alt Hacker NewsYou don’t need anthroporphism to draw the conclusion that using copyrighted material in model training is fair use. It extends pretty directly from existing fair use doctrine surrounding transformative uses of technology, in particular from Authors Guild v. Google, where the 2nd circuit ruled that creating a searchable database of copyrighted material (i.e. Google Books) was transformative, as long as the material presented to the end user was limited snippets of text and not the entirety. Bartz v. Anthropic explicitly cites that case as precedent
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Google: scans all books, people can search for them, find little snippets, see the title and author, buy the book to read it
AI: scans all art, people can ask it to produce art they're searching for, no reference to the original or its author, people no longer pay artists/designers/...
I think there's a very obvious distinction there. The whole purpose of copyright is ensuring the financial viability of creating works. AI slop is a direct market substitute for the originals it ate up for training, so it goes directly against that. Meanwhile, search actually improves the reach of works and, well, snippets and summaries are somewhere in between...
In this instance the training data was New Yorker cartoons signed by Brendan Loper, and the material presented to the end user is New Yorker-style cartoons signed by Brendan Loper.
To me that seems a exceedingly broad definition of fair use.