So I can use pirated media to train my AI (Actual Intelligence), right?
this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
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Should make all journal publications fair use.
Looking forward to Jellyfin getting a LLM to train locally on movie preferences so everyone’s library is fair use. Wait, is this why LLMs are being shoehorned into everything? 🤔
By this logic i should be able to copy paste Moby Dick and change all instances of the name to Mopy Dick and now it's output no longer matches the imput. I'm about to be the next Stefani King.
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Shorter and more reasonable copyright lengths would make this a moot point because then there would sufficient literature in the public domain to pull from.
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These kind of charges are what put the Pirate Bay admins in prison and caused Aaron Swartz to kill himself because of a threat of lifetime in prison. The claim that they did this either with the goal of profit or actually successful profit and that this was a serious crime. Neither TPB or Swartz at that point in time had ever moved as much data as Meta has for these claims, nor did they ever have the profit or possibility of profit Meta aims to make from their AI offerings.
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Now Meta is claiming they've profited so hard you can't possibly hold them accountable.
It will be the biggest "fuck you" in history to anyone ever hit with civil charges for piracy in the early 2000s, let alone the TPB admins and Swartz, if they let this go. Which means they probably will because in America, apparently if you crime hard enough and big enough they stop putting you in prison and start patting you on the back and calling it good business sense.
in America, apparently if you crime hard enough and big enough they stop putting you in prison and start patting you on the back and calling it good business sense.
There's a story about Alexander the great capturing a pirate and scolding him for raiding villages along the coast line. Alexander asked if the pirate feels ashamed and wants to beg for forgiveness. However, the pirate had something else to say. He said that Alexander was doing the same thing, but infinitely worse. The only difference was that Alexander called himself king and plundered entire lands while the pirate only raided small villages. The pirate reminded Alexander of the many lives he had destroyed in his conquest. So the pirate's only crime was not to be the biggest baddie in the hood, so to speak.
Alexander replied by stating that the title of king forces his hand and that he couldn't just stop what he was doing. The pirate on the other hand was just an individual who could easily change course. And so Alexander set the pirate free, stating that he himself will start changing his own ways right there and then if the pirate makes a fresh start first.
I don't know if there is any truth to this but it's a fable often used to explain how legitimacy changes the perception people have of wrong doing and heroism on a fundamental level. Alexander's reply sounds like an excuse and I think that's on purpose. The pirate outwitted him in the end by stating a basic truth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQBWGo7pef8
This is where I first remember hearing this tale, in this old Schoolhouse Rock parody that was in protest of the War in Iraq.
Yup, that's what I'm doing with all those audiobooks I torrented. Helping the US maintain the lead in AI 😂
Is it fair use if I do it?
Classic "the end justifies the means" (bad) defense. If ISPs can send letter for torrenting, and Facebook torrented a lot, Facebook deserves a fair punishment.
Not deserves, needs.
truck full of letters backs up to Meta's headquarters
"there, that's more appropriate."
Just spitballing...
If you were to train a model on just one book, as long as you don't prompt it to create an exact copy (maybe just some indiscernible differences) then presumably that's fair use.
Then, since we know AI generated work can't be copyrighted, does that essentially create a copyright-free version of the text which can be freely distributed?
There are no rules. Everything is made up to their convenience.
sure. thanks meta, anna's archive will help me with my reading list, thanks.
We can train our NI (Natural Intelligence) models.
As long as they cannot copyright what they generate from using the pirated materials
We're going to end up in a situation where whatever is necessary to train AI is permitted, and the main question is whether that will be through (re)interpretation of existing law or the passage of a new law.
Good thing I have a local model running that's constantly learning, for precisely this reason
I’m still collecting media before I can start the training process.
If anything, this is proof you should be next in line for a large venture capital infusion!
Arguing that training models isn't fair use us going to be a massive uphill battle, it's basically reading the book but with a computer. It's not actually a big deal to people, unless you hold the copyright to a ton of works and want to get a percentage of all the AI income these companies have made.
Torrenting the books is likely absolutely copyright infringement, but that has relatively low payout compared to the money these companies are getting for their models. The training being fair use means that rights holders can't try to take any money from the model's use. The statutory limits for infringement even at per work levels aren't significant compared to the legal cost of proving it happened.
Anthropic pirating books for their training corpus resulted in the biggest copyright settlement in history--well over a billion. That is still being quibbled over i believe, but they settled because they were likely to pay out more if the case went forward. So I'm not really sure where you're coming from that infringement via torrenting does not result in monstrously large liability.
There's an argument to be made that it is, in fact, not 'reading'. The training of the model could be considered a lossy compression of the data. And streaming movies in a lossy compression format is not fair use, is it?
It's not the storage of the information that matters as much as the presentation. Google's search index stores a huge amount of copyrighted material, even losslessly. But they only present small snippets at a time which is not considered copyright infringement. The question really is whether or not the information being presented by the models is in a format which is considered copyright infringement. So far, courts have not found that they are.
They didn't say seeding is fair use, just inherently part of torrenting. Good thing Sarah Silverman has pc gamer there to pander for her.