rights holders, even if it doesn’t produce similar works of art. The copyrighted works increased the value of the product (otherwise why would they use it?).
> The later is something that can be tested because we have processes to compare works of art for it.
This is the most expensive, least practical and most arbitrary part of existing copyright. It would be a huge mistake, imo, to expand this dramatically. This problem mostly goes away if the supply chain is sanely regulated.
All you’d need is give access to the training set upon audit, and bureaucrats could check for copyrighted works. There are already automated tools for this.
"That said, I believe that selling access to the tool to the public already violates the copyright of the rights holders, even if it doesn’t produce similar works of art. The copyrighted works increased the value of the product (otherwise why would they use it?)."
So it is similar to how ISPs argue that they should get a cut of streaming services because they enable another product.
I think it is also relevant that more than half of the globe will just completely ignore any regulation and any artist in a country with regulation will just have to compete with ever more empowered artists using all ai has to offer.
This is not about the rights of a machine but about how one human product is consumed by another human product. This is just a commercial supply chain: if you make a model, you need human data. You generally need to compensate your suppliers of “raw material”.