So they're not valuable... except to AI companies. They should pay a fair amount.
You know, piracy online is nice and simple - but it's kind of hard to get physical media without paying what the previous owner considers "a fair amount" to part with it.
they should pay the marginal value that the next buyer would buy.
Do you also think that a person dying of thirst ought to pay the maximum price they could possibly pay for water?
Well the argument is that they should pay for the right to produce derivative works not for the physical copy.
I'm told some of the recent Qwen models were trained on something like 140TB of data or so. I can put some of the Qwen models on a slightly large USB stick (~32G) . No way that contains the whole source text. No form of compression survives that. It's an old argument, it's still the simplest argument-by-numbers.
The intuition this counters is "it's drawing from a big database" or "it memorized everything". It didn't. It still can recall passages at times. But then again, so can I for my favorite books and movies.
And no I'm not saying it's human, to stop the next big jump.
LLMs are LLMs. They have their own properties. Some of which happen to coincide with human properties. Just like a robot arm has some properties in common with humans.
Similar requirements, similar constraints; you're going to have to expect similar behaviors and failure modes at least some of the time. But I haven't heard anyone claim a robot arm can edit a python program, nor have I heard of an LLM picking 100 widgets per minute.
> derived works
It's not evident that any works are being produced in the legal sense. Since LLM outputs are not considered copyrightable it's probably closer to using a search engine.
I suppose an argument might be made for fair use if they released their model weights publicly without financially profiting from it.
Instead of blindly jumping on a manipulated outrage bandwagon, people would do well to maybe read some of those old books, not even the rare ones - they tend to contain plenty of parables and stories explaining basics of morality and civilized conduct. We used to teach that to kids at homes and in primary education...
Me, as a software engineer, will do research on a company to determine how much they can afford to pay me before giving them my salary range.
And almost every SAAS company charges people differently depending on their needs, even if the underlying software is identical between customers.
So no, I don't think it's inherently immoral to charge different prices to people depending on their ability to pay or use cases. It can be, but it's not a defacto standard.
Turning it the other way around is it deeply immoral and sociopathic for someone to hoard massive amounts of money/resources if there are people dying or suffering around them (even if not on the spot but e.g. due to poor access to healthcare)?