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Comment by 47282847 | Hacker News Reader

“Information wants to be free“.

It’s not “theft of labor”; the work was already done. If anything it is theft of “intellectual property” (aka “copyright infringement”), if you believe that is a thing, but not of the “labor” that went into it.

My personal take: anyone producing content, everyone’s creativity, is fed by something that others did before. We’re all standing on the shoulders of giants composed of previous generations and their “content’s” distribution and dissemination. I have an immense gratitude for all the labor before me that I was and am allowed to partake; without that, I would be nothing. Sharing information is an act of love; gatekeeping it is short-sighted greed. New technologies have always “killed” previous “labor”, out of which new opportunity grows. I just wished the collected data was public. I hope we all get a mega-leak at some point.

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"I just wished the collected data was public. "

That's the entire contention here. It's a double standard. Companies will sue the living hell out of anyone taking their IP, whether it's code or art, yet they have no qualms taking all the data they need from anyone and everyone. It was already a problem before, i.e. artists getting paid very little for work that companies profit a lot from like musicians or digital artists, but now with AI it's on steroids.

On the flip side, output from an LLM is not copyrighted.

That has not been decided. The only thing that's been decided is that the LLM itself does not have copyright on its output.

I think the difference is that the companies are dumping billions of dollars into transforming that data into something useful, so they would like a return on their profits. Opening up the models for free is not a good business model if you want to make money.

I think the difference is that people are investing significant amounts of time, effort, and money into transforming their work into something useful, so naturally they would like some return on that investment. Giving away that work for free is not a particularly good business model if those people expect to be compensated for the value they create.

There’s too many implicit assumptions in that sentence that run afoul of the conversation.

Just spending money doesn’t mean it’s legal, for example. Criminals expect RoI too.

Other companies have no qualms about distilling the first. Let's hop on gear and get the market to deliver a distilled Fable that runs on a smartwatch. Sooner is better.

I don't think this trend of open sourcing LLM will continue for a simple reason: Money.

I agree. The double standard is the problem. People have been imprisoned for IP theft, but when these companies commit IP theft on the grandest scale ever imaginable, they're rewarded with trillion dollar IPOs. Either IP isn't protected, or it is. Legislators need to pick a lane. Right now it appears that poor people go to prison, and rich people get rewarded.

IP does not protect the little guy. This is nothing new. Draw a picture and then people start putting it on t-shirts and posters without paying you? Great, you can't do anything about it unless you have enough time and money to hire a lawyer to go after them. Self publish a book and then people start uploading PDFs of it? Better hope your real passion is filing takedown requests instead of writing.

Legislators have consistently picked a lane. Protect the rich and powerful.

AI training is the clearest example yet that companies are allowed to get away with what is treated as a serious crime only when an individual does it. There are many more examples of this, of course, but this one seems to be the most stark and obvious.

Huey Freeman: "Kim Dotcom was pissed."

Anthropic getting angry other AIs are trained on their AIs output is, to me, one of the stupidest things I’ve read in a while.

I sort of agree, and i think strengtening IP Law is probably not great. But I do think it's very fucked that building generative ai is only possible by taking the works of countless artists and craftspeople and then the model produced from that data immediately gets deployed to destroy the careers of the people whose, work was vital to it being created, without compensation for them, while making a few evil nerds richer than god. I think if you work at one of these labs you owe an enormous debt to society and your earnings should be redistributed among it.

> I think if you work at one of these labs you owe an enormous debt to society and your earnings should be redistributed among it.

Now we’re getting somewhere. Let’s start with redistributing the profits from AI companies and then move on to all profits from all companies because the logic is the same.

Nope. You are making one or both of these mistakes. (1) Overlooking that the same logic can lead to different outcomes depending on the premises to which the logic is applied. (2) Overlooking that real life is analog, not digital, and so thinking the premises are the same when they are not.

The targeted outcome is the redistribution of wealth away from the capital class to the working class. Capitalist exploitation of labor was analog to begin with, and the same premise does apply: the capital class absorbs the fruits of labor, training, and education that is performed by the masses in order to enrich themselves. The capital class owes a tremendous debt to society and if they don't plan on paying we should plan to seize it.

And how has exproproation been working out for you? What is that? Massive poverty and nobody wants to trade with you?

The exploitation of labor has has a tremendous negative impact on the environment and the health of humans. Recall that it took dragging the factory bosses from their and beating them to death to get an 8 hour work day, a weekend, and restrictions on child labor.

We can do it the easy way —- government redistribution of excess profits — or we can do it the hard way. I suspect the people in charge won’t realize they could have taken the easy way until it’s too late.

Pretty sure we had to sanction/assassinate/goad into self-destructive military campaigns the Red Terror to beat it. And even then, the major survivor still beat us to cyberpunk dystopia (the cool one with hologram skyscrapers, not the uncool one with decaying suburbs).

the problem at this point is none of those AI companies are profitable or are even flirting with the possibility of being profitable

How will you redistribute to people in Japan, for example?

The profits and income is earned in America. The idea that America would pay manga artists whose work was copied is … beyond idealistic.

Well the future we seem to be getting is “information wants to be free for the first ten thousand tokens, then $1 per million tokens after”.

Your point notwithstanding, that's still a bargain.

> Sharing information is an act of love

Most AI companies are not sharing it, though. They appropriated it and resell it.

Yikes. That’s some deep entitlement.

Unfortunately in the real world there’s this thing called money, and we exchange it for goods and services. The reason information isn’t free is because it costs time to produce it and people need to be fed.

If you believe that a creator doesn’t need to consent and doesn’t deserve credit or compensation for their work, then you’re likely not someone who has many fundamental needs unmet

These AI companies actively chose not to get consent from creators and earn billions from their content with no compensation.

In the past, but today fewer people are getting paid less this way.

Would you rather resurrect IP law, or find some new way to pay creators, then finish killing it?

> In the past, but today fewer people are getting paid less this way.

There has never been more content creators making a living off their content than there is today. Look no further than these enormous platforms with ad rev sharing options for contributors producing UGC.

> Would you rather resurrect IP law, or find some new way to pay creators, then finish killing it?

Uploading content online and getting a cut of ad revenue fits this criteria, no?

The idea that we would scrap IP law and rewrite it from scratch is the very definition of tossing the baby out with the bathwater, IMO.

> There has never been more content creators making a living off their content than there is today. Look no further than these enormous platforms with ad rev sharing options for contributors producing UGC.

And you think anyone is actually making a living this way? It's one of the most extreme winner-take-all markets, even worse than sports and music. Top .1% maybe can live off it, everyone else also has an actual job that pays the bills.

Ad revenue is declining. Most creators make money off sponsorships and Patreon.

IIUC, the question at hand is: does training require a special, separate, license or can you legally acquire a work and then use it for training?

I.E. Anthropic can not pirate a bunch of books and then use those for training, but it can legally purchase the same books and then use those purchased books for training.

> does training require a special, separate, license or can you legally acquire a work and then use it for training?

No. But it's not about current precedence or legality because the legal framework for accurately (according to general moral and societal acceptance) is decades behind where it needs to be. The courts will decide over the next few years.

There’s a difference between an individual creating something and the industrialization of creation. You can’t scale the creation of a single person 1000000x by the snap of a finger but you can with machines. This has severe implications.

>"Information wants to be free".

I agree wholeheartedly and in keeping with that, I call upon frontier AI labs to release both their weights and training sets.

Just because “information wants to be free” is a thing people say doesn’t mean it’s true.

> anyone producing content, everyone’s creativity, is fed by something that others did before

The thing I produce does not replace demand for the original though?

I can’t recite the original for a million people

> It’s not “theft of labor”; the work was already done. If anything it is theft of “intellectual property” (aka “copyright infringement”), if you believe that is a thing, but not of the “labor” that went into it.

If you cross out "intellectual" from these sentences, isn't this just the dichotomy of actual workers as living labor vs capital as dead labor?

The key problem is that IP is either proprietary to the creator or it is a commons type of situation.

Even if you agree with the former exploiting the commons for personal profit is... not good.

One could make the argument that if these LLMs were all open weight it would be okay, but to keep the result of the training private and proprietary is not fair.

> “Information wants to be free“

What about the rest of that quote?

By your argument, I should be able to directly copy a book and sell it myself. The work was already done! What's more, they were fed by everyone's creativity, so of course I should be able to sell an exact copy.

In reality, the short-sighted greed is allowing widespread theft of intellectual property; do you think the number of writers would increase or decrease if there were no protections against content theft?

If you have such "immense gratitude", pay for the work.

Most likely increase, despite your intuition. This argument has been debunked so many times both intellectually and empirically. For one, read "Against Intellectual Property" by Stephan Kinsella.

I find Kinsella's argumentation extremely weak, and his defense of it (e.g. his AMA) entirely unconvincing. Unless you susbscribe to a number of very daring assumptions which, in my view, do not at all track with our reality, his ideas just don't hold up.

That being said, in this scenario of yours, how much of that additional work do you figure would be actually original? If someone wants to make a living with music, why bother learning an instrument and writing songs if nobody can stop them from just recording someone else and selling that?

That's really the heart of this lawsuit, isn't it? If we give freeloaders the right to legally monetise other people's work, we will drown in bland, derivative, stolen garbage and drive out the actual creators, in the process also breaking the "business model" of the freeloaders. A real lose-lose-lose situation which I see as much more realistic and believable than Kinsella's libertarian dream world.

Not much need for extrapolation, either. We can just watch it happen right now. "Content production" on the web is definitely exploding, as per your point. But even in the mainstream, most people will agree that this flood of new, LLM-generated "works" is worth less than the originals they're sloppy pastiches of.

I think you’re confusing fan in and fan out.

You wouldn't be standing on the shoulders of giants without IP laws, bub. Your "immense gratitude" is a farce.

So by definition creative labor cannot be stolen? Seems like flawed logic to me.

Taking the original of a painting from your house is stealing. Copying is only potentially violating the government-granted limited-time exclusivity that allows you to decide who can copy your work.

BTW I hereby allow you or your browser to copy this comment into your computer’s RAM.

It's telling that you need to fall back to non-creative information in your argument.

Clearly we're talking about the labor of creating a written or visual work, not the contents of your ram. I did not use the word copy either. My interpretation of the parent comment is that it was rationalizing by claiming all creativity is not fully original and therefore must have no rights.

Extrapolated further, this is a collapse of creative works as a profession.

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