this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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You've failed to explain how that relates to your point. Sure you can purchase an econonomics textbook and then go become a finance bro, but that's not what they're doing here. They're taking that textbook (that wasn't paid for) and feeding it into their commercial product. The end product is derived from the author's work.
To put it a different way, would they still be able to produce ChatGPT if one of the developers simply read that same textbook and then inputted what they learned into the model? My guess is no.
It'd be the same if I went and bought CDs, ripped my favorite tracks, and then put them into a compilation album that I then sold for money. My product can't exist without having copied the original artists work. ChatGPT just obfuscates that by copying a lot of songs.
A better comparison would probably be sampling. Sampling is fair use in most of the world, though there are mixed judgments. I think most reasonable people would consider the output of ChatGPT to be transformative use, which is considered fair use.
If I created a web app that took samples from songs created by Metallica, Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, Snoop Dogg, Slayer, Eminem, Mozart, Beethoven, and hundreds of other different musicians, and allowed users to mix all these samples together into new songs, without getting a license to use these samples, the RIAA would sue the pants off of me faster than you could say "unlicensed reproduction."
It doesn't matter that the output of my creation is clear-cut fair use. The input of the app--the samples of copyrighted works--is infringing.
The RIAA is indeed a litigious organization, and they tend to use their phalanx of lawyers to extract anyone who does anything creative or new into submission.
But sampling is generally considered fair use.
And if the algorithm you used actually listened to tens of thousands of hours of music, and fed existing patterns into a system that creates new patterns, well, you'd be doing the same thing anyone who goes from listening to music to writing music does. The first song ever written by humans was probably plagiarized from a bird.