One of the largest businesses of the Internet to date has been piracy. Individual informal piracy has been the smallest component of this. By far the largest ha

One of the largest businesses of the Internet to date has been piracy. Individual informal piracy has been the smallest component of this. By far the largest has been corporate mass-scale piracy, and LLMs are probably the largest heist to date. They've literally downloaded the sum total of all human thought and knowledge, compressed it into queryable lossy compression models (which is what LLMs are), and are selling it back to us. Meta, with its "open weights" models, is one of the least guilty parties, since at least they've made the resulting blobs of mass piracy available to us. Same with Mistral, Deepseek, etc. ClosedAI, Google, and others have all probably done this and more and refuse to make even the model available. I think the way to deal with this is very simple: If you have trained your model on works to which you do not have rights or permission, the resulting model is not copyrightable and cannot be sold. It must either be kept for research purposes only or released free of charge and in the public domain. All these models that have been trained on pirated works should become public domain. Of course now that we have full capture of the US Federal Government I'm sure any suggestion like that would be neutralized with one bribe to Trump.