This comment in the footnotes made me chuckle, for purely innocuous reasons.

I was actually surprised they offered such simple options. Of course the complexity is there, the moment you start wanting an extra column, you're in the rabbit hole.

That is a bold claim!

"There is no free will." - Dr. Robert Sapolsky

For LLMs the transformative part is then removing the copyright info and serving it to you as OpenAI whatever.

Sure, you can query multiple books at the same time and the technology is godlike. But the underlying issue remains. Without the original content, the LLM is useless. Someone took all the books, feed them in and didn't pay anything back to the authors.

I'm not sure whether arguing in good faith here. This information you could easily check for yourself too. The problem is not the information itself. It's the massive machinery that steals all the works and one day we are staring at the paywall. And the artists are still not funded. I'd rather just do something nice offline in the future.

Or if you had to buy the book yourself, same thing, distributed, royalties paid.

Seriously though, I do think that is the case. It would be self-righteous to argue otherwise. It's just the scale and the nature of this, that makes it so repulsive. For my taste, copying something without permission, is stealing. I don't care what a judge somewhere thinks of it. Using someone's good will for profit is disgusting. And I hope we all get to profit from it someday, not just a select few. But that is just my opinion.

I don't even use Claude and it has been rather clear to me, that their service has not been working properly for some time now.

And they are making money off of other people's work. Sure, you can use mental jiujutsu to make it fair use. But fair use for LLMs means you basically copy the whole thing. All of it. It sounds more like a total use to me.

I hope the free market and technology catches up and destroys the VC backed machinery. But only time will tell.

Cha cha cha ...

Which, in fact, would open up the same rat race with determining which accounts are real and so forth.

Not disagreeing with you, just circling around this same problem. Feels like the world still isn't ready yet.