4 ms·

> it's only now the issues are coming into the commons in a way that industry / society needs the regulatory clarity. you mean like the regulatory clarity surr

> it's only now the issues are coming into the commons in a way that industry / society needs the regulatory clarity. you mean like the regulatory clarity surrounding stealing shit to make the LLMs in the first place? > [There is] extensive litigation on the limits of Fair Use to AI development. Currently, we only have 3 first instance decisions out of the 53 cases being tried. It will likely take a decade before we understand how Fair Use applies to any one step in AI training, let alone all. https://www.britishcopyright.org/wp-content/uploads/BCC-Fair-use-summary-final-2.pdf https://www.britishcopyright.org/wp-content/uploads/BCC-Fair... > The government should a) legislate and b) create test cases and run them through the courts so that we can have clarity. if so, it would be nice if they approached the instances of stealing shit chronologically. but that's just my view.

bluegatty 3mo ago
It's hilarious to see how all these HN intellectuals, who on any other day are rabidly against most DRM / IP issues all of a sudden become private property absolutists. It's also sadly hypocritical to see all this rhetoric here on this thread decrying SOTAs for using a variety of content for their inputs as somehow sTeaLINg sTufF! ... ... but Chinese SOTA foundries directly using distillation as fair game. I don't think there is any coherence to any of these arguments - other than 'we liking big companies'. That's the only common thread. What is more reasonable: - There's some grounds for fair use by SOTA models to ingest content, so long as they are not reproducing it ... very roughly speaking. - SOTA makers are producing novel works, there is value add in that process, again roughly speaking. - Distillation is a bit of a grey zone, producing random content as arbitrary input is one thing, but producing training sets is another. I think there's a coherent line in there somewhere, I'm not sure where it is.
- lovich 3mo ago
  > It's also sadly hypocritical to see all this rhetoric here on this thread decrying SOTAs for using a variety of content for their inputs as somehow sTeaLINg sTufF! ... > ... but Chinese SOTA foundries directly using distillation as fair game. As someone who says it’s fair game, it’s less that I’m being hypocritical and more that I don’t care that one thief had their shit stolen by a second thief. I also wouldn’t care if someone distills the Chinese models. It’s just thieves all around and if they want legal protection or moral outrage from the common man then my view is that they should stop stealing first.
  - wasfgwp 3mo ago
    Why are you calling the Chinese companies “thieves” though? LLM outputs are not copyrightable (or rather the user is effectively the only one who can own it). It would be problematic if Anthropic owned all the software generated using Claude..
    - lovich 3mo ago
      They are thieves the same way Anthropic or OpenAI are thieves. Either it’s fair use to learn from this data or not. If what Anthropic/OpenAi did for training is theft then the Chinese models also are a form of theft. If they didn’t steal then I don’t think the Chinese firms did either.
      - wasfgwp 3mo ago
        Following that logic anyone using an LLM trained on “stolen” data for any purpose whatsoever is engaging in theft. Assuming the Chinese companies are obtaining their traces legitimately (which is a different question) what they are engaging in is morally no different than what the overwhelming majority of people on this site are regularly doing.
- HarHarVeryFunny 3mo ago
  You're being too charitable to Anthropic, and assuming that the way they are abusing the word "distillation" has some real meaning here. It doesn't. Anthropic's models simply do not give you their reasoning output - they give a sanitized "summary" instead, for this exact reason, so that the output is not useful to anyone who might want to use it for training. You can't distill what you are not given - simple as that. Are Chinese using the output of US models to help create some additional training data for their own in some way? Yes - quite possibly (e.g. LLM as judge), but its got nothing to do with distillation.
  - bluegatty 3mo ago
    I see your 'fine point' but I don't think it holds - 'distillation' is a perfectly reasonable term to describe the process of creating outputs from one model to that expose key training element, to use in another model. I think where the definition may be be invalid, is in the creation of 'unrelated data sets for training' models, for unrelated issues. Creating training sets that mach a models core training, is definitely distillation, it does not have to expose the reasoning traces. Synthesizing data for some arbitrary thing ... I'm not sure that would be the same thing. It's hard to draw the line. But the Chinese models are absolutely distilling - and would not be competitive without this distillation. At the same time, there's a lot of real innovation and regular building going on at the same time over there.
    - HarHarVeryFunny 3mo ago
      No - you can't distill if what you are given doesn't have the thing in it that you want to distill out of it. I don't know why it's so important to you to use the word "distillation", but it's the wrong word to use. BTW OpenAI on twitter also said that Kimi 3 "cannot be explained away by distillation or anything like that". The timeline of how long it takes to train a model and when Fable was released don't even line up. This is just Anthropic as usual trying to manipulate the US government into helping them shut down competition.
      - bluegatty 3mo ago
- dijksterhuis 3mo ago
  > it's hilarious to see how all these HN intellectuals, who on any other day are rabidly against most DRM / IP issues all of a sudden become private property absolutists. for the record, i've always been rabidly pro-copyright since i worked at a performing royalty organization (prs for music) circa 15 years ago, way before i joined hn. i don't use llms for that reason. > It's also sadly hypocritical to see all this rhetoric here on this thread decrying SOTAs for using a variety of content for their inputs as somehow sTeaLINg sTufF! ... when i see a spade, i call it a spade. just because the US has utterly stupid copyright provisions that are wide open for abuse, i.e. fair use, doesn't mean abusing those provisions at scale is morally acceptable. > ... but Chinese SOTA foundries directly using distillation as fair game. two wrongs don't make a right, but the irony is at least something. > I don't think there is any coherence to any of these arguments - other than 'we liking big companies'. That's the only common thread. the corpos can get fucked as far as i'm concerned. > What is more reasonable: ... There's some grounds for fair use by SOTA models to ingest content, so long as they are not reproducing it ... very roughly speaking. *only in the US.
  - bluegatty 3mo ago
    I'm not attacking you, you don't have to defend yourself. I'm just nothing that HN rhetoric is contradictory. But this: "when i see a spade, i call it a spade." -> this is anti intellectual absolutism. If it were some true injustice, then fine, but that is clearly not the case. There is ample room to contemplate that even copyrighted works could be considers fair use as training material. "the corpos can get fucked as far as i'm concerned." Ok that's fine - but then don't expect anyone to respect your principles if you don't have any other than 'screw that group!'. I'm sympathetic to it (!!!) - but if we want to call a 'spade a spade' in a legitimate way, then we can do it in consistent and principled way.
    - throw10920 3mo ago
      > I'm just nothing that HN rhetoric is contradictory. Periodic reminder that HN is not a collective or a singular entity and is actually a bunch of different people with different opinions. Often the people with the loudest opinions get upvoted to the top - and often the "side" represented at the top is different from thread to thread.
- queenkjuul 3mo ago
  Like most things, i support rights for people, and not companies. Copyright was created for authors, artists, and inventors. Rules for corporations can and should be different.
  - blackqueeriroh 3mo ago
    Lolololololololol One person can a corporation be.
  - bluegatty 3mo ago
    This makes little sense, either from either a moral or pragmatic perspective. You do realize the 'investors' are the one's who 'own' companies and therefore the IP?
- 8note 3mo ago
  idk. i think its fair use when anthropic trains off of copyrighted works, and theres no property rights at all related to the model outputs there's no creative work between the weights and the tokens being made. whats the big deal if chinese companies sell an exact replica of the model? its a summary of a variety of works of text and images
- wasfgwp 3mo ago
  Do you think that Anthropic should own any outputs you generate with their models? If not there is not there is no grey zone whatsoever.
- m4rtink 3mo ago
  I think people just react to the hypocrisy of corporations stamping on people for "copyright violations" only for (often the same) corporations to blatantly obtain any data they can find, totally disregarding any licenses, scrappers overloading web sites or even privacy. And the result is force feeding an AI slop generator with a subscription while making personal hardware 3x+ times more expensive. No wonder people are fed up with this behavior.

bluegatty 3mo ago

It's hilarious to see how all these HN intellectuals, who on any other day are rabidly against most DRM / IP issues all of a sudden become private property absolutists. It's also sadly hypocritical to see all this rhetoric here on this thread decrying SOTAs for using a variety of content for their inputs as somehow sTeaLINg sTufF! ... ... but Chinese SOTA foundries directly using distillation as fair game. I don't think there is any coherence to any of these arguments - other than 'we liking big companies'. That's the only common thread. What is more reasonable: - There's some grounds for fair use by SOTA models to ingest content, so long as they are not reproducing it ... very roughly speaking. - SOTA makers are producing novel works, there is value add in that process, again roughly speaking. - Distillation is a bit of a grey zone, producing random content as arbitrary input is one thing, but producing training sets is another. I think there's a coherent line in there somewhere, I'm not sure where it is.

lovich 3mo ago
> It's also sadly hypocritical to see all this rhetoric here on this thread decrying SOTAs for using a variety of content for their inputs as somehow sTeaLINg sTufF! ... > ... but Chinese SOTA foundries directly using distillation as fair game. As someone who says it’s fair game, it’s less that I’m being hypocritical and more that I don’t care that one thief had their shit stolen by a second thief. I also wouldn’t care if someone distills the Chinese models. It’s just thieves all around and if they want legal protection or moral outrage from the common man then my view is that they should stop stealing first.
- wasfgwp 3mo ago
  Why are you calling the Chinese companies “thieves” though? LLM outputs are not copyrightable (or rather the user is effectively the only one who can own it). It would be problematic if Anthropic owned all the software generated using Claude..
  - lovich 3mo ago
    They are thieves the same way Anthropic or OpenAI are thieves. Either it’s fair use to learn from this data or not. If what Anthropic/OpenAi did for training is theft then the Chinese models also are a form of theft. If they didn’t steal then I don’t think the Chinese firms did either.
    - wasfgwp 3mo ago
      Following that logic anyone using an LLM trained on “stolen” data for any purpose whatsoever is engaging in theft. Assuming the Chinese companies are obtaining their traces legitimately (which is a different question) what they are engaging in is morally no different than what the overwhelming majority of people on this site are regularly doing.
HarHarVeryFunny 3mo ago
You're being too charitable to Anthropic, and assuming that the way they are abusing the word "distillation" has some real meaning here. It doesn't. Anthropic's models simply do not give you their reasoning output - they give a sanitized "summary" instead, for this exact reason, so that the output is not useful to anyone who might want to use it for training. You can't distill what you are not given - simple as that. Are Chinese using the output of US models to help create some additional training data for their own in some way? Yes - quite possibly (e.g. LLM as judge), but its got nothing to do with distillation.
- bluegatty 3mo ago
  I see your 'fine point' but I don't think it holds - 'distillation' is a perfectly reasonable term to describe the process of creating outputs from one model to that expose key training element, to use in another model. I think where the definition may be be invalid, is in the creation of 'unrelated data sets for training' models, for unrelated issues. Creating training sets that mach a models core training, is definitely distillation, it does not have to expose the reasoning traces. Synthesizing data for some arbitrary thing ... I'm not sure that would be the same thing. It's hard to draw the line. But the Chinese models are absolutely distilling - and would not be competitive without this distillation. At the same time, there's a lot of real innovation and regular building going on at the same time over there.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 3mo ago
    No - you can't distill if what you are given doesn't have the thing in it that you want to distill out of it. I don't know why it's so important to you to use the word "distillation", but it's the wrong word to use. BTW OpenAI on twitter also said that Kimi 3 "cannot be explained away by distillation or anything like that". The timeline of how long it takes to train a model and when Fable was released don't even line up. This is just Anthropic as usual trying to manipulate the US government into helping them shut down competition.
    - bluegatty 3mo ago
dijksterhuis 3mo ago
> it's hilarious to see how all these HN intellectuals, who on any other day are rabidly against most DRM / IP issues all of a sudden become private property absolutists. for the record, i've always been rabidly pro-copyright since i worked at a performing royalty organization (prs for music) circa 15 years ago, way before i joined hn. i don't use llms for that reason. > It's also sadly hypocritical to see all this rhetoric here on this thread decrying SOTAs for using a variety of content for their inputs as somehow sTeaLINg sTufF! ... when i see a spade, i call it a spade. just because the US has utterly stupid copyright provisions that are wide open for abuse, i.e. fair use, doesn't mean abusing those provisions at scale is morally acceptable. > ... but Chinese SOTA foundries directly using distillation as fair game. two wrongs don't make a right, but the irony is at least something. > I don't think there is any coherence to any of these arguments - other than 'we liking big companies'. That's the only common thread. the corpos can get fucked as far as i'm concerned. > What is more reasonable: ... There's some grounds for fair use by SOTA models to ingest content, so long as they are not reproducing it ... very roughly speaking. *only in the US.
- bluegatty 3mo ago
  I'm not attacking you, you don't have to defend yourself. I'm just nothing that HN rhetoric is contradictory. But this: "when i see a spade, i call it a spade." -> this is anti intellectual absolutism. If it were some true injustice, then fine, but that is clearly not the case. There is ample room to contemplate that even copyrighted works could be considers fair use as training material. "the corpos can get fucked as far as i'm concerned." Ok that's fine - but then don't expect anyone to respect your principles if you don't have any other than 'screw that group!'. I'm sympathetic to it (!!!) - but if we want to call a 'spade a spade' in a legitimate way, then we can do it in consistent and principled way.
  - throw10920 3mo ago
    > I'm just nothing that HN rhetoric is contradictory. Periodic reminder that HN is not a collective or a singular entity and is actually a bunch of different people with different opinions. Often the people with the loudest opinions get upvoted to the top - and often the "side" represented at the top is different from thread to thread.
queenkjuul 3mo ago
Like most things, i support rights for people, and not companies. Copyright was created for authors, artists, and inventors. Rules for corporations can and should be different.
- blackqueeriroh 3mo ago
  Lolololololololol One person can a corporation be.
- bluegatty 3mo ago
  This makes little sense, either from either a moral or pragmatic perspective. You do realize the 'investors' are the one's who 'own' companies and therefore the IP?
8note 3mo ago
idk. i think its fair use when anthropic trains off of copyrighted works, and theres no property rights at all related to the model outputs there's no creative work between the weights and the tokens being made. whats the big deal if chinese companies sell an exact replica of the model? its a summary of a variety of works of text and images
wasfgwp 3mo ago
Do you think that Anthropic should own any outputs you generate with their models? If not there is not there is no grey zone whatsoever.
m4rtink 3mo ago
I think people just react to the hypocrisy of corporations stamping on people for "copyright violations" only for (often the same) corporations to blatantly obtain any data they can find, totally disregarding any licenses, scrappers overloading web sites or even privacy. And the result is force feeding an AI slop generator with a subscription while making personal hardware 3x+ times more expensive. No wonder people are fed up with this behavior.