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Comment by Maken

2 hours ago

If scrapping content is legal, model distillation should be legal too.

> If scrapping content is legal, model distillation should be legal too.

No, because legality should be determined by what's in the best interests of Athropic and OpenAI's business models.

Hopefully they're working on RLHF their models to insert clauses making that reality clear into any legislation their models generate or review. That way it's only a matter of time until the confusion is cleared up.

I suppose model distillation is technically legal, in terms of copyright, because LLM output is automatically public domain.

It's only "illegal" from a standpoint of breach of contract given its against the terms of use/service, which is to say its not illegal at all, there's no criminality there.

  • Yeah I considered whether I should use the term "illegal" in my original post, but in this case, I believe these models are actually banned for use in China, right? Like there are probably export controls (at least with the NVidia chips)

    I honestly don't know ... yeah if it's just technically a terms of use violation (which isn't illegal, just a violation of one company's rules, for which Anthropic has every right to stop), or do we now have export controls applied from the various government actions, etc making them truly illegal now.