I think you are walking all around the word "consent" and trying very hard to avoid it altogether.
Your perspective, because it refuses to include any sort of consent, is invalid. No perspective that refuses consent can be valid.
Free use is an important part of intellectual property law. If it did not exist, the powerful could, for example, stifle public criticism by declaring that they do not consent to you using their words or likeness. The ability to do that is important for society. It is also just generally important for creating works inspired by others, which is virtually every work. There has to be lines for cases where requiring attribution is required, and cases where it is not.
I am not representing your words as mine. I am not using your words to profit off. I am not making a gain by attributing your words to you.
> There has to be lines for cases where requiring attribution is required, and cases where it is not.
You are blurring the lines between "using a quote or likeness" and "giving credit to". I am skeptical that you don't know the difference between the two.
Regardless, any "perspective" that disregards the need to acquire consent is invalid. Even if you are going to ignore it, you have to acknowledge that you don't feel you need any consent from the people you are taking from.
This whole "silence is consent" attitude is baffling.
I do not think that, if you read, say, https://steveklabnik.com/writing/when-should-i-use-string-vs... , and then later, a friend asks you "hey, should I use String or &str here?" that you need my consent to go "at the start, just use String" instead of "at the start, just use String, like Steve Klabnik says in https://steveklabnik.com/writing/when-should-i-use-string-vs... ". And if they say "hey that's a great idea, thank you" I don't think you're a bad person if you say "you're welcome" without "you should really be saying welcome to Steve Klabnik."
It is of course nice if you happen to do so, but I think framing it as a consent issue is the wrong way to think about it.
We recognize that this is different than simply publishing the exact contents of the blog post on your blog and calling it yours, because it is! To me, an LLM is a transformative derivative work, not an exact copy. Because my words are not in there, they are not being copied.
But again, I am not telling anyone else that they must agree with me. Simply stating my own relationship with my own creative output.
Until that question is settled, it’s disingenuous to dismiss his points out of hand as conflating fair use or ignoring consent.
However, I don't feel comfortable suggesting that this is settled just yet, one district judge's opinion does not mean that other future cases may disagree, or we may at some point get explicit legislation one way or the other.
There's a doctrine in Fifth Amendment law called "fruit of the poisonous tree." The general rule is that prosecutors don't get to present evidence in a criminal trial that they gained unlawfully. It's excluded. The jury never gets to see it even if it provides incontrovertible evidence of guilt. The point is to discourage law enforcement from violating the rights of the accused during the investigative process, and to obtain a warrant as the Amendment requires.
It seems to me that the same logic ought to be applied to these companies. They want to make money by building the best models they can. That's fine! They should be able to use all the source data they can legitimately obtain to feed their training process. But if they refuse to do so and resort to piracy, they mustn't be allowed to claim that they then used it fairly in the transformative process.
Anthropic legally acquired the data and re-trained on it before release.
"[T]he test requires that we contemplate the likely result were the conduct to be condoned as a fair use — namely to steal a work you could otherwise buy (a book, millions of books) so long as you at least loosely intend to make further copies for a purportedly transformative use (writing a book review with excerpts, training LLMs, etc.), without any accountability."
See also p. 31:
"The downloaded pirated copies used to build a central library were not justified by a fair use. Every factor points against fair use. Anthropic employees said copies of works (pirated ones, too) would be retained 'forever' for 'general purpose' even after Anthropic determined they would never be used for training LLMs. A separate justification was required for each use. None is even offered here except for Anthropic’s pocketbook and convenience."
Despite this consideration, the court still found for Anthropic on the question of fair use.
> The copies used to train specific LLMs were justified as a fair use.
This is (in my understanding) because those were not the pirated copies.
> The copies used to convert purchased print library copies into digital library copies were justified, too, though for a different fair use.
Buying a book and then digitizing it for purposes of training is fair use.
> The downloaded pirated copies used to build a central library were not justified by a fair use.
Piracy is not fair use, you quoted this part as well.
In the conclusions section a the end of 31:
> This order grants summary judgment for Anthropic that the training use was a fair use. And, it grants that the print-to-digital format change was a fair use for a different reason. But it denies summary judgment for Anthropic that the pirated library copies must be treated as training copies.
Training is fair use. Pirating is not fair use, and therefore, you can't train on that either.
What part am I missing?
Anthropic settled the case with the publishers just a few months later, leaving the question mostly unsettled still.
And yes, you are right, the legal and moral question of fair use in training data hasn't been settled yet; we agree here.
Look, I'm not saying that you are doing that, I'm pointing out that "Silence is consent" is not as strong an argument that many think it is.
What has been "taken", exactly?
Where are you going with this line of thought? That making a copy of someone's work, using it for profit and not crediting them doesn't "take" anything from them?
"making a copy of someone's work, using it for profit and not crediting them" wasn't really the scenario being discussed in this thread -- is that what you meant by "taking"?
Steve had made the point:
Not every single thing in the entire world requires explicit consent.
That doesn't preclude other instance where explicit consent is not required. For example, do I need your consent to learn from your work and produce similar work of my own? Am I required to credit you in my work for having learned from you? Am I taking from you if I don't share my profits with you?
Some rights holders would say yes, actually. Which, I don't agree with. I think it's important that we not require the artist's explicit consent for all things, because listening to some of rights holders (e.g. Disney), they have very expansive ideas about what kind of control they are owed by society over their creations.
Therefore, I think if you're going to claim something has been taken, you should specify what exactly.
In most cases, no, I (and it seems most others) don't feel the need for that, it is only you who seems to have an ideological hangup over this.
It's not an ideological hangup, it's confusion over the assumption by certain groups that "silence is consent", when it is not.
You may need to clarify that thought.
I don't think the poster has a viewpoint that 'refuses consent', their viewpoint is their writing they put for others to view is for others to view, regardless of how it is viewed. They seem to be giving consent, not refusing it, no?
Who said anything about refusing consent?
> Your perspective, because it refuses to include any sort of consent, is invalid. No perspective that refuses consent can be valid.
This is what I was responding to. I do not understand your thinking in this post.
I thought it was clear from "refuses to include any sort of consent" that I am talking specifically about holding an opinion that refuses to include consideration for consent, not refuses consent for usage.
How is freely giving consent for (all) others to read your content not 'considering consent'?
I'm not trying to be snarky. I really don't see the missing piece that isn't written that connects those dots.