Okay, people keep telling me to read this NY Mag profile of Emily Bender, and they're right. It's a fantastic read. However, this line is... wrong (or misleading). Everything that ChatGPT trains on is also covered by copyright. The idea that it can't do books because of copyright is just wrong. It can't train based on ebooks, because the ebooks are locked up and not publicly available (without great cost).

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html

@mmasnick
Wow. Yeah, the idea that copyright law only applies to books is... um... Well, it's dead wrong for one!
@SarahAnneDipity i mean, if we go back to the 1790, copyright only applied to books, maps, charts, so not the internet. But, also, the internet didn't exist. And copyright law has... changed.