What is inspiration? What is imitation? What is plagiarism? The lines aren't clearly drawn for humans... much less for LLMs.
I can absolutely guarantee you that neither DeepSeek nor Alibaba's highly talented Qwen group will care even a little bit, in the long run. Not if there's value to be had in AI. (And I can tell you down to the dollar what LLMs can save in certain business use cases.)
If the US decides to unilaterally shut down LLMs, that just means that the rest of the world will route around us. Whether this is good or bad is another question.
LLMs are a drop on a hot stone compared to countless other factors why the world already is routing around the US - but I don't want to get political or economical.
You're talking as if they are some kind of nationalized or publically-owned asset, as opposed to a bunch of for-profit, privately-owned silos.
Even if ChatGPT, Huggingface, etc. died, we would still have the models and we would still be able to run them.
The firms pouring trillions of dollars into them want to own their creative output, and charge rent for access to it.
They won't be leapfrogging 'us'.
They'll be leapfrogging some privately owned, for-profit business.
Frankly, I don't give two shits about that, and I fail to see why anyone who doesn't own one of them should give one.
If they want me to have skin in the game, they should share either the profits, or the models. Until they do, it's not 'us', it's 'them'.
My fear is that the US tech won’t be able to compete with state sponsored open source out of China and will move to ban open source or suppress it somehow.
And Alibaba's Qwen team seems to be quite genuinely talented at "small" models, 32B parameters and below. Once you get Qwen3 properly configured, it punches well above its "weight class." I'm still running real benchmarks, but subjectively, it feels like the 32B model performs somewhere between 4o-mini and 4o on "objectively measureable" tasks. It's a little "stodgy" and formal by default, though. We'll see what it looks like when people start fine-tuning it.
If the US dropped off the planet, it would maybe set LLM technology back a year.
Meta did this first I believe?
Please do!!
But seriously, LLMs are useless for anything except the most basic secretarial tasks and even there they still require as much reviewing as a high school intern. The reason executives want to use AI instead of humans is because AI is a capital expense that does not hit the financial the same way that wages do. (Capital expenses are excluded from EBITDA, which is the most common metric for measuring a company's financial performance. But it's become so popular for companies to push expenses to ITDA whenever they can that financial analysts are starting to push back and include ITDA in their analyses.)
In a nutshell, there are 3 ways to look at company financials: the PR way (EBITDA), the financial reporting way (GAAP, which includes ITDA), and the tax way (starts from GAAP or IFRS but with numerous rules on what items are included or excluded).
Shouldn't they have to follow the law?
US AI companies will either make sure that a similar ruling will never be made or they will ignore it and pay the fines. They won't let anybody stop the gravy train.
But then they'd have to actually communicate with people and negotiate consent instead of just hoovering up everything they can get their hands on in their quest to replace it.
You assume that getting tested means the AI trainers lose, and also thar the model architectures that have been developed can’t be retrained from scratch with public domain, owned, and purpose-licensed material. (With several AI companies having been actively pursuing deals to license content for AI training for a while now.)
End of the road for major AI companies, and hopefully something better can be created once it's declared illegal without any murky waters.
There are LLMs trained on data that isn't illegally obtained, OLMo by Ai2 is one such model, that is actually open source and uses open data for training. Just because it's "very difficult" for OpenAI et al shouldn't be an argument to force them to behave ethically anyways. If they cannot survive acting legally, then so be it, sucks for them.
I see no reason why we should even entertain the idea of extending human rights to computer programs, and so far, nobody has been able to give me any good reasons why.
Furthermore, why are we only entertaining the human rights that can be used for profit-driven purposes? Why do LLMs, for example, not have the right to free speech? Or an attorney? It seems highly unethical to grant these computer programs some protections as if they're humans but not grant them personhood. This is akin to slavery, which is something we actually have to consider. Anthropomorphization is a double-edged sword. We cannot simultaneously consider them human when convenient and then consider them programs when it's not. Or, if we want to do that, we need to form coherent argument to why, how, and when.
It's not about the program's rights, it's about the human's rights to use the program. Not the machine's right to do something, but the human's right to do something through a machine, or make a machine do something.
A lot of people just jump to LLMs learning like it's a foregone conclusion. Mm... no. You need to convince people of that. You'll find if you talk to non-tech people, they're not just going to believe you when you say that.
Why isn't an LLM more akin to a database or a compression algorithm? Why is it closer to human learning? After all, humans are humans and we have the exclusive right and power to determine what is human and what isn't. And database and compression algorithms are computer programs, of the same kind as an LLM.
Your causality seems to be inverted here. You seem to be implying that "learning" (or the ingestion and retention of information for the same means) is banned by default for everything, but we decide to allow it for humans as the sole exception. This is not the case. Everything not prohibited is allowed, and "intermediate copies" are considered to be vital to fair use by the court system.
Fair use is pretty complicated. Part of Fair Use is the "The Effect of the Use on the Potential Market for or Value of the Work", which already puts even human commercial endeavors in a tough spot. You can make it work, but you have to really try. Satire like Weird Al or whatever isn't competing with the music it's satirizing, the venn diagram between those markets barely overlap. But a lot of LLM use cases are explicitly meant to obsolesce and siphon value from the things they used.
Like, why go to Getty Images when you could instead go to the glorified database, which has ingested all of Getty Images, and acquire an indistinguishable stock photo for free?
The only reason we're even really entertaining this is because people continually draw parallels to humans. You see, it's not stealing from Getty. It's more like if someone saw Getty Images and then went out and took a photo in that same flat, boring style. Except nobody saw anything. And nobody went out an took a photo.
But unless your argument is that the photo outputs from the GenAI are literally equivalent to the training data, you would agree the end result is the same, right? Anyone can see that the images are not the training data stitched together, so it doesn't even really matter how it all works mechanistically, even though your description ("glorified database") is wrong.
Can GenAI produce indistinguishable images to what's on Getty Images? If you write the prompt correctly, yes. I know because there are services where you can get generated stock images.
That's because you would be redistributing the actual material, just in a really roundabout way. GenAI models are not that, they're not a database and don't work like one.
> Can GenAI produce indistinguishable images to what's on Getty Images?
That doesn't matter because you can't copyright a style. From the point of view of copyright law, it would look like you were copying nothing proprietary/owned at all.
Right, which I’m arguing is what LLMs do just in an even more roundabout way.
The technical details of LLMs don’t actually matter. We don’t really care if they’re a database or not. The question is do they reproduce the source material? And yeah, pretty much they do, in a lot of instances. Not all, but a lot.
To produce yet another analogy, imagine I have a service X. You can pay and I will give you any movie you want. You don’t know how I do it. Is this copyright infringement or not? I would say yes. Now let’s say I reveal the secret - I open up photoshop and painstakingly recreate the movie frame by frame. I might make a mistake here or there. Is this still copyright infringement? I think it is.
Okay, but that is not what's happening here. Demonstratably so. The fact that a model is technically capable of overfitting to certain very repeated points in the training data doesn't mean the entire thing has to be shot down. The non-infringing uses far outweigh the offending ones, by a lot.
If what you say is true, and they do outright copy a lot, then it should be pretty easy for any IP holder to sue anyone who misuses the model that way for copyright infringement on those specific outputs.
Even changes made using simple non-ML algorithms can be transformative according to fair use doctrine, like the thumbnailing of images done by search engines. It's not meant in some spiritual sense.
But, a lot of AI products are specifically and explicitly designed to obsolesce the thing they trained off. No need to go to Encyclopedia X or the NYT, this has the same content.
I don't mean to claim that search engine image thumbnailing is like-to-like in every consideration, just that it demonstrates there's no "human spirit" required in order to qualify as "transformative" as far as fair use is concerned. Search engine image thumbnailing has been found to be transformative, for instance in Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc.: "Google's use of thumbnails is highly transformative."
And, though I'm probably being pedantic here, I think it's important to distinguish that the other fair use factor you allude to is not whether you're "competing against" the original work, but specifically the effect of your use on the market/value of that original work. For example if your documentary uses a clip from a TV show and also happens to air in the same time-slot as that TV show - the extent you compete/displace market for the TV show in general (even as you would had you not included the clip of it) is not what's under consideration, but rather only the additional extent you displace its market specifically due to inclusion of that clip.
Because of that, I'd claim that some machine-learning-based tool that partially displaces the market for a work it was trained on (for instance, Google Translate displacing the market for a translated version of a book) might still be seen reasonably favorably under the market impact factor, so long as the extent it displaces that work is largely independent of whether it has trained on that work specifically (such as if the translation tool could already provide a decent translation of the original book even before having trained on its translated version).
Because the obvious question would be - how can free people compete with that?
https://273ventures.com/kl3m-the-first-legal-large-language-...
So, it's really the majority of companies breaking the law who will be affected. Companies using permissible and licensed works will be fine. The other companies would finally have to buy large collections of content, too. Their billions will have go to something other than GPU's.
Not really sure a claim is good enough. I don't know that you can just go into court and say, "Trust me, I don't use copyrighted material."
And I also can't see any way, other than providing training data and training an identically structured model on that data, that a company can conclusively show that they got the weights in an allegedly copyright free model from the copyright free training data a company provides.
If you did not use copyrighted materials for training, people will not be able to prove that you did, and that should be good enough.
It's a civil matter not a criminal matter so that that doesn't apply.
There is benefit to using them, though. For one, they've tried really hard to be legal. That sets a positive example, shows good faith if they were sued, and reduces risk for those using them (good faith on our part). Also, one can be sure that they can ditch or replace any outputs in the long term if they're ruled illegal. So, we try not to use the A.I.'s in a way where losing access to them seriously damages our business.
That's the best I can offer until legal reforms happen.
If training, one can train it in Singapore on material you he or she has legal access to. Their law pretty much let's you use anything for AI purposes so long as you legally can access it yourself. To further reduce the risk, they should crawl it themselves, too, taking care to avoid risky sources.
So good luck finding the thing that looks exactly like your copyrighted work that's not in the corpus, if you can yeah, you might be able to prove it.
At the end of the day its like a lot of business, where a liability shell game is played out, and if the chain of evidence cant be drawn quite brightly then lawsuits would be frivolous at best.