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I like this comment because its argument only makes sense if you assume that the entire world's output of books and art did not require a huge amount of resourc

by Bratmon 2mo ago

I like this comment because its argument only makes sense if you assume that the entire world's output of books and art did not require a huge amount of resources and expertise to make, nor did it add any value. It's the most CS-major take ever!

joshuamorton 2mo ago
I don't think that's what it's saying at all. It's saying that there's a level of creativity in model creation that isn't present in distillation.
- remus 2mo ago
  Yes, this is what I was getting at.
  - gozucito 2mo ago
    There is an even higher level of creativity in creating books, songs and all sorts of art used in model training though. That's your apparent blindspot. There is no world in which me vacuuming the entirety of human knowledge to make a genai model is ok but hoovering my model answers is not. The hypocrisy is stunning and risible. Now if you go and make a model based on purely synthetic data and not a single work made by humans, you would have a valid point.
    - joshuamorton 2mo ago
      So, I'm not the person you were responding to. I'd like you to take a moment and suggest where anyone in the thread you're replying to, either me or Remus, has said anything that suggests disagreement with the statement > There is an even higher level of creativity in creating books, songs and all sorts of art used in model training though. He claimed there was more creativity in model training than in model distillation. That makes no claim about the relationship between the creativity in model creation and art. Why are you continuing to attack a claim that was never made, after a sub thread very explicitly clarifying that that claim was not made?
      - gozucito 2mo ago
        This is the post Nemus was replying to: >Perhaps even more importantly, the current frontier LLM models are self-admittedly the product of enormous quantities of copyright infringement and even less savory inputs, so calling them out for distilling the fruit of that tainted tree reads as highly hypocritical at best. Context is important. And in this context, their argument only mentions creativity when it belongs to an AI lab. That omission is the blind spot I pointed out. Bottom line is whether or not Anthropic are being hypocritical and yes, they most definitely are, regardless of any attempted sophistry. There is a reason courts want you to tell "The whole truth" and not just "the truth".
    - remus 2mo ago
      > There is an even higher level of creativity in creating books, songs and all sorts of art used in model training though. No argument here, I completely agree. > There is no world in which me vacuuming the entirety of human knowledge to make a genai model is ok but hoovering my model answers is not. I disagree with this though. Clearly LLMs owe a huge debt to everything that has come before, but surely you'd agree that the models that are produced are something substantial and new and novel which didn't exist before and have lots of value in their own right. Let's be a bit reductive and pretend Moonshot had just outright stolen the weights from Fable somehow, clearly that wouldn't be contributing anything really new or novel. Now of course they've distilled rather than stolen, but the point is similar: how much value have they added along the way?
      - gozucito 2mo ago
        Since this is HN Think of it like one of the GPL license for software. It's ok for me to use your source code for free as long as I then let others also use my source code for free.
- skybrian 2mo ago
  Maybe, but it's not like their AI is likely to repeat it back verbatim so it's unlikely to be a copyright violation. It seems like at most, they would be breaking Anthropic's terms of service? Or maybe they're going through an intermediary "transfer station" that's breaking terms of service: https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens-in https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...
  - perching_aix 2mo ago
    Yes, it's just a ToS violation at present. Those are legally binding though, despite the common adage. What that really translates to here though, anyone's guess. Anthropic's own copyright infringement could apparently be forgiven for 1.5B USD after all, so maybe there's a price that breaking the distillation clause for is acceptable too. Or some other arrangement.
    - Bratmon 2mo ago
      But surely at least one of the websites Anthropic scraped to make Claude had a ToS forbidding automatic access? Why is Anthropic's ToS any more binding than that of a rabidly-anti-ai literature blog with 50 readers?
      - perching_aix 2mo ago
        Do feel free to read the court documents to find out and let us know. > Why is Anthropic's ToS any more binding than that of a rabidly-anti-ai literature blog with 50 readers? Although I will say, this whole comparison stuff really doesn't seem to be your thing; might impede your analysis quite a lot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49013148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49013148 Maybe ask Claude?
      - queenkjuul 2mo ago
        > Why is Anthropic's ToS any more binding than that of a rabidly-anti-ai literature blog with 50 readers? I mean i know you know the answer: anthropic is a corporation with lawyers on retainer, and that's really all that matters
- trhway 2mo ago
  >a level of creativity in model creation that isn't present in distillation. the same argument - a level of creativity in the world knowledge creation that ins't present in the model training on that knowledge. Or in other words - model creation and training is just a distilling of the world knowledge.
  - joshuamorton 2mo ago
    I don't disagree. I'm not sure why that's a relevant reply though. If you think that the addition of a less creative process (model creation) to a more creative corpus ("art") is problematic, then it follows that you should think the addition of a less creative process (distillation) to a more creative corpus (a model) is also problematic.
    - trhway 2mo ago
      I think both are natural and fine. Otherwise we'd have to outlaw analytical thinking.
bluegatty 2mo ago
This is a misrepresentation though. The LLM output, is not the same as the input - there is value add. Of course works used as raw inputs to LLMs required work and are reasonably subject to IP concerns - but they are different. It's possible that the LLM makers 'owe' the content creators that created the content they used to make their products - it's an interesting but separate question. We could very well end up where content IP is protected, LLM output is not and visa versa with reasonable legal founding, doubtful but plausible.
- jaggederest 2mo ago
  > but they are different. How, and why? > We could very well end up where content IP is protected, LLM output is not and visa versa with reasonable legal founding, doubtful but plausible. That is the current state of legal rulings - LLM output is public domain, not copyrightable.
  - bluegatty 2mo ago
    "> but they are different. How, and why?" How are they even remotely the same? They're not even used the same way. One is raw data input, the other is training content - designed to train LLMs. One is a set of IP derived for other purposes entirely, and has esablished IP law - how you can use someone else's creative work or not ... for LLM outputs, less clear.
  - semiquaver 2mo ago
    This misstates the small number of legal opinions and orders on this topic, none of which form binding precedent outside the districts where the cases happened. So even if a court had found that “LLM output is public domain” (none did) that wouldn’t make it “the law” until it went up the appellate system and was upheld. Our current laws simply weren’t built for this and I expect the legal status of LLM output is not going to be resolved until Congress actually legislates on this topic.
- blks 2mo ago
  Lossly storing IP in LLM itself, and using IP for training (so it’s lossly stored in LLM), without licensing these works or otherwise following license agreements (eg GPL) is infringement. Using then this product for commercial activity is a smoking gun.
mapontosevenths 2mo ago
If turning other peoples copyrighted work into a model is transformative enough to be protected then so is distilling that model into a different, better, model.
- foo12bar 2mo ago
  The models were built using copyrighted works, so why can't models be built using other models?
  - breppp 2mo ago
    Because model output is probably far closer to software or a licensed work which possibly has greater protections than it is to copyright. There is far less possibility of fair use, it might be protected by patents, license or reverse engineering laws. In any case the laws are being written now, but I doubt these will have worse protection than software does, which has far better protections than copyright
    - preg_match 2mo ago
      Why would this be the case. Why would software output from a model magically have greater protection than the software the model trained on.
    - vel0city 2mo ago
      Let's assume model output can be claimed by copyright or some form IP. You can't really patent it, as the output isn't a novel idea or process, much like you don't patent a book or a movie. But for arguments sake, let's agree it is some kind of IP. Who are you saying owns that IP? The people who trained the model? The people who ran the model? The people who wrote the prompt? The person who paid for all of that to happen? If the model output is owned by the person prompting it and paying for the tokens, what's the problem here? If the model output is owned by the trainer of the model, that's a big nasty can of worms.
    - giaour 2mo ago
      > I doubt these will have worse protection than software does, which has far better protections than copyright Software is protected by copyright. Some software may also be protected by patents, but last time I checked, AI generated output of any kind was not patentable.
perching_aix 2mo ago
No? They outright say the opposite! Like look, I'm not a native speaker, sure. But I think when someone says "value add", that means there was value there (which you claim they're rhetorically erasing), and then that was added to. Under no interpretation of this phrase do I get an erasure of prior value. So certainly, as long as words mean anything, no, they absolutely did not say or suggest what you claim they did, and what you extract a thus unreasonable amount of obnoxious schadenfreude from, while throwing in a cheap insult for funsies at the end. It's the second time I feel compelled to reach for this just today: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/659/979/108.png https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/659/979/108...
arbitrary_name 2mo ago
there is a major god complex here. MBAs and non technical managers = inept Catbert-type charlatans. Software engineers, devs, etc = geniuses capable of mastering any domain, innate ability to be right on any topic.

by Bratmon 2mo ago

joshuamorton 2mo ago

I don't think that's what it's saying at all. It's saying that there's a level of creativity in model creation that isn't present in distillation.

remus 2mo ago
Yes, this is what I was getting at.
- gozucito 2mo ago
  There is an even higher level of creativity in creating books, songs and all sorts of art used in model training though. That's your apparent blindspot. There is no world in which me vacuuming the entirety of human knowledge to make a genai model is ok but hoovering my model answers is not. The hypocrisy is stunning and risible. Now if you go and make a model based on purely synthetic data and not a single work made by humans, you would have a valid point.
  - joshuamorton 2mo ago
    So, I'm not the person you were responding to. I'd like you to take a moment and suggest where anyone in the thread you're replying to, either me or Remus, has said anything that suggests disagreement with the statement > There is an even higher level of creativity in creating books, songs and all sorts of art used in model training though. He claimed there was more creativity in model training than in model distillation. That makes no claim about the relationship between the creativity in model creation and art. Why are you continuing to attack a claim that was never made, after a sub thread very explicitly clarifying that that claim was not made?
    - gozucito 2mo ago
      This is the post Nemus was replying to: >Perhaps even more importantly, the current frontier LLM models are self-admittedly the product of enormous quantities of copyright infringement and even less savory inputs, so calling them out for distilling the fruit of that tainted tree reads as highly hypocritical at best. Context is important. And in this context, their argument only mentions creativity when it belongs to an AI lab. That omission is the blind spot I pointed out. Bottom line is whether or not Anthropic are being hypocritical and yes, they most definitely are, regardless of any attempted sophistry. There is a reason courts want you to tell "The whole truth" and not just "the truth".
  - remus 2mo ago
    > There is an even higher level of creativity in creating books, songs and all sorts of art used in model training though. No argument here, I completely agree. > There is no world in which me vacuuming the entirety of human knowledge to make a genai model is ok but hoovering my model answers is not. I disagree with this though. Clearly LLMs owe a huge debt to everything that has come before, but surely you'd agree that the models that are produced are something substantial and new and novel which didn't exist before and have lots of value in their own right. Let's be a bit reductive and pretend Moonshot had just outright stolen the weights from Fable somehow, clearly that wouldn't be contributing anything really new or novel. Now of course they've distilled rather than stolen, but the point is similar: how much value have they added along the way?
    - gozucito 2mo ago
      Since this is HN Think of it like one of the GPL license for software. It's ok for me to use your source code for free as long as I then let others also use my source code for free.
skybrian 2mo ago
Maybe, but it's not like their AI is likely to repeat it back verbatim so it's unlikely to be a copyright violation. It seems like at most, they would be breaking Anthropic's terms of service? Or maybe they're going through an intermediary "transfer station" that's breaking terms of service: https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens-in https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...
- perching_aix 2mo ago
  Yes, it's just a ToS violation at present. Those are legally binding though, despite the common adage. What that really translates to here though, anyone's guess. Anthropic's own copyright infringement could apparently be forgiven for 1.5B USD after all, so maybe there's a price that breaking the distillation clause for is acceptable too. Or some other arrangement.
  - Bratmon 2mo ago
    But surely at least one of the websites Anthropic scraped to make Claude had a ToS forbidding automatic access? Why is Anthropic's ToS any more binding than that of a rabidly-anti-ai literature blog with 50 readers?
    - perching_aix 2mo ago
      Do feel free to read the court documents to find out and let us know. > Why is Anthropic's ToS any more binding than that of a rabidly-anti-ai literature blog with 50 readers? Although I will say, this whole comparison stuff really doesn't seem to be your thing; might impede your analysis quite a lot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49013148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49013148 Maybe ask Claude?
    - queenkjuul 2mo ago
      > Why is Anthropic's ToS any more binding than that of a rabidly-anti-ai literature blog with 50 readers? I mean i know you know the answer: anthropic is a corporation with lawyers on retainer, and that's really all that matters
trhway 2mo ago
>a level of creativity in model creation that isn't present in distillation. the same argument - a level of creativity in the world knowledge creation that ins't present in the model training on that knowledge. Or in other words - model creation and training is just a distilling of the world knowledge.
- joshuamorton 2mo ago
  I don't disagree. I'm not sure why that's a relevant reply though. If you think that the addition of a less creative process (model creation) to a more creative corpus ("art") is problematic, then it follows that you should think the addition of a less creative process (distillation) to a more creative corpus (a model) is also problematic.
  - trhway 2mo ago
    I think both are natural and fine. Otherwise we'd have to outlaw analytical thinking.

bluegatty 2mo ago

This is a misrepresentation though. The LLM output, is not the same as the input - there is value add. Of course works used as raw inputs to LLMs required work and are reasonably subject to IP concerns - but they are different. It's possible that the LLM makers 'owe' the content creators that created the content they used to make their products - it's an interesting but separate question. We could very well end up where content IP is protected, LLM output is not and visa versa with reasonable legal founding, doubtful but plausible.

jaggederest 2mo ago
> but they are different. How, and why? > We could very well end up where content IP is protected, LLM output is not and visa versa with reasonable legal founding, doubtful but plausible. That is the current state of legal rulings - LLM output is public domain, not copyrightable.
- bluegatty 2mo ago
  "> but they are different. How, and why?" How are they even remotely the same? They're not even used the same way. One is raw data input, the other is training content - designed to train LLMs. One is a set of IP derived for other purposes entirely, and has esablished IP law - how you can use someone else's creative work or not ... for LLM outputs, less clear.
- semiquaver 2mo ago
  This misstates the small number of legal opinions and orders on this topic, none of which form binding precedent outside the districts where the cases happened. So even if a court had found that “LLM output is public domain” (none did) that wouldn’t make it “the law” until it went up the appellate system and was upheld. Our current laws simply weren’t built for this and I expect the legal status of LLM output is not going to be resolved until Congress actually legislates on this topic.
blks 2mo ago
Lossly storing IP in LLM itself, and using IP for training (so it’s lossly stored in LLM), without licensing these works or otherwise following license agreements (eg GPL) is infringement. Using then this product for commercial activity is a smoking gun.

mapontosevenths 2mo ago

If turning other peoples copyrighted work into a model is transformative enough to be protected then so is distilling that model into a different, better, model.

foo12bar 2mo ago
The models were built using copyrighted works, so why can't models be built using other models?
- breppp 2mo ago
  Because model output is probably far closer to software or a licensed work which possibly has greater protections than it is to copyright. There is far less possibility of fair use, it might be protected by patents, license or reverse engineering laws. In any case the laws are being written now, but I doubt these will have worse protection than software does, which has far better protections than copyright
  - preg_match 2mo ago
    Why would this be the case. Why would software output from a model magically have greater protection than the software the model trained on.
  - vel0city 2mo ago
    Let's assume model output can be claimed by copyright or some form IP. You can't really patent it, as the output isn't a novel idea or process, much like you don't patent a book or a movie. But for arguments sake, let's agree it is some kind of IP. Who are you saying owns that IP? The people who trained the model? The people who ran the model? The people who wrote the prompt? The person who paid for all of that to happen? If the model output is owned by the person prompting it and paying for the tokens, what's the problem here? If the model output is owned by the trainer of the model, that's a big nasty can of worms.
  - giaour 2mo ago
    > I doubt these will have worse protection than software does, which has far better protections than copyright Software is protected by copyright. Some software may also be protected by patents, but last time I checked, AI generated output of any kind was not patentable.

perching_aix 2mo ago

No? They outright say the opposite! Like look, I'm not a native speaker, sure. But I think when someone says "value add", that means there was value there (which you claim they're rhetorically erasing), and then that was added to. Under no interpretation of this phrase do I get an erasure of prior value. So certainly, as long as words mean anything, no, they absolutely did not say or suggest what you claim they did, and what you extract a thus unreasonable amount of obnoxious schadenfreude from, while throwing in a cheap insult for funsies at the end. It's the second time I feel compelled to reach for this just today: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/659/979/108.png https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/659/979/108...

arbitrary_name 2mo ago

there is a major god complex here. MBAs and non technical managers = inept Catbert-type charlatans. Software engineers, devs, etc = geniuses capable of mastering any domain, innate ability to be right on any topic.