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Stop Calling AI Training a Theft: A Nuanced Look at Copyright and AI
This recent article, I Don’t Know How To Make You Care What ChatGPT Is Quietly Doing, echoes significant concerns about AI-generated text and its implications for writers. While I understand how emotionally unsettling this issue is for writers and readers alike, describing AI training on copyrighted works as “theft” oversimplifies a complex legal and ethical landscape. I commented on it multiple times but time to put it out as article of its own.
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The Legal Nuances of AI Training
Copyright law grants creators rights over the production of copies, distribution, and derivative works — not ownership of ideas, patterns, or structures extracted from their creations.
Unlike a patent, a copyright gives no exclusive right to the art disclosed; protection is given only to the expression of the idea — not the idea itself (source)
AI training involves analyzing patterns within a dataset to generate new content, not replicating or redistributing the original works. The legal question isn’t whether AI training is “theft,” but whether it constitutes…
