Compensation to writers for AI training

By drz, 29 January, 2024

Discussion with Claude  1/20/24

There is a major controversy about authors rights copyright and AI work not being copy righted. That is a mess but I see the solution as a symbiosis, but that will take time and I will hurry it along.
More importantly, authors say that if AI is trained on their work, they should be compensated. In their minds you are taking their ideas and they want to be compensated. They need to understand that is not what you do. And then I realized I do not understand it either

Can clarify what "training" on their data means
You raise an important point about the relationship between AI systems like myself and the data we are trained on. Let me try to clarify:

When an AI is "trained on" text or other data, what's generally happening is that the system is analyzing patterns and relationships in that data in order to learn how to generate similar kinds of text or make predictions. The system is not directly copying or reusing the specific text from the training data.

For example, if I was trained on a dataset of novels, I would analyze things like the structure of sentences, relationships between ideas, topics and themes that come up, etc. This allows me to learn general rules about how human language and writing works. I don't store copies of passages from those novels to reuse later - I learn more abstract patterns.

So while the training data is important for developing an AI's capabilities, the AI is not simply copying or repackaging that specific data. It is learning general linguistic models that can be applied to generate new text or analyze new questions.

The relationship is more analogous to a human learner reading a variety of books to build their general language skills, vs a human plagiarizing passages from those books later on. The learning process does not deprive authors of their copyright or ownership of the specific expressing in their texts. But it does allow the learner to develop their own skills for new applications.