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This is sad for open source AI, piracy for the purpose of model training should also be fair use because otherwise only the big companies who can afford to pay
by petralithic 1y ago
This is sad for open source AI, piracy for the purpose of model training should also be fair use because otherwise only the big companies who can afford to pay off publishers like Anthropic will be able to do so. There is no way to buy billions of books just for model training, it simply can't happen.
- dbalatero 1y agoThis implies training models is some sort of right.
- 542458 1y agoNo, it implies that having the power to train AI models exclusively consolidated into a handful of extremely powerful companies is bad.
- JoshTriplett 1y agoThat's true. Those handful of companies shouldn't get to do it either.
- johnnyanmac 1y agoIt implies that people want everyone to do this when it's clear no one should do it. I'm not exactly a fan of "this isn't profitable for small businesses to steal from so we should make it so everyone should steal".
- petralithic 1y agoPiracy is not stealing. I don't know why everyone on HN suddenly turned into a copyright hawk, only big companies benefit from our current copyright regime, like Disney and their lobbying for increasing its length.
- Aurornis 1y ago> only big companies benefit from our current copyright regime You’ve never authored, created, or published something? Never worked for a company that sells something protected by copyright?
- petralithic 1y agoAll my works are open source or in the public domain. I don't like copyright for a reason.
- kiitos 1y ago"open source" and "in the public domain" aren't like separate things from "copyright", they describe specific sub-sets of stuff underneath "copyright", which is a top-level category that establishes a meaningful definition of stuff like "your work(s)" in the first place i.e. "copyright" describes a legal concept, "copyleft" describes a licensing concept
- petralithic 1y agoThe point is the legal concept is a fiction, useful perhaps in the past, but increasingly not today, and like all fictions, it can be dispelled if people agree to do so.
- kiitos 1y agoi mean sure if you're gonna take some epistemological position then every legal concept is a fiction, but that's not a particularly interesting nor useful angle on the discussion or, to put it more succinctly, and quoting one of the great contemporary aphorisms: sure, and if my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bicycle
- okanat 1y ago> Never worked for a company that sells something protected by copyright? I.e. never created software in exchange of money.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- stingraycharles 1y agoIsn’t that already the case, with the capacity required to train these models?
- johanyc 1y agoNo. It means model training is transformative enough to be fair use. They should just be asked to pay them back plus reimbursement/punishment, say pay 10x the price of the pirated books
- vessenes 1y agoCurious: are you trolling? Or do you really think doing math shouldn’t be a priori allowed to humans?
- dbalatero 1y agoDo you seriously think it's a matter of doing math in a vacuum? The issue is pirating books, using them as inputs to math which is then resold as an LLM without compensation to the authors who have clearly copyrighted material. I can't tell if _you're_ trolling.
- petralithic 1y ago> The issue is pirating books, using them as inputs to math which is then resold as an LLM without compensation to the authors who have clearly copyrighted material. No one seems to be able to explain what exactly the issue is here. How are authors harmed by LLMs (where such harm is often used to understand the range of copyright in lawsuits)? I don't see anyone replacing authors and their works, such as JK Rowling being harmed just because people can output Harry Potter esque texts. And if that's the case, well, fan fiction has been around for a long time, with no LLMs in its writing.
- sefrost 1y agoI wonder how much it would cost to buy every book that you'd want to train a model.
- GMoromisato 1y ago500,000 x $20 = $10 million Obviously there would be handling costs + scanning costs, so that’s the floor. Maybe $20 million total? Plus, of course, the time it would take to execute.
- riskable 1y agoThe real expense is in the data centers/hardware. The cost of the books is negligible in comparison.
- Scoundreller 1y agoSomewhere a gritty warehouse in a developing country is receiving shipping containers of old books, massive teams manually flipping each page as a 2nd hand Canon digicam takes a pic of each page, to be OCR’d by the same AI being trained. Once the book is done, 99% of them go into the furnace at the district heating boiler next door. The other 1% back to a developed country for resale.
- bcrosby95 1y agoFair use isn't about how you access the material, its about what you can do with it after you legally access it. If you don't legally access it, the question of fair use is moot.
- petralithic 1y agoHence, "should"
- btmiller 1y agoIt’s the sign of a health economy when we respect the creation of content.
- scotty79 1y agoIt's a sign of rent seeking economy in decline. Rising economies never respect IPs.
- thfuran 1y agoIP protections are in the US Constitution. Has the US been in decline since the late 1700s?
- scotty79 1y agoYes. Great recession was its death throes. It would have fallen by now if it wasn't the only economy not damaged by Second World War and as a result economy that put its currency as currency of global trade. Since then it's mostly sustained by selling freshly printed paper and bullying everyone around with IP laws.
- bigyabai 1y agoWith respect to the IP protected under the Constitution of the United States, unquestionably and absolutely. The past 50 years of macroeconomic activity is basically a warning sign that says "your IP is basically worthless" in big red flashing letters. China mass-manufactures ARM chips and turbojet engines using unlicensed stolen schematics - Russia endlessly pirates foreign entertainment with impunity. These are entire nations of people who benefit from American financial assets without paying us a dime for them. In case you missed it, the other day China showed off their F-35 clone for the PRC military parade. Your constitution can say pigs fly for all George Washington cares, trusting absolutely in IP protection is a game for butthurt chumps.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- OhioMan2943 1y agoI wish the hn rules were more flexible because I would write the best comment to you right now.
- petralithic 1y agoAre you implying some sort of threat?
- Aurornis 1y agoThis is a settlement. It does not set a precedent nor even admit to wrongdoing. > otherwise only the big companies who can afford to pay off publishers like Anthropic will be able to do so Only well funded companies can afford to hire a lot of expensive engineers and train AI models on hundreds of thousands of expensive GPUs, too. Something tells me many the grassroots LLM training people are less concerned about legality of their source training set than the big companies anyway.
- heavyset_go 1y agoI don't know if I agree with it, but you could argue that if a model was built for purely academic purposes, and then used for purely academic purposes, it could meet requirements for fair use.
- rwmj 1y ago(Half joking but) I wonder if musicians need to worry if they learned to play by listening to cassette mixtapes.
- josh-sematic 1y agoSetting aside whether or not I think it should be fair use, you’re only going to be training a new foundation model these days if you have billions of dollars to spend on the endeavor anyway. Nobody is training Llama 5 in their garage.
- petralithic 1y agoMillions, not billions, as DeepSeek and others have shown.