"Imagine a world in which the Copyright Act of 1976 requires an electronic copy of every book to be deposited with the Library of Congress."
I fail to imagine such a world. It's 1976, there's very few computers around (at least for the general public and smaller companies), and a lot of typesetting is still not based on computers. Those who are using "digital" typesetting (not Aldus, but interacting with a photo-typesetter via a terminal) are probably storing data in proprietary formats on floppy drives or tapes, and presumably not as a neat .txt file. Who would even consider such a law?
The huge data availability which enabled GPT-2, GPT-3, ChatGPT, etc. is not because of project gutenberg, but because of the capillary usage of Internet and tons of user-produced content you can scrape and reuse. Sure, we can imagine a past in which all these conditions are in place, but then we're just moving all the tech of 2010's and 2020's 50 years behind. And if we do that, I agree we can have current AI approaches and flared trousers go hand in hand :)
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"Imagine a world in which the Copyright Act of 1976 requires an electronic copy of every book to be deposited with the Library of Congress."
I fail to imagine such a world. It's 1976, there's very few computers around (at least for the general public and smaller companies), and a lot of typesetting is still not based on computers. Those who are using "digital" typesetting (not Aldus, but interacting with a photo-typesetter via a terminal) are probably storing data in proprietary formats on floppy drives or tapes, and presumably not as a neat .txt file. Who would even consider such a law?
The huge data availability which enabled GPT-2, GPT-3, ChatGPT, etc. is not because of project gutenberg, but because of the capillary usage of Internet and tons of user-produced content you can scrape and reuse. Sure, we can imagine a past in which all these conditions are in place, but then we're just moving all the tech of 2010's and 2020's 50 years behind. And if we do that, I agree we can have current AI approaches and flared trousers go hand in hand :)