4 ms·

This is personal for me, as I have a large dataset (near books3 sized) in my specialized domain that I tried to publish an NLP paper for. Excellent scores but I

This is personal for me, as I have a large dataset (near books3 sized) in my specialized domain that I tried to publish an NLP paper for. Excellent scores but I was too honest about the fact that some stuff in my evidence was gathered from paywalled sources. Despite excellent conference scores, the senior area chair intervened and they rejected the paper. Seems that the current copyright fights are having a chilling effect in the context of research on language resources and datasets. This is extremely sad. I expected the academic AI world to have a bit more institutional compassion for copyright abolitionism…

moffkalast 3y ago
Modern copyright law is so far behind the times and broken in more ways one can count. The only sensible way one can deal with it is to ignore it and keep their mouth shut. Say for example, the Mistral AI approach. The released Mistral 7B and destroyed every other model in its class in performance while giving it a much less restrictive license. They gave zero info about what they trained on... and nobody is asking. A very smart move from both sides that benefits just about everyone. The only winning move is not to play.
- ShamelessC 3y ago
  I suspect they’re covered under fair use (for now) but also nobody cares because the larger models are the ones that get used by people who would care enough to be upset about it.
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    Everyone claims fair use, but the terms for that are pretty narrow and wouldn't hold up anywhere afaik. Unless you're doing a news report or a review with actual criticism it probably won't pass the smell test. An LLM definitely doesn't fit that description in the slightest.
    - ShamelessC 3y ago
      I maintain my position that despite whatever moral or ethical quandaries you feel are being violated, “no one cares”.
__loam 3y ago
"Hey chief, I stole all this data but the scores are great!" I think the entitlement to the work of others I've seen in software engineering generally has been so gross with regards to this technology. Copyright isn't just some antiquated idea from the middle ages, it's how artists and writers eat. They rightly spiked your paper.
- jkeisling 3y ago
  Just a brief reminder of the last hundred years of copyright: large lobbies like UMG, Disney, or Elsevier have hugely circumscribed the public domain for all but historical purposes (copyright lengths increased from 28 years to *128*). Open access in academic publishing (for public funded research, even!) has been a decades-long fight that is not fully won. The DMCA has created myriad abuses and denied the freedom to control your own hardware, like allowing companies like John Deere to prevent right to repair. Six studios own most movies, a few labels control most music. The cultural heritage of the last hundred years, which should be the collective property of humanity, is locked up in the coffers of a few megacorps: who, by the way, don't much care how well their artists are eating. Yes, there are edge cases, but spare me the sympathy for the poor artist on Fiverr with five images in LAION: this is a fight between tech titans and copyright monopolists, where the little people are always going to be an afterthought. Come out and say the original copyright term of 28 years (well long enough to eat!) should be brought back, condemn the DMCA and the naked abuse of democracy in the Sonny Bono act, and THEN maybe we can get to chiding the lapses of a few researchers just wanting to understand the world better.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - ahhfgsado6698 3y ago
    I don't support tech titans or copyright monopolists and mostly just think stuff should enter the public domain earlier as that is what both groups don't want to have happen. And in the case of software I think it ought to be illegal to not release source code into the public domain after a reasonable amount of time, say 25 years. In fact I think it's absolutely crazy we allow large companies to sell infrastructure with software in it and then basically light the source code on fire so that people are forced to buy new versions of their product rather than maintain the source for the old version themselves.

moffkalast 3y ago

Modern copyright law is so far behind the times and broken in more ways one can count. The only sensible way one can deal with it is to ignore it and keep their mouth shut. Say for example, the Mistral AI approach. The released Mistral 7B and destroyed every other model in its class in performance while giving it a much less restrictive license. They gave zero info about what they trained on... and nobody is asking. A very smart move from both sides that benefits just about everyone. The only winning move is not to play.

ShamelessC 3y ago
I suspect they’re covered under fair use (for now) but also nobody cares because the larger models are the ones that get used by people who would care enough to be upset about it.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  Everyone claims fair use, but the terms for that are pretty narrow and wouldn't hold up anywhere afaik. Unless you're doing a news report or a review with actual criticism it probably won't pass the smell test. An LLM definitely doesn't fit that description in the slightest.
  - ShamelessC 3y ago
    I maintain my position that despite whatever moral or ethical quandaries you feel are being violated, “no one cares”.

__loam 3y ago

"Hey chief, I stole all this data but the scores are great!" I think the entitlement to the work of others I've seen in software engineering generally has been so gross with regards to this technology. Copyright isn't just some antiquated idea from the middle ages, it's how artists and writers eat. They rightly spiked your paper.

jkeisling 3y ago
Just a brief reminder of the last hundred years of copyright: large lobbies like UMG, Disney, or Elsevier have hugely circumscribed the public domain for all but historical purposes (copyright lengths increased from 28 years to *128*). Open access in academic publishing (for public funded research, even!) has been a decades-long fight that is not fully won. The DMCA has created myriad abuses and denied the freedom to control your own hardware, like allowing companies like John Deere to prevent right to repair. Six studios own most movies, a few labels control most music. The cultural heritage of the last hundred years, which should be the collective property of humanity, is locked up in the coffers of a few megacorps: who, by the way, don't much care how well their artists are eating. Yes, there are edge cases, but spare me the sympathy for the poor artist on Fiverr with five images in LAION: this is a fight between tech titans and copyright monopolists, where the little people are always going to be an afterthought. Come out and say the original copyright term of 28 years (well long enough to eat!) should be brought back, condemn the DMCA and the naked abuse of democracy in the Sonny Bono act, and THEN maybe we can get to chiding the lapses of a few researchers just wanting to understand the world better.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ahhfgsado6698 3y ago
  I don't support tech titans or copyright monopolists and mostly just think stuff should enter the public domain earlier as that is what both groups don't want to have happen. And in the case of software I think it ought to be illegal to not release source code into the public domain after a reasonable amount of time, say 25 years. In fact I think it's absolutely crazy we allow large companies to sell infrastructure with software in it and then basically light the source code on fire so that people are forced to buy new versions of their product rather than maintain the source for the old version themselves.