Technology

What do you think happens to data when it’s scraped? Copying the data is a fundamental requirement for using it in training. These models are trained in big datacenters where the original work is split up and tokenized and used over and over again.

Tokenizing and calculating vectors or whatever is not the same thing as distributing copies of said work.

The difference between you training a model and you reading a book (put online by its author in clear text, to avoid the obvious issue of actual piracy for human use) is that you reading on a website is the intention of the copyright holder and you as a person have a fundamental right to remember things and be inspired.

Copyright holders can't say what I do with their work, nor what I do with the knowledge of their book. They can only say how I copy and distribute it. I don't need consent to burn an author's book, create fan art around it, or quote characters in my blog. I do need their consent to copy and distribute their works directly.

You don’t however have a right to copy and use the text for other purposes, whether that’s making a t-shirt with a memorable line, printing it out to give to someone else, or tokenizing it to train a computer algorithm.

And at some point the resolution of said words is so specific that it becomes uncopyrightable. You can't copyright most phrases nor words.