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Comment by recursive | Hacker News Reader

What's the argument? What's been done by anyone that's shitty? I don't even understand the point of this post. As far as I know, the current wave of text-based AIs is trained on all text accessible on the internet. Would it be a scandal to learn that ChatGPT is trained on wikipedia? Reddit? What is even the argument here, good faith or otherwise?

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The argument is these companies are using our ideas created by us humans in this thing called the interenet for free and without attribution and it's problematic.

You can't own ideas, they got their own life-cycle.

Right, but I do think you can "own" (by which I mean our societally-mediated legal definition of ownership in the anglosphere) specific sequences of text or at least the right to copy them?

I'm not necessarily arguing against you, but "problematic" is too generic a term to be useful. Genocide is "problematic". Having to run to the bathroom every 5 minutes to blow my runny nose is "problematic". What do you actually mean?

Responding to sibling comment: We need some clarification here: are we speaking about just ideas in the abstract sense, or ideas that have been fleshed out i.e "materialized"

If the latter, there are many laws that say you can own an idea, provided it exists somewhere.

From an open source point of view it would be better if scraping proprietary LLMs would be allowed. Small LMs need this infusion of data to develop.

But the big news is that it works, just a bit of data can have a large impact on the open source LLMs. OpenAI can't have a moat in their proprietary RLHF dataset. Public models leak, they can be distilled.

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