Good news for devs: You can train AI with books (if they’re legal)

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Thinking of building your own AI model or just curious how tools like GPT get trained? A new court ruling just made things clearer: you can train AI on copyrighted books, as long as they’re legally sourced. This decision is a major win for devs, educators, and anyone learning to build with AI.

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Why This Ruling Changes Everything

This decision is the first of its kind to so clearly separate the act of training an AI from the act of acquiring the training data.

For AI companies and those who want to learn AI, it provides a powerful legal shield for the core process of training their models, so long as the final product is transformative and not a market substitute for the original works.

For authors, artists, and creators, it affirms that their copyrights cannot be ignored. AI firms cannot simply scrape the internet's dark corners for free material without consequence. The ruling empowers creators to fight back against the mass acquisition of their work from illegal sources.

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