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Comment by chii | Hacker News Reader

> blindly trusting they won't train on any of that

being allowed to train on any data that you can legally obtain ought to be a right for anyone.

After all, i am allowed to learn off anything i can legally read (and perhaps even illegally read). The only thing not allowed (rightly so) is to produce a copy with enough similarities that it can be replacing the original.

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It's a bit different when "training on any data" means basically storing a lossily-compressed copy of that data, that could be spit out years later if the model decides to do so.

It's exactly the same problem as with humans, though.

It's part of why we sign NDAs, and why their duration is measured in years (and that's not even targeting the human retention - just duration after which information ages enough that its disclosure is not likely to negatively impact anyone who cares).

It's not exactly the same problem, in that you can parallelize usage of an LLM and copy it over to another computer, but cannot do the same things with a brain. Put it another way, humans do not have the processing power needed to answer hundreds of millions of queries per day, while LLMs do.

It’s not because humans are rate limited which is the entire point.

Weirdly I think humans should have more rights than machines

Yes, but in a big way, denying capabilities to LLMs is denying the capability for people to exercise the rights they have. LLMs are user agent tools.

Yes, but i cannot create a robot that can get married, people do not have the right to give personhood to tools

> being allowed to train on any data that you can legally obtain ought to be a right for anyone.

I have the opposit viewpoint to the extreme. They shouldn't be allowed to even read that data until they are very clear about what they will or not do with it.

Can they publish it? Can they store it? Can they use the information in it on prediction markets? Etc.

Humans reading texts historically come with little negative consequences, but machines reading and processing texts en masse is more dangerous and should be regulated.

> Humans reading texts historically come with little negative consequences, but machines reading and processing texts en masse is more dangerous and should be regulated.

Citation needed. This is sounding tautological.

Not really hard to find example: License plate ALPR like Flock ?

And not really hard to find examples of humans reading text being way more consequential than that. See: the Bible, nazi propaganda, etc.

A legislative solution to Flock seems a lot more feasible than one for literacy

> Humans reading texts historically come with little negative consequences

IDK, we do have laws against opening other people's mail. Those have been on the books for hundreds of years. Seems like someone figured out a while ago that certain unauthorized humans reading certain restricted text wouldn't be good.

> After all, i am allowed to learn off anything i can legally read (and perhaps even illegally read).

Are you a tool?

Because humans gets rights, tools don't.

Arguing that untrained or partially trained models should have have rights is a different argument to arguing that a trained model should get the same rights as a human.

What if I'm reading it for work? What am I but a tool for the corporatioN?

Are you claiming that you have no human rights while you are at work?

At the risk of stating the obvious, there are a lot of legal rights that are human-specific (voting, holding office, filling lawsuits, etc.). It's not at all obvious why you think that you as a human being legally allowed to learn from something implies that it should be legal to train an LLM on.

> The only thing not allowed (rightly so) is to produce a copy with enough similarities that it can be replacing the original.

But LLMs are replacing the original, just in different words.

And what does 'legally obtain' mean in this context? Copyrighted content is usually licensed for specific purposes. So if a license is given from training your LLM, then by all means do! But what if the license is 'for personal use'... ?

Oh so if I use mickey mouse in a completely original production that doesn't replace the existing work by Walt Disney, you reckon they'll be fine with that?

You are one person. The corporation is not. Scale matters

> You are one person. The corporation is not. Scale matters

Correct, if you violate it too often to count, you have to pay around less than ~2.5ct per violation.

So the lesson here is: Create a company to do torrenting professionally, and resell its values for higher prices. Then get sued and pay a dime on the dollar you made.

edit: Actually it's 2.5ct per violation.

Anthropic settled for $3,000 per book(1) in the settlement, so it provably depends of whether the government likes you or not.

(1) https://apnews.com/article/ai-anthropic-copyright-settlement...

Why would that be a legal right?

Why should we hand over even MORE power to the owner class?

In a fantasy world this could be possible yes.

Copyright (or any other such restriction on free use of information) creates power for owners by the simple fact that it turns information into something that can be owned.

We don't hand over more power to the owner class by making fewer things ownable.

Make it a right, then companies/universities will think twice before using said APIs. Instead of this grey area where we will never know.

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