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I don't know if there is a lot of confusion, purposely misleading deception, or both, but I cannot grasp the argument for "training on copyrighted data is a vio

I don't know if there is a lot of confusion, purposely misleading deception, or both, but I cannot grasp the argument for "training on copyrighted data is a violation of copyright". What I can grasp is "output of copyrighted data is violation of copyright", and the fix seems to be a straight forward dumb software contentID filter on the output.

michaelt 2y ago
The argument is "An artist getting inspired by a work and creating something similar is allowed, but photocopying, photographing a painting or statue, or using samples in music-making can be fraught with legal problems. One of the major dividing lines between legal and illegal is whether it's a purely mechanical process, or done by human hands. The training of LLMs and diffusion models is a purely mechanical process, more like photocopying or photographing than an artist gaining inspiration"
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  >but photocopying, photographing a painting or statue, or using samples in music-making can be fraught with legal problems. That's part of where I think a lot of confusion is - LLM training doesn't do any of that. There is no coherent corpus of data in these models.
- throwaway4aday 2y ago
  The training process is not purely mechanical. The amount of time that goes into selecting, cleaning, reformatting and otherwise preparing the training data is significant not to mention all of the other work involved in the actual training. If your measure is simply the amount of work done by humans then we should simply reclassify ML models as art pieces and dismiss all of the criticism as gatekeeping by people who don't understand hypermodern art.
dialup_sounds 2y ago
The confusion seems to be on your part, because that's not the argument being made here. The argument is that the 400k books being shared here are themselves copyrighted works that the poster probably does not have the right to be distributing, and that is not very nice of them. "It's just a dataset, bro!" being used to bulldoze people's rights to their own work might have negative consequences.
hunswer 2y ago
So if I break into one of these llm shops and download their models’ weights they will totally be cool with me distributing them publically?
zaptheimpaler 2y ago
This isn't a model trained on the books, it is the complete text of the books themselves with the label "dataset" slapped on it. Calling it a dataset doesn't make it not piracy.

michaelt 2y ago

The argument is "An artist getting inspired by a work and creating something similar is allowed, but photocopying, photographing a painting or statue, or using samples in music-making can be fraught with legal problems. One of the major dividing lines between legal and illegal is whether it's a purely mechanical process, or done by human hands. The training of LLMs and diffusion models is a purely mechanical process, more like photocopying or photographing than an artist gaining inspiration"

Workaccount2 2y ago
>but photocopying, photographing a painting or statue, or using samples in music-making can be fraught with legal problems. That's part of where I think a lot of confusion is - LLM training doesn't do any of that. There is no coherent corpus of data in these models.
throwaway4aday 2y ago
The training process is not purely mechanical. The amount of time that goes into selecting, cleaning, reformatting and otherwise preparing the training data is significant not to mention all of the other work involved in the actual training. If your measure is simply the amount of work done by humans then we should simply reclassify ML models as art pieces and dismiss all of the criticism as gatekeeping by people who don't understand hypermodern art.

dialup_sounds 2y ago

The confusion seems to be on your part, because that's not the argument being made here. The argument is that the 400k books being shared here are themselves copyrighted works that the poster probably does not have the right to be distributing, and that is not very nice of them. "It's just a dataset, bro!" being used to bulldoze people's rights to their own work might have negative consequences.

hunswer 2y ago

So if I break into one of these llm shops and download their models’ weights they will totally be cool with me distributing them publically?

zaptheimpaler 2y ago

This isn't a model trained on the books, it is the complete text of the books themselves with the label "dataset" slapped on it. Calling it a dataset doesn't make it not piracy.