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Comment by captainbland | Hacker News Reader

I think it would be totally incoherent to say that copyrighted information is essentially fair game to include in your model but the outputs of your model are privileged against being included in other models.

I'm not sure "competition" is necessarily the right word but I don't think that model creators and their political backers have a leg to stand on when complaining about distillation.

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Exactly. AI companies distilled the whole internet into AI weights, now other AI companies are distilling their work to generate new AI weights. Nothing wrong with that, and the world gets open weights AI models.

The accusation of theft by anyone is really only as strong as their financial capability to enforce it. The leg that the model companies stand on is their bank account, which is increasingly becoming the only force that moves the needle in this economic and political environment.

If your recommendation algorithm always recommends B when it sees A, and I derive this information from exfiltrating your masked data , is it not theft simply because I didn’t unmask the true identity of A and B?

Stole all other important information embedded in the relationship (the essence of the relationship itself).

This is not seen as theft to only two or three types of people:

1) Technically ignorant

2) Or Technically ignorant and morally bankrupt

3) Truly evil, a combination of technically capable, and morally bankrupt.

(An “Abomination” is also possible, unaware and unable to perceive morality , not just mere ignorance. For example, it is tremendously generous to call an Abomination ignorant or amoral, that’s a compliment to such a thing. Would Jensen Huang know about the words coming out of his mouth, is the true question really.)

> I think it would be totally incoherent to say that copyrighted information is essentially fair game to include in your model but the outputs of your model are privileged against being included in other models.

IANAL, but going from copyrighted texts to an AI model likely constitutes a new original creation, not a slavish reproduction. Whereas going from one AI model to another is more likely to be considered a slavish reproduction reproduction, although arguably AI models are not copyrightable to the extent that the weights are objective facts, like entries in a phone book.

Downloading and redistributing companies' exact AI models would violate copyright. Querying multiple AI models to form your own model with a unique set of weights does not.

Realistically the companies will organise their data through a network which will involve distributing and storing the copyrighted material without the consent of the copyright holder. This is in and of itself generally ruled to be a breach of copyright irrespective of whether it is fed into a model or not.

And this stance isn’t new - AI output is already considered public domain.

This is not true and there have not been any court cases which decided it.

It's entirely possible for AI output to be copyrighted if it meets the requirements; prompting an AI takes some skill.

As of right now it's true and court decisions on other intelligences creating output is considered public domain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

Acquiring and setting up a camera for the right shot takes some skill. That does not matter.

Yes, copyright requires a human - in much the same way that an LLM requires a prompt. There's a continuum of author involvement that has to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

It's worth noting in your case that no determination of copyright was actually made by a court (well, almost: a court ruled that the monkey definitely didn't have copyright and that even if it did they wouldn't make PETA its guardian).

Some opinions were issued but those are non-binding and eventually the photographer gave up because litigating copyright is expensive.

Saying AI output is public domain is a misinterpretation of that case. The only court case related to the monkey selfies was by PETA, and the court ruled that the monkeys don't hold the copyright. The court didn't rule on who, if anyone, holds the copyright; whether Slater holds the copyright or it's public domain is undecided. The official opinion of the US Copyright Office is that generative AI outputs can be copyrighted by a person "to the extent that their contributions qualify as authorship".

One is allegedly a copyright violation (fair use IMHO but still a grey area legally AIUI), one is a very explicitly a violation of the terms of service you agree to when signing up. And yes I do think that if somebody puts their website behind some barrier where a user has to actively affirm they won't download the contents and use it to train an LLM that should be protected by the same law for the same reason.

So all those authors needed to do was add a TOS page in front of the contents of their books!

many, many websites have terms of service that forbid scraping. how many of those ended up in the training set, I wonder?

How many of those made it an actual barrier requiring an explicit click and not just some CYA text buried in a footer somewhere? Anyway they're free to sue.

Are you arguing that training on copyrighted material is fine but distilling against tos is somehow bad? Lmao what a take. Nah, if copyright cant even be enforced then theres no way on earth violating a tos should ever have repercussions other than they ban you. stop carrying water theyre not gonna pay you

It's so nice of you to think of the poor ignored Terms of Use rather than merely clicking the nag box to proceed like everyone else. Maybe with some more positive attention the Terms might become less depressed, abstain from binge eating, and stop putting on pounds of new paragraphs every year.

Edit: I realize I can't justify this and it's an irresponsible comment. Please ignore it.

Original:

Smells like a CEO justifying theft. It is reasonable to believe Wong thinks differently about law breaking, given this article.

Something something legal liabilities something something?

Which one? Seems like there's a lot of it going about.

I'm not sure I can defend my comment. So I'm feeling like taking it back.

Regarding CEOs - it looks pretty common yes.

I think rule breaking is a quality I've seen in entrepreneurs, thinking differently to use that euphemism. Challenging the dominant paradigm, to be tongue-in-cheek.

I imagine it's a quality engendered by business leadership schools or maybe Market economics? To Find a need and fill it, but taken to the extreme. Can be figuring out where the illegal line is and walking it.

Next, Commenting on the actual article again ..

China, the Chinese government has a known history of stealing technology from other nations. (Aside: I assume all governments do this, State-Sponsored espionage/industrial or whatever.) So that is actual theft. China is also supporting industries that it considers strategically important to success. I am ignorant at the difference between, or limitation of reach of a Chinese government supported influence of theft activities, versus a business that happens to be in China and exhibits theft behavior All on its own.

The area that I'm puzzling about is noticing how this business leader is in a position, through extraordinary concentration of wealth and power, to influence the efficacy of state-sponsored industrial espionage by helping to propose state-level policies by the United States and internationally. I don't know if the word oligarchy is the right word, but, it's like a corporation can author international financial and political policy. Pretty wild considering Nvidia was just like a $80 stock back in in the late '90s.

I have no comment one way or the other, other than to say that I really respect this kind of attitude in discourse. Realizing you can’t defend an argument, and choosing not to just dig in and fight, is exactly the kind of thing that makes us better as a society. I hope I can be more like you!

And building a tool that can reverse-engineer other people’s products but going out of your way to prevent yours being reverse-engineered.

I agree that AI companies shouldn’t be allowed to bar distillation under grounds of fairness and societal benefit.

But I don’t see how copyright has anything to do with anything. Copyright is a legal concept, not an ethical concept. Training an LLM on copyrighted material is legal. Ethically, whether a work that the LLM trained on is copyrighted or not has no relevance

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