6 ms·
From the recent story about the Sarah Silverman lawsuit: The complaint lays out in steps why the plaintiffs believe the datasets have illicit origins — in a Me
by foob 3y ago
From the recent story about the Sarah Silverman lawsuit:
The complaint lays out in steps why the plaintiffs believe the datasets have illicit origins — in a Meta paper detailing LLaMA, the company points to sources for its training datasets, one of which is called ThePile, which was assembled by a company called EleutherAI. ThePile, the complaint points out, was described in an EleutherAI paper as being put together from “a copy of the contents of the Bibliotik private tracker.” Bibliotik and the other “shadow libraries” listed, says the lawsuit, are “flagrantly illegal.”
IANAL, but this basically sounds like LLaMa was trained on illegally obtained books by Meta's own admission. It's an exciting development that Meta is releasing a commercial-use version of the model, but I wonder if this is going to cause issues down the road. It's not like Meta can remove these books from the training set without retraining from scratch (or at least the last checkpoint before they were used).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36657540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36657540
- cameldrv 3y agoIt seems difficult to argue that Meta can copy every ebook in existence to train a model, but then other people cannot copy the resulting model.
- schleck8 3y agoReally, really bad look for Eleuther if this is true. I did not expect them do something like this and not even see the issue with it.
- Ancalagon 3y agoMove fast and break the law.
- andybak 3y agoIt's far from certain at this stage whether this does break the law.
- haswell 3y agoWhile this may be true, the reverse is also true, and even if it’s legal, there are other ways to frame this that are worth considering, e.g. It could technically be legal, but not in accordance with the spirit of the law. Updates to laws are required. The fact that the model is legal is an additional problem on top of the gap in the law. I think my main point here is that “legal” does not imply moral or acceptable to society, and our understanding of the technical legal status is not a prerequisite for exploring those factors, which may be the thing that changes the legal status in response to the major shift in landscape.
- Spivak 3y agoRight but if you have a plausible case you weren't breaking the law and it was a legal unknown the most that will happen is "we've decided this is officially illegal, stop doing it." You risk nothing by assuming things are legal until explicitly illegal.
- haswell 3y agoIf you limit the framing of the conversation to that of an amoral corporate entity, sure. But I don’t think there was ever a question that companies can legally do things that are potentially (or unequivocally) distasteful if not outright unethical/immoral. More interesting is the broader conversation which involves society’s response to a major shift in the information economy, new questions about what role these tools should play, and how laws should evolve accordingly. The factors surrounding the emergence/unfolding of AI tooling can’t be stripped down to just the corporate interests involved.
- innagadadavida 3y agoCopyright laws should be amended to allow this scenario. If I read a book and write about it in a blog, it is considered review. Why shouldn’t we allow companies to do the same to train their models? Overall it will benefit society more than it hurts some rich authors.
- TX81Z 3y ago“Rich authors”. Citation needed.
- innagadadavida 3y agoI meant the authors that are suing - if you have the money to sue, you can be considered rich? no?
- TX81Z 3y agoGoing to go with “no, you don’t need to be rich to sue”. Likewise to be included in a class action you don’t have to pay anything, or even participate any way, you just get a cut of the settlement.
- doctoboggan 3y agoI think the difference is you presumably obtained that book legally before writing the review. In this case the book was pirated (the definitely illegal part), and then used for training (the possibly illegal part, but I suspect this would be deemed fair use). IMO google and their massive google books DB would have a better leg to stand on here if they trained on that dataset as they owned physical copies of all the books.
- Spivak 3y agoI don't think it matters. Your review isn't copyright infringement because you pirated the movie.
- haswell 3y ago
- TX81Z 3y agoIt worked for Uber!
- amelius 3y agoIt certainly worked for their founders.
- CamperBob2 3y agoAnd their customers. Show of hands: who wants to go back to taxis?
- Der_Einzige 3y agoMost large datasets are full of copyrighted content. They aren’t unique.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ramshanker 3y agoSometimes, I wonder what if someone in XYZ country downloads whole of Z-Library/Libgen, all the books ever printed, and all the papers ever published, all the newspapers and so on. and releases the model open source. There are jurisdictions with Lax rules. And they will have much better knowledge, answers, etc than the western, Lawyer approved models. Sometimes knowledge needs to be set free I guess.
- TX81Z 3y agoThe production of knowledge needs to be funded as it isn’t “free”. Copyright and licensing is one model that has worked for a long time. It has flaws, but it has produced good things. At this point with the quality of current web content and the collapse of journalism as an industry I think we can say online ads have utterly failed as a replacement income stream. Unless you want all LLM to say “I’m sorry the data I was trained on ends in 2023” you still need a content funding model. Maybe not copyright, but sure as hell not ads either.
- 411111111111111 3y agoYou state this as a fact, but it's actually much less certain wherever it's ever been net-positive. It was probably intended that way, but the reality is that the power has been with the publisher since the beginning, and they've absolutly been screwing over the author's as well. Only the most successful author's have gotten decent deals. I don't have an answer to this either though, i just wanted to point out that copyright has arguably never been successful at getting money to the content creators proportional to the value the Publisher extracted from the work either.
- Auracle 3y agoThe only way you’d know is to A/B test with a country with no copyright, and see how their authors get by. My guess is extremely poorly. Again, the biggest might be fine. Instead of publishers paying fairly little to authors they could just literally take the best books and print them, taking all of the profits…not to mention ebooks. I’m not an author so I can’t speak to how much publishers make, but I’d assume that if one was way better than the others in how much they’re distribute to authors all of the best authors would jump ship. Markets have a way of working things out. A lot of people want to be authors, and any time that happens - game dev, teachers, musicians, etc. - you’re going to take on a bit of extra hardship compared to other jobs.
- brucethemoose2 3y ago> It's not like Meta can remove these books from the training set without retraining from scratch (or at least the last checkpoint before they were used). They probably can: https://github.com/zjunlp/EasyEdit https://github.com/zjunlp/EasyEdit > I wonder if this is going to cause issues down the road. There are some popular Stable Diffusion models, being run in small businesses, that I am certain have CSAM in them because they have a particular 4chan model in their merging lineage. ... And yet, it hasn't blown up yet? I have no explanation, but running "illegal" weights seems more sustainable than I would expect.
- twayt 3y ago> They probably can: No, actually they probably can’t. There is no verifiable way to remove the data from the model apart from completely removing all instances of information from the training data. The project you linked only describes a selective finetuning approach.
- xnx 3y agoIt's an area of active research: https://ai.googleblog.com/2023/06/announcing-first-machine-unlearning.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2023/06/announcing-first-machine-u...
- NBJack 3y agoWhich means we are probably at least 5-10 years away from verifiable action that a court of law will recognize.
- nomel 3y agoThis assumes it's possible. I naively assume it's not, in a way that doesn't harm the model, beyond the content of the book.
- twayt 3y agoUntil you get models with completely disentangled feature spaces such that you know that the influence of a piece of data is completely removed (at the limit this is something like an embedding DB), there is absolutely no way you can claim you’ve removed the data from the model. At most, these efforts will amount to data laundering where it will be impossible to prove that a piece of data was used to train the model, not provide conclusive proof that it was removed.
- dogma1138 3y agoTraining and copyright is going to be interesting, people can be trained on “illegally obtained” books too yet you’ll probably going to be hard pressed to make an argument that any employee who downloaded a book or a paper from “libre library” could be used as fruit of the poisonous tree argument down the line.
- l33t233372 3y agoIf the company supplied the employee with the “illegally obtained” books, that could be reason to view the situation differently than an employee acting on their own. Since the company is obtaining + providing these models with 100% of their input data, it could be argued they have some responsibility to verify the legality of their procurement of the data.
- _Algernon_ 3y agoHow is it different than training from random blogs, or stack overflow or in general "The Internet"?
- stainablesteel 3y agoits not deemed illegal yet its in a weird place imo, with japan ruling that anything goes for AI data, other countries are put under pressure to allow the same ie, you're allowed to scrape the web you're allowed to take what you scrape and put it in a database you're allowed to use your database to inform on decisions you might make, or content you might create but once you put AI model in the mix, all of a sudden there's problems, despite the fact that making the model is 10000% harder than doing all of the points mentioned above, the problem of using someone else's work somehow becomes a problem when it never was before and if truly free and open source LLMs come into the game, then might the corporate ones become crippled from copyright? that's bad for business
- wongarsu 3y agoIf we accept the argument that you can train a ML model on data scraped from the internet because the model is sufficiently transformative and thus isn't impacted by the copyright of that data, then how does that change simply because somebody else distributed the data illegally? Either the ML model breaks the copyright chain or it doesn't. Or is the argument that using data that was provided to you in violation of copyright is illegal in general?