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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 inc

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.
lelanthran 7mo ago
> But again, I am not telling anyone else that they must agree with me. Simply stating my own relationship with my own creative output. Look, I'm not saying that you are doing that, I'm pointing out that "Silence is consent" is not as strong an argument that many think it is.

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.

lelanthran 7mo ago

> But again, I am not telling anyone else that they must agree with me. Simply stating my own relationship with my own creative output. Look, I'm not saying that you are doing that, I'm pointing out that "Silence is consent" is not as strong an argument that many think it is.