Comment by BobbyTables2

Music artists get in trouble for using more than a sample from other music artists without permission because their work is in direct competition with the work they're borrowing from.

A ZIP file of a book is also in direct competition of the book, because you could open the ZIP file and read it instead of the book.

A model that can take 50 tokens and give you a greater than 50% probability for the 50 next tokens 42% of the time is not in direct competition with the book, since starting from the beginning you'll lose the plot fairly quickly unless you already have the full book, and unlike music sampling from other music, the model output isn't good enough to read it instead of the book.

> a blatantly derived work only using 50% of a copyrighted work without permission

What's the work here? If it's the output of the LLM, you have to feed in the entire book to make it output half a book so on an ethical level I'd say it's not an issue. If you start with a few sentences, you'll get back less than you put in.

If the work is the LLM itself, something you don't distribute is much less affected by copyright. Go ahead and play entire songs by other artists during your jam sessions.

>Amassing troves of copyrighted works illegally into a ZIP file wouldn’t be allowed. The fact that the meaning was compressed using “Math” makes everyone stop thinking because they don’t understand “Math”.

LLMs are in reality the artifacts of lossy compression of significant chunks of all of the text ever produced by humanity. The "lossy" quality makes them able to predict new text "accurately" as a result.

>compressed using “Math”

This is every compression algorithm.