We're having to rediscover in real time the extremely hard way, why enabling mass theft is so incredibly damaging to society. This is literally why we need a functional copyright system
If theft becomes more profitable than genuine creation, then nobody will create anything. Then there's nothing to steal, at which point all progress collapses
What theft? LLM output has never been copyrightable.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. GP was referring to the use of copyrighted material to train LLMs.
Which is not "theft" according to current legal precedent, and also common sense.
Download a book and you are a thief
Download 1 million books and you are OpenAI
What? HN has always praised Library Genesis for example.
Libgen isn’t trying to sell you back the content for $100/month. No one would be complaining if OpenAI open sourced their models.
the second part is definitely not true
No one's complaining about stolen content from any of the labs releasing open source models
Hunting an animal would be considered ok by most, but scaling it to the point of damage is not ok according to most.
It is theft under common sense.
Only in the sense that you reading a book from the library also constitutes theft of knowledge. Does it?
If I stole someone's private research notes and republished them loosely in my own words, they'd correctly be pissed
This was unpublished research that was stolen, and constitutes plagiarism and academic fraud by even the strictest definition
They are not “private research notes” if they are generated by an LLM.
The prompts they put in are the equivalent
>This was unpublished research that was stolen, and constitutes plagiarism and academic fraud by even the strictest definition
It was not stolen, it was willingly given.
The terms of service does not dictate what constitutes plagiarism
1. using copyrighted material to train LLMs is fair use, not theft
2. The topic we are dissussing concerns LLMs being trained on logs from previous LLM chats. If you're prompting a model and it spits out some unique mathematical insight, you do not have copyright on that.
Nobody owns math and it is ridiculous to suggest someone should.
> why enabling mass theft is so incredibly damaging to society. This is literally why we need a functional copyright system
What is interesting is that LLM's do not directly violate copyright. The settlements we have seen are for how the works were acquired (that was a copyright violation) not the use of the works.
The vectors of a book, or a paper, are not the paper. They are, for all intents, facts about the work itself, and more generally writing. You can not copyright a fact.
It also means that the weights, the things that (mostly) matter can not be copyrighted either.
This is literally why we need a functional copyright system
To block progress. Got it.
This is the literal opposite of progress: stealing from people genuinely creating, and stealing the money they should earn
Funny, the stuff that was stolen is still there. A strange kind of theft.
Copyright maximalism is a bad look on a site called "Hacker News." Perhaps other sites beckon.
> Copyright maximalism is a bad look on a site called "Hacker News." Perhaps other sites beckon.
Frankly it's more of an insult to the "hacker" name to be apologising for big companies profiting off of frontrunning existing work for PR purposes, if the claims about piggybacking on human-directed efforts/prompting are true.
Being pro-copyright in order to protect the work of an individual from being reconstituted into the corporate machine is VERY hackery. Novel use for an existing tool, to fight the dominant system.
(Of course, we're on a so-called "hacker" site hosted by a company run by squarely-establishment individuals acting in an extremely un-hackery-field (investing), so the irony here has been at least one layer deep since the start.)
In my mind being a hacker is something very anarchist/left libertarian coded. Hackers don't try and get laws passed to achieve their goals, they do it themselves no matter if it's legal or not. Activists fight for right to repair, hackers jailbreak their device and publish the keys. We need both to fight big tech effectively.
Copyright is not a hacker thing because it restricts peoples freedom to share and hack on anything they see. Now abusing a bad system to do something good, as you said, would be hackery. But that's not the same thing as supporting copyright as it is right now or wanting to expand it. It needs to be in the spirit of "we turn their own tools against them". The ultimate goal is still eliminating IP laws as far as they limit individuals free speech.
It would be different if it was an asymmetric system. Protect creators from companies trying to make money off their work, but not the companies from users taking their profits. That would mean switching to a form of copyright that only applies to commercial use and abolishing work for hire / any form of rights assignment as opposed to a license. That's one idea I can get behind.
"Corporate machine," yadda, yadda, whatever, go sell it on Reddit. The model running on the box in my basement is almost as good as the one we're talking about here, and may in fact be just as good by this time next year... and it couldn't have existed under your proposed regime.
Yes, OpenAI is likely to be found to have acted like a slimeball in this instance, or at least the employee in question may have. But you can't fix that without making laws that will make everything else worse... and only here in the US.