Jane. Love this article and thank you so much for taking the time to write it and not string a bunch of words togethers. It's one thing to use and AI agent and upload your material versus the material being taken from you unaware.
This is a beautiful reflection - thanks for writing and sharing it, Jane.
Your final idea is thought-provoking ("But what the courts won’t rule on is what it will mean for reading and writing if we agree to see books as no more than strings of words to be chopped up and transformed into data for AI models.") I wonder: What stops us from seeing books as *both* the precious fruits of individual human cognitive effort and expression *and* as strings of words to be fed to models to make them stronger and more amazing in their abilities? The nightmare scenario is that we give up on reading books, preferring instead to read the outputs of generative AI. But I think humans have the hunger and the curiosity to know what other humans think, a hunger and a curiosity that won't be sated by gen AI. At least I hope.
It is a slippery argument, indeed. Of course the value of any *one* book is zero in the context of how many words they need to train these. And yet, and yet, and yet.
Jane. Love this article and thank you so much for taking the time to write it and not string a bunch of words togethers. It's one thing to use and AI agent and upload your material versus the material being taken from you unaware.
This is a beautiful reflection - thanks for writing and sharing it, Jane.
Your final idea is thought-provoking ("But what the courts won’t rule on is what it will mean for reading and writing if we agree to see books as no more than strings of words to be chopped up and transformed into data for AI models.") I wonder: What stops us from seeing books as *both* the precious fruits of individual human cognitive effort and expression *and* as strings of words to be fed to models to make them stronger and more amazing in their abilities? The nightmare scenario is that we give up on reading books, preferring instead to read the outputs of generative AI. But I think humans have the hunger and the curiosity to know what other humans think, a hunger and a curiosity that won't be sated by gen AI. At least I hope.
Meta’s legal argument defies logic. If the absolute value of the books as training data is “zero,” then why are they using it as training data?
It is a slippery argument, indeed. Of course the value of any *one* book is zero in the context of how many words they need to train these. And yet, and yet, and yet.