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I think they are doing us a disservice by perpetuating this focus on intellectual "property" [1] in regard to AI. The real issue with Anthropic, OpenAI etc. is

I think they are doing us a disservice by perpetuating this focus on intellectual "property" [1] in regard to AI. The real issue with Anthropic, OpenAI etc. is not that they have used all of our public knowledge for training their LLMs. Creating new work from old and learning from prior generations is what we all do. The issue is that they want to claim all of the benefits for themselves. They are standing on the shoulders of giants and have contributed an inch themselves, yet want to privatize the power of the whole giant. We shouldn't let them "own" these models. The influence on society by AI is so novel that it's reasonable to craft new laws specifically for them. There are a lot of ways to deal with their power grab. We could force them to open source the models after two years. Or we could tax tokens or compute. We just need to agree that the power grab is the problem, the privatization of our cumulative knowledge, and not some details about copyright infringement. [1] I know I'm going to risk dissent just by putting quotation marks here. But I think for this topic specifically it is crucial to understand that intellectual property is an arbitrary social/legal construct. With physical stuff, there is an inherent scarcity. If you steal my smartphone, I no longer have it. If you steal the character from my book, I... have a harder time selling my next book? Our ancestors have invented copyright to solve a specific problem, but the solution has become perverted over time. There are a lot of egregious cases out there (looking at you, Disney), but even relatively tame success cases don't look good. Society has paid J.K. Rowling a literal billion for her work and still this cultural touchstone of a generation remains privatized. Imagine what other authors could have build upon her stories, if only they were allowed to publish their own stories with these characters. She has not been a particularly good steward in the past decades.

breezybottom 2mo ago
That is the issue, you just rephrased it to sound softer (public knowledge isn't a legal term). Fair use law isn't supposed to apply to commercial activity. So it is absolutely about using copyrighted work for LLM training.
- Perseids 2mo ago
  The thing is, I explicitly wanted to not focus on current legality, because I believe this is leading us astray. This is about how we want to shape our society, not about how their actions fit into a legal system that wasn't designed to handle AI training. If, by chance, all of this was legal, the same arguments would still apply. For example, see how Adobe is training their image generating AI on licensed work. The result -- privatized intelligence -- is the same as when illegitimate training data would have been used. Or, say, an AI company makes a deal with all the publishers to license their books for training. Or a court decides that training AI with MIT licensed code is totally fine. Or an AI company pays legions of software developers to train their AI. All of this still ends in a power grab. All of this still privatizes knowledge and skills accumulated over centuries, if not millennia.
- gruez 2mo ago
  >Fair use law isn't supposed to apply to commercial activity. No, otherwise there would be a straightforward "non-commercial" clause. Instead there's a 4 part test, which takes usage (commercial or not) into account, but doesn't hinge solely on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
  - breezybottom 2mo ago
    Spirit vs letter
    - gruez 2mo ago
      The law says: >... In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include: >1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; >... If they really meant "non-commercial use only", they sure did spend a lot of words to not say that.

breezybottom 2mo ago

That is the issue, you just rephrased it to sound softer (public knowledge isn't a legal term). Fair use law isn't supposed to apply to commercial activity. So it is absolutely about using copyrighted work for LLM training.

Perseids 2mo ago
The thing is, I explicitly wanted to not focus on current legality, because I believe this is leading us astray. This is about how we want to shape our society, not about how their actions fit into a legal system that wasn't designed to handle AI training. If, by chance, all of this was legal, the same arguments would still apply. For example, see how Adobe is training their image generating AI on licensed work. The result -- privatized intelligence -- is the same as when illegitimate training data would have been used. Or, say, an AI company makes a deal with all the publishers to license their books for training. Or a court decides that training AI with MIT licensed code is totally fine. Or an AI company pays legions of software developers to train their AI. All of this still ends in a power grab. All of this still privatizes knowledge and skills accumulated over centuries, if not millennia.
gruez 2mo ago
>Fair use law isn't supposed to apply to commercial activity. No, otherwise there would be a straightforward "non-commercial" clause. Instead there's a 4 part test, which takes usage (commercial or not) into account, but doesn't hinge solely on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
- breezybottom 2mo ago
  Spirit vs letter
  - gruez 2mo ago
    The law says: >... In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include: >1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; >... If they really meant "non-commercial use only", they sure did spend a lot of words to not say that.