Once again, we regret to inform you, it is AI
This week in death to AI some judge in some case ruled that AI companies using our books without permission qualifies as fair use because it's transformative, and not distinct from authors being influenced by other books themselves.
The judge did also say that AI companies pirating books to train their AI was illegal, so I guess hooray for that, but I'm here today to take issue with the claim that feeding books into an LLM to train it is the same as my reading books and then also writing books.
An LLM is, by design, imitative. It is imitating everything at once which is why in general the output sounds bland and uninteresting, but it can also imitate specific things if you ask it to. We all saw this with the harrowing Ghibli nonsense a couple of months ago.
