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Comment by Der_Einzige | Hacker News Reader

In practice this matters less than you think. You can’t easily prove that any outputs were generated by a particular model in general, so any user can simply ignore your licenses and do as they please.

I know it rustles purist feathers, but I don’t understand why we live in this pretend world that assumes that folks particularly care about respecting licenses. Consider how little success that the GNU folks have had with using the courts for any enforcement of their licenses, and that’s by stallmans own admission.

AI is itself a subversive technology, whose current versions rely on subversive training techniques. Why should we expect everyone to suddenly want to follow the rules when they read a poorly written restrictive open source license?

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For personal or noncommercial use I agree the restrictions are meaningless. As they are for "bad actors" that would potentially abuse the tools in contravention of the license. But the license terms are a risk for commercial users especially when dealing with a big company like Meta. These risks werent previously there in say pytorch that is MIT licensed. The ironic thing with these licenses is that they are least enforceable on those who would be most likely to abuse them: https://katedowninglaw.com/2023/07/13/ai-licensing-cant-bala...

Re success of free licenses, linux (other than a few arguable abuses) has remained free and unencumbered thanks to GPL licensing.

Somehow the "AI defense" (namely that it is not possible to "prove" anything was used illegally) will open Pandora's box in terms of providing viable channels for whitewashing explicit theft activity. Steal anything proprietary, run it through an AI filter that mixes it with other stuff and claim it as your own.

A human could have done that at any point in the past. The only novelty is now a machine can do it.

The scale and ease of doing it matter.

It's like the difference between a bunch of shops having security cameras that they can look at the footage from, versus having every such camera connected to a wide surveillance network with facial recognition and querying abilities. Both are technically just a bunch of cameras in the same places, but not many people would argue it's the same thing.

Nope. Its the other way around. A human could not do it, but a machine can. Or at least it can fake that it can. And the trend seems to be to put the burden on the victim to prove the wrongdoing.

The AI bros who celebrate this development probably think the benefit they will extract by committing this on others exceeds the negatives of others committing it on them.

Good luck.

> You can’t easily prove that any outputs were generated by a particular model in general

But we also don’t know if there’s a trick up the sleeve that allows any of those models to be asked a very specific question that will result in a very specific answer.

Similarly to how map makers hide mistakes in their maps that they can point to when they want to prove that someone took their maps and presented it as their own.

Imagine using Llama for a customer support bot with a custom prompt, but there exist some phrase you don’t know that will make it say something that only Llama would say in response to that.

> But we also don’t know if there’s a trick up the sleeve that allows any of those models to be asked a very specific question that will result in a very specific answer.

So sanitize user input. Don't let the question get asked the specific way the user wanted it to.

Take a page out of OpenAI's book and sanitize the output too.

Matters a lot for any company trying to use them. There are licensing agreements, security audits, legal approval, etc. that make using any of these proprietary license models quite hard if not impossible

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