I like this comment because its argument only makes sense if you assume that the entire world's output of books and art did not require a huge amount of resources and expertise to make, nor did it add any value.
It's the most CS-major take ever!
It's the most CS-major take ever!
In any case the laws are being written now, but I doubt these will have worse protection than software does, which has far better protections than copyright
Who are you saying owns that IP? The people who trained the model? The people who ran the model? The people who wrote the prompt? The person who paid for all of that to happen?
If the model output is owned by the person prompting it and paying for the tokens, what's the problem here?
If the model output is owned by the trainer of the model, that's a big nasty can of worms.
Software is protected by copyright. Some software may also be protected by patents, but last time I checked, AI generated output of any kind was not patentable.
Also, if model output distillation is shown as some form of reverse engineering I assume the DMCA can apply
I agree that you can't patent a book, but I would point out that you can patent an idea, which may only appear in a book or journal article.
For example, a patent describing a chemical process. The actual idea of how to do it is public domain, go look up the patent. Print it out. Do whatever with those words. Its fine. Building a plant to go do that chemical process to make that same output chemical in that same way, that's IP infringement. Its not the words, its the idea.
Also note that the OpenAI/Anthropic argument is that the model training is sufficiently transformative to satisfy the fair use of the original content for training.
By that same argument, when distilling the distillers aren't using the original content the OpenAI/Anthropic models were trained on - the distillers are interacting only with the "sufficiently transformed" content of the OpenAI/Anthropic models and are normally paying for that.
There is also that old phonebook rule that facts can't be copyrighted. So, if i asked the model about bunch of phone numbers, i can publish the resulting list, can train my model on it, etc. Such approach doesn't allow to reproduce copyrighted works of course - and as we know the AI output isn't copyrightable, so it looks like basically any output i get i can use whatever way i like.
I mean otherwise it’s a very slippery slope, effectively it would give Anthropic the ownership of any code generated by its models..
Whether we think they're paying enough is another question, but "I'm paying for content so can protect it" doesn't seem inconsistent.
We may decide that giving models away for free means they don't have to license content (judging by HN comments), but currently that doesn't seem to be the case as Meta is facing lawsuits for its open models.
(Obligatory stratechery piece: https://stratechery.com/2026/whos-afraid-of-chinese-models/ )
The same principle can be applied to distillation - it is a fair use. You just shouldn't use illegal ways to access the models being distilled.
To the commenter below: if it is illegal - has the police/FBI report been made? Otherwise it is just a civil court matter.
It does seem to be becoming the norm for AI companies to licence premium content in America, judging by the deals they're making. It doesn't seem to be done by the international distillers. It's a cost that American open models will seem to have to pay but not international.
This is a very surprising claim to me (and I imagine many small website owners who keep getting scraped by Anthropic and OpenAI).
Do you have a source?
https://digiday.com/media/a-timeline-of-the-major-deals-betw...
I don't really understand why you think they're relevant, given that this conversation is about the training itself.
Even the news orgs say explicitly in the press releases that it's about training on their archive
eg. http://ap.org/media-center/press-releases/2023/ap-open-ai-ag...
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edit, examples:
Wiley https://newsroom.wiley.com/press-releases/press-release-deta...
Shutterstock https://investor.shutterstock.com/news-releases/news-release...
Axel Springer https://openai.com/index/axel-springer-partnership
Stack Overflow: https://stackoverflow.co/partnerships
Disney (for characters in video. Video is especially where licensing is a big difference internationally right now) https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement
etc.
The news corp one had a leaked price ($250mill), so they don't seem to be insignificant. These would have to be included in API prices I presume.
International distillers doesn't use that premium content, so they don't pay for it. They do pay for their access to the models they are distilling. Thus providing the revenue stream to those models. Thus those models make profit off the content they used for training. The content they mostly have't paid for.
>It's a cost that American open models will seem to have to pay but not international.
It goes both ways - American companies and their business are protected by American laws and have access to the market protected by those laws, etc.
This doesn't seem to be true. They are training on their own scraped data overwhelmingly (we can extract copyright data from, eg, deepseek). They couldn't get nearly enough tokens through the American APIs to train a model on alone.
> American companies and their business are protected by American laws and have access to the market protected by those laws
Absolutely. Currently international providers are selling inference on the American market though, I don't know how that will sit legally the way things are currently going.
MBAs and non technical managers = inept Catbert-type charlatans.
Software engineers, devs, etc = geniuses capable of mastering any domain, innate ability to be right on any topic.
There is no world in which me vacuuming the entirety of human knowledge to make a genai model is ok but hoovering my model answers is not. The hypocrisy is stunning and risible.
Now if you go and make a model based on purely synthetic data and not a single work made by humans, you would have a valid point.
> There is an even higher level of creativity in creating books, songs and all sorts of art used in model training though.
He claimed there was more creativity in model training than in model distillation. That makes no claim about the relationship between the creativity in model creation and art. Why are you continuing to attack a claim that was never made, after a sub thread very explicitly clarifying that that claim was not made?
>Perhaps even more importantly, the current frontier LLM models are self-admittedly the product of enormous quantities of copyright infringement and even less savory inputs, so calling them out for distilling the fruit of that tainted tree reads as highly hypocritical at best.
Context is important. And in this context, their argument only mentions creativity when it belongs to an AI lab. That omission is the blind spot I pointed out. Bottom line is whether or not Anthropic are being hypocritical and yes, they most definitely are, regardless of any attempted sophistry.
There is a reason courts want you to tell "The whole truth" and not just "the truth".
No argument here, I completely agree.
> There is no world in which me vacuuming the entirety of human knowledge to make a genai model is ok but hoovering my model answers is not.
I disagree with this though. Clearly LLMs owe a huge debt to everything that has come before, but surely you'd agree that the models that are produced are something substantial and new and novel which didn't exist before and have lots of value in their own right. Let's be a bit reductive and pretend Moonshot had just outright stolen the weights from Fable somehow, clearly that wouldn't be contributing anything really new or novel. Now of course they've distilled rather than stolen, but the point is similar: how much value have they added along the way?
It's ok for me to use your source code for free as long as I then let others also use my source code for free.
Or maybe they're going through an intermediary "transfer station" that's breaking terms of service:
https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...
Anthropic's own copyright infringement could apparently be forgiven for 1.5B USD after all, so maybe there's a price that breaking the distillation clause for is acceptable too. Or some other arrangement.
Why is Anthropic's ToS any more binding than that of a rabidly-anti-ai literature blog with 50 readers?
> Why is Anthropic's ToS any more binding than that of a rabidly-anti-ai literature blog with 50 readers?
Although I will say, this whole comparison stuff really doesn't seem to be your thing; might impede your analysis quite a lot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49013148
Maybe ask Claude?
I mean i know you know the answer: anthropic is a corporation with lawyers on retainer, and that's really all that matters
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pile_(dataset)
Another reason is that if you can download a web page without agreeing to a ToS, I'm not sure that counts as one?
the same argument - a level of creativity in the world knowledge creation that ins't present in the model training on that knowledge.
Or in other words - model creation and training is just a distilling of the world knowledge.
If you think that the addition of a less creative process (model creation) to a more creative corpus ("art") is problematic, then it follows that you should think the addition of a less creative process (distillation) to a more creative corpus (a model) is also problematic.
Like look, I'm not a native speaker, sure. But I think when someone says "value add", that means there was value there (which you claim they're rhetorically erasing), and then that was added to. Under no interpretation of this phrase do I get an erasure of prior value.
So certainly, as long as words mean anything, no, they absolutely did not say or suggest what you claim they did, and what you extract a thus unreasonable amount of obnoxious schadenfreude from, while throwing in a cheap insult for funsies at the end.
It's the second time I feel compelled to reach for this just today: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/659/979/108...
The LLM output, is not the same as the input - there is value add.
Of course works used as raw inputs to LLMs required work and are reasonably subject to IP concerns - but they are different.
It's possible that the LLM makers 'owe' the content creators that created the content they used to make their products - it's an interesting but separate question.
We could very well end up where content IP is protected, LLM output is not and visa versa with reasonable legal founding, doubtful but plausible.
How, and why?
> We could very well end up where content IP is protected, LLM output is not and visa versa with reasonable legal founding, doubtful but plausible.
That is the current state of legal rulings - LLM output is public domain, not copyrightable.
How, and why?"
How are they even remotely the same?
They're not even used the same way.
One is raw data input, the other is training content - designed to train LLMs.
One is a set of IP derived for other purposes entirely, and has esablished IP law - how you can use someone else's creative work or not ... for LLM outputs, less clear.
Our current laws simply weren’t built for this and I expect the legal status of LLM output is not going to be resolved until Congress actually legislates on this topic.
But it's debatable if that's the case.
Google stores copyrighted content and produces in in their product.
Also - it's fair game to use snippets of things here and there, if the derived work is novel, which I think it is for LLMs, mostly.
I do agree though, that we ought to draw the line somehow.