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> There are research models out there which are trained on only permissively licensed data

Models whose authors tried to train only on permissively licensed data.

For example https://huggingface.co/bigcode/starcoder2-15b tried to be a permissively licensed dataset, but it filtered only on repository-level license, not file-level. So when searching for "under the terms of the GNU General Public License" on https://huggingface.co/spaces/bigcode/search-v2 back when it was working, you would find it was trained on many files with a GPL header.

I agree with your assessment. Which is why I was proposing a middle-ground where an agreement is setup between the model training company and the collective of developers/artists et all and come up with a license agreement where they are rewarded for their original work for perpetuity. A tiny % of the profits can be shared, which would be a form of UBI. This is fair not only because companies are using AI generated output but developers themselves are also paying and using AI generated output that is trained on other developer's input. I would feel good (in my conscience) that I am not "stealing" someone else's effort and they are being paid for it.

Why settle on some private agreement between creators and ai companies where a tiny percentage is shared, let's just tax the hell out of AI companies and redistribute.

Because the authors of the original content deserve recompense for their work.

That's what the whole copyright and patent regimes are designed to achieve.

It's to encourage the creation of knowledge.

US Constitution, Article I, section 8:

    To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by
    securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the
    exclusive Right to their respective Writings 
    and Discoveries;

Right, it says exclusive rights, which does not translate to "we siphon everything and you get a tiny percentage of our profits", it means I can choose to say no to all of this. To me the matter of compensation and that of authorship rights are mostly orthogonal.

Agreed, but the right to compensation is derived from the right of licensing something you author.

The courts have ruled that something machine generated does not have a human author, so therefore it is not subject to copyright, in the US.

So if enough authors agreed and sued the AI companies to remove their copyrighted elements from the AI training, then that would be a reasonable solution as well.

However, any lawsuit is highly likely to result in some sort of compensation paid if decided in favor of the authors.

> let's just tax the hell out of AI companies and redistribute.

That's not what I favor because you are inserting a middleman, the Government, into the mix. The Government ALWAYS wants to maximize tax collections AND fully utilize its budget. There is no concept of "savings" in any Government anywhere in the World. And Government spending is ALWAYS wasteful. Tenders floated by Government will ALWAYS go to companies that have senators/ministers/prime ministers/presidents/kings etc as shareholders. In other words, the tax money collected will be redistributed again amongst the top 500 companies. There is no trickle down. Which is why agreements need to be between creators and those who are enjoying fruits of the creation. What have Governments ever created except for laws that stifle innovation/progress every single time?

Uh, no? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...

Just because you have a failure of imagination for how government should work, doesn’t mean it can’t work. And stifling innovation is exactly what I want, when that innovation is “steal from everyone so we can invent the torment nexus” or whatever’s going on these days.

Pension fund is an example of what exactly? All countries have pension funds. This has nothing to do with Governments wasting money. Please go beyond tiny European countries that have very few verticals and are largely dependent on outside support for protecting their sovereignty. They are not representative of most of the World.

> As its name suggests, the Government Pension Fund Global is invested in international financial markets, so the risk is independent from the Norwegian economy. The fund is invested in 8,763 companies in 71 countries (as of 2024).

Basically what I said above. You give your tax dollars to Government and it will invest it into top 500 companies. In the Norway Pension Fund case it is 8,763 companies in 71 countries. None of them are startups/small businesses/creators.

> And stifling innovation is exactly what I want, when that innovation is “steal from everyone so we can invent the torment nexus” or whatever’s going on these days.

You are confusing current lack of laws regulating this space with innovation being evil. Innovation is not evil. The technology per se is not evil. Every innovation brings with it a set of challenges which requires us to think of new legislation. This has ALWAYS been the case for thousands of years of human innovation.

> What have Governments ever created except for laws that stifle innovation/progress every single time?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ

In all seriousness without the government you would have no innovation and progress, because it's the public school system, functioning roads, research grants a stable and lawful society that allow you to do any kind of innovation.

Apart from that, you have answered to a strawman. I said redistribute, not give to the government. I explicitly worded things that way because I don't think we should not be having a discussion on policy.

I think we are moving to an economy where the share of profits taken by capital becomes much larger than the one take from labor. If that happens then laborers will have very little discretionary income to fuel consumption and even capitalists will end up suffering. We can choose to redistribute now or wait for it to happen naturally, however that usually happens in a much more violent way, be it hyperinflation, famine, war or revolution.

> Apart from that, you have answered to a strawman. I said redistribute, not give to the government

You said: "let's just tax the hell out of AI companies and redistribute.". Only the Government has the power to tax. Question of redistribution does not even arise without first having the power to the coffers of the Company. Which you nor I have. Government CAN have if it wants to by either Nationalizing the Company or as you said "taxing the hell out of" the company. Please explain how you would go about taxing and redistributing without involving the Government?

> In all seriousness without the government you would have no innovation and progress, because it's the public school system, functioning roads, research grants a stable and lawful society that allow you to do any kind of innovation.

These fall under the ambit of governance and hence why you have a Government. That's the only power Governments should have. Governments SHOULD NOT be managing private enterprises.

> I think we are moving to an economy where the share of profits taken by capital becomes much larger than the one take from labor. If that happens then laborers will have very little discretionary income to fuel consumption and even capitalists will end up suffering. We can choose to redistribute now or wait for it to happen naturally, however that usually happens in a much more violent way, be it hyperinflation, famine, war or revolution.

Agreed. Which is why I was proposing private agreements in the first place (without involving a third-party like the Government which, more often than not, mismanages funds).

> Which is why I was proposing a middle-ground where an agreement is setup between the model training company and the collective of developers/artists et all and come up with a license agreement where they are rewarded for their original work for perpetuity. A tiny % of the profits can be shared, which would be a form of UBI. This is fair

That wouldn't be fair because these models are not only trained on code. A huge chunk of the training data are just "random" webpages scraped off the Internet. How do you propose those people are compensated in such a scheme? How do you even know who contributed, and how much, and to whom to even direct the money?

I think the only "fair" model would be to essentially require models trained on data that you didn't explicitly license to be released as open weights under a permissive license (possibly with a slight delay to allow you to recoup costs). That is: if you want to gobble up the whole Internet to train your model without asking for permission then you're free to do so, but you need to release the resulting model so that the whole humanity can benefit from it, instead of monopolizing it behind an API paywall like e.g. OpenAI or Anthropic does.

Those big LLM companies harvest everyone's data en-masse without permission, train their models on it, and then not only they don't release jack squat, but have the gall to put up malicious explicit roadblocks (hiding CoT traces, banning competitors, etc.) so that no one else can do it to them, and when people try they call it an "attack"[1]. This is what people should be angry about.

[1] -- https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...

>under a permissive license

well, assuming all data that is itself not permissively licensed is excluded

I don't know how far it would get, but I imagine that a FAANG will be able to get the farthest here by virtue of having mountains of corporate data that they have complete ownership over.

They’d probably get the farthest, but they won’t pursue that because they don’t want to end up leaking the original data from training. It is possible in regular language/text subsets of models to reconstruct massive consecutive parts of the training data [1], so it ought to be possible for their internal code, too.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671

Copyright for me not for thee? :) That's a good point though. Maybe they could round trip things? E.g., use the model trained only on internal content to generate training data (which you could probably do some kind of screening to remove anything you don't want leaking) and then train a new model off just that?