This is a silly perspective, inaccurate, and out of bounds framing.

Public libraries, in this instance, is curated data from all the internet, obtained through not legal means (I don't have a problem with this other than lack of attribution, being copy-left). Just to be clear.

But in answer to your incredibly leading and inaccurate framing... they are required (by their job title) to teach to those who who show up in the classroom, it's not their place to discriminate against anyone/thing (even those like itself (other robots)) that also show up in the classroom.

But you can't teach at a university using only knowledge learned from the library. you need a degree. You are free to teach at the park, where anyone can hear you. public in -> public out.

If a professor learns from multiple books, generalizes from them and then shares his knowledge he is providing a valuable service. Versus someone who makes a recording of the professor's lectures and resells them to undercut the professor--that guy is not providing a valuable service.

What kind of fresh hell does the sentence "undercut the professor" come from?

Teaching isn't a race to the bottom. You don't undercut teaching by giving more lessons, just like you don't slight the hospital by performing CPR.

We are not really talking about teaching here.

We sure wouldn't be, if we picked better metaphors.

> If a professor learns from multiple books, generalizes from them and then shares his knowledge he is providing a valuable service. Versus someone who makes a recording of the professor's lectures and resells them to undercut the professor--that guy is not providing a valuable service.

I'm confused now; isn't the LLM that trains on that professor's lectures, videos and textbooks undercutting him?

Where were you going with this?

What about a student attending lectures of other professors and generalizing what he learns from them, then going on to become a professor?

If the student is really good at generalizing we wouldn't even be having this debate because he would've just generalized from the same source materials the professor used.

What are you even trying to say: "undercut the professor"...

The further you try to constrain this topic into this illformed analogy the weirder it becomes. If we start off with a better analogy...

No, but the students that learn and distill what the professor teaches are not obligated to use that information only how the professor wants them to.

Can the professor refuse to teach some students, or must he teach all comers?

One can teach whoever they want to or don't want to. If one joins a university, that changes things. They are now part of an organization larger than themself.

glhf under the circumstances

'why is reselling stolen stuff bad'

if the professor took all human knowledge, much of which was explicitly not free, and used it to make a for-profit knowledge machine that extrudes unreliable summaries of that knowledge, then yes, being obligated to teach for free would be a fitting punishment.

More like, is a professor who learned from books prohibited from writing his own books on the subject?

He is prohibited from regurgitating source material, of course! But if he generalized from the books he read and really learned the subject--and even made new connections between ideas--then he is free to write his own book.

He is not prohibited from "regurgitating source material" in many cases. Facts are free. It doesn't matter who first measured Young's Modulus of aluminum, anyone may state that fact as originally presented.

The professor is free to lift all the facts and formula they want. They just need to rephrase explanations. Which is pretty much what an LLM is going to do.

Who cares, a LLM isn’t a person.

1) No one is asking Anthropic to give tokens for free, but at market rates.

2) Any professor who tried to ban students from posting lecture notes online would be immediately mocked.