A court says training on copyrighted books is fair use

On Monday, a United States District Court ruled that training LLMs on copyrighted books constitutes fair use. A number of authors had filed suit against Anthropic for training its models on their books without permission. Just as we allow people to read books and learn from them to become better writers, but not to regurgitate copyrighted text verbatim, the judge concluded that it is fair use for AI models to do so as well. Indeed, Judge Alsup wrote that the authors’ lawsuit is “no different than it would be if they complained that training schoolchildren to write well would result in an explosion of competing works.” While it remains to be seen whether the decision will be appealed, this ruling is reasonable and will be good for AI progress. (Usual caveat: I am not a lawyer and am not giving legal advice.) AI has massive momentum, but a few things could put progress at risk: - Regulatory capture that stifles innovation, including especially open source - Loss of access to cutting-edge semiconductor chips (the most likely cause would be war breaking out in Taiwan) - Regulations that severely impede access to data for training AI systems Access to high-quality data is important.…