Ok so you can buy books scan them or ebooks and use for AI training but you can’t just download priated books from internet to train AI. Did I understood that correctly ?
If you violated laws in obtaining the book (eg stole or downloaded it without permission) it’s illegal and you’ve already violated the law, no matter what you do after that.
If you obtain the book legally you can do whatever you want with that book, by the first sale doctrine. If you want to redistribute the book, you need the proper license. You don’t need any licensing to create a derivative work. That work has to be “sufficiently transformed” in order to pass.
The LLM is not repeating the same book. The owner of the LLM has the exact same rights to do with what his LLM is reading, as you have to do with what ever YOU are reading.
As long as it is not a verbatim recitation, it is completely okay.
According to story telling theory: there are only roughly 15 different story types anyway.
How they don’t use same words as in the book ? That’s not how LLM works. They use exactly same words if the probabilities align. It’s proved by this study. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12546
FIrst, it’s a very new article with only 3 citations. The authors seem like serious researchers but the paper itself is still in the, “hot off the presses” stage and wouldn’t qualify as “proven” yet.
It also doesn’t exactly say that books are copies. It says that in some models, it’s possible to extract some portions of some texts. They cite “1984” and “Harry Potter” as two books that can be extracted almost entirely, under some circumstances. They also find that, in general, extraction rates are below 1%.
Ok so you can buy books scan them or ebooks and use for AI training but you can’t just download priated books from internet to train AI. Did I understood that correctly ?
That’s my understanding too. If you obtained them legally, you can use them the same way anyone else who obtained them legally could use them.
Make an AI that is trained on the books.
Tell it to tell you a story for one of the books.
Read the story without paying for it.
The law says this is ok now, right?
Sort of.
If you violated laws in obtaining the book (eg stole or downloaded it without permission) it’s illegal and you’ve already violated the law, no matter what you do after that.
If you obtain the book legally you can do whatever you want with that book, by the first sale doctrine. If you want to redistribute the book, you need the proper license. You don’t need any licensing to create a derivative work. That work has to be “sufficiently transformed” in order to pass.
The LLM is not repeating the same book. The owner of the LLM has the exact same rights to do with what his LLM is reading, as you have to do with what ever YOU are reading.
As long as it is not a verbatim recitation, it is completely okay.
According to story telling theory: there are only roughly 15 different story types anyway.
As long as they don’t use exactly the same words in the book, yeah, as I understand it.
How they don’t use same words as in the book ? That’s not how LLM works. They use exactly same words if the probabilities align. It’s proved by this study. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12546
I’d say there are two issues with it.
FIrst, it’s a very new article with only 3 citations. The authors seem like serious researchers but the paper itself is still in the, “hot off the presses” stage and wouldn’t qualify as “proven” yet.
It also doesn’t exactly say that books are copies. It says that in some models, it’s possible to extract some portions of some texts. They cite “1984” and “Harry Potter” as two books that can be extracted almost entirely, under some circumstances. They also find that, in general, extraction rates are below 1%.
The “if” is working overtime in your statement