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Comment by class4behavior | Hacker News Reader

It's a buzzword salad for investors or users, not developers. DYI stuff is cheaper and you can pretend to be an expert in everything (at least until you'll ruin everything). Input data is free as it's stolen from the internet just as other companies do it.

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why is it stolen ? Assuming you are using data from the public internet. Why would someone consider that "stolen data" ?

For text-to-image models there are currently two major lawsuits because they were trained on copyrighted pictures. I'm not aware of any such lawsuits for text, but in terms of copyright, text isn't very different from images.

I'm not aware of a text lawsuit either, but there is one for code: https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/. I'm a little surprised there isn't one for text yet, since the Washington Post published an article detailing how many tokens from websites, including those run by major media companies, go into large models: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/a.... It may be that corporations think they can profit off these models to a greater extent than they are subject to damages, that their attorneys simply don't think they have a case, or that they want to see how the image and code lawsuits go first. This is all speculation, however.

One of the image lawsuits is by Getty, a stock photo repository. The business model of stock photo services is directly threatened by text-to-image models. The equivalent to this would be book publishers who can't sell their books anymore because everything is written by LLMs, which doesn't seem as imminent a threat.

It doesn't matter if there are lawsuits if none of them are successful.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves and assume we know how they'll turn out.

Law does not equate to morality. They are two free floating things. Lawsuit or not, it doesn't make something that isn't theft, theft.

Because information wants to be free until it’s to train an LLM. Then you need everybody having ever typed anything on the internet to approve.

There is this thing called "copyright".

>stolen from the internet

Is it illegal to walk into a library, read a book, then walk back out with your memory of the book contents?

Libraries acquire proper licenses for a particular manner of use. That license takes into account what a human and technology are capable of. Moreover, even beyond that, you aren't allowed to just utilize an IP however you wish just because you managed to memorize the contents.

I'm not someone in favor of overly broad copyright and authors' rights but it's certainly not an either nothing or everything dilemma.

Stolen in the context of someone claiming “we did this all ourselves in-house”.

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