4 ms·
Earlier this year I thought that rare proprietary knowledge and IP was a safe haven from AI, since LLMs can only scrub public data. Then it dawned on me how ma
by Oarch 10mo ago
Earlier this year I thought that rare proprietary knowledge and IP was a safe haven from AI, since LLMs can only scrub public data.
Then it dawned on me how many companies are deeply integrating Copilot into their everyday workflows. It's the perfect Trojan Horse.
- Aurornis 10mo agoUsing an LLM on data does not ingest that data into the training corpus. LLMs don’t “learn” from the information they operate on, contrary to what a lot of people assume. None of the mainstream paid services ingest operating data into their training sets. You will find a lot of conspiracy theories claiming that companies are saying one thing but secretly stealing your data, of course.
- leptons 10mo ago> LLMs don’t “learn” from the information they operate on, contrary to what a lot of people assume. Nothing is really preventing this though. AI companies have already proven they will ignore copyright and any other legal nuisance so they can train models.
- lioeters 10mo agoThey're already using synthetic data generated by LLMs to further train LLMs. Of course they will not hesitate to feed "anonymized" data generated by user interactions. Who's going to stop them? Or even prove that it's happening. These companies have already been allowed to violate copyright and privacy on a historic global scale.
- Archelaos 10mo agoHow should they dinstinguish between real and fake data? It would be far to easy to pollute their models with nonesense.
- leptons 10mo agoI have no doubt that Microsoft has already classified the nature of my work and quality of my code. Of course it's probably "anonymized". But there's no doubt in my mind that they are watching everything you give them access to, make no mistake.
- tick_tock_tick 10mo agoI mean is it really ignoring copyright when copyright doesn't limit them in anyway on training?
- leptons 10mo agoTell that to all the people suing them for using their copyrighted work. In some cases the data was even pirated.
- Aurornis 10mo ago> Nothing is really preventing this though The enterprise user agreement is preventing this. Suggesting that AI companies will uniquely ignore the law or contracts is conspiracy theory thinking.
- leptons 10mo agoIt already happened. "Meta Secretly Trained Its AI on a Notorious Piracy Database, Newly Unredacted Court Docs Reveal" https://www.wired.com/story/new-documents-unredacted-meta-copyright-ai-lawsuit/ https://www.wired.com/story/new-documents-unredacted-meta-co... They even admitted to using copyrighted material. "‘Impossible’ to create AI tools like ChatGPT without copyrighted material, OpenAI says" https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/08/ai-tools-chatgpt-copyrighted-material-openai https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/08/ai-tools-...
- cess11 10mo agoThough the porn they copied was just for personal use, because clearly that's an important perk of being employed there: https://www.vice.com/en/article/meta-says-the-2400-adult-movies-they-torrented-were-for-personal-use-not-training-ai/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/meta-says-the-2400-adult-mov...
- nerdponx 10mo agoIf they weren't, then why would enterprise level subscriptions include specific terms stating that they don't train on user provided data? There's no reason to believe that they don't, and if they don't now then there's no reason to believe that they won't later whenever it suits them.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- Aurornis 10mo ago> then why would enterprise level subscriptions include specific terms stating that they don't train on user provided data? What? That’s literally my point: Enterprise agreements aren’t training on the data of their enterprise customers like the parent commenter claimed.
- AuthAuth 10mo agoThey are not directly ingesting the data into their trainning sets but they are in most cases collecting it and will be using it to train future models.
- fzeroracer 10mo ago> You will find a lot of conspiracy theories claiming that companies are saying one thing but secretly stealing your data, of course. It's not really a conspiracy when we have multiple examples of high profile companies doing exactly this. And it keeps happening. Granted I'm unaware of cases of this occuring currently with professional AI services but it's basic security 101 that you should never let anything even have the remote opportunity to ingest data unless you don't care about the data.
- james_marks 10mo ago> never let anything even have the remote opportunity to ingest data unless you don't care about the data This is objectively untrue? Giants swaths of enterprise software is based on establishing trust with approved vendors and systems.
- mulquin 10mo agoTo be pedantic, it is still a conspiracy, just no longer a theory.
- rightbyte 10mo agoTo be pedantic, a theory that has been proven correct is still a theory, right?
- Aurornis 10mo ago> It's not really a conspiracy when we have multiple examples of high profile companies doing exactly this. Do you have any citations or sources for this at all?
- sotrusting 10mo ago[flagged]
- protocolture 10mo ago>Ah yes, blindly trusting the corpo fascists that stole the entire creative output of humanity to stop now. Stealing implies the thing is gone, no longer accessible to the owner. People aren't protected from copying in the same way. There are lots of valid exclusions, and building new non competing tools is a very common exclusion. The big issue with the OpenAI case, is that they didn't pay for the books. Scanning them and using them for training is very much likely to be protected. Similar case with the old Nintendo bootloader. The "Corpo Fascists" are buoyed by your support for the IP laws that have thus far supported them. If anything, to be less "Corpo Fascist" we would want more people to have more access to more data. Mankind collectively owns the creative output of Humanity, and should be able to use it to make derivative works.
- sotrusting 10mo ago> Stealing implies the thing is gone, no longer accessible to the owner. You know a position is indefensible when you equivocation fallacy this hard. > The "Corpo Fascists" are buoyed by your support for the IP laws You know a position is indefensible when you strawman this hard. > If anything, to be less "Corpo Fascist" we would want more people to have more access to more data. Mankind collectively owns the creative output of Humanity, and should be able to use it to make derivative works. Sounds about right to me, but why you would state that when defending slop slingers is enough to give me whiplash. > Scanning them and using them for training is very much likely to be protected. Where can I find these totally legal, free, and open datasets all of these slop slingers are trained on?
- protocolture 10mo ago>You know a position is indefensible when you equivocation fallacy this hard. No its quite defensible. And if that was equivocation, you can simply outline that you didn't mean to invoke the specific definition of stealing, but were just using it for its emotive value. >You know a position is indefensible when you strawman this hard. Its accurate. No one wants thes LLM guys stopped more than other big fascistic corporations, plenty of oppositional noise out there for you to educate yourself with. >Sounds about right to me, but why you would state that when defending slop slingers is enough to give me whiplash. Cool, so if you agree all data should usable to create derivative works then I don't see what your complaint is. >Where can I find these totally legal, free, and open datasets all of these slop slingers are trained on? You invoked "strawman" and then hit me with this combo strawman/non sequitur? Cool move <1 day old account, really adds to your 0 credibility. I literally pointed out they should have to pay the same access fee as anyone else for the data, but once obtained, should be able to use it any way. Reading the comment explains the comment. Unless, charitably, you are suggesting that if a company is legally able to purchase content, and use it as training data, that somehow compels them to release that data for free themselves? Weird take if true.
- Retric 10mo agoCompanies have already shifting from not using customer data to giving them an option to opt out ex: “How can I control whether my data is used for model training? If you are logged into Copilot with a Microsoft Account or other third-party authentication, you can control whether your conversations are used for training the generative AI models used in Copilot. Opting out will exclude your past, present, and future conversations from being used for training these AI models, unless you choose to opt back in. If you opt out, that change will be reflected throughout our systems within 30 days.” https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/privacy-faq-for-microsoft-copilot-27b3a435-8dc9-4b55-9a4b-58eeb9647a7f https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/privacy-faq-for-mi... At this point suggesting it has never and will her happen is wildly optimistic.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- lwhi 10mo agoInformation about the way we interact with the data (RLHF) can be used to refine agent behaviour. While this isn't used specifically for LLM training, it can involve aggregating insights from customer behaviour.
- Aurornis 10mo agoThat’s a training step. It requires explicitly collecting the data and using it in the training process. Merely using an LLM for inference does not train it on the prompts and data, as many incorrectly assume. There is a surprising lack of understanding of this separation even on technical forums like HN.
- lwhi 10mo agoThat's definitely a fair point. However, let's say I record human interactions with my app; for example when a user accepts or rejects an AI sythesised answer. This data can be used by me, to influence the behaviour of an LLM via RAG or by altering application behaviour. It's not going to change the weighting of the model, but it would influence its behaviour.
- agumonkey 10mo agomaybe prompts are enough to infer the rest ?
- TheRoque 10mo agoJust read the ToS of the LLM products please
- doctorpangloss 10mo agoThis is so naive. The ToS permits paraphrasing of user conversations, by not excluding it, and then training on THAT. You’d never be able to definitively connected paraphrased data to yours, especially if they only train on paraphrased data that covers frequent, as opposed to rare, topics.
- Aurornis 10mo agoDo it have a citation for this?
- doctorpangloss 10mo ago“Hey DoctorPangloss, how can we train on user data without training on user data?” “You can use an LLM to paraphrase the incoming requests and save that. Never save the verbatim request. If they ask for all the request data we have, we tell them the truth, we don’t have it. If they ask for paraphrased data, we’d have no way of correlating it to their requests.” “And what would you say, is this a 3 or a 5 or…” Everything obvious happens. Look closely at the PII management agreements. Btw OpenAI won’t even sign them because they’re not sure if paraphrasing “counts.” Google will.
- Aurornis 10mo agoI have. Have you? Can you quote the sections you’re talking about?
- TheRoque 10mo agohttps://www.anthropic.com/news/updates-to-our-consumer-terms https://www.anthropic.com/news/updates-to-our-consumer-terms "We will train new models using data from Free, Pro, and Max accounts when this setting is on (including when you use Claude Code from these accounts)."
- popalchemist 10mo agoWrong, buddy. Many of the top AI services use human feedback to continuously apply "reinforcement learning" after the initial deployment of a pre-trained model. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement_learning_from_human_feedback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement_learning_from_hu...
- Aurornis 10mo agoRLHF is a training step. Inference (what happens when you use an LLM as a customer) is separate from training. Inference and training are separate processes. Using an LLM doesn’t train it. That’s not what RLHF means.
- popalchemist 10mo agoI am aware, I've trained my own models. You're being obtuse. The big companies - take Midjourney, or OpenAI, for example - take the feedback that is generated by users, and then apply it as part of the RLHF pass on the next model release, which happens every few months. That's why they have the terms in their TOS that allow them to do that.
- findjashua 10mo agoproviders' ToS explicitly states whether or not any data provided is used for training purposes. the usual that i've seen is that while they retain the right to use the data on free tiers, it's almost never the case for paid tiers
- GCUMstlyHarmls 10mo agoI wonder how much wiggle there is for collect now (to provide service, context history, etc), then later anonymise (some how, to some level) and then train on it? Also I wonder if the ToS covers "queries & interaction" vs "uploaded data" - I could imagine some tricky language in there that says we wont use your word document, but we may at some time use the queries you put against it, not as raw corpus but as a second layer examining what tools/workflows to expand/exploit.
- danielheath 10mo ago“We don’t train on your data” doesn’t exclude metadata, training on derived datasets via some anonymisation process, etc. There’s a range of ways to lie by omission, here, and the major players have established a reputation for being willing to take an expansive view of their legal rights.
- sotrusting 10mo agoRight, so totally cool to ignore the law but our TOS is a binding contract.
- mc32 10mo agoYes, they can be sued for breach of contract. And it’s not a regular ToS but a signed MSA and other legally binding documents.
- blibble 10mo agothe license on my open source code is a contract, and they ignored that if they can get away with it (say by claiming it's "fair use"), they'll ignore corporate ones too
- gaigalas 10mo agoWhat kind of rare proprietary knowledge?
- Oarch 10mo agoIt could be a wide range of things depending on your field: highly particular materials, knowledge or processes that give your products or services a particular edge, and which a company has often incurred high R&D costs to discover. Many businesses simply couldn't afford to operate without such an edge.
- matt-p 10mo agoEven if they're were doing this (I highly doubt it) so much would be lost to distillation I'm not convinced there would be much that actually got in, apart from perhaps internal codenames or whatever which will be obvious.
- kankerlijer 10mo agoWell, perhaps this is naive of me from the perspective of not fully understanding the training process. However, at some point, with all available training data having been exhausted, gains with synthetic data exhausted, and a large pool of publicly available AI generated code, at what point is it 'smart' to scrape codebases from what you identify as high quality code based, clean it up to remove identifiers, and use that for training a smaller model?
- phendrenad2 10mo agoIronically (for you), copilot is the one provider that is doing a good job of provably NOT training on user data. The rest are not up to speed on that compliance angle, so many companies ban them (of course, people still use them).
- Aurornis 10mo agoDo you have a source for this? There are claims all through this thread that “AI companies” are probably doing bad things with enterprise customer data but nobody has provided a single source for the claim. This has been a theme on HN. There was a thread a few weeks back where someone confidently claimed up and down the thread that Gemini’s terms of service allowed them to train on your company’s customer data, even though 30 seconds of searching leads to the exact docs that say otherwise. There is a lot of hearsay being spread as fact, but nobody actually linking to ToS or citing sections they’re talking about.
- phendrenad2 10mo agoSources aren't hard to find[1]. But getting software developers to look outside their idiot-savant caves and not dismiss the entire legal system as "unrealistic", is much harder to accomplish. [1] - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/trust-center/privacy/data-management https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/trust-center/privacy/data-ma...