8 ms·

I am tired and hungry… The thing I’m tired of is elites stealing everything under the sun to feed these models. So funny that copyright is important when it pr

I am tired and hungry… The thing I’m tired of is elites stealing everything under the sun to feed these models. So funny that copyright is important when it protects elites but not when a billion thefts are committed by LLM folks. Poor incentives for creators to create stuff if it just gets stolen and replicated by AI. I’m hungry for more lawsuits. The biggest theft in human history by these gang of thieves should be held to account. I want a waterfall of lawsuits to take back what’s been stolen. It’s in the public’s interest to see this happen.

artninja1988 2y ago
Copying data is not theft
- rpgbr 2y ago
  It’s only theft when people copy data from companies. The other way around is ok, I guess.
  - CaptainFever 2y ago
    Copying is not theft either way.
    - goatlover 2y ago
      It is if it's legally defined as theft.
- a5c11 2y ago
  Is piracy legal then? It's just a copy of someone else's copy.
  - chownie 2y ago
    Was the legality the question? If so it seems we care about data "theft" in a very one sided manner.
  - tempfile 2y ago
    It's not legal, but it's also not theft.
  - criddell 2y ago
    The person who insists copying isn’t theft would probably point out that piracy is something done on the high seas. From the context of the comment it was pretty clear that they were using theft as shorthand for taking without permission.
    - IanCal 2y ago
      The usual argument is less about piracy as a term and more the use of the word theft, and your use of the word "taking". When we talk about physical things theft and taking mean depriving the owner of that thing. If I have something, and you copy it, then I still have that thing.
      - criddell 2y ago
        Did you read that original comment and wonder how Sam Altman and his crew broke into the commenter's home and made off with their hard drive? Probably not and so theft was a fine word choice. It communicated exactly what they wanted to communicate.
        CaptainFever 2y ago
        Even if that's the case, the disagreement is in semantics. Let's take your definition of theft. There's physical theft (actually taking something) and there's digital theft (merely copying). The point of anti-copyright advocates are that merely copying is not ethically wrong. In fact, Why Software Must Be Free made the argument that preventing people from copying is ethically wrong because it limited the spread of culture and reuse. That is the crux of the disagreement. You may rephrase our argument as "physical theft may be bad, but digital theft is not bad, and in fact preventing digital theft is in itself bad", but the argument does not change. Of course, there is additional disagreement in the implied moral value of the word "theft". In that case I agree with you that pro-copyright/anti-AI advocates have made their point by the usage of that word. Of course, we disagree, but... it is what it is I suppose.
  - vasco 2y ago
    You calling it piracy is already a moral stance. Copying data isn't morally wrong in my opinion, it is not piracy and it is not theft. It happens to not be legal but just a few short years ago it was legal to marry infants to old men and you could be killed for illegal artifacts of witchcraft. Legality and morality are not the same, and the latter depends on personal opinion.
    - cdrini 2y ago
      I agree with you they're not the same, but to build on that, I would add that they're not entirely orthogonal either, they influence each other a lot. Generally morallity that a society agrees on gets enforced as laws.
- threeseed 2y ago
  Technically that is true. But you will still be charged with a litany of other crimes.
- flohofwoe 2y ago
  So now suddenly when the bigwigs do it, software piracy and "IP theft" is totally fine? Thanks, good to know ;)
- atoav 2y ago
  Yet unlicensed use can be its own crime under current law.
makin 2y ago
I'm sorry if this is strawmanning you, but I feel you're basically saying it's in the public's interest to give more power to Intellectual Property law, which historically hasn't worked out so well for the public.
- jbstack 2y ago
  The law already exists. Applying the law in court doesn't "give more power" to it. To do that you'd have to change the law.
  - joncrocks 2y ago
    Which law are you referencing? Copyright as far as I understand is focused on wholesale reproduction/distribution of works, rather than using material for generation of new works. If something is available without contractual restriction it is available to all. Whether it's me reading a book, or a LLM reading a book, both could be considered the same. Where the law might have something to say is around the output of said trained models, this might be interesting to see given the potential of small-scale outputs. i.e. If I output something to a small number of people, how does one detect/report that level of infringement. Does the `potential` of infringement start to matter.
- atoav 2y ago
  Nah. What he is saying is that the existing law should be applied equally. As of now intellectual property as a right only works for you if you are a big corporation.
- probably_wrong 2y ago
  I think the second alternative works too: either you sue these companies to the ground for copyright infringement at a scale never seen, OR you decriminalize copyright infringement. The problem (as far as this specific discussion goes) is not that IP laws exist, but rather that they are only being applied in one direction.
- fallingknife 2y ago
  HN generally hated (and rightly so, IMO) strict copyright IP protection laws. Then LLMs came along and broke everybody's brain and turned this place into hardline copyright extremists.
Palmik 2y ago
The only entities that will win with these lawsuits are the likes of Disney, large legacy news media companies, Reddit, Stack Overflow (who are selling content generated by their users), etc. Who will also win: Google, OpenAI and other corporations that enter exclusive deals, that can more and more rely on synthetic data, that can build anti-recitation systems, etc. And of course the lawyers. The lawyers always win. Who will not win: Millions of independent bloggers (whose content will be used) Millions of open source software engineers (whose content will be used against the licenses, and used to displace their livelihood), etc. The likes of Google and OpenAI entered the space by building on top of the work of the above two groups. Now they want to pull up the ladder. We shouldn't allow that to happen.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  Honestly the most depressing thing about this entire affair is seeing not the entire, certainly but a sizable chunk of the software development community jump behind OpenAI and company’s blatant theft on an industrial scale of the mental products of probably literally billions of people (not the least of whom is other software developers!) with absolutely not the slightest hint of concern about what that means for the world because afterwards, they got a new toy to play with. Squidward was apparently 100% correct: on balance, few care about the fate of labor as long as they get their instant gratification.
  - logicchains 2y ago
    >blatant theft on an industrial scale of the mental products They haven't been stolen; the creators still have them. They've just been copied. It's amazing how much the ethos on this site has shifted over the past decade, away from the hacker idea that "intellectual property" isn't real property, just a means of growing corporate power, and information wants to be free.
    - candiddevmike 2y ago
      > They haven't been stolen; the creators still have them. They've just been copied You wouldn't download a car.
Kiro 2y ago
I would never have imagined hackers becoming copyright zealots advocating for lawsuits. I must be getting old but I still remember the Pirate Bay trial as if it was yesterday.
- williamcotton 2y ago
  It’s because it now affects hackers and before it only affected musicians.
  - bko 2y ago
    It affects hackers how? By giving them cool technology at below cost? Or is it further democratizing knowledge? Or maybe it's the inflated software eng salaries due to AI hype? Help me understand the negative effect of AI and LLMs on hackers.
    - t-3 2y ago
      It's trendy caste-signaling to hate on AI which endangers white-collar jobs and creative work the way machinery endangered blue-collar jobs and productive work (ie. not at all in the long run, but in the short term you will face some changes). I've never actually used an LLM though - I just don't have any use for such a thing. All my writing and programming are done for fun and automation would take that away.
  - xdennis 2y ago
    Nonsense. Computer piracy started with sharing software. Music piracy (on computers) started in the late 90s when computers were powerful enough to store and play music. Bill Gates' infamous letter was sent in 1976[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
- someNameIG 2y ago
  Pirate Bay wasn't selling access to the torrents trying to make a massive profit.
forinti 2y ago
Capitalism started by putting up fences around land to kick people out and keep sheep in. It has been putting fences around everything it wants and IP is one such fence. It has always been about protecting the powerful. IP has had ample support because the "protect the little artist" argument is compelling, but it is just not how the world works.
- johnchristopher 2y ago
  > Capitalism started by putting up fences around land to kick people out and keep sheep in. That's factually wrong. Capitalism is about moving wealth more efficiently: easier to allocate money/wealth to X through the banking system than to move sheep/wealth to X's farm.
  - tempfile 2y ago
    capitalism and "money as an abstract concept" are unrelated.
    - johnchristopher 2y ago
      Neither is the relevance of your comment about it and yet here we are.
      - tempfile 2y ago
        What are you talking about? You said: > Capitalism is about moving wealth more efficiently: easier to allocate money/wealth to X through the banking system than to move sheep/wealth to X's farm. It's not. That's what money's about. Any system with an abstract concept of money admits that it's easier to allocate wealth with abstractions than physically moving objects. Capitalism is about capital. It's an economic system that says individuals should own things (i.e. control their purpose) by investing money (capital) into them. You attempted to correct the previous commenter, but provided an incorrect definition. I hope that clears up the relevance issue for you.
Lichtso 2y ago
Lawsuits based on what? Copyright? People crying for copyright in the context of AI training don't understand what copyright is, how it works and when it applies. What they think how copyright works: When you take someones work as inspiration then everything you produce form that counts as derivative work. How copyright actually works: The input is irrelevant, only the output matters. Thus derivative work is what explicitly contains or resembles underlying work, no matter if it was actually based on that or it is just happenstance / coincidence. Thus AI models are safe from copyright lawsuits as long as they filter out any output which comes too close to known material. Everything else is fine, even if the model was explicitly trained on commercial copyrighted material only. In other words: The concept of intellectual property is completely broken and that is old news.
- LunaSea 2y ago
  Lawsuits based on code licensing for example. Scraping websites containing source code which is distributed with specific licenses that OpenAI & co don't follow.
  - Lichtso 2y ago
    Unfortunately not how it works, or at least not to the extend you wish it to be. One can train a model exclusively on source code from the linux kernel (GPL) and then generate a bunch of C programs or libraries from that. And they could publish them under MIT license as long as they don't reproduce any identifiable sections from the linux kernel. It does not matter where the model learned how to program.
    - LunaSea 2y ago
      You're mistaken. If I write code with a license that says that using this code for AI training is forbidden then OpenAI is directly going against this by scraping websites indiscriminately.
      - Lichtso 2y ago
        Sure, you can write all kinds of stuff in a license, but it is simply plain prose at that point. Not enforcable. There is a reason why it is generally advised to go with the established licenses and not invent your own, similarly to how you should not roll your own cryptography: Because it most likely won't work as intended. e.g. License: This comment is licensed under my custom L*a license. Any user with an username starting with "L" and ending in "a" is forbidden from reading my comment and producing replies based on what I have written. ... see?
fallingknife 2y ago
Copyright law is intended to prevent people from stealing the revenue stream from someone else's work by copying and distributing that work in cases where the original is difficult and expensive to create, but easy to make copies of once created. How does an LLM do this? What copies of copyrighted work do they distribute? Whose revenue stream are they taking with this action? I believe that all the copyright suits against AI companies will be total failures because I can't come up with a answer to any of those questions.
DoctorOetker 2y ago
Here is a business model for copy right law firms: Use source-aware training, use the same datasets as used in LLM training + copyrighted content. Now the LLM can respond not just what it thinks is most likely but also what source document(s) provided specific content. Then you can consult commercially available LLM's and detect copy right infringements, and identify copyright holders. Extract perpetrators and victims at scale. To ensure indefinite exploitation only sue commercially succesful LLM providers, so there is a constant new flux of growing small LLM providers taking up the freed niche of large LLM providers being sued empty.
- chrismorgan 2y ago
  > Use source-aware training My understanding (as one uninvolved in the industry) is that this is more or less a completely unsolved problem.
  - DoctorOetker 2y ago
    It's just training the source association together with the training set: https://github.com/mukhal/intrinsic-source-citation https://github.com/mukhal/intrinsic-source-citation The only 2 reasons big LLM providers refuse to do it is 1) to prevent a long slew of content creators filing class action suit. 2) to keep regulators in the dark of how feasible and actionable it would be, once regulators are aware they can perform the source-aware training themselves
jokethrowaway 2y ago
It's the other way round. The little guys will never win, it will be just a money transfer from one large corp to another. We should just scrap copyright and everybody plays a fair game, including us hackers. Sue me because of breach of contract in civil court for damages because I shared your content, don't send the police and get me jailed directly. I had my software cracked and stolen and I would never go after the users. They don't have any contract with me. They downloaded some bytes from the internet and used it. Finding whoever shared the code without authorization is hard and even so, suing them would cost me more than the money I'm likely to get back. Fair game, you won. It's a natural market "tax" on selling a lot of copies and earning passively.
repelsteeltje 2y ago
I like the stone soup narrative on AI. It was mentioned in a recent Complexity podcast, I think by Alison Gopnik of SFI. It's analogous to the Pragmatic Programmar story about stone soup, paraphrasing: Basically you start with a stone in a pot of water — a neural net technology that does nothing meaningful but looks interesting. You say: "the soup is almost done, but would taste better given a bunch of training data." So you add a bunch of well curated docs. "Yeah, that helps but how about adding a bunch more". So you insert some blogs, copy righted materials, scraped pictures, reddit, and stack exchange. And then you ask users to interact with the models to fine tune it, contribute priming to make the output look as convincing as possible. Then everyone marvels at your awesome LLM — a simple algorithm. How wonderful, this soup tastes given that the only ingredients are stones and water.
- CaptainFever 2y ago
  The stone soup story was about sharing, though. Everyone contributes to the pot, and we get something nice. The original stone was there to convince the villagers to share their food with the travellers. This goes against the emotional implication of your adaptation. The story would actually imply that copyright holders are selfish and should be contributing what they can to the AI soup, so we can get something more than the sum of our parts. From Wikipedia: > Some travelers come to a village, carrying nothing more than an empty cooking pot. Upon their arrival, the villagers are unwilling to share any of their food stores with the very hungry travelers. Then the travelers go to a stream and fill the pot with water, drop a large stone in it, and place it over a fire. One of the villagers becomes curious and asks what they are doing. The travelers answer that they are making "stone soup", which tastes wonderful and which they would be delighted to share with the villager, although it still needs a little bit of garnish, which they are missing, to improve the flavor. > The villager, who anticipates enjoying a share of the soup, does not mind parting with a few carrots, so these are added to the soup. Another villager walks by, inquiring about the pot, and the travelers again mention their stone soup which has not yet reached its full potential. More and more villagers walk by, each adding another ingredient, like potatoes, onions, cabbages, peas, celery, tomatoes, sweetcorn, meat (like chicken, pork and beef), milk, butter, salt and pepper. Finally, the stone (being inedible) is removed from the pot, and a delicious and nourishing pot of soup is enjoyed by travelers and villagers alike. Although the travelers have thus tricked the villagers into sharing their food with them, they have successfully transformed it into a tasty meal which they share with the donors. (Open source models exist.)
AI_beffr 2y ago
ok the "elites" have spent a lot of money training AI but have the "commoners" lifted a single finger to stop them? nope! its the job of the commoners to create a consensus, a culture, that protects people. so far all i see from the large group of people who are not a part of the elite is denial about this entire issue. they deny AI is a risk and they dont shame people who use it. 99.99% of the population is culpable for any disaster that befalls us regarding AI.
infecto 2y ago
I suspect the greater issue is that copyright is not always clear in this area? I am also not sure how you prevent "elites" from using the information while also allowing the "common" person to it.
drstewart 2y ago
>elites stealing everything > a billion thefts >The biggest theft >what’s been stolen I do like how the internet has suddenly acknowledged that pirating is theft and torrenting IS a criminal activity. To your point, I'd love to see a massive operation to arrest everyone who has downloaded copyrighted material illegal (aka stolen), for the public interest.
- amatecha 2y ago
  This is such a misrepresentation of the issue and what people are saying about it. They call it "theft" because corps are, apparently-indiscriminately and without remuneration of creators, "ingesting" the original work of thousands or millions of individuals, in order to provide for-profit services derived from that ingestion/training. "Pirates", on the other hand, copy content for their own momentary entertainment, and the exploitation ends there. They aren't turning around and starting a multi-million-dollar business selling pirated content en masse.
  - drstewart 2y ago
    Theft isn't concerned with what you do with the product afterwards.
masswerk 2y ago
> The thing I’m tired of is elites stealing everything under the sun to feed these models. I suggest to apply the same to property law: make a photo and obtain instant and unlimited rights of use. – Things may change faster than we may imagine…
uhtred 2y ago
We need a revolution.
bschmidt1 2y ago
Same here hungry neigh thirsty for prompt-2-film "output a 90 minute harry potter sequel to the final film starring the original actors plus Tom Hanks"
csomar 2y ago
There is no copyright with AI unless you want to implement the same measures for humans too. I am fine with it as long as we at least get open-weights. This way you kill both copyright and any company that's trying to profit out of AI.
visarga 2y ago
> I’m hungry for more lawsuits. The biggest theft in human history You want to own abstract ideas because AI can rephrase any specific expression. But that is antithetic to creativity.
IanKerr 2y ago
It's been pretty incredible watching these companies siphon up everything under the sun under the guise of "training data" with impunity. These same companies will then turn around and sic their AIs on places like Youtube and send out copyright strikes via a completely automated system with loads of false-positives. How is it acceptable to allow these companies to steal all of this copyrighted data and then turn around and use it to enforce their copyrights in the most heavy-handed manner? The irony is unbelievable.
defgeneric 2y ago
Perhaps what we should be pushing for is a law that would force full disclosure regarding the training corpus and require a curated version of the training data to be made available. I'm sure there would be all kinds of unintended consequences of a law like that but maybe we'd be better off starting from a strong basis and working out those exceptions. While billions have been spent to train these models, the value of the millions of human hours spent creating the content they're trained on should likewise be recognized.

artninja1988 2y ago

Copying data is not theft

rpgbr 2y ago
It’s only theft when people copy data from companies. The other way around is ok, I guess.
- CaptainFever 2y ago
  Copying is not theft either way.
  - goatlover 2y ago
    It is if it's legally defined as theft.
a5c11 2y ago
Is piracy legal then? It's just a copy of someone else's copy.
- chownie 2y ago
  Was the legality the question? If so it seems we care about data "theft" in a very one sided manner.
- tempfile 2y ago
  It's not legal, but it's also not theft.
- criddell 2y ago
  The person who insists copying isn’t theft would probably point out that piracy is something done on the high seas. From the context of the comment it was pretty clear that they were using theft as shorthand for taking without permission.
  - IanCal 2y ago
    The usual argument is less about piracy as a term and more the use of the word theft, and your use of the word "taking". When we talk about physical things theft and taking mean depriving the owner of that thing. If I have something, and you copy it, then I still have that thing.
    - criddell 2y ago
      Did you read that original comment and wonder how Sam Altman and his crew broke into the commenter's home and made off with their hard drive? Probably not and so theft was a fine word choice. It communicated exactly what they wanted to communicate.
      - CaptainFever 2y ago
        Even if that's the case, the disagreement is in semantics. Let's take your definition of theft. There's physical theft (actually taking something) and there's digital theft (merely copying). The point of anti-copyright advocates are that merely copying is not ethically wrong. In fact, Why Software Must Be Free made the argument that preventing people from copying is ethically wrong because it limited the spread of culture and reuse. That is the crux of the disagreement. You may rephrase our argument as "physical theft may be bad, but digital theft is not bad, and in fact preventing digital theft is in itself bad", but the argument does not change. Of course, there is additional disagreement in the implied moral value of the word "theft". In that case I agree with you that pro-copyright/anti-AI advocates have made their point by the usage of that word. Of course, we disagree, but... it is what it is I suppose.
- vasco 2y ago
  You calling it piracy is already a moral stance. Copying data isn't morally wrong in my opinion, it is not piracy and it is not theft. It happens to not be legal but just a few short years ago it was legal to marry infants to old men and you could be killed for illegal artifacts of witchcraft. Legality and morality are not the same, and the latter depends on personal opinion.
  - cdrini 2y ago
    I agree with you they're not the same, but to build on that, I would add that they're not entirely orthogonal either, they influence each other a lot. Generally morallity that a society agrees on gets enforced as laws.
threeseed 2y ago
Technically that is true. But you will still be charged with a litany of other crimes.
flohofwoe 2y ago
So now suddenly when the bigwigs do it, software piracy and "IP theft" is totally fine? Thanks, good to know ;)
atoav 2y ago
Yet unlicensed use can be its own crime under current law.

makin 2y ago

I'm sorry if this is strawmanning you, but I feel you're basically saying it's in the public's interest to give more power to Intellectual Property law, which historically hasn't worked out so well for the public.

jbstack 2y ago
The law already exists. Applying the law in court doesn't "give more power" to it. To do that you'd have to change the law.
- joncrocks 2y ago
  Which law are you referencing? Copyright as far as I understand is focused on wholesale reproduction/distribution of works, rather than using material for generation of new works. If something is available without contractual restriction it is available to all. Whether it's me reading a book, or a LLM reading a book, both could be considered the same. Where the law might have something to say is around the output of said trained models, this might be interesting to see given the potential of small-scale outputs. i.e. If I output something to a small number of people, how does one detect/report that level of infringement. Does the `potential` of infringement start to matter.
atoav 2y ago
Nah. What he is saying is that the existing law should be applied equally. As of now intellectual property as a right only works for you if you are a big corporation.
probably_wrong 2y ago
I think the second alternative works too: either you sue these companies to the ground for copyright infringement at a scale never seen, OR you decriminalize copyright infringement. The problem (as far as this specific discussion goes) is not that IP laws exist, but rather that they are only being applied in one direction.
fallingknife 2y ago
HN generally hated (and rightly so, IMO) strict copyright IP protection laws. Then LLMs came along and broke everybody's brain and turned this place into hardline copyright extremists.

Palmik 2y ago

The only entities that will win with these lawsuits are the likes of Disney, large legacy news media companies, Reddit, Stack Overflow (who are selling content generated by their users), etc. Who will also win: Google, OpenAI and other corporations that enter exclusive deals, that can more and more rely on synthetic data, that can build anti-recitation systems, etc. And of course the lawyers. The lawyers always win. Who will not win: Millions of independent bloggers (whose content will be used) Millions of open source software engineers (whose content will be used against the licenses, and used to displace their livelihood), etc. The likes of Google and OpenAI entered the space by building on top of the work of the above two groups. Now they want to pull up the ladder. We shouldn't allow that to happen.

ToucanLoucan 2y ago
Honestly the most depressing thing about this entire affair is seeing not the entire, certainly but a sizable chunk of the software development community jump behind OpenAI and company’s blatant theft on an industrial scale of the mental products of probably literally billions of people (not the least of whom is other software developers!) with absolutely not the slightest hint of concern about what that means for the world because afterwards, they got a new toy to play with. Squidward was apparently 100% correct: on balance, few care about the fate of labor as long as they get their instant gratification.
- logicchains 2y ago
  >blatant theft on an industrial scale of the mental products They haven't been stolen; the creators still have them. They've just been copied. It's amazing how much the ethos on this site has shifted over the past decade, away from the hacker idea that "intellectual property" isn't real property, just a means of growing corporate power, and information wants to be free.
  - candiddevmike 2y ago
    > They haven't been stolen; the creators still have them. They've just been copied You wouldn't download a car.

Kiro 2y ago

I would never have imagined hackers becoming copyright zealots advocating for lawsuits. I must be getting old but I still remember the Pirate Bay trial as if it was yesterday.

williamcotton 2y ago
It’s because it now affects hackers and before it only affected musicians.
- bko 2y ago
  It affects hackers how? By giving them cool technology at below cost? Or is it further democratizing knowledge? Or maybe it's the inflated software eng salaries due to AI hype? Help me understand the negative effect of AI and LLMs on hackers.
  - t-3 2y ago
    It's trendy caste-signaling to hate on AI which endangers white-collar jobs and creative work the way machinery endangered blue-collar jobs and productive work (ie. not at all in the long run, but in the short term you will face some changes). I've never actually used an LLM though - I just don't have any use for such a thing. All my writing and programming are done for fun and automation would take that away.
- xdennis 2y ago
  Nonsense. Computer piracy started with sharing software. Music piracy (on computers) started in the late 90s when computers were powerful enough to store and play music. Bill Gates' infamous letter was sent in 1976[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
someNameIG 2y ago
Pirate Bay wasn't selling access to the torrents trying to make a massive profit.

forinti 2y ago

Capitalism started by putting up fences around land to kick people out and keep sheep in. It has been putting fences around everything it wants and IP is one such fence. It has always been about protecting the powerful. IP has had ample support because the "protect the little artist" argument is compelling, but it is just not how the world works.

johnchristopher 2y ago
> Capitalism started by putting up fences around land to kick people out and keep sheep in. That's factually wrong. Capitalism is about moving wealth more efficiently: easier to allocate money/wealth to X through the banking system than to move sheep/wealth to X's farm.
- tempfile 2y ago
  capitalism and "money as an abstract concept" are unrelated.
  - johnchristopher 2y ago
    Neither is the relevance of your comment about it and yet here we are.
    - tempfile 2y ago
      What are you talking about? You said: > Capitalism is about moving wealth more efficiently: easier to allocate money/wealth to X through the banking system than to move sheep/wealth to X's farm. It's not. That's what money's about. Any system with an abstract concept of money admits that it's easier to allocate wealth with abstractions than physically moving objects. Capitalism is about capital. It's an economic system that says individuals should own things (i.e. control their purpose) by investing money (capital) into them. You attempted to correct the previous commenter, but provided an incorrect definition. I hope that clears up the relevance issue for you.

Lichtso 2y ago

Lawsuits based on what? Copyright? People crying for copyright in the context of AI training don't understand what copyright is, how it works and when it applies. What they think how copyright works: When you take someones work as inspiration then everything you produce form that counts as derivative work. How copyright actually works: The input is irrelevant, only the output matters. Thus derivative work is what explicitly contains or resembles underlying work, no matter if it was actually based on that or it is just happenstance / coincidence. Thus AI models are safe from copyright lawsuits as long as they filter out any output which comes too close to known material. Everything else is fine, even if the model was explicitly trained on commercial copyrighted material only. In other words: The concept of intellectual property is completely broken and that is old news.

LunaSea 2y ago
Lawsuits based on code licensing for example. Scraping websites containing source code which is distributed with specific licenses that OpenAI & co don't follow.
- Lichtso 2y ago
  Unfortunately not how it works, or at least not to the extend you wish it to be. One can train a model exclusively on source code from the linux kernel (GPL) and then generate a bunch of C programs or libraries from that. And they could publish them under MIT license as long as they don't reproduce any identifiable sections from the linux kernel. It does not matter where the model learned how to program.
  - LunaSea 2y ago
    You're mistaken. If I write code with a license that says that using this code for AI training is forbidden then OpenAI is directly going against this by scraping websites indiscriminately.
    - Lichtso 2y ago
      Sure, you can write all kinds of stuff in a license, but it is simply plain prose at that point. Not enforcable. There is a reason why it is generally advised to go with the established licenses and not invent your own, similarly to how you should not roll your own cryptography: Because it most likely won't work as intended. e.g. License: This comment is licensed under my custom L*a license. Any user with an username starting with "L" and ending in "a" is forbidden from reading my comment and producing replies based on what I have written. ... see?

fallingknife 2y ago

Copyright law is intended to prevent people from stealing the revenue stream from someone else's work by copying and distributing that work in cases where the original is difficult and expensive to create, but easy to make copies of once created. How does an LLM do this? What copies of copyrighted work do they distribute? Whose revenue stream are they taking with this action? I believe that all the copyright suits against AI companies will be total failures because I can't come up with a answer to any of those questions.

DoctorOetker 2y ago

Here is a business model for copy right law firms: Use source-aware training, use the same datasets as used in LLM training + copyrighted content. Now the LLM can respond not just what it thinks is most likely but also what source document(s) provided specific content. Then you can consult commercially available LLM's and detect copy right infringements, and identify copyright holders. Extract perpetrators and victims at scale. To ensure indefinite exploitation only sue commercially succesful LLM providers, so there is a constant new flux of growing small LLM providers taking up the freed niche of large LLM providers being sued empty.

chrismorgan 2y ago
> Use source-aware training My understanding (as one uninvolved in the industry) is that this is more or less a completely unsolved problem.
- DoctorOetker 2y ago
  It's just training the source association together with the training set: https://github.com/mukhal/intrinsic-source-citation https://github.com/mukhal/intrinsic-source-citation The only 2 reasons big LLM providers refuse to do it is 1) to prevent a long slew of content creators filing class action suit. 2) to keep regulators in the dark of how feasible and actionable it would be, once regulators are aware they can perform the source-aware training themselves

jokethrowaway 2y ago

It's the other way round. The little guys will never win, it will be just a money transfer from one large corp to another. We should just scrap copyright and everybody plays a fair game, including us hackers. Sue me because of breach of contract in civil court for damages because I shared your content, don't send the police and get me jailed directly. I had my software cracked and stolen and I would never go after the users. They don't have any contract with me. They downloaded some bytes from the internet and used it. Finding whoever shared the code without authorization is hard and even so, suing them would cost me more than the money I'm likely to get back. Fair game, you won. It's a natural market "tax" on selling a lot of copies and earning passively.

repelsteeltje 2y ago

I like the stone soup narrative on AI. It was mentioned in a recent Complexity podcast, I think by Alison Gopnik of SFI. It's analogous to the Pragmatic Programmar story about stone soup, paraphrasing: Basically you start with a stone in a pot of water — a neural net technology that does nothing meaningful but looks interesting. You say: "the soup is almost done, but would taste better given a bunch of training data." So you add a bunch of well curated docs. "Yeah, that helps but how about adding a bunch more". So you insert some blogs, copy righted materials, scraped pictures, reddit, and stack exchange. And then you ask users to interact with the models to fine tune it, contribute priming to make the output look as convincing as possible. Then everyone marvels at your awesome LLM — a simple algorithm. How wonderful, this soup tastes given that the only ingredients are stones and water.

CaptainFever 2y ago
The stone soup story was about sharing, though. Everyone contributes to the pot, and we get something nice. The original stone was there to convince the villagers to share their food with the travellers. This goes against the emotional implication of your adaptation. The story would actually imply that copyright holders are selfish and should be contributing what they can to the AI soup, so we can get something more than the sum of our parts. From Wikipedia: > Some travelers come to a village, carrying nothing more than an empty cooking pot. Upon their arrival, the villagers are unwilling to share any of their food stores with the very hungry travelers. Then the travelers go to a stream and fill the pot with water, drop a large stone in it, and place it over a fire. One of the villagers becomes curious and asks what they are doing. The travelers answer that they are making "stone soup", which tastes wonderful and which they would be delighted to share with the villager, although it still needs a little bit of garnish, which they are missing, to improve the flavor. > The villager, who anticipates enjoying a share of the soup, does not mind parting with a few carrots, so these are added to the soup. Another villager walks by, inquiring about the pot, and the travelers again mention their stone soup which has not yet reached its full potential. More and more villagers walk by, each adding another ingredient, like potatoes, onions, cabbages, peas, celery, tomatoes, sweetcorn, meat (like chicken, pork and beef), milk, butter, salt and pepper. Finally, the stone (being inedible) is removed from the pot, and a delicious and nourishing pot of soup is enjoyed by travelers and villagers alike. Although the travelers have thus tricked the villagers into sharing their food with them, they have successfully transformed it into a tasty meal which they share with the donors. (Open source models exist.)

AI_beffr 2y ago

ok the "elites" have spent a lot of money training AI but have the "commoners" lifted a single finger to stop them? nope! its the job of the commoners to create a consensus, a culture, that protects people. so far all i see from the large group of people who are not a part of the elite is denial about this entire issue. they deny AI is a risk and they dont shame people who use it. 99.99% of the population is culpable for any disaster that befalls us regarding AI.

infecto 2y ago

I suspect the greater issue is that copyright is not always clear in this area? I am also not sure how you prevent "elites" from using the information while also allowing the "common" person to it.

drstewart 2y ago

>elites stealing everything > a billion thefts >The biggest theft >what’s been stolen I do like how the internet has suddenly acknowledged that pirating is theft and torrenting IS a criminal activity. To your point, I'd love to see a massive operation to arrest everyone who has downloaded copyrighted material illegal (aka stolen), for the public interest.

amatecha 2y ago
This is such a misrepresentation of the issue and what people are saying about it. They call it "theft" because corps are, apparently-indiscriminately and without remuneration of creators, "ingesting" the original work of thousands or millions of individuals, in order to provide for-profit services derived from that ingestion/training. "Pirates", on the other hand, copy content for their own momentary entertainment, and the exploitation ends there. They aren't turning around and starting a multi-million-dollar business selling pirated content en masse.
- drstewart 2y ago
  Theft isn't concerned with what you do with the product afterwards.

masswerk 2y ago

> The thing I’m tired of is elites stealing everything under the sun to feed these models. I suggest to apply the same to property law: make a photo and obtain instant and unlimited rights of use. – Things may change faster than we may imagine…

uhtred 2y ago

We need a revolution.

bschmidt1 2y ago

Same here hungry neigh thirsty for prompt-2-film "output a 90 minute harry potter sequel to the final film starring the original actors plus Tom Hanks"

csomar 2y ago

There is no copyright with AI unless you want to implement the same measures for humans too. I am fine with it as long as we at least get open-weights. This way you kill both copyright and any company that's trying to profit out of AI.

visarga 2y ago

> I’m hungry for more lawsuits. The biggest theft in human history You want to own abstract ideas because AI can rephrase any specific expression. But that is antithetic to creativity.

IanKerr 2y ago

It's been pretty incredible watching these companies siphon up everything under the sun under the guise of "training data" with impunity. These same companies will then turn around and sic their AIs on places like Youtube and send out copyright strikes via a completely automated system with loads of false-positives. How is it acceptable to allow these companies to steal all of this copyrighted data and then turn around and use it to enforce their copyrights in the most heavy-handed manner? The irony is unbelievable.

defgeneric 2y ago

Perhaps what we should be pushing for is a law that would force full disclosure regarding the training corpus and require a curated version of the training data to be made available. I'm sure there would be all kinds of unintended consequences of a law like that but maybe we'd be better off starting from a strong basis and working out those exceptions. While billions have been spent to train these models, the value of the millions of human hours spent creating the content they're trained on should likewise be recognized.