Comment by waffletower
6 hours ago
It sickens me when people use the word plagiarism to describe LLMs. Particularly when they use words and language that they themselves have plagiarized -- words like "love" and "economic" -- where do you draw the line? No, we haven't figured out how to fairly compensate everyone -- the frontiers aren't even trying. Spotify does at least try in their domain (and fails badly). Regardless of how the entitled get paid, the plagiarism label isn't fair and is diametrically opposed to Fair Use. Fair Use allows the commons to build on its history. Those against are typically parroting IP conglomerate conservatism and localized greed. I see immense benefit from the distillation of all available knowledge with an LLM interface. A recent article posted here says it perfectly "AI rewards expertise". I see vast benefits -- am willing to pay a significant monthly fee -- and sense that many are simply blind to and inarticulate about the growing force multiplier potential of modern AI.
So, I think this issue is a lot more obvious in image generation than it is in code or writing (but the implicit problem is the same). You can ask an image model to generate images in the style of an artist, that it's been trained on, without permission, and with a lot of these artists intentionally trying to poison the data and leaving every hint to the scrapers to fuck off. It takes a lot of work to develop a unique style that people love, and it's ugly as hell that a bunch of sloppers just plagiarize it. It's different when a person does it. Sure, you can & should practice on other people's styles, but ultimately in the process you find your own. GenAI doesn't do that, it just.. steals and copies. So yeah, it might make you sick, but it also is a plagiarism machine. The thing you should feel sick about is the plagiarism, not the description.
> It sickens me when people use the word plagiarism to describe LLMs. Particularly when they use words and language that they themselves have plagiarized -- words like "love" and "economic" -- where do you draw the line?
It sickens me when people use the word "piracy" to describe my downloading PDFs of books from torrent sites then printing them out and selling them, particularly when those authors used words and language that they themselves have "pirated" like "love" and "economic".
Call it whatever you want, but LLM companies took from people without compensation, and took from the commons, so that they could rent it out to us in regurgitated ad-infested chunks. That's where the true greed is. If the LLMs and the datasets they trained on were made available to everyone for free I'd be tempted to agree that the benefits to society would be worth it, but instead those creative works and the distillation of all available knowledge are being tightly controlled, censored, and leased out by a small number of corporations only to those who can afford to pay "a significant monthly fee" and many of those people are in turn just trying to profit from their access to the uncompensated work of others.