5 ms·

AI is a technology that is going to bring ridiculous profits, billions of dollars. Why don't AI researchers want to pay for the books and for the work to write

AI is a technology that is going to bring ridiculous profits, billions of dollars. Why don't AI researchers want to pay for the books and for the work to write them? They want to train their models for free, and then sell access for money like OpenAI.

sillysaurusx 3y ago
Imagine saying that someone should pay for the right to make open source software, before you’ve made anything, or proven any kind of market value. In a world with power law distributions, the vast majority of people will not come close to even millions in profit. At one point I was hoping just to run my own GPT API to self fund my measly $7k/mo burn rate. Then I could live life happy as a clam doing research all day in my little shell. Such a dream is completely impossible when rightsholders demand everyone pay for training data, rather than sharing in the profits of the result. It’s backwards. The actual market profit is what matters. But authors are frothing at the mouth, upset that their work is being used at all without their explicit consent. And some of those authors, like Sarah Silverman and more recently former governor Mike Huckabee, are going after LLM companies and demanding injunctions preventing them from using books at all, under any circumstance, unless they go through authors. Good luck going through 100,000 different authors. The net result is that we’re headed for a world where the YouTube of LLMs will dominate the space, and no one else will be able to run their own platforms. I’ve done everything humanly possible to try to steer us away from that outcome — you like using stable diffusion yourself? Imagine if no one released stable diffusion in the first place. But things are not looking good. Lawsuit against Eleuther for books3, courtesy of Huckabee: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37962244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37962244 Example of authors being furious, though thankfully with an exception for academic curiosity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37949012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37949012 Twitter is completely merciless. Digging up some examples to illustrate the point… Here’s one: look through the replies of someone who released a 3D dataset. https://x.com/mattdeitke/status/1678855859089326080?s=61&t=jQbmCk1JqL7depzFWJNuPA https://x.com/mattdeitke/status/1678855859089326080?s=61&t=j... "Eat shit Matt" (5O likes) "Hope you enjoy the storm" "you make me sick" and on and on. I can tell you firsthand that this isn’t unusual; it’s the default reaction now.
- stavros 3y ago
  The good thing about LLMs (at least when compared to YouTube) is that "all" you need to train an LLM is processing power, so it's easier now (and will be much easier in the future) to do it illegally. Much easier than running a YouTube competitor illegally for any length of time.
- vasco 3y ago
  > Such a dream is completely impossible when rightsholders demand everyone pay for training data, rather than sharing in the profits of the result. It’s backwards. The actual market profit is what matters I like the way you think, can I also get free books at the store if I'm just reading them for learning and will only make money with the knowledge later, or if I promise that I won't put it in practice? I did a similar deal in university but had to return books to the library every week so I like your plan better.
  - pwagland 3y ago
    One big difference with your university analogy is that the university _did_ pay for the resource, often way more than you would as a private citizen, since it is for sharing purposes. Even worse, for e-books, libraries are often limited to how often they can lend the book out, and this was done since physical books "degrade" over time, and so have a limited lend-life, the idea is that the same should hold true for digital books as well… I get the point behind your sarcasm of the first sentence, since that is the essence of the problem.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Well yeah, people sometimes read whole books in a store. Though this use case is done better in facilities that specifically support it - libraries. If you really need to take the books back with you, that's what the library copy machine is for.
- sensanaty 3y ago
  Why do you deserve to reap the benefits of their labour while not giving them a cent? Just saying "but open source!" Isn't a valid argument, everyone who wants access to someone else's work should be forced to pay, this includes the current big players that have so far been circumventing paying people for their work. It's attitudes like these from the AI sycophants that makes people despise the technology and anyone involved in any of it. I don't give a shit how difficult not having free unfettered access to everyone else's work makes it for you. I don't care that we're supposedly holding the world back (from infinite machine-generated spam made for the sole purpose of making everyone else's lives maximally miserable).
visarga 3y ago
> Why don't AI researchers want to pay for the books and for the work to write them? You get paid in exchange - you give them your text, they give you their AI. Have you tried Mistral-7B, it can do amazing feats on a 5 year old GPU. Didn't imagine my old GPUs were going to get so smart someday. LLMs by their nature give every user what they need, adapting and customizing the repository of human knowledge to a particular situation. That's how they pay back, they adapt to serve our needs. Now the authors can use AI to help themselves - brainstorm ideas, critique, first drafts, etc. But in order to benefit they got to use it first.
userbinator 3y ago
They want to train their models for free, and then sell access for money like OpenAI. Counterpoint: Someone who teaches himself how to do something entirely via freely borrowed books from the library, and then makes a living out of those learned skills, is normally not considered stealing.
- stevewallis 3y ago
  But… how do you think the book got into the library? The state buys the book from the author’s publisher. The author gets paid their royalty. This happens with your tax dollars. This is a good thing, the library system allows authors to receive payment to provide a public good, that can educate citizens who can then make a living. Stealing their work to train an LLM to make a living is not the same thing.
  - PeterisP 3y ago
    Okay, then let's have libraries train LLMs on the whole collection of the books that they have legitimately obtained. I'd assume that for this particular collection of Chinese printed works, the National Library of China would also own a copy of every one of them, so the end result would be literally be the same.
- sensanaty 3y ago
  And a computer isn't a human luckily, so this argument doesn't work here.
raincole 3y ago
People will write complex moral and legal reasoning. I'll tell you the simple answer. They don't want to pay for the books because they can get it for free. Simple as that.

sillysaurusx 3y ago

Imagine saying that someone should pay for the right to make open source software, before you’ve made anything, or proven any kind of market value. In a world with power law distributions, the vast majority of people will not come close to even millions in profit. At one point I was hoping just to run my own GPT API to self fund my measly $7k/mo burn rate. Then I could live life happy as a clam doing research all day in my little shell. Such a dream is completely impossible when rightsholders demand everyone pay for training data, rather than sharing in the profits of the result. It’s backwards. The actual market profit is what matters. But authors are frothing at the mouth, upset that their work is being used at all without their explicit consent. And some of those authors, like Sarah Silverman and more recently former governor Mike Huckabee, are going after LLM companies and demanding injunctions preventing them from using books at all, under any circumstance, unless they go through authors. Good luck going through 100,000 different authors. The net result is that we’re headed for a world where the YouTube of LLMs will dominate the space, and no one else will be able to run their own platforms. I’ve done everything humanly possible to try to steer us away from that outcome — you like using stable diffusion yourself? Imagine if no one released stable diffusion in the first place. But things are not looking good. Lawsuit against Eleuther for books3, courtesy of Huckabee: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37962244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37962244 Example of authors being furious, though thankfully with an exception for academic curiosity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37949012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37949012 Twitter is completely merciless. Digging up some examples to illustrate the point… Here’s one: look through the replies of someone who released a 3D dataset. https://x.com/mattdeitke/status/1678855859089326080?s=61&t=jQbmCk1JqL7depzFWJNuPA https://x.com/mattdeitke/status/1678855859089326080?s=61&t=j... "Eat shit Matt" (5O likes) "Hope you enjoy the storm" "you make me sick" and on and on. I can tell you firsthand that this isn’t unusual; it’s the default reaction now.

stavros 3y ago
The good thing about LLMs (at least when compared to YouTube) is that "all" you need to train an LLM is processing power, so it's easier now (and will be much easier in the future) to do it illegally. Much easier than running a YouTube competitor illegally for any length of time.
vasco 3y ago
> Such a dream is completely impossible when rightsholders demand everyone pay for training data, rather than sharing in the profits of the result. It’s backwards. The actual market profit is what matters I like the way you think, can I also get free books at the store if I'm just reading them for learning and will only make money with the knowledge later, or if I promise that I won't put it in practice? I did a similar deal in university but had to return books to the library every week so I like your plan better.
- pwagland 3y ago
  One big difference with your university analogy is that the university _did_ pay for the resource, often way more than you would as a private citizen, since it is for sharing purposes. Even worse, for e-books, libraries are often limited to how often they can lend the book out, and this was done since physical books "degrade" over time, and so have a limited lend-life, the idea is that the same should hold true for digital books as well… I get the point behind your sarcasm of the first sentence, since that is the essence of the problem.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Well yeah, people sometimes read whole books in a store. Though this use case is done better in facilities that specifically support it - libraries. If you really need to take the books back with you, that's what the library copy machine is for.
sensanaty 3y ago
Why do you deserve to reap the benefits of their labour while not giving them a cent? Just saying "but open source!" Isn't a valid argument, everyone who wants access to someone else's work should be forced to pay, this includes the current big players that have so far been circumventing paying people for their work. It's attitudes like these from the AI sycophants that makes people despise the technology and anyone involved in any of it. I don't give a shit how difficult not having free unfettered access to everyone else's work makes it for you. I don't care that we're supposedly holding the world back (from infinite machine-generated spam made for the sole purpose of making everyone else's lives maximally miserable).

visarga 3y ago

> Why don't AI researchers want to pay for the books and for the work to write them? You get paid in exchange - you give them your text, they give you their AI. Have you tried Mistral-7B, it can do amazing feats on a 5 year old GPU. Didn't imagine my old GPUs were going to get so smart someday. LLMs by their nature give every user what they need, adapting and customizing the repository of human knowledge to a particular situation. That's how they pay back, they adapt to serve our needs. Now the authors can use AI to help themselves - brainstorm ideas, critique, first drafts, etc. But in order to benefit they got to use it first.

userbinator 3y ago

They want to train their models for free, and then sell access for money like OpenAI. Counterpoint: Someone who teaches himself how to do something entirely via freely borrowed books from the library, and then makes a living out of those learned skills, is normally not considered stealing.

stevewallis 3y ago
But… how do you think the book got into the library? The state buys the book from the author’s publisher. The author gets paid their royalty. This happens with your tax dollars. This is a good thing, the library system allows authors to receive payment to provide a public good, that can educate citizens who can then make a living. Stealing their work to train an LLM to make a living is not the same thing.
- PeterisP 3y ago
  Okay, then let's have libraries train LLMs on the whole collection of the books that they have legitimately obtained. I'd assume that for this particular collection of Chinese printed works, the National Library of China would also own a copy of every one of them, so the end result would be literally be the same.
sensanaty 3y ago
And a computer isn't a human luckily, so this argument doesn't work here.

raincole 3y ago

People will write complex moral and legal reasoning. I'll tell you the simple answer. They don't want to pay for the books because they can get it for free. Simple as that.