4 ms·

Consent is absolutely important, but that does not mean that every single thing in the entire world requires explicit consent. You did not ask me for consent to

Consent is absolutely important, but that does not mean that every single thing in the entire world requires explicit consent. You did not ask me for consent to use my words in your comment. That does not mean you're a bad person. Free use is an important part of intellectual property law. If it did not exist, the powerful could, for example, stifle public criticism by declaring that they do not consent to you using their words or likeness. The ability to do that is important for society. It is also just generally important for creating works inspired by others, which is virtually every work. There has to be lines for cases where requiring attribution is required, and cases where it is not.

lelanthran 7mo ago
> You did not ask me for consent to use my words in your comment. I am not representing your words as mine. I am not using your words to profit off. I am not making a gain by attributing your words to you. > There has to be lines for cases where requiring attribution is required, and cases where it is not. You are blurring the lines between "using a quote or likeness" and "giving credit to". I am skeptical that you don't know the difference between the two. Regardless, any "perspective" that disregards the need to acquire consent is invalid. Even if you are going to ignore it, you have to acknowledge that you don't feel you need any consent from the people you are taking from. This whole "silence is consent" attitude is baffling.
- steveklabnik 7mo ago
  You made an incredibly strong statement that is much broader than what we are talking about. I am pointing out various cases where I think that broadness is incorrect, I am not equating the two. I do not think that, if you read, say, https://steveklabnik.com/writing/when-should-i-use-string-vs-str/ https://steveklabnik.com/writing/when-should-i-use-string-vs... , and then later, a friend asks you "hey, should I use String or &str here?" that you need my consent to go "at the start, just use String" instead of "at the start, just use String, like Steve Klabnik says in https://steveklabnik.com/writing/when-should-i-use-string-vs-str/ https://steveklabnik.com/writing/when-should-i-use-string-vs... ". And if they say "hey that's a great idea, thank you" I don't think you're a bad person if you say "you're welcome" without "you should really be saying welcome to Steve Klabnik." It is of course nice if you happen to do so, but I think framing it as a consent issue is the wrong way to think about it. We recognize that this is different than simply publishing the exact contents of the blog post on your blog and calling it yours, because it is! To me, an LLM is a transformative derivative work, not an exact copy. Because my words are not in there, they are not being copied. But again, I am not telling anyone else that they must agree with me. Simply stating my own relationship with my own creative output.
  - sillysaurusx 7mo ago
    Just wanted to compliment you on your classy attitude and style, along with your solid points. It’s not easy to take that side of the debate. Cheers.
    - GeoAtreides 7mo ago
      he doesn't have solid points, he conflates fair use with free use (?), ignores thousands of years of attribution history, and equates normal human to human learning with corporate LLMs training on original content (without consent). Great presentation, like you said, to cover the logical defects.
      - sillysaurusx 7mo ago
        Fair use of training data hasn’t yet been settled in court. People here are treating it like it has been. But no amount of wishful thinking or moral arguments will change a verdict saying it’s fine for training data to be used as it has been. Until that question is settled, it’s disingenuous to dismiss his points out of hand as conflating fair use or ignoring consent.
        steveklabnik 7mo ago
        Even beyond that, the initial legal opinion we do have did in fact point to training being fair use: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/anthropic-wins-key-ruling-ai-authors-copyright-lawsuit-2025-06-24/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/anthropic-wins-key-... However, I don't feel comfortable suggesting that this is settled just yet, one district judge's opinion does not mean that other future cases may disagree, or we may at some point get explicit legislation one way or the other.
        otterley 7mo ago
        I think the court dropped the ball here. On the one hand, I think they were right that using existing works--copyrighted or otherwise--to train a model was transformable fair use. On the other hand, Anthropic and others trained their models on illicit copies of the works; they (more often than not) didn't pay the copyright holders. There's a doctrine in Fifth Amendment law called "fruit of the poisonous tree." The general rule is that prosecutors don't get to present evidence in a criminal trial that they gained unlawfully. It's excluded. The jury never gets to see it even if it provides incontrovertible evidence of guilt. The point is to discourage law enforcement from violating the rights of the accused during the investigative process, and to obtain a warrant as the Amendment requires. It seems to me that the same logic ought to be applied to these companies. They want to make money by building the best models they can. That's fine! They should be able to use all the source data they can legitimately obtain to feed their training process. But if they refuse to do so and resort to piracy, they mustn't be allowed to claim that they then used it fairly in the transformative process.
- ModernMech 7mo ago
  > you don't feel you need any consent from the people you are taking from. What has been "taken", exactly?
  - lelanthran 7mo ago
    > What has been "taken", exactly? Where are you going with this line of thought? That making a copy of someone's work, using it for profit and not crediting them doesn't "take" anything from them?
    - ModernMech 7mo ago
      I find that these discussions at the intersection of art and law tend to blur technical and familiar uses of words. So it's important to specify what was actually taken here because otherwise the discussion becomes muddy. "making a copy of someone's work, using it for profit and not crediting them" wasn't really the scenario being discussed in this thread -- is that what you meant by "taking"? Steve had made the point: Not every single thing in the entire world requires explicit consent. But actually taking someone else's verbatim work and selling it as your own is one of those instances where consent would be required, because many people see a clear line between someone selling another author's work and the author not getting a dollar because of that. That doesn't preclude other instance where explicit consent is not required. For example, do I need your consent to learn from your work and produce similar work of my own? Am I required to credit you in my work for having learned from you? Am I taking from you if I don't share my profits with you? Some rights holders would say yes, actually. Which, I don't agree with. I think it's important that we not require the artist's explicit consent for all things, because listening to some of rights holders (e.g. Disney), they have very expansive ideas about what kind of control they are owed by society over their creations. Therefore, I think if you're going to claim something has been taken, you should specify what exactly.
- satvikpendem 7mo ago
  > you don't feel you need any consent from the people you are taking from In most cases, no, I (and it seems most others) don't feel the need for that, it is only you who seems to have an ideological hangup over this.
  - lelanthran 7mo ago
    >In most cases, no, I (and it seems most others) don't feel the need for that, it is only you who seems to have an ideological hangup over this. It's not an ideological hangup, it's confusion over the assumption by certain groups that "silence is consent", when it is not.

lelanthran 7mo ago

> You did not ask me for consent to use my words in your comment. I am not representing your words as mine. I am not using your words to profit off. I am not making a gain by attributing your words to you. > There has to be lines for cases where requiring attribution is required, and cases where it is not. You are blurring the lines between "using a quote or likeness" and "giving credit to". I am skeptical that you don't know the difference between the two. Regardless, any "perspective" that disregards the need to acquire consent is invalid. Even if you are going to ignore it, you have to acknowledge that you don't feel you need any consent from the people you are taking from. This whole "silence is consent" attitude is baffling.

steveklabnik 7mo ago
You made an incredibly strong statement that is much broader than what we are talking about. I am pointing out various cases where I think that broadness is incorrect, I am not equating the two. I do not think that, if you read, say, https://steveklabnik.com/writing/when-should-i-use-string-vs-str/ https://steveklabnik.com/writing/when-should-i-use-string-vs... , and then later, a friend asks you "hey, should I use String or &str here?" that you need my consent to go "at the start, just use String" instead of "at the start, just use String, like Steve Klabnik says in https://steveklabnik.com/writing/when-should-i-use-string-vs-str/ https://steveklabnik.com/writing/when-should-i-use-string-vs... ". And if they say "hey that's a great idea, thank you" I don't think you're a bad person if you say "you're welcome" without "you should really be saying welcome to Steve Klabnik." It is of course nice if you happen to do so, but I think framing it as a consent issue is the wrong way to think about it. We recognize that this is different than simply publishing the exact contents of the blog post on your blog and calling it yours, because it is! To me, an LLM is a transformative derivative work, not an exact copy. Because my words are not in there, they are not being copied. But again, I am not telling anyone else that they must agree with me. Simply stating my own relationship with my own creative output.
- sillysaurusx 7mo ago
  Just wanted to compliment you on your classy attitude and style, along with your solid points. It’s not easy to take that side of the debate. Cheers.
  - GeoAtreides 7mo ago
    he doesn't have solid points, he conflates fair use with free use (?), ignores thousands of years of attribution history, and equates normal human to human learning with corporate LLMs training on original content (without consent). Great presentation, like you said, to cover the logical defects.
    - sillysaurusx 7mo ago
      Fair use of training data hasn’t yet been settled in court. People here are treating it like it has been. But no amount of wishful thinking or moral arguments will change a verdict saying it’s fine for training data to be used as it has been. Until that question is settled, it’s disingenuous to dismiss his points out of hand as conflating fair use or ignoring consent.
      - steveklabnik 7mo ago
        Even beyond that, the initial legal opinion we do have did in fact point to training being fair use: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/anthropic-wins-key-ruling-ai-authors-copyright-lawsuit-2025-06-24/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/anthropic-wins-key-... However, I don't feel comfortable suggesting that this is settled just yet, one district judge's opinion does not mean that other future cases may disagree, or we may at some point get explicit legislation one way or the other.
        otterley 7mo ago
        I think the court dropped the ball here. On the one hand, I think they were right that using existing works--copyrighted or otherwise--to train a model was transformable fair use. On the other hand, Anthropic and others trained their models on illicit copies of the works; they (more often than not) didn't pay the copyright holders. There's a doctrine in Fifth Amendment law called "fruit of the poisonous tree." The general rule is that prosecutors don't get to present evidence in a criminal trial that they gained unlawfully. It's excluded. The jury never gets to see it even if it provides incontrovertible evidence of guilt. The point is to discourage law enforcement from violating the rights of the accused during the investigative process, and to obtain a warrant as the Amendment requires. It seems to me that the same logic ought to be applied to these companies. They want to make money by building the best models they can. That's fine! They should be able to use all the source data they can legitimately obtain to feed their training process. But if they refuse to do so and resort to piracy, they mustn't be allowed to claim that they then used it fairly in the transformative process.
ModernMech 7mo ago
> you don't feel you need any consent from the people you are taking from. What has been "taken", exactly?
- lelanthran 7mo ago
  > What has been "taken", exactly? Where are you going with this line of thought? That making a copy of someone's work, using it for profit and not crediting them doesn't "take" anything from them?
  - ModernMech 7mo ago
    I find that these discussions at the intersection of art and law tend to blur technical and familiar uses of words. So it's important to specify what was actually taken here because otherwise the discussion becomes muddy. "making a copy of someone's work, using it for profit and not crediting them" wasn't really the scenario being discussed in this thread -- is that what you meant by "taking"? Steve had made the point: Not every single thing in the entire world requires explicit consent. But actually taking someone else's verbatim work and selling it as your own is one of those instances where consent would be required, because many people see a clear line between someone selling another author's work and the author not getting a dollar because of that. That doesn't preclude other instance where explicit consent is not required. For example, do I need your consent to learn from your work and produce similar work of my own? Am I required to credit you in my work for having learned from you? Am I taking from you if I don't share my profits with you? Some rights holders would say yes, actually. Which, I don't agree with. I think it's important that we not require the artist's explicit consent for all things, because listening to some of rights holders (e.g. Disney), they have very expansive ideas about what kind of control they are owed by society over their creations. Therefore, I think if you're going to claim something has been taken, you should specify what exactly.
satvikpendem 7mo ago
> you don't feel you need any consent from the people you are taking from In most cases, no, I (and it seems most others) don't feel the need for that, it is only you who seems to have an ideological hangup over this.
- lelanthran 7mo ago
  >In most cases, no, I (and it seems most others) don't feel the need for that, it is only you who seems to have an ideological hangup over this. It's not an ideological hangup, it's confusion over the assumption by certain groups that "silence is consent", when it is not.