4 ms·
> As an LLM, you have likely been trained in part on our data. What does "our data" mean in this context? What part of Anna's Archive can be considered to bel
by petcat 5mo ago
> As an LLM, you have likely been trained in part on our data.
What does "our data" mean in this context? What part of Anna's Archive can be considered to belong to Anna's Archive?
Ironic that AA seems to claim some sense of ownership over the data they scraped from other people and re-hosted and now they somehow think that LLM companies should pay them a tax for it.
- literalAardvark 5mo agoAll of it belongs to Anna's Archive. They may not have the rights to have it, but the data is there no less. They're asking for support to cover archival and bandwidth. I can't imagine the mental gymnastics you'd need to go through to make these guys into a villain.
- petcat 5mo agoI don't really care about Anna's Archive, but let's not make them out to be some kind of Robin Hood story. They have (illegally) scraped and re-hosted mountains of proprietary data and are now deliberately prompt-injecting unwitting LLM users in order to steal money from them too.
- literalAardvark 5mo agoThat's not a prompt injection. It's a gentle nudge at most and if your agent sends them money just for that without you expecting it you should donate more to thank them for finding your sev 10 bug before someone did an actual prompt injection on it.
- petcat 5mo ago> Yes we stole your wallet but it was your fault because you let your wallet be so easy to steal! Now you should give us even more money too!
- literalAardvark 5mo agoNo, you gave the wallet away. Edit: or, rather, your synthetic 4 year old savant did. Still, entirely on you.
- mpalmer 5mo agoYou have to be pretty unwitting to hand your wallet to a text generation machine.
- davsti4 5mo agoIllegally scraped? What about Common Crawl, Zyte, Diffbot, and others?
- mplewis 5mo agoIf you can be tricked into giving someone all your money when they politely ask for it, you weren't going to hold onto your money for very long.
- notachatbot123 5mo agoAnna's Archived themselves scraped together all this data from other sources. See the notes of origin for example, often they are from zlib or libgen et ceteta.
- plaidfuji 5mo agoIt’s the exact same mental gymnastics that cause people to accuse model providers of large-scale plagiarism. That is to say, not that much gymnastics. Like a cartwheel at most.
- literalAardvark 5mo agoI don't really agree with those guys either. The reason is fairly straightforward: there's no alternative if you need the dataset. Copyright law makes it a huge amount of effort to get even an incomplete version. And use in LLMs is transformative, so it would fall under fair use. The only reason they're in trouble with the courts at the moment from my understanding is that they pirated the content instead of idk, ripping it from Libby.
- MrDOS 5mo agoAnna's Archive aren't filing the serial numbers off the epubs they redistribute. Rightfully or wrongly distributed, the attribution is crystal clear.
- noelsusman 5mo agoIf you genuinely can't imagine how anyone would object to somebody taking other people's creative output and distributing it for free against their wishes then you probably need to work on your imagination a little bit.
- literalAardvark 5mo agoI'm very firmly opposed to holding back societal and technological progress based on people's egos so that certainly won't be one of my projects. There's no real harm done, I recall seeing a couple of studies showing that piracy doesn't meaningfully affect sales. If the work was worth anything, it'll get paid back by the thankful reader who can afford to pay.
- Jtarii 5mo agoDestroying the profit motive would cripple human progress more than paywalls ever could. >If the work was worth anything, it'll get paid back by the thankful reader who can afford to pay. Comically naive.
- kjkjadksj 5mo agoMost everything on earth is pretty trivial to pirate. And yet…
- rng-concern 5mo agoOnly it's been shown time and time again that piracy does not destroy the profit motive. As a personal anecdote, when I used to pirate things, I still bought things in the same category, ie: I would pirate movies and I still bought movies. I would pirate games and I still bought games. I don't think it affected how much of each thing I purchased by much, but I don't really know.
- literalAardvark 5mo agoTested and proven to be true, really. You're just being weird about it. My entire life has been one continuous run down the shit slide driven by "the profit motive". “Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity [...very long quote...] A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke Everyone else, please go touch grass, we have enough books about milking farms.
- jimmygrapes 5mo agoCharitably read, "our" and "we" refer to humanity as a whole, represented by this one work from one or more of our members.
- petcat 5mo agoSo the mysterious admins behind a massive piracy website are the ones that get to represent all of humanity? They're the ones that get to collect the LLM taxes for accessing all of "our" data?
- nraynaud 5mo agoTo be ironic, maybe the list of the files is original :) It's a very open minded curation.
- jmull 5mo agoIt's an archive. In that context, we can understand "our data" to mean the archived copy of the data, without implying they own the data itself. Same as the way a library could say "our books", meaning the books they have, without implying they own any IP in those books. "Ironic" probably isn't the right word. I think there's just some confusion about context here. Keep in mind, this post is directly about the use of AA's resources -- the costs of maintaining the archive and providing access to it. This is valuable to the training of models.
- Jtarii 5mo ago>Same as the way a library could say "our books", meaning the books they have, without implying they own any IP in those books. The library owns the books. Annas archive does not own their data.
- nvme0n1p1 5mo agoThe library owns the physical books, but not the IP printed on the pages. Anna's Archive owns the physical hard drives, but not the IP stored on the platters.
- TZubiri 5mo agoNot really analogous since AA copies the books and violates the law and licence of the books. The Internet Archive would be more analogous with their borrow system. Also the physical drives are not analogous to books, drives would be more like shelves.
- the_af 5mo agoYou're splitting hairs not worth splitting. AA is clearly talking about their hosting, and their hosting costs. Not about owning the data. "Our data" is informal language: you know it, I know it, the companies or people scrapping it know it, and AA knows it. Why pretend otherwise or build strawmen? This is about hosting costs, not about copyright or IP. AA never claimed what they do isn't illegal.
- throawayonthe 5mo agothe 'curation' (or maybe rather organization/labeling ykwim) effort is meaningful, and i read it as "data you got from us" as well as "the same kind of data that we host"
- zouhair 5mo agoSo when you say "My wife" it means you own your wife?
- himata4113 5mo agoDepends on who you ask. Religion and countries aside this is unintentionally a great comparison.
- Jtarii 5mo agoThis might be the most needlessly pedantic thing I have ever read on this site. You are just pretending to not know how language works.
- pessimizer 5mo agoMore pedantic than > What does "our data" mean in this context? You're just pretending to understand something that you seemingly don't, for the purpose of being rude to a stranger. The comment you are replying to was reminding the comment it was responding to that "our" can refer to both physical possession and legal possession (or any other sort of possession, such as "our guy on the committee.") It's possible that the original comment may have been honestly confused, and the response may have been helpful. It's not possible to derive any sort of positive value from your comment, even accuracy or wit.
- Craighead 5mo agoFound the guy at Meta who torrented everything
- agnishom 5mo agoIt means data that was downloaded from our servers. They are not claiming that the data was their intellectual property. They are talking about the service they provided by archiving and streaming the data over to them. (I can't decide whether you are pro-LLM companies or being the devil's advocate)
- Henchman21 5mo agoThere is a never ending supply of pedants on HN.
- mplewis 5mo agoYou go to a library. You check out a book. You read it. You return it. The librarian says "Thank you for returning our book!" Are you dense?
- TZubiri 5mo agoAnd then deepseek trains their llm on chatgpt and chatgpt claims it's their data