Comment by cornholio
2 hours ago
It's ironic how AI companies are re-inventing their own form of privately enforced copyright, lobby the government to ban foreign competitors that don't respect it etc., all while spending the last 5 years fighting tooth and nail against the copyright of the training material they're using.
If you can take any book and turn it into a model, because it's "transformative enough", and "AI learns just like a person does", then surely a model distilling another model is transformative and fair use.
They tied themselves into knots fighting the letter of the law, and now, when they need the spirit of the law - that each creator deserves protection for their work - now we devolve to the law of the jungle. Maybe we'll even see LLM book curses, the way medieval scribes damned book thieves to blindness and worms.
Prompt injections hidden into rare books, swallowed by the AI machine.
> then surely a model distilling another model is transformative and fair use.
Yes it is, in the legal/copyright sense of fair use. That's why they ban it in their TOS. Which customers agree to when signing up for the service.
It's one of the things you need to do if you want your company to later become the only company in the world. They also promised that they would treat you nicely afterwards after they get what they want.
I am pretty sure that the goal of these companies at the end is ruling more than what governments can.
Just look at the pattern... they collude, they provide to them whatever is needed, and at some point, if this is not true yet, they will be the ones who will tell them what to do or not, bc you know how humans are, right... blackmailing, mess up the business or shames of people, etc.
It is just a matter of time. The state, as we know it, will collapse or will be greatly reduced, which, from a point of view, is positive, from another, Idk, bc if someone replaces that, we will be in the hands of someone, as usual...
Did we not watch every single supposedly powerful US tech CEO immediately drop in supplication and kiss Trump's ring as soon as he became president? And when Jack Ma got mouthy, Xi locked him in a basement for 3 months and then kept him in exile for another 5 years.
So much for the all-powerful cabal.
And then powerful local LLMs become feasible and everyone and every government self hosts and the megacorps lose all power.
Imagine the United States DoD, CIA, NSA training an LLM on all its top secret intel.
Pretty sure?
Guy this was openly stated more than a decade and half ago by all the current oligarchs
Companies are well within their rights to choose who they sell to. I don't see how this is 'privately enforced copyright'.
Also, copyright has always been privately enforced anyway?
On the one hand, yes; on the other hand, so much of the training data comes from scraping the web that it feels wrong for them to do what they deny others the right to do.
On the third hand, the settlement Anthropic famously had to pay was for copyright infringement because they didn't actually have the right to even access some of the training data they used, so I can see how this might be compatible with the law.
On the fourth hand, I'm saying that as someone who absolutely isn't a lawyer and sometimes gets surprised when reading about copyright cases that sure sound like they ought to have been trademark cases given my limited understanding.
DMCA? Which is actually an American law enforced globally?
Enforcement ultimately happens through law and the legal system.
> If you can take any book and turn it into a model, because it's "transformative enough", and "AI learns just like a person does", then surely a model distilling another model is transformative and fair use.
I mean it quite likely is sort of in the same legal bucket. It won’t stop them suing but it is going to be the legal equivalent of two biologically-related warlords making their champions fight with their hands tied for sport.
Are you willing to denounce each and every Chinese company for equal amounts of IP theft as well then?
They already are? When an American company does it no one cares but when a Chinese company does it, it's shamed publicly in America as a distillation attack?
Only any who hypocritically want protection for their own models (are there any?). The morality of scraping everyone is arguable; it's when you object to being scraped back that you reveal yourself as a scoundrel.
Yes. Two wrongs do not make a right.