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AI giants learn what everyone else on the modern internet already knows (www.businessinsider.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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For years, tech giants have argued that if information is available on the internet, it can be used for AI model development and outputs. They call it fair use. Content owners have tried to prevent this, with no success.

Now Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are discovering what the rest of the internet has already learned through painful experience: once you put something online, people will find ways to use it in ways you don't like and can't stop.

The latest flashpoint is something called "distillation," using the outputs of one AI model to improve another. Anthropic says competitors are harvesting its outputs at scale, turning billions of dollars of research into a shortcut for rivals. OpenAI and Google have made similar warnings recently.

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[–] 47 points 1 week ago (3 children)

This is how we know AI should be a collectivist project, one that isn't owned by large corporations but is funded by taxes and developed in academies, and all IP derived from it falls into the public domain.

Besides which a lot of artists mind a lot less when their material is borrowed by a non-profit, or to serve a public works project. (There are exceptions. Disney is notoriously litigious about murals in nurseries.)

PS: Development of a robust public domain is the only reason that intellectual property should exist at all. Also it's not property so much as a licensed temporary monopoly.

PSS: History has already shown us that people will invent stuff and do fabulous art simply by being allowed to live in a state other than desperation. Public welfare programs beget art booms. The most recent example of this was during the COVID-19 lockdown which came with extended unemployment and stimulus checks, resulting in the Great Resignation in which a lot of people turned their hobbies into something lucrative.

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  • [–] 20 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    I agree. The worst part about GitHub training LLM's on my FOSS code without permission for me is that they then keep the models to themselves. Like if you're going to use all my code without permission, at least allow me to run the model locally.

    My personal opinion is that all models trained on copyleft code should be open-weights, most FOSS licenses didn't account for this specific possibility, but this is the only way to follow them in spirit.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    This. Some day a court should declare all models trained on copyrighted data without permission to be public. Open weights, public domain, whatever. All of them, and you're required to share them with the people whose data you used.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (1 child)

    All models and all their output should be considered public property regardless, full stop

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago

    Ultimately, yes. If AI is going to take over all jobs, the profits from AI should benefit and therefore fund everybody. But that requires a different economic system that will take time to convince people it's necessary.

    But leveraging copyright law, that's something that can be done right now.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 week ago

    Yeah it has to be open weight and free to use for everybody, with regulation to tag all AI output as generated so we know what is what.

    The worst outcome would be if somehow all open weight AI models that can't show their training data will be subject to some kind of tax or rent by AI / IP collection agencies, ultimately going to the plutocrats. That would be techno feudalism. Big corporations can afford to negotiate and pay license fees and often profit from cumbersome regulation too that prevents others from producing value. So the worst outcome is if we have robots doing all the work, and all the robot IP is owned by the techno-feudalists. And we can't even use robots to help with subsistence farming because we can't pay the expensive AI IP licenses.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    One small problem: LLMs are mostly useless save for being slop generating machines. We should create solutions for already existing problems, not continuing trying to find problems for techbro "solutions" to solve.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago

    No, they're mostly useless except for all the things that they're useful for.

    The problem is more the whole overshoving by the tech Bros into literally everything. Instead of them just being a better personal assistant.

    Cuz they are legitimately very good at being personal assistance. At least the high-end models are.

    The cheap low-free models will get there eventually. Till then we just have to deal with the really s***** version of Gemini or whatever we have. Dear God, that thing sucks.

    At the current rate, it's like a 2-year lag time or something. So sometime around 2028 we'll have actually functional models that can do day-to-day stuff without s******* the bed. At least to my standards anyways.

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