It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up. Crimes this large are crimes against humanity. So many people whose life's work got appropriated without consideration, compensation or consent it is baffling.
It is said that at the heart of every great fortune there is a great crime, so it should be no surprise that the most valuable companies on the planet will most likely result from this crime. And given that justice can be bought by those with the most money you can forget about anything coming of this.
Our "culture" has long been the province of corporations. In prior epochs it was still the product of patronage and power.
At least with LLMs we can glimpse an escape route to that which generations of humans have strived for - a world in which the labor required of each human to lead a flourishing life approaches zero.
Instead of fixating on a remedy that seeks to criminalize AI, maybe focus on the relatively rather achievable goal of redistributing LLM gains. Would that not be the most desirable justice? What is your alternative, and would you foreclose the future in the name of a past that never really existed in the first place?
> At least with LLMs we can glimpse an escape route to that which generations of humans have strived for - a world in which the labor required of each human to lead a flourishing life approaches zero.
Let me fix that for you: A world in the the value of the labor of each human approaches zero.
Humans with zero economic value can still vote. They can still mass. They will still have needs. Really the script here writes itself. The historical precedents bound the problem rather well. As always, radical social change will not occur until a wide swath of the population is aligned. In this case, due to their broad economic devaluation.
It would be easier if today's knowledge workers stopped deluding themselves into thinking that their standards of living will maintain. Your acknowledgement of the necessary predicate to change is, in that respect, progress in itself. There is little reason why we cannot accelerate the timing of broad consensus if more people so readily came to that conclusion - and resisted the temptation to then find the answer instead in nostalgia about the past.
Flourishing life? Where is your data leading to the conclusion that AI models are leading to the world populace leading a ‘flourishing life’? Are taxes on revenue of companies like OpenAI somehow being collected and turned into a UBI and I just didn’t hear about it?
I said a glimpse. I didn't say it's here now or it would be easy.
It is however, achievable. Certainly more so than engaging in the fantasy that we can criminalize LLMs out of existence. And it is likely more desirable than such an effort anyway.
Or, perhaps, the companies forming the for profit LLMs could be made to pay a license fee for the copyrighted data they lifted from behind the paywall and then used to form a for profit entity with.
Nothing about banning technology. How about enforcing DMCA and then applying a penalty for the knowing theft rather than negotiating a license?
This is solid but how many people you reckon would benefit if they paid every single penny for any copyrighted data? I am in my 50's with 30 years in the industry and I know maybe 2 people that might benefit from this... certainly not something general public would benefit from
We’re likely looking at a new world where physical and mental work from humans holds much less value.
So if the world still generates value ( think AI inventing new drugs, robots planting and harvesting fields of corn ), who is able to make income? The people who have the capital to purchase and run the systems.
So our future world probably looks like a system where effort has little to no reward and capital (e.g. inheritance, passive income) has all the reward.
So, we can have a world where you are born rich or you live in abject poverty, or we can figure out something else.
In the 50's there were predictions that in 10 years no-one will have to work again because of the advances made in automation, like the washing machine for example. Any predictions of less work this time around are a complete joke.
> a world in which the labor required of each human to lead a flourishing life approaches zero.
The AI bubble is pricing AI stocks so high that the only possible way for them to meet investors expectations is for AI to charge so much that every human & corporation has no money left.
Considering that we don't seem able to appropriately tax the biggest corporations, why do you think we'll suddenly be able to redistribute LLM gains?
Far more likely is that wealth and power will become even more concentrated into the hands of the few and the rest of humanity will become effective slaves.
These doomsday theories sound solid in practice but in order for someone to accumulate a lot of wealth there have to be consumers to chip into this. If we are all slaves, where is that wealth going to come from?!
US has been procrastinating reparations for slavery. LLM redistribution can't happen until the capitalism machines recursively solve "sins of our fathers".
>It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up
Would regulation help with that? Right now you can download free models that have been trained on that "stolen" data.
With regulation and compensation, only rich companies would be able to do that, and they would definitely not give it back for free.
I put "stolen" in quotation marks because it's still unclear if we can call that stealing. Nobody would say a human reading a book and learning from it is stealing. I'm not saying that a machine doing the same is equivalent, but the only thing I am sure of is that I am not sure we can call it "stealing".
We don’t have to treat people reading books and companies stealing all human knowledge the same.
Also, companies spent a long time telling us downloading single songs via Napster was the worst thing ever, before torrenting every book in existence themselves. I don’t believe any of these companies have paid for all the books they have trained on.
>companies spent a long time telling us downloading single songs via Napster was the worst thing ever, before torrenting every book in existence themselves
No, but why should we accept they get away with it? Also Microsoft has definitely sued people for pirating windows and now collaborates with OpenAI and uses their ai trained on stolen materials.
Well, it's kinda converging, because Napster and Microsoft have teamed up to build a multimodal interactive video agent through a simple proxy API (this is a direct quote from Napster's blog post)
Morally speaking, one of the issues of modern society is the idea that knowledge should be free which was partially started by the file sharing movement, which didn't really move society in the right direction imo.
Free means the same as worthless, which inherently isn't true - since information takes time to consume in some form, and your time isn't worthless. Therefore even if you could listen to all songs theoretically for free, you would need to spend an inordinate time doing that.
When I was a kid, getting a CD from your favourite band was a major expense, getting a video game even more so. But it formed a sort of emotional attachment (and not even just for me), my friends talked about how 'band X''s new album was amazing or a stinker. Since there were multiple bands making similar kinds of music, choosing to be a fan of one but not the other carried real monetary weight.
Nowadays you just fish out a song you think you would like out of the endless sea of Spotify, no different from prompting an LLM. No, Spotify didn't make me enjoy music more.
Same applies for Steam & videogames.
Therefore I think the ritualistic act of paying money to get access to something does have a purpose. It inherently establishes the value of information to you, makes it an investment that you need to recoup by using it. I'm sure most musicians would trade a million fans who might check them out if they're in town, to ones who think their music changed their perspective in life.
Also the process of creating a song that vaguely appeals to millions is different from making one that speaks to a thousand.
This is a fundamental issue of modern capitalistic society, similar to the Marxist idea of 'alienation' - once something is cheap to get, you don't appreciate the effort that went into making it. And if your customers don't care about the thing they get, producers won't make an effor to make it good either.
And once nobody cares, people even forget what a quality product is like.
Interesting argument. At first sight it looks like an argument for scarcity, but I think it's more an argument for relationship - the value of art isn't in the capitalist concept of 'a for-profit content object in a corporate inventory' but in the social relationships and shared experiences it creates.
Without that, everything gets atomised into lonely individualism. You sit there with your headphones on listening to [Interesting band]. Not only do you not really care because you don't feel personally connected to the music - it's one of literally more than a hundred million content items on Spotify - but you're not sharing the experience.
This seems like the loss of a valuable thing which capitalist economics can't put a price on because it has no concept of value-created-by-shared-experience.
Superficially it's the same as 'sell-content-consumption-item-to-the-mass-market' but it's fundamentally not the same kind of thing.
The value is relationally both fleeting and persistent in ways that content consumption experiences - including live and recorded media of all kinds - aren't.
> Nowadays you just fish out a song ... Spotify didn't make me enjoy music more.
Maybe change your perspective? Treat Spotify like a valuable audio lexicon. You read about an artist, a song, a time and immediately you can hear what is it about. Incredible!
If Spotify is only treated as a lazy background feelgood provider (while reading Marx;)), no wonder you feel that way. But it's your power/choice to appreciate it (or not), regardless of money.
> companies spent a long time telling us downloading single songs via Napster was the worst thing ever
One's world cannot be so drawn in crayon that "companies" is a useful level of detail with something like that. There's no irony in two totally different companies (one of which was actually an industry body, the RIAA) doing two totally different things.
Does ones world view get upgraded to oil paint if one acknowledges that it's the same class of people - and in many cases literally the same people, PE firms and family offices - profiting from 2000s era record industry profits and on the hook for / in line to profit from Open AI, Anthropic and the rest if they IPO?
> I don’t believe any of these companies have paid for all the books they have trained on.
Did you miss the "book burning" hysteria from a couple weeks ago? These companies have been trying to digitize copyrighted materials legally, in which copyright law demands destruction of the original, and people shit on them even harder.
It's clearly not a problem for these companies to buy the books they need for training, and they have been doing that in crazy high volumes. Lots of good training materials simply cannot be legally purchased though, and should those parts of human knowledge just be ignored?
> We don’t have to treat people reading books and companies stealing all human knowledge the same.
We don't. People engaging in piracy have their lives ruined, companies engaging in piracy pay a tiny fraction of their revenues out to authors who can't legally outgun them.
(Sorry, I just wanted to air the juxtaposition as clearly as possible, I sense we are actually in agreement)
> Also, companies spent a long time telling us downloading single songs via Napster was the worst thing ever, before torrenting every book in existence themselves.
So whose viewpoint is right here? Is downloading theft or not? These arguments always boil down to "it's fine when I do it, but wrong when a company does."
> These arguments always boil down to "it's fine when I do it, but wrong when a company does."
The problem is that it is enforced exactly the opposite. People have been hit with fines and jail time for pirating and seeding, without even doing so for commercial gain. But when massive tech companies pirate training data for their AI and build a product from that that, nobody goes to jail. Where is the sense in that?
> Nobody would say a human reading a book and learning from it is stealing. I'm not saying that a machine doing the same is equivalent, but the only think I am sure of is that I am not sure we can call it "stealing".
It is stealing. A human paid for the book, compensated the author and learnt from it. The machine DID NOT pay for the book, DID NOT compensate the author and still learnt from it anyways.
We need to define machine in terms of "human-power"... much the same as how we already define automobiles via "horse-power". A single NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 chip, for example, delivers roughly 35.58 teraflops of standard computing power (via 10,496 CUDA cores). That means 35.58 trillion calculations every second. In comparison, a mathematically trained human being, taking their time to solve a complex, multi-digit decimal division problem by hand takes roughly 100 to 120 seconds. That gives the human 0.01 flops. To match RTX 3090, you would need 3.56 quadrillion people working/learning in perfect sync. We can use a calculation similar to this to derive metrics on how much is being stolen for "learning/training" these models. The loot can be quantified.
EDIT: The reason I am comparing chip computation to human-power is because the authors of those digital works intended their works to only be read by humans. Not by some alien species (even if it be made of silicon) that incorporated their work into producing models.
So naturally the price should be determined based on this new species capabilities. I would not sell my software license for the same price to an Enterprise the size of Google that I would sell to a fellow developer. I price my product appropriately. With this entry of a new alien specie authors would need to have different tiers for them. Since these chips can train on petabytes of data and create models in a matter of days/weeks/months, it is obviously not comparable to a human being who has the capacity to ingest maybe 1-5 books a month at most. So the payout has to be different too.
The multiplication comparison makes no sense because humans don’t learn by multiplying numbers to change weights. It’s like comparing the lubrication oil consumption of a car to the cooking oil consumption of a human to compare the carrying capacity. That’s an implementation detail inside the GPU and doesn’t let you compare how much they learn. Otherwise, a human would learn much less in their whole life than a GPU does in one second.
> Would regulation help with that? Right now you can download free models that have been trained on that "stolen" data
We do have regulation against these issues. Companies spent years railing against piracy and IP theft enshrining it into law but now that it's being done by them en masse it's considered acceptable. The reality is that no regulation would help because we don't have regulators willing to enforce it nor do we have a legal system designed to help individuals against mass theft by corporations.
Well theres at least two different buckets of this.
First is the scraping of the open internet.
The second is the paywall bypassing, YouTube audio recording, and pirated content training that the labs have basically admitted to in one form or another.
Content from both gets served back to us, in exchange for watching ads/paying a subscription/paying tokens.
The second is more immediately hypocritical because they are license/copyright/DMCA violations that the little guy could get sued for while the labs get $2T valuations for. The automation of crime at scale, which is a common VC pattern.
> With regulation and compensation, only rich companies would be able to do that
Well, with some imagination, you can have regulation that forces companies to open up, not just close down.
Imagine a law that stipulates that if you want to offer "LLM-inference-as-a-service", you need to also publish exact details about how it was trained, what datasets were used and also offer those exact weights for download.
Sure, this would never happen, but just offering another perspective on how laws and regulation can be used if it was wanted, locking stuff down and pulling up the ladder behind you isn't the only way to use laws, although that is a very popular reason and approach.
Culture robbery is not limited to AI. Any big concert for example is capitalismed to hell. So are neighborhoods. Where you used to have people just living, now you have an intentionally designed facade for people to live within. There was a comment on the 40C3 thread saying it's got too capitalist because of the ticket cost, and idk about that because it's always been hosted in commercial venues to my knowledge, but the vibe of the conference and the club itself are much less rebel than they used to be. Stuff like Burning Man now exists for people like Elon to go there and say "I was at Burning Man" and for people to get T-shirts saying "I was at Burning Man" and photos of themselves being at Burning Man more than for whatever the first few ones were about.
> and they would definitely not give it back for free.
...not like they are doing it for free now either.
open-weight is an economic war strategy of trying to undermine your competitors and prevent it from rising prices, thus preventing profit, driving them out of business.
> I put "stolen" in quotation marks because it's still unclear if we can call that stealing
It never was stealing: you can't steal a book by copying it. You can however commit copyright infringement.
This blatant disregard of licenses and copyright is clearly infringing on the authors ability to make a profit from their work, which was the whole point of copyright.
They knew it too, which is why they said nothing about the pirating and infringing until they got too big to fail.
So now we are left discussing and wasting time on what technically counts as infringing, pirating, stealing and whatnot.
All the while the small authors who can't possibly lawyer up against the literal biggest corporations on earth will just have to shut up.
Yet, somehow they had deals with Disney and other big names, proving that they did actually feel they need approval.
Their actions are two-faced, thus proving malice. Now we can go back to pointless technicalities.
There are no viable free versions with sufficient computing power. The do-it-yourself AI is dangled as a carrot in front of users to camouflage the lock-in and rent seeking by Big AI. Go prove something new like Navier Stokes (replicating N-S itself no longer counts due to scraping and plagiarism) on your Mac Pro!
Paid influencers who perpetuate the open narrative are a whole new industry.
Even if there were open models, it is still IP theft and would not be "democratization" but "forced unpaid nationalization".
Wiki already democratized it just fine and was legitimately free for people who know how to read.
It's asinine that you think the sell it back to us argument falls short.
Not only does it distill our history to try to sound like some average version of us, it sounds like the blandest versions of us... And then sells this back to us.
From a coding standpoint, the tech is good and gets the job done. The pillaging of all other aspects of human history is just sad. With the only solace I'm seeing is that future training has to train on the dogshit versions of the internet that are now infected with LLM content.
> Making it accessible, understandable, and usable is another matter.
I see no evidence that this is what the use of LLMs is accomplishing for most users. Rather, they see to get distilled answers without the depth required to fully understand the response. Partially because that's what they like, and that's what the LLMs serve. Deeper understanding is not being given by LLMs. Instead, it's the SEMBLANCE of depth and laypeople don't know the difference. It's effectively eroding comprehension for some cool knowledge dopamine hit.
Awesome, can I make my own competitive LLM, just like I can make my own open source software?
> and in some time useful models will ship preinstalled on all mobile phones.
Considering hardware prices, that "some time" is doing super heavy lifting. It could be 10-15+ years before that happens and the local LLM is actually useful. Most people don't see hardware prices declining from current prices until at least 2030, likely much longer.
No. I also cannot make a competitive computer, yet can use one for my work to remain competitive.
Yes, it could take some time to arrive on phones. It is questionable if it will ever make sense compared to using a paid hosted provider.
But what are 10 years in the grand scheme of things?
Should we have scrapped it all, called it a crime against humanity, and never developed AI, because it will take a decade to disseminate the benefits to everyone?
> Should we have scrapped it all, called it a crime against humanity, and never developed AI, because it will take a decade to disseminate the benefits to everyone?
Nah, we should have:
1. invested less, in a more targeted way
2. ideally like ARPANET, with the benefits given to all humanity
3. with fair royalties paid to all (where relevant)
4. and by creating an ever growing shared curated and high quality data set that would allow anyone to create their own competitive LLM
ARPANET & co were all taxpayer funded and the internet has created more wealth than most human inventions. The base should be part of the commons, everyone should knock themselves out by building on top.
> and never developed AI, because it will take a decade to disseminate the benefits to everyone?
Yes, probably. The benefits of dissemination already existed. The internet was free. Libraries are free. You deny people basic reading and comprehension growth by giving a distilled, without thought, answer.
You say "some time in the future this might be available on our phones for free" and "what's 10 years in the grand scheme of things?"
We'll, I'll argue that in 10 years from now we may see the full damage of what doing this has done to us and I'd rather not wait for "the what's 10 years in the grand scheme of things" to playout and irreversibly damage an entire generation the way we let the unmitigated and unregulated rollout of social media do the same to the most recent generation.
The risk/reward of this technology is unproven regarding the long-term effects on developing minds. We are beta testing the bullshit dreams of a couple billionaire techbros on an entire cohort of kids and young adults.
Every time you're writing software or building machines/factories (which is automating things), you are committing a crime. Every time you learn from your superiors or colleagues, get better than them, get promotion or they get fired, you are committing a crime. Provide justice there first.
Suddenly, mega corporations were allowed to digest(sometimes by illegally pirating “data”, and sometimes by achieving their training corpus and subsequently destroying the copies) and digest this information in a novel way, without any discussion or law making.
You may argue it’s beneficial (it very well could be, I use ChatGPT and Claude all the time), but let’s not pretend it’s the same as learning from your history teacher…
Social conventions are regressive and are followed blindly by luddites. Real progress comes from doing what is right and breaking idiotic conventions.
Pirating is fine.
Subsequently destroying is bad but it is the result of screeching from people lacking foresight who support the idea of training LLM on book copies is wrong. So now corps found "legal" way to do it by destroying it. Again, idiotic social conventions.
Without discussing? Law making? What are you, German? There's a reason EU is shit while USA is center of the progress of the world: laws follow innovation; not the other way around.
The average human doesn't do much on his own, and definitely doesn't uproot society or risk siphoning/leeching wealth from every person on this planet.
Yes, the whole IT sector is built on it. Robbing jobs, money, power, opportunities from billions of people and delegating them in to shitty jobs.
Average human on his own...why draw the line there? It doesn't matter much what one human does...but what many/collective/society do and society has been "ripping off", "uprooting", "leeching (read: creating)" wealth since dawn of time. It is called PROGRESS.
There is no such thing as PROGRESS for progress' sake.
And FYI, agriculture is a wonderful invention.
Yet for about 5000 years after its introduction the average human had worse nutrition than the average hunter gatherer, which led to such things as height decreases for those 5000 years.
Industrial agriculture is another wonderful invention. Yet 150 years later we're not sure it's sustainable and it's likely many of its aspects aren't, which will raise some sticky issues soon ("which billion people do we decide to let starve since we can't make enough food for everyone after most of our soil eroded?"). Repeat this for industrial textile production, mining, etc.
I won't even go into climate change.
And again, scale matters. Most individuals can only control what they do, and what they do generally doesn't impact much. But companies can impact a whole lot.
Let's not be 100% cynical here. A lot of what humanity has achieved has been genuine wealth creation and distribution/re-distribution. I would say more wealth has been created than leeched off.
* * *
And before you think I'm some starry eyed teen, I'll play the game. At the end of the day, me and mine have to outrun you in the face of PROGRESS.
At the very least we should foribly confiscate the models & make them available free-for-all as open-weights downloads. Failing that, bring back the guillotine.
There are no open-source LLMs. There are only downloadable LLMs, with no source for the model being provided. The source for the training and inference programs is not the source for the model itself, which would be the training set, training program, and random seeds.
Yes? I own a lot of books that were public domain when published (as reprints). I could read them on Gutenberg, but I'm paying for the nice paper formatting.
Owning ideas with copyright and patents is what separates the United States from communism.
The first time a saw a documentary about Tetris it really hit me what communism is -- nobody owned anything they invented or created. [0] It was a long time ago and I remember feeling sad watching the story. In the Soviet Union, a group of ~15 people, Politburo, controlled everything including any thought written to paper.
It is this one line, Article 1 Section 8 Clause 8, that separates the United States from the disaster that was the Soviet Union:
> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
I don't think it is far fetched to call ignoring and disregarding the Copyright Clause a communist revolution, violent or not. That is the one thing the communists -- there have been many over the years inside the United States -- would change to make the United States a communist country.
In the Soviet Union the state owned all media (de facto) and you had to get permission from a party official before you published or copied anything. It's not the same thing as a free for all.
It's actually the first sentence from your quote. One state owned company had a monopoly on software exports. Soviet citizens were not allowed to write code and export it themselves, or import software from Western countries. They had heavy censorship and centralized control over everything.
In a way it's the ultimate endpoint of copyright. One {person, state, company} owns everything and you have to ask them for permission to do anything with it.
In a communist society there is no profit (or incentive for), thus no need for copyright laws.
It's not abolishing copyrights that would turn the US into a commie country, communism is about abolishing private ownership to the means of production.
In the United State, the individual or corporation owns the invention. In the Soviet Union the state automatically owned the invention. That clause is what ensures private ownership.
The clause is what ensures profits from market sales or licensing of ideas go to the creator.
Removing (or ignoring in the case of AI companies) that clause in the US Constitution is what abolishes private ownership.
Well it's worth reading the linked wiki article section, which includes a link to another article "Copyright law of the Soviet Union", flatly contradicting you unless you maintain that the USSR wasn't truly communist.
Try doing something about the actual evil shit like arms manufacturers and the politicians ordering the deaths and misery of millions from the comfort of their couch.
At this point in our civilization, all human knowledge NEEDS to be collated in one place and easily queryable. Otherwise it's just too damn difficult to make any further progress at the edge of our understanding; there's just too much shit for one person to learn "manually" (wait I'm not advocating for low-effort slop, chill)
It's helping common folk who wanted to do something but didn't know where to start, while legacy search engines increasingly lead to spam, shallow knowledge or outright predatory shit.
Example:
Not long ago I had the misfortune of becoming interested in some WarHammer 40K lore. Most of the links led to Fandom (the enshittification of Wikia) and that place is a cesspool of obnoxious ads.
That content was written by unpaid volunteers. Should Fandom keep profiting from their work for perpetuity? Should I not be able to get the gist of what the heck a Qoiazrjirnowerx@# is without wasting my mortal lifespan on a horrible website?
Or, if I need to ask something peculiar, should I post on Reddit or StackOverflow or HN and wait for someone to see it and deem to give a sufficient answer, only to have a pricky mod decide that the question doesn't "fit" the community?
God hell no, if you don't know how much bullshit AI could eliminate for the silent majority then you were probably part of that bullshit.
(that's a general "you" for whomever was fine with the status quo and not a personal insult @ anybody)
>It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up. Crimes this large are crimes against humanity. So many people whose life's work got appropriated without consideration, compensation or consent it is baffling.
This is such a brain-dead take. By that logic there could never be any kind of AI, because unlike a human it'd be completely forbidden from learning from the sources of knowledge from which humans learn. It's stupid to suggest silicon brains should not legally be able to read copyrighted material just because you hate bigcos and capitalism.
Learning isn't stealing, regardless of whether it's done by a human or a machine. By your logic someone reading and memorizing all somebody's life work is appropriation; completely inane.
Has it affected DD as deeply as it as affected software engineering? Guessing clients feel a lot more "empowered" or "independent" and knowledgeable these days? I liked doing DD, just as much as I enjoyed developing, but it must be dying a slow death too. What's changed in how DD reports are produced?
Nit: Please don’t use obscure acronyms when writing things to an international audience without defining them first… DD can mean so many different things
It’s not “theft of labor”; the work was already done. If anything it is theft of “intellectual property” (aka “copyright infringement”), if you believe that is a thing, but not of the “labor” that went into it.
My personal take: anyone producing content, everyone’s creativity, is fed by something that others did before. We’re all standing on the shoulders of giants composed of previous generations and their “content’s” distribution and dissemination. I have an immense gratitude for all the labor before me that I was and am allowed to partake; without that, I would be nothing. Sharing information is an act of love; gatekeeping it is short-sighted greed. New technologies have always “killed” previous “labor”, out of which new opportunity grows. I just wished the collected data was public. I hope we all get a mega-leak at some point.
Information wants to be free“.
It’s not “theft of labor”; the work was already done. If anything it is theft of “intellectual property” (aka “copyright infringement”), if you believe that is a thing, but not of the “labor” that went into it.
My personal take: anyone producing content, everyone’s creativity, is fed by something that others did before. We’re all standing on the shoulders of giants composed of previous generations and their “content’s” distribution and dissemination. I have an immense gratitude for all the labor before me that I was and am allowed to partake; without that, I would be nothing. Sharing information is an act of love; gatekeeping it is short-sighted greed. New technologies have always “killed” previous “labor”, out of which new opportunity grows. I just wished the collected data was public. I hope we all get a mega-leak at some point.
That's the entire contention here. It's a double standard. Companies will sue the living hell out of anyone taking their IP, whether it's code or art, yet they have no qualms taking all the data they need from anyone and everyone. It was already a problem before, i.e. artists getting paid very little for work that companies profit a lot from like musicians or digital artists, but now with AI it's on steroids.
I sort of agree, and i think strengtening IP Law is probably not great. But I do think it's very fucked that building generative ai is only possible by taking the works of countless artists and craftspeople and then the model produced from that data immediately gets deployed to destroy the careers of the people whose, work was vital to it being created, without compensation for them, while making a few evil nerds richer than god. I think if you work at one of these labs you owe an enormous debt to society and your earnings should be redistributed among it.
I wouldn't have a problem with working off the fruits of other people's labor because most of us are essentially doing that everyday anyway, the issue is that big tech companies (want to) reap all the benefit and create profit from something that should be accessible to everyone. Everything is getting privatized -- housing, water, electricity, and now, thinking and knowledge. We are heading towards a world where you have to pay even more excessive fees just for existing and for completing any basic task.
In a way their future labor was? If i recorded you 24/7, then went to your employer and told them I had masterfully trained a chimpanzee to perform your jpb, and it was good enough your employer considered getting rid of you. Would you consider me recording/copying whart you did theft in some way?
I work in infosec and I would give up everything I own and die happy if infosec became a solved problem and the profession died forever.
It's hard for me to imagine a profession that should exist in a utopian society. People should just be able to explore and build cool shit. People should have instant access to food when they're hungry and housing when the weather gets bad, and we could live in a society that does all that without having rent extraction baked into everything.
Do we normally consider recorded music to be theft from musicians who would have been paid to play music live if we never allowed (or invented) recorded music?
Normally this isn't the case for any technology except for the time it first comes around. AI is only different to use for two reasons. First, it is in our time. Second, it seems to be faster than any of the options before, so the shock is harder.
But in general, this is a website of people writing code. How many on here study how a person solves a problem and then trains the ultimate chimpanzee to do (at least part of) their job? Is building computer programs that automate what others did manually theft?
Consider the origin of the word "computer" itself, a mass theft of jobs that would have employed the whole world many many times over.
Slavery is a weird one. It has been there for longer than any written history exists. In ancient times (Greece, Rome), slaves didn't have rights at all. A horrific injustice but it'd be not be a theft. Then you get the serfdom in the middle ages. Up to recent times humans have been brutally exploited.
The copy part was a recognized right, then taken away.
> If someone asked what is 'the largest theft of labor in human history' I would have thought slavery.
Then I take it you're interested in factual information as to whom the biggest slavers were, which country was the last to abolish slavery (an african one, in the 1980s) and in which countries, today, there are still people selling slaves.
No actually it's when someone copies that blog post you did about react.js and puts it into a dataset, I'm not sure how they sleep with themselves the absolute monsters
How much do the current LLMs invent solutions for user tasks, how much they just copy and adopt existing open-source solutions from from Github and other code repositories?
This not a problem for open-source code under permissive software license, but works derived from open-source code with copyleft software license should be also under copyleft license.
Could the biggest commercial benefit of LLMs be just working around limitations of copyleft licenses?
What is the monetary value of human work put into copyleft software and later used to train LLMs? It's hard to estimate, but the study "Estimating the Total Development Cost of a Linux Distribution", estimated that it would cost $1.4 billion to develop the Linux kernel alone.
They do invent code solution for the problem that exists in your codebase. Latter implies that the code solution LLM synthesizes is usually unique of a kind, so, it's not a copy-paste neither it is a simple extract from "another codebase" and adopted.
IMO they operate pretty similarly to humans - we synthesize our solutions, and therefore build-up our knowledge, by collecting knowledge from multiple other sources, including technical books and blogs, open-source code repositories, and our past experiences.
As someone who thinks that LLMs are harmful, I deeply resent that any of my work has been used to help develop them. I will never forgive these companies for forcing me to contribute.
I think so too. The only way to redeem this theft would be to force all AI companies to open source their models if they cannot prove that copyrighted material was not used to train them.
The largest theft of labor in human history … and it’s to do away with the laborers by making a device that produces labor substitute, with full awareness that the substitute produced is not fit for the purpose of making more such devices.
It’s like burning all the crops for heat, which you use to boil the oceans for salt, which you use to salt the earth so no more crops can grow.
If AI wants to destroy humanity it better get its boots on, or else AI companies might get there first.
There will be a point where companies will not need to scrape any content. Agents will create endless streams of probes, and they will end up solving all kinds of knowledge problems.
Are those factory workers we saw photos of now, wearing cameras to capture the movement of their hands stitching getting compensated for a generations worth of wages? Do they even have any choice but to give away the copy-right to their labor?
I understand the sentiment and partly agree. But also, the original has not gone anywhere. You're free to accumulate knowledge in the old way just as before. So maybe it's not theft of knowledge that we should be angry about, it's something else harder to define.
We do have some unique carve outs already for what we consider intellectual theft e.g. trade secrets. In this case the original artifacts might remain, but admitting the market that created them could go extinct is enough definition to be infringement at least. Fair use has been really resilient in these training cases so far but it is pretty damning to admit a negative market effect and that you're a direct substitute (see Warhol v Goldsmith recently).
I want to share the open source code for the good of everyone - which is why I put it under the GPL, for this right of everyone to share it to be protected. Therefore, any AI model that ingested GPL code should logically also have all its output GPL licensed. Not problem with that.
It's not the fact that they scraped the knowledge and used it to train a model. It's the fact they're trying so desperately to corner the market so that we're all reliant on them and only them, and have no means to free ourselves.
I've heard people say "theft" of intellectual property a lot. Also stealing an idea is common parlance. Maybe it's regional or something but I hear "theft" or similar used all the time for things other than physical goods that you lose access to.
The original might no longer be there as the site might have already shut down due to AI scrapper bot overload. Or the original was a book Anthropic scanned and then shredded. Or the artist stopped publishing their works or doing art all together after all their creations were ingested into the model blob without their permission.
It is really insane to compare individuals copying data to big corporations parasiting on the Internet.
You have to admit there is now some lovely schadenfreude to be had from the whole ‘Chinese free LLM companies be stealing our theft! Stop them!’ whining.
It's humanities collective knowledge and work. That's why nobody should ever buy the narrative of distillation being a crime or theft. It should be a human right to distill these models. Distillation should be being provided as a service.
If corporations weren't already owning the consumer, with AI it does this by many orders of magnitude. If something isn't done to prevent AI from being used to farm the masses for data, we will be living in a sci-fi dystopia without a doubt.
Because it was, it completely defaced all copyright and similar laws, like there is ZERO ground to stand against China now regarding theft... it's so weird how this is being allowed.
I do not understand what "theft" they are talking about. Those AI bots were scraping publicly accessible internet.
Publicly. Accessible.
Of course there are some parts of the publicly accessible internet which host content that may be considered illegal or has been obtained illegally. If those AI bots used such content as well, it is fair to call it out as wrong, in my opinion. But that is a separate topic.
Blindly calling scraping of publicly accessible internet a "theft" is, in my opinion, disingenuous. Especially when coming from a company operating a web search engine. Which itself has its own bots scraping the same parts of the internet 24/7.
Just because something is publicly accessible doesn't mean you can use it for free, or that it gives you rights to do whatever you want with it.
I can access a public park, but that doesn't necessarily give me the right to also bike on its sidewalks, or walk on the grass, or take some of the plants home with me.
> ... or has been obtained illegally
Similarly, content that is _accessible_ publicly may be illegal to _obtain_, these aren't mutually exclusive.
On the internet, you'll find there are terms of services and licenses. These restrict how you can use even publicly accessible material. Public availability doesn't give you a license to use it however you want.
A lot of sites have terms and conditions which explicitly disallow the use of site content as a part of another service.
If I have a bike and you start renting it out without my permission, surely you are committing theft of some sort.
If I build a complex custom bike and you start copying individual features from it on your custom bikes, surely you are committing theft of some sort, but whether it’s punishable depends on whether I’ve decided to go full corporate and protect my designs with patents and trademarks. You’ll be hard pressed to patent or trademark anything if I have published and documented prior art.
Indeed. If I take somebody's work, transform it somewhat and sell it, I should pay royalties (unless the author explicitly allowed me to do so). That is exactly the case.
I'd call the introduction of copyright the largest theft of human labor in history.
No one was compensated for all the free labor they did before the introduction of copyright which copyright holders then privatized. For example the Disney corporation would have had to pay the Brother's Grimm estate for the use of Snow white under the copyright regime they instilled in 1998 with the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.
That we are finally having a sane pendulum swing towards no copyright is a breath of fresh air.
The only way the AI bubble could improve the world more is if we end up becoming a Type I Kardashev civilization to feed the data centers. Then when the bubble pops we suck up all the extra CO2 with all the now idle nuclear power plants we can't shut down.
At the same time it's truly baffling going on a site called _hacker_ news and seeing corpo talking points from the 90s/00s regurgitated wholesale. Information wants to be free.
> That we are finally having a sane pendulum swing towards no copyright is a breath of fresh air.
Might be a short one though if all goes to plan. Just another form of gatekeeping the worlds information and with new gatekeepers replacing the old ones.
> At the same time it's truly baffling going on a site called _hacker_ news and seeing corpo talking points from the 90s/00s regurgitated wholesale. Information wants to be free.
Under “conduct requirements” imposed by the CMA in June, UK websites are able to activate an opt-out to stop Google from scraping their content to power search features such as AI overviews - very similar conceptually to the news law passed in Australia.
Linking to work, where ownership and attribution is clear and the owner has the ability to commercialise is a very different thing to “laundering” content through the model, quoting the midjourney developers here
> "We just need to launder it through a fine-tuned codex." [0]
It’s not that different to the US helping itself to indigenous peoples’ lands in North America, decimating them with smallpox and alcohol, then generously offering reservations.
Ask Anthropic how non-destructive their copying is, when the clandestinely buy rare books for cheap & shred them after scanning and not sharing the result.
But what about M$ owning Github and doing the same with its content?
Github even did not deny scanning private repositories. (Gitlab denied the same when asked). So...
I remember when this was the prevailing thinking online until about 2024. But that's when everyone was trying to justify their own piracy of GTA or whatever.
It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up. Crimes this large are crimes against humanity. So many people whose life's work got appropriated without consideration, compensation or consent it is baffling.
It is said that at the heart of every great fortune there is a great crime, so it should be no surprise that the most valuable companies on the planet will most likely result from this crime. And given that justice can be bought by those with the most money you can forget about anything coming of this.
Our "culture" has long been the province of corporations. In prior epochs it was still the product of patronage and power.
At least with LLMs we can glimpse an escape route to that which generations of humans have strived for - a world in which the labor required of each human to lead a flourishing life approaches zero.
Instead of fixating on a remedy that seeks to criminalize AI, maybe focus on the relatively rather achievable goal of redistributing LLM gains. Would that not be the most desirable justice? What is your alternative, and would you foreclose the future in the name of a past that never really existed in the first place?
> At least with LLMs we can glimpse an escape route to that which generations of humans have strived for - a world in which the labor required of each human to lead a flourishing life approaches zero.
Let me fix that for you: A world in the the value of the labor of each human approaches zero.
Right, and the consequence is going to be, what?
Humans with zero economic value can still vote. They can still mass. They will still have needs. Really the script here writes itself. The historical precedents bound the problem rather well. As always, radical social change will not occur until a wide swath of the population is aligned. In this case, due to their broad economic devaluation.
It would be easier if today's knowledge workers stopped deluding themselves into thinking that their standards of living will maintain. Your acknowledgement of the necessary predicate to change is, in that respect, progress in itself. There is little reason why we cannot accelerate the timing of broad consensus if more people so readily came to that conclusion - and resisted the temptation to then find the answer instead in nostalgia about the past.
Flourishing life? Where is your data leading to the conclusion that AI models are leading to the world populace leading a ‘flourishing life’? Are taxes on revenue of companies like OpenAI somehow being collected and turned into a UBI and I just didn’t hear about it?
I said a glimpse. I didn't say it's here now or it would be easy.
It is however, achievable. Certainly more so than engaging in the fantasy that we can criminalize LLMs out of existence. And it is likely more desirable than such an effort anyway.
Or, perhaps, the companies forming the for profit LLMs could be made to pay a license fee for the copyrighted data they lifted from behind the paywall and then used to form a for profit entity with.
Nothing about banning technology. How about enforcing DMCA and then applying a penalty for the knowing theft rather than negotiating a license?
This is solid but how many people you reckon would benefit if they paid every single penny for any copyrighted data? I am in my 50's with 30 years in the industry and I know maybe 2 people that might benefit from this... certainly not something general public would benefit from
We’re likely looking at a new world where physical and mental work from humans holds much less value.
So if the world still generates value ( think AI inventing new drugs, robots planting and harvesting fields of corn ), who is able to make income? The people who have the capital to purchase and run the systems.
So our future world probably looks like a system where effort has little to no reward and capital (e.g. inheritance, passive income) has all the reward.
So, we can have a world where you are born rich or you live in abject poverty, or we can figure out something else.
Like trickle down economics?
We all experience the substance which is trickling down.
In the 50's there were predictions that in 10 years no-one will have to work again because of the advances made in automation, like the washing machine for example. Any predictions of less work this time around are a complete joke.
> a world in which the labor required of each human to lead a flourishing life approaches zero.
The AI bubble is pricing AI stocks so high that the only possible way for them to meet investors expectations is for AI to charge so much that every human & corporation has no money left.
[delayed]
Considering that we don't seem able to appropriately tax the biggest corporations, why do you think we'll suddenly be able to redistribute LLM gains?
Far more likely is that wealth and power will become even more concentrated into the hands of the few and the rest of humanity will become effective slaves.
These doomsday theories sound solid in practice but in order for someone to accumulate a lot of wealth there have to be consumers to chip into this. If we are all slaves, where is that wealth going to come from?!
The Amazon warehouse worker is a modern day slave.
Don’t believe me? Try it. I have.
US has been procrastinating reparations for slavery. LLM redistribution can't happen until the capitalism machines recursively solve "sins of our fathers".
>It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up
Would regulation help with that? Right now you can download free models that have been trained on that "stolen" data.
With regulation and compensation, only rich companies would be able to do that, and they would definitely not give it back for free. I put "stolen" in quotation marks because it's still unclear if we can call that stealing. Nobody would say a human reading a book and learning from it is stealing. I'm not saying that a machine doing the same is equivalent, but the only thing I am sure of is that I am not sure we can call it "stealing".
We don’t have to treat people reading books and companies stealing all human knowledge the same.
Also, companies spent a long time telling us downloading single songs via Napster was the worst thing ever, before torrenting every book in existence themselves. I don’t believe any of these companies have paid for all the books they have trained on.
>companies spent a long time telling us downloading single songs via Napster was the worst thing ever, before torrenting every book in existence themselves
really not the same entities here
No, but why should we accept they get away with it? Also Microsoft has definitely sued people for pirating windows and now collaborates with OpenAI and uses their ai trained on stolen materials.
Yeah that's more fair
Well, it's kinda converging, because Napster and Microsoft have teamed up to build a multimodal interactive video agent through a simple proxy API (this is a direct quote from Napster's blog post)
https://www.napster.com/blog/napster-heads-to-microsoft-buil...
Not at leaf level, but if you trace the trunk, pretty sure you end up on the same one.
Morally speaking, one of the issues of modern society is the idea that knowledge should be free which was partially started by the file sharing movement, which didn't really move society in the right direction imo.
Free means the same as worthless, which inherently isn't true - since information takes time to consume in some form, and your time isn't worthless. Therefore even if you could listen to all songs theoretically for free, you would need to spend an inordinate time doing that.
When I was a kid, getting a CD from your favourite band was a major expense, getting a video game even more so. But it formed a sort of emotional attachment (and not even just for me), my friends talked about how 'band X''s new album was amazing or a stinker. Since there were multiple bands making similar kinds of music, choosing to be a fan of one but not the other carried real monetary weight.
Nowadays you just fish out a song you think you would like out of the endless sea of Spotify, no different from prompting an LLM. No, Spotify didn't make me enjoy music more.
Same applies for Steam & videogames.
Therefore I think the ritualistic act of paying money to get access to something does have a purpose. It inherently establishes the value of information to you, makes it an investment that you need to recoup by using it. I'm sure most musicians would trade a million fans who might check them out if they're in town, to ones who think their music changed their perspective in life.
Also the process of creating a song that vaguely appeals to millions is different from making one that speaks to a thousand.
This is a fundamental issue of modern capitalistic society, similar to the Marxist idea of 'alienation' - once something is cheap to get, you don't appreciate the effort that went into making it. And if your customers don't care about the thing they get, producers won't make an effor to make it good either.
And once nobody cares, people even forget what a quality product is like.
Interesting argument. At first sight it looks like an argument for scarcity, but I think it's more an argument for relationship - the value of art isn't in the capitalist concept of 'a for-profit content object in a corporate inventory' but in the social relationships and shared experiences it creates.
Without that, everything gets atomised into lonely individualism. You sit there with your headphones on listening to [Interesting band]. Not only do you not really care because you don't feel personally connected to the music - it's one of literally more than a hundred million content items on Spotify - but you're not sharing the experience.
This seems like the loss of a valuable thing which capitalist economics can't put a price on because it has no concept of value-created-by-shared-experience.
Superficially it's the same as 'sell-content-consumption-item-to-the-mass-market' but it's fundamentally not the same kind of thing.
The value is relationally both fleeting and persistent in ways that content consumption experiences - including live and recorded media of all kinds - aren't.
> Nowadays you just fish out a song ... Spotify didn't make me enjoy music more.
Maybe change your perspective? Treat Spotify like a valuable audio lexicon. You read about an artist, a song, a time and immediately you can hear what is it about. Incredible!
If Spotify is only treated as a lazy background feelgood provider (while reading Marx;)), no wonder you feel that way. But it's your power/choice to appreciate it (or not), regardless of money.
> companies spent a long time telling us downloading single songs via Napster was the worst thing ever
One's world cannot be so drawn in crayon that "companies" is a useful level of detail with something like that. There's no irony in two totally different companies (one of which was actually an industry body, the RIAA) doing two totally different things.
However, there is irony in a subscription to pirated material.
Does ones world view get upgraded to oil paint if one acknowledges that it's the same class of people - and in many cases literally the same people, PE firms and family offices - profiting from 2000s era record industry profits and on the hook for / in line to profit from Open AI, Anthropic and the rest if they IPO?
Napster was a company. Pretty sure that company didn’t tell you that.
> I don’t believe any of these companies have paid for all the books they have trained on.
Did you miss the "book burning" hysteria from a couple weeks ago? These companies have been trying to digitize copyrighted materials legally, in which copyright law demands destruction of the original, and people shit on them even harder.
It's clearly not a problem for these companies to buy the books they need for training, and they have been doing that in crazy high volumes. Lots of good training materials simply cannot be legally purchased though, and should those parts of human knowledge just be ignored?
> We don’t have to treat people reading books and companies stealing all human knowledge the same.
We don't. People engaging in piracy have their lives ruined, companies engaging in piracy pay a tiny fraction of their revenues out to authors who can't legally outgun them.
(Sorry, I just wanted to air the juxtaposition as clearly as possible, I sense we are actually in agreement)
Came here to post this, got beaten by someone putting it far more succinctly than I would have.
I mean if you cite a copyrighted book verbatim. You are held liable. So should a company producing copyrighted work.
For instance a image/video generating model.
> Also, companies spent a long time telling us downloading single songs via Napster was the worst thing ever, before torrenting every book in existence themselves.
So whose viewpoint is right here? Is downloading theft or not? These arguments always boil down to "it's fine when I do it, but wrong when a company does."
> These arguments always boil down to "it's fine when I do it, but wrong when a company does."
The problem is that it is enforced exactly the opposite. People have been hit with fines and jail time for pirating and seeding, without even doing so for commercial gain. But when massive tech companies pirate training data for their AI and build a product from that that, nobody goes to jail. Where is the sense in that?
Regulation that said something like “we own 50% of your profit or 20% of your revenue, whichever is the larger” would.
If Apple can charge 30% to gate-keep mobile payments, we can surely charge that for the total information output of humanity.
> Nobody would say a human reading a book and learning from it is stealing. I'm not saying that a machine doing the same is equivalent, but the only think I am sure of is that I am not sure we can call it "stealing".
It is stealing. A human paid for the book, compensated the author and learnt from it. The machine DID NOT pay for the book, DID NOT compensate the author and still learnt from it anyways.
We need to define machine in terms of "human-power"... much the same as how we already define automobiles via "horse-power". A single NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 chip, for example, delivers roughly 35.58 teraflops of standard computing power (via 10,496 CUDA cores). That means 35.58 trillion calculations every second. In comparison, a mathematically trained human being, taking their time to solve a complex, multi-digit decimal division problem by hand takes roughly 100 to 120 seconds. That gives the human 0.01 flops. To match RTX 3090, you would need 3.56 quadrillion people working/learning in perfect sync. We can use a calculation similar to this to derive metrics on how much is being stolen for "learning/training" these models. The loot can be quantified.
EDIT: The reason I am comparing chip computation to human-power is because the authors of those digital works intended their works to only be read by humans. Not by some alien species (even if it be made of silicon) that incorporated their work into producing models.
So naturally the price should be determined based on this new species capabilities. I would not sell my software license for the same price to an Enterprise the size of Google that I would sell to a fellow developer. I price my product appropriately. With this entry of a new alien specie authors would need to have different tiers for them. Since these chips can train on petabytes of data and create models in a matter of days/weeks/months, it is obviously not comparable to a human being who has the capacity to ingest maybe 1-5 books a month at most. So the payout has to be different too.
The multiplication comparison makes no sense because humans don’t learn by multiplying numbers to change weights. It’s like comparing the lubrication oil consumption of a car to the cooking oil consumption of a human to compare the carrying capacity. That’s an implementation detail inside the GPU and doesn’t let you compare how much they learn. Otherwise, a human would learn much less in their whole life than a GPU does in one second.
> Would regulation help with that? Right now you can download free models that have been trained on that "stolen" data
We do have regulation against these issues. Companies spent years railing against piracy and IP theft enshrining it into law but now that it's being done by them en masse it's considered acceptable. The reality is that no regulation would help because we don't have regulators willing to enforce it nor do we have a legal system designed to help individuals against mass theft by corporations.
Well theres at least two different buckets of this.
First is the scraping of the open internet.
The second is the paywall bypassing, YouTube audio recording, and pirated content training that the labs have basically admitted to in one form or another.
Content from both gets served back to us, in exchange for watching ads/paying a subscription/paying tokens.
The second is more immediately hypocritical because they are license/copyright/DMCA violations that the little guy could get sued for while the labs get $2T valuations for. The automation of crime at scale, which is a common VC pattern.
Copy one book, and you're a thief. Copy thousands, and you're a VC.
And yet a third bucket is the license-laundering of GPL code when the entire github corpus was vacuumed up.
> With regulation and compensation, only rich companies would be able to do that
Well, with some imagination, you can have regulation that forces companies to open up, not just close down.
Imagine a law that stipulates that if you want to offer "LLM-inference-as-a-service", you need to also publish exact details about how it was trained, what datasets were used and also offer those exact weights for download.
Sure, this would never happen, but just offering another perspective on how laws and regulation can be used if it was wanted, locking stuff down and pulling up the ladder behind you isn't the only way to use laws, although that is a very popular reason and approach.
I am unclear how this would help anyone?
Any argument that writers and artists lose from these existing, would remain unchanged.
Culture robbery is not limited to AI. Any big concert for example is capitalismed to hell. So are neighborhoods. Where you used to have people just living, now you have an intentionally designed facade for people to live within. There was a comment on the 40C3 thread saying it's got too capitalist because of the ticket cost, and idk about that because it's always been hosted in commercial venues to my knowledge, but the vibe of the conference and the club itself are much less rebel than they used to be. Stuff like Burning Man now exists for people like Elon to go there and say "I was at Burning Man" and for people to get T-shirts saying "I was at Burning Man" and photos of themselves being at Burning Man more than for whatever the first few ones were about.
The what thread, now? Got a link instead?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49737787
> and they would definitely not give it back for free.
...not like they are doing it for free now either.
open-weight is an economic war strategy of trying to undermine your competitors and prevent it from rising prices, thus preventing profit, driving them out of business.
> I put "stolen" in quotation marks because it's still unclear if we can call that stealing
It never was stealing: you can't steal a book by copying it. You can however commit copyright infringement.
This blatant disregard of licenses and copyright is clearly infringing on the authors ability to make a profit from their work, which was the whole point of copyright.
They knew it too, which is why they said nothing about the pirating and infringing until they got too big to fail.
So now we are left discussing and wasting time on what technically counts as infringing, pirating, stealing and whatnot.
All the while the small authors who can't possibly lawyer up against the literal biggest corporations on earth will just have to shut up.
Yet, somehow they had deals with Disney and other big names, proving that they did actually feel they need approval.
Their actions are two-faced, thus proving malice. Now we can go back to pointless technicalities.
Regulation can mean all sorts of things, including declaring the models themselves illegal.
Tech bros have a hard time understanding this, but a state can and will enforce its laws, even seemingly absurd one, if it wants to.
If piracy isn't stealing training definitely isn't stealing.
It is the largest democratization of knowledge that ever happened.
The 'sell it back to us' argument falls short in my view.
Free versions are abundant, and in some time useful models will ship preinstalled on all mobile phones.
The comment here seems incredibly pessimistic and quite dramatical.
There are no viable free versions with sufficient computing power. The do-it-yourself AI is dangled as a carrot in front of users to camouflage the lock-in and rent seeking by Big AI. Go prove something new like Navier Stokes (replicating N-S itself no longer counts due to scraping and plagiarism) on your Mac Pro!
Paid influencers who perpetuate the open narrative are a whole new industry.
Even if there were open models, it is still IP theft and would not be "democratization" but "forced unpaid nationalization".
It is woefully pessimistic indeed.
There will be new jobs coming from this.
The bountiful abundance of intelligence is truly the best thing that has happened this decade.
Wiki already democratized it just fine and was legitimately free for people who know how to read.
It's asinine that you think the sell it back to us argument falls short.
Not only does it distill our history to try to sound like some average version of us, it sounds like the blandest versions of us... And then sells this back to us.
From a coding standpoint, the tech is good and gets the job done. The pillaging of all other aspects of human history is just sad. With the only solace I'm seeing is that future training has to train on the dogshit versions of the internet that are now infected with LLM content.
Wikis made knowledge available.
Making it accessible, understandable, and usable is another matter.
How LLMs sound is not a fundamental limitation of the technology.
The current model's poor writing style and tone are currently a main focus of research and I would expect improvements there soon.
You do not have to train on anything you do not deem up to standard. This supposed poisoning of training data remains a common fantasy.
> Making it accessible, understandable, and usable is another matter.
I see no evidence that this is what the use of LLMs is accomplishing for most users. Rather, they see to get distilled answers without the depth required to fully understand the response. Partially because that's what they like, and that's what the LLMs serve. Deeper understanding is not being given by LLMs. Instead, it's the SEMBLANCE of depth and laypeople don't know the difference. It's effectively eroding comprehension for some cool knowledge dopamine hit.
> Free versions are abundant,
Awesome, can I make my own competitive LLM, just like I can make my own open source software?
> and in some time useful models will ship preinstalled on all mobile phones.
Considering hardware prices, that "some time" is doing super heavy lifting. It could be 10-15+ years before that happens and the local LLM is actually useful. Most people don't see hardware prices declining from current prices until at least 2030, likely much longer.
No. I also cannot make a competitive computer, yet can use one for my work to remain competitive.
Yes, it could take some time to arrive on phones. It is questionable if it will ever make sense compared to using a paid hosted provider.
But what are 10 years in the grand scheme of things?
Should we have scrapped it all, called it a crime against humanity, and never developed AI, because it will take a decade to disseminate the benefits to everyone?
> Should we have scrapped it all, called it a crime against humanity, and never developed AI, because it will take a decade to disseminate the benefits to everyone?
Nah, we should have:
1. invested less, in a more targeted way
2. ideally like ARPANET, with the benefits given to all humanity
3. with fair royalties paid to all (where relevant)
4. and by creating an ever growing shared curated and high quality data set that would allow anyone to create their own competitive LLM
ARPANET & co were all taxpayer funded and the internet has created more wealth than most human inventions. The base should be part of the commons, everyone should knock themselves out by building on top.
Exactly like the internet.
> and never developed AI, because it will take a decade to disseminate the benefits to everyone?
Yes, probably. The benefits of dissemination already existed. The internet was free. Libraries are free. You deny people basic reading and comprehension growth by giving a distilled, without thought, answer.
You say "some time in the future this might be available on our phones for free" and "what's 10 years in the grand scheme of things?"
We'll, I'll argue that in 10 years from now we may see the full damage of what doing this has done to us and I'd rather not wait for "the what's 10 years in the grand scheme of things" to playout and irreversibly damage an entire generation the way we let the unmitigated and unregulated rollout of social media do the same to the most recent generation.
The risk/reward of this technology is unproven regarding the long-term effects on developing minds. We are beta testing the bullshit dreams of a couple billionaire techbros on an entire cohort of kids and young adults.
> Can I make my own competitive LLM?
Yes, yes you can.
See the number of startups that have finetuned or trained an OSS model to build their business on.
“But you have to have compute!”
Ok, and you’re writing OSS on a rock with no internet connection?
The world has all kinds of barriers, but if anyone has a chance of competing on the LLM from it’s not going to be by getting rid of fair use.
Every time you're writing software or building machines/factories (which is automating things), you are committing a crime. Every time you learn from your superiors or colleagues, get better than them, get promotion or they get fired, you are committing a crime. Provide justice there first.
Theres a big difference.
We have social conventions regulating this.
Suddenly, mega corporations were allowed to digest(sometimes by illegally pirating “data”, and sometimes by achieving their training corpus and subsequently destroying the copies) and digest this information in a novel way, without any discussion or law making.
You may argue it’s beneficial (it very well could be, I use ChatGPT and Claude all the time), but let’s not pretend it’s the same as learning from your history teacher…
Social conventions are regressive and are followed blindly by luddites. Real progress comes from doing what is right and breaking idiotic conventions.
Pirating is fine.
Subsequently destroying is bad but it is the result of screeching from people lacking foresight who support the idea of training LLM on book copies is wrong. So now corps found "legal" way to do it by destroying it. Again, idiotic social conventions.
Without discussing? Law making? What are you, German? There's a reason EU is shit while USA is center of the progress of the world: laws follow innovation; not the other way around.
Scale matters.
The average human doesn't do much on his own, and definitely doesn't uproot society or risk siphoning/leeching wealth from every person on this planet.
Yes, the whole IT sector is built on it. Robbing jobs, money, power, opportunities from billions of people and delegating them in to shitty jobs.
Average human on his own...why draw the line there? It doesn't matter much what one human does...but what many/collective/society do and society has been "ripping off", "uprooting", "leeching (read: creating)" wealth since dawn of time. It is called PROGRESS.
> It is called PROGRESS.
There is no such thing as PROGRESS for progress' sake.
And FYI, agriculture is a wonderful invention.
Yet for about 5000 years after its introduction the average human had worse nutrition than the average hunter gatherer, which led to such things as height decreases for those 5000 years.
Industrial agriculture is another wonderful invention. Yet 150 years later we're not sure it's sustainable and it's likely many of its aspects aren't, which will raise some sticky issues soon ("which billion people do we decide to let starve since we can't make enough food for everyone after most of our soil eroded?"). Repeat this for industrial textile production, mining, etc.
I won't even go into climate change.
And again, scale matters. Most individuals can only control what they do, and what they do generally doesn't impact much. But companies can impact a whole lot.
> "ripping off", "uprooting", "leeching (read: creating)" wealth
Let's not be 100% cynical here. A lot of what humanity has achieved has been genuine wealth creation and distribution/re-distribution. I would say more wealth has been created than leeched off.
* * *
And before you think I'm some starry eyed teen, I'll play the game. At the end of the day, me and mine have to outrun you in the face of PROGRESS.
May the odds be ever in your favor.
*Rent it back to us
At the very least we should foribly confiscate the models & make them available free-for-all as open-weights downloads. Failing that, bring back the guillotine.
At least the Chinese AI companies are doing good service open-sourcing their models back to the public.
There are no open-source LLMs. There are only downloadable LLMs, with no source for the model being provided. The source for the training and inference programs is not the source for the model itself, which would be the training set, training program, and random seeds.
OLMo
Works produced by AI are not copyrightable. Are they in the public domain? Can an entity sell unique works which are in the public domain?
Yes? I own a lot of books that were public domain when published (as reprints). I could read them on Gutenberg, but I'm paying for the nice paper formatting.
Owning ideas with copyright and patents is what separates the United States from communism.
The first time a saw a documentary about Tetris it really hit me what communism is -- nobody owned anything they invented or created. [0] It was a long time ago and I remember feeling sad watching the story. In the Soviet Union, a group of ~15 people, Politburo, controlled everything including any thought written to paper.
It is this one line, Article 1 Section 8 Clause 8, that separates the United States from the disaster that was the Soviet Union:
> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
I don't think it is far fetched to call ignoring and disregarding the Copyright Clause a communist revolution, violent or not. That is the one thing the communists -- there have been many over the years inside the United States -- would change to make the United States a communist country.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris#Spread_beyond_the_Sovie...
In the Soviet Union the state owned all media (de facto) and you had to get permission from a party official before you published or copied anything. It's not the same thing as a free for all.
It's actually the first sentence from your quote. One state owned company had a monopoly on software exports. Soviet citizens were not allowed to write code and export it themselves, or import software from Western countries. They had heavy censorship and centralized control over everything.
In a way it's the ultimate endpoint of copyright. One {person, state, company} owns everything and you have to ask them for permission to do anything with it.
In a communist society there is no profit (or incentive for), thus no need for copyright laws.
It's not abolishing copyrights that would turn the US into a commie country, communism is about abolishing private ownership to the means of production.
In the United State, the individual or corporation owns the invention. In the Soviet Union the state automatically owned the invention. That clause is what ensures private ownership.
The clause is what ensures profits from market sales or licensing of ideas go to the creator.
Removing (or ignoring in the case of AI companies) that clause in the US Constitution is what abolishes private ownership.
Well it's worth reading the linked wiki article section, which includes a link to another article "Copyright law of the Soviet Union", flatly contradicting you unless you maintain that the USSR wasn't truly communist.
Copying data isn't a crime.
"copyright". its right there in the name of the rights.
Agreed, but now they're trying to stop other people from copying data so that they can be the sole gatekeepers of humanities collective knowledge.
And they should get effed. Distilling should be a right.
[delayed]
> sell it back to us at a mark-up.
What if it was for free, like Wikipedia?
> Crimes this large are crimes against humanity.
jfc no, sit down.
Try doing something about the actual evil shit like arms manufacturers and the politicians ordering the deaths and misery of millions from the comfort of their couch.
At this point in our civilization, all human knowledge NEEDS to be collated in one place and easily queryable. Otherwise it's just too damn difficult to make any further progress at the edge of our understanding; there's just too much shit for one person to learn "manually" (wait I'm not advocating for low-effort slop, chill)
It's helping common folk who wanted to do something but didn't know where to start, while legacy search engines increasingly lead to spam, shallow knowledge or outright predatory shit.
Not long ago I had the misfortune of becoming interested in some WarHammer 40K lore. Most of the links led to Fandom (the enshittification of Wikia) and that place is a cesspool of obnoxious ads.That content was written by unpaid volunteers. Should Fandom keep profiting from their work for perpetuity? Should I not be able to get the gist of what the heck a Qoiazrjirnowerx@# is without wasting my mortal lifespan on a horrible website?
Or, if I need to ask something peculiar, should I post on Reddit or StackOverflow or HN and wait for someone to see it and deem to give a sufficient answer, only to have a pricky mod decide that the question doesn't "fit" the community?
God hell no, if you don't know how much bullshit AI could eliminate for the silent majority then you were probably part of that bullshit.
(that's a general "you" for whomever was fine with the status quo and not a personal insult @ anybody)
Defending the same entities getting large DoD contracts to use AI for killing?
Do you protest against Intel Nvidia amd apple/Qualcomm? When will you stop buying their products? Their chips are used for killing too!
You sound like one of those mentally unstable vegans who loves their avocado. How cute the animal has to be for them to care...?
They've been using computers for killing for decades, who's taking up pitchforks against computers?
>It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up. Crimes this large are crimes against humanity. So many people whose life's work got appropriated without consideration, compensation or consent it is baffling.
This is such a brain-dead take. By that logic there could never be any kind of AI, because unlike a human it'd be completely forbidden from learning from the sources of knowledge from which humans learn. It's stupid to suggest silicon brains should not legally be able to read copyrighted material just because you hate bigcos and capitalism.
Learning isn't stealing, regardless of whether it's done by a human or a machine. By your logic someone reading and memorizing all somebody's life work is appropriation; completely inane.
[delayed]
You're ignoring that there are options other than theft. Heard of buying things?
Do you think OpenAI has a New York Times subscription? Do you think that's actually relevant to what the New York Times is arguing here?
The vast a majority of text that is being claimed to have been "stolen" was never for sale. Reddit posts, deviant art images, personal websites, etc.
>It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up. Crimes this large are crimes against humanity.
Yeah the introduction of copyright was truly criminal.
> So many people whose life's work got appropriated without consideration, compensation or consent it is baffling.
Oh wait ...
“It is said that at the heart of every great fortune there is a great crime”
lol at this edgy 5th grade statement. So ridiculous.
Has it affected DD as deeply as it as affected software engineering? Guessing clients feel a lot more "empowered" or "independent" and knowledgeable these days? I liked doing DD, just as much as I enjoyed developing, but it must be dying a slow death too. What's changed in how DD reports are produced?
What is DD supposed to mean?
Nit: Please don’t use obscure acronyms when writing things to an international audience without defining them first… DD can mean so many different things
Due diligence — pretty standard acronym in this community.
We aren’t on WSB. DD can mean datadog, domain driven, design driven, data driven, etc
No it's not, and I've been here more than a decade.
“Information wants to be free“.
It’s not “theft of labor”; the work was already done. If anything it is theft of “intellectual property” (aka “copyright infringement”), if you believe that is a thing, but not of the “labor” that went into it.
My personal take: anyone producing content, everyone’s creativity, is fed by something that others did before. We’re all standing on the shoulders of giants composed of previous generations and their “content’s” distribution and dissemination. I have an immense gratitude for all the labor before me that I was and am allowed to partake; without that, I would be nothing. Sharing information is an act of love; gatekeeping it is short-sighted greed. New technologies have always “killed” previous “labor”, out of which new opportunity grows. I just wished the collected data was public. I hope we all get a mega-leak at some point.
Well the future we seem to be getting is “information wants to be free for the first ten thousand tokens, then $1 per million tokens after”.
Information wants to be free“. It’s not “theft of labor”; the work was already done. If anything it is theft of “intellectual property” (aka “copyright infringement”), if you believe that is a thing, but not of the “labor” that went into it. My personal take: anyone producing content, everyone’s creativity, is fed by something that others did before. We’re all standing on the shoulders of giants composed of previous generations and their “content’s” distribution and dissemination. I have an immense gratitude for all the labor before me that I was and am allowed to partake; without that, I would be nothing. Sharing information is an act of love; gatekeeping it is short-sighted greed. New technologies have always “killed” previous “labor”, out of which new opportunity grows. I just wished the collected data was public. I hope we all get a mega-leak at some point.
> Sharing information is an act of love
Most AI companies are not sharing it, though. They appropriated it and resell it.
"I just wished the collected data was public. "
That's the entire contention here. It's a double standard. Companies will sue the living hell out of anyone taking their IP, whether it's code or art, yet they have no qualms taking all the data they need from anyone and everyone. It was already a problem before, i.e. artists getting paid very little for work that companies profit a lot from like musicians or digital artists, but now with AI it's on steroids.
I sort of agree, and i think strengtening IP Law is probably not great. But I do think it's very fucked that building generative ai is only possible by taking the works of countless artists and craftspeople and then the model produced from that data immediately gets deployed to destroy the careers of the people whose, work was vital to it being created, without compensation for them, while making a few evil nerds richer than god. I think if you work at one of these labs you owe an enormous debt to society and your earnings should be redistributed among it.
Unpopular opinion on here
Probably because it claims there’s no problem, and then makes a tiny little mention of the BIG problem at the very end.
I wouldn't have a problem with working off the fruits of other people's labor because most of us are essentially doing that everyday anyway, the issue is that big tech companies (want to) reap all the benefit and create profit from something that should be accessible to everyone. Everything is getting privatized -- housing, water, electricity, and now, thinking and knowledge. We are heading towards a world where you have to pay even more excessive fees just for existing and for completing any basic task.
The most shocking point is that they have a Microsoft exec who knows what he's talking about.
If someone asked what is 'the largest theft of labor in human history' I would have thought slavery.
Yeah gulags and other forced work camps also come to mind. But I guess this is a larger scale in terms of man hours
But it's copying...how is it theft? Your labour WASNT stolen was it?
In a way their future labor was? If i recorded you 24/7, then went to your employer and told them I had masterfully trained a chimpanzee to perform your jpb, and it was good enough your employer considered getting rid of you. Would you consider me recording/copying whart you did theft in some way?
Even better question: would you be willing to train the AI-driven robot which will end your profession altogether?
I work in infosec and I would give up everything I own and die happy if infosec became a solved problem and the profession died forever.
It's hard for me to imagine a profession that should exist in a utopian society. People should just be able to explore and build cool shit. People should have instant access to food when they're hungry and housing when the weather gets bad, and we could live in a society that does all that without having rent extraction baked into everything.
Do we normally consider recorded music to be theft from musicians who would have been paid to play music live if we never allowed (or invented) recorded music?
Normally this isn't the case for any technology except for the time it first comes around. AI is only different to use for two reasons. First, it is in our time. Second, it seems to be faster than any of the options before, so the shock is harder.
But in general, this is a website of people writing code. How many on here study how a person solves a problem and then trains the ultimate chimpanzee to do (at least part of) their job? Is building computer programs that automate what others did manually theft?
Consider the origin of the word "computer" itself, a mass theft of jobs that would have employed the whole world many many times over.
Well, given these companies are trying to sell it back to you - seems like even worse than stealing. ;-)
For intellectual property, copying without permission is theft.
Depending on the context, it’s fair use.
As it is, in this case.
Slavery is a weird one. It has been there for longer than any written history exists. In ancient times (Greece, Rome), slaves didn't have rights at all. A horrific injustice but it'd be not be a theft. Then you get the serfdom in the middle ages. Up to recent times humans have been brutally exploited.
The copy part was a recognized right, then taken away.
Never ended, just changed in form.
> If someone asked what is 'the largest theft of labor in human history' I would have thought slavery.
Then I take it you're interested in factual information as to whom the biggest slavers were, which country was the last to abolish slavery (an african one, in the 1980s) and in which countries, today, there are still people selling slaves.
No actually it's when someone copies that blog post you did about react.js and puts it into a dataset, I'm not sure how they sleep with themselves the absolute monsters
I don’t mind these companies scraping my content.
But for love of god, my blog changes at most every couple months. You don’t need to scrape it every few minutes.
In case of programming.
How much do the current LLMs invent solutions for user tasks, how much they just copy and adopt existing open-source solutions from from Github and other code repositories?
This not a problem for open-source code under permissive software license, but works derived from open-source code with copyleft software license should be also under copyleft license.
Could the biggest commercial benefit of LLMs be just working around limitations of copyleft licenses?
What is the monetary value of human work put into copyleft software and later used to train LLMs? It's hard to estimate, but the study "Estimating the Total Development Cost of a Linux Distribution", estimated that it would cost $1.4 billion to develop the Linux kernel alone.
https://consortiuminfo.org/metalibrary/estimating-the-total-...
They do invent code solution for the problem that exists in your codebase. Latter implies that the code solution LLM synthesizes is usually unique of a kind, so, it's not a copy-paste neither it is a simple extract from "another codebase" and adopted.
IMO they operate pretty similarly to humans - we synthesize our solutions, and therefore build-up our knowledge, by collecting knowledge from multiple other sources, including technical books and blogs, open-source code repositories, and our past experiences.
LLMs can output near-exact segments of copyrighted code used for training.
https://arxiv.org/html/2408.02487v3
I wonder how would Microsoft react if someone would synthesize a code solution based on Windows source code.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Source_Initiative
I guess you're not writing code much or haven't done much so as your professional career?
The problem isn’t just “stealing the fruits of human labor”, it’s also driving down the value of human skills and even taking away human jobs.
One leads to the other so its simpler to point the root issue.
As someone who thinks that LLMs are harmful, I deeply resent that any of my work has been used to help develop them. I will never forgive these companies for forcing me to contribute.
I think so too. The only way to redeem this theft would be to force all AI companies to open source their models if they cannot prove that copyrighted material was not used to train them.
The largest theft of labor in human history … and it’s to do away with the laborers by making a device that produces labor substitute, with full awareness that the substitute produced is not fit for the purpose of making more such devices.
It’s like burning all the crops for heat, which you use to boil the oceans for salt, which you use to salt the earth so no more crops can grow.
If AI wants to destroy humanity it better get its boots on, or else AI companies might get there first.
I remember techchrunch.com making the argument that IP Infringment != Theft in the music piracy era.. how quickly the tide turns :)
they did say theft of labor, not theft of the things being trained on
There will be a point where companies will not need to scrape any content. Agents will create endless streams of probes, and they will end up solving all kinds of knowledge problems.
Are those factory workers we saw photos of now, wearing cameras to capture the movement of their hands stitching getting compensated for a generations worth of wages? Do they even have any choice but to give away the copy-right to their labor?
I understand the sentiment and partly agree. But also, the original has not gone anywhere. You're free to accumulate knowledge in the old way just as before. So maybe it's not theft of knowledge that we should be angry about, it's something else harder to define.
We do have some unique carve outs already for what we consider intellectual theft e.g. trade secrets. In this case the original artifacts might remain, but admitting the market that created them could go extinct is enough definition to be infringement at least. Fair use has been really resilient in these training cases so far but it is pretty damning to admit a negative market effect and that you're a direct substitute (see Warhol v Goldsmith recently).
Lots of the original content is no longer available. Bots kill sites, AI kills monetization - both results in the original material disappearing.
Copying means we can both share in the knowledge, surely everyone on HN wants that right? Share the open source code for the good of everyone?
Hackers used to say "information yearns to be free" now they're saying "that's my information and I don't want you using it"
Probably indicative of America's wider downfall that they've all become so self interested
I want to share the open source code for the good of everyone - which is why I put it under the GPL, for this right of everyone to share it to be protected. Therefore, any AI model that ingested GPL code should logically also have all its output GPL licensed. Not problem with that.
Hackers are irrationally anti-corporation. This is where the nonsensical AGPL came from, too.
The AGPL didn't go far enough because it didn't limit freedom 0 to natural born humans. In the 00s/10s it was corporations. Today it's AI.
If it has no soul to save and no body to torture it deserves no rights.
Show me where this "soul" is. Never seen one yet.
I don't believe in souls. But I believe in metaphorical souls, and an LLM ain't got one.
Whats a metaphorical soul?
It's not the fact that they scraped the knowledge and used it to train a model. It's the fact they're trying so desperately to corner the market so that we're all reliant on them and only them, and have no means to free ourselves.
I've heard people say "theft" of intellectual property a lot. Also stealing an idea is common parlance. Maybe it's regional or something but I hear "theft" or similar used all the time for things other than physical goods that you lose access to.
The original might no longer be there as the site might have already shut down due to AI scrapper bot overload. Or the original was a book Anthropic scanned and then shredded. Or the artist stopped publishing their works or doing art all together after all their creations were ingested into the model blob without their permission.
It is really insane to compare individuals copying data to big corporations parasiting on the Internet.
I think it’s more like ‘The absolute maximum possible degree of theft’ there can’t be larger, it’s everything current and past.
You have to admit there is now some lovely schadenfreude to be had from the whole ‘Chinese free LLM companies be stealing our theft! Stop them!’ whining.
It's humanities collective knowledge and work. That's why nobody should ever buy the narrative of distillation being a crime or theft. It should be a human right to distill these models. Distillation should be being provided as a service.
Yeah, distilled, hosted by OpenAI and charged for. And don’t you try reverse engineer what they did!
If this was all open, I’d maybe half agree.
I think it's okay to advance humanity, but they can GTFO when they then try to ban distilling and open models.
If corporations weren't already owning the consumer, with AI it does this by many orders of magnitude. If something isn't done to prevent AI from being used to farm the masses for data, we will be living in a sci-fi dystopia without a doubt.
Because it was, it completely defaced all copyright and similar laws, like there is ZERO ground to stand against China now regarding theft... it's so weird how this is being allowed.
I do not understand what "theft" they are talking about. Those AI bots were scraping publicly accessible internet.
Publicly. Accessible.
Of course there are some parts of the publicly accessible internet which host content that may be considered illegal or has been obtained illegally. If those AI bots used such content as well, it is fair to call it out as wrong, in my opinion. But that is a separate topic.
Blindly calling scraping of publicly accessible internet a "theft" is, in my opinion, disingenuous. Especially when coming from a company operating a web search engine. Which itself has its own bots scraping the same parts of the internet 24/7.
Just because something is publicly accessible doesn't mean you can use it for free, or that it gives you rights to do whatever you want with it.
I can access a public park, but that doesn't necessarily give me the right to also bike on its sidewalks, or walk on the grass, or take some of the plants home with me.
> ... or has been obtained illegally
Similarly, content that is _accessible_ publicly may be illegal to _obtain_, these aren't mutually exclusive.
On the internet, you'll find there are terms of services and licenses. These restrict how you can use even publicly accessible material. Public availability doesn't give you a license to use it however you want.
A lot of sites have terms and conditions which explicitly disallow the use of site content as a part of another service.
If I have a bike and you start renting it out without my permission, surely you are committing theft of some sort.
If I build a complex custom bike and you start copying individual features from it on your custom bikes, surely you are committing theft of some sort, but whether it’s punishable depends on whether I’ve decided to go full corporate and protect my designs with patents and trademarks. You’ll be hard pressed to patent or trademark anything if I have published and documented prior art.
AI overall is the ultimate piracy crime.
I wonder what a token cost would be if AI companies were to pay royalties to every author who made their business even possible.
Then let's make humans pay royalties to every author from whom they ever learned something, even if it was offered freely to them, only fair?
Indeed. If I take somebody's work, transform it somewhat and sell it, I should pay royalties (unless the author explicitly allowed me to do so). That is exactly the case.
I'd call the introduction of copyright the largest theft of human labor in history.
No one was compensated for all the free labor they did before the introduction of copyright which copyright holders then privatized. For example the Disney corporation would have had to pay the Brother's Grimm estate for the use of Snow white under the copyright regime they instilled in 1998 with the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.
That we are finally having a sane pendulum swing towards no copyright is a breath of fresh air.
The only way the AI bubble could improve the world more is if we end up becoming a Type I Kardashev civilization to feed the data centers. Then when the bubble pops we suck up all the extra CO2 with all the now idle nuclear power plants we can't shut down.
At the same time it's truly baffling going on a site called _hacker_ news and seeing corpo talking points from the 90s/00s regurgitated wholesale. Information wants to be free.
Vectoralist News doesn’t have the same ring to it
> That we are finally having a sane pendulum swing towards no copyright is a breath of fresh air.
Might be a short one though if all goes to plan. Just another form of gatekeeping the worlds information and with new gatekeepers replacing the old ones.
> At the same time it's truly baffling going on a site called _hacker_ news and seeing corpo talking points from the 90s/00s regurgitated wholesale. Information wants to be free.
Look at who owns that site, no surprise here.
How is this different from Microsoft scraping to build Bing?
Honest question. There is a line in the sand somewhere apparently.
Under “conduct requirements” imposed by the CMA in June, UK websites are able to activate an opt-out to stop Google from scraping their content to power search features such as AI overviews - very similar conceptually to the news law passed in Australia.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-56163550
Linking to work, where ownership and attribution is clear and the owner has the ability to commercialise is a very different thing to “laundering” content through the model, quoting the midjourney developers here
> "We just need to launder it through a fine-tuned codex." [0]
[0] https://cybernews.com/news/midjourney-ai-images-art-lawsuit-...
Bing sent traffic to the original source. AI answers don't. That's the line. It's not complicated.
Huge difference between building AI and a search index.
Why? In both cases the SaaS downloaded the whole web and derives 100% of revenue from content they didn't make.
Bing isn’t re-selling you back the content it took.
"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
Spiderman pointing
And here we are, just watching and doing nothing..
It’s not that different to the US helping itself to indigenous peoples’ lands in North America, decimating them with smallpox and alcohol, then generously offering reservations.
At least it’s consistent, is what I’m saying.
Genocide vs non-destructive copying of digital information - I'd say that's pretty different.
Ask Anthropic how non-destructive their copying is, when the clandestinely buy rare books for cheap & shred them after scanning and not sharing the result.
But what about M$ owning Github and doing the same with its content? Github even did not deny scanning private repositories. (Gitlab denied the same when asked). So...
Copying isn't stealing you babies
I remember when this was the prevailing thinking online until about 2024. But that's when everyone was trying to justify their own piracy of GTA or whatever.
Suddenly, they don't like other people pirating.
All the "LOL you wouldn't steal a car???" posts in this thread miss the point entirely.
AI is cannibalizing information. It is literally destroying information and impoverishing those who would produce more of it.
At a long time scale, AI dominance is apocalyptic even if it never intentionally hurts anyone.