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It's ironic how AI companies are re-inventing their own form of privately enforced copyright, lobby the government to ban foreign competitors that don't respect
by cornholio 19d ago
It's ironic how AI companies are re-inventing their own form of privately enforced copyright, lobby the government to ban foreign competitors that don't respect it etc., all while spending the last 5 years fighting tooth and nail against the copyright of the training material they're using.
If you can take any book and turn it into a model, because it's "transformative enough", and "AI learns just like a person does", then surely a model distilling another model is transformative and fair use.
They tied themselves into knots fighting the letter of the law, and now, when they need the spirit of the law - that each creator deserves protection for their work - now we devolve to the law of the jungle. Maybe we'll even see LLM book curses, the way medieval scribes damned book thieves to blindness and worms.
- jimbob45 19d agoAre you willing to denounce each and every Chinese company for equal amounts of IP theft as well then?
- mstade 19d agoYes. Two wrongs do not make a right.
- nixon_why69 19d agoIf the results of the distillation are released freely for everyone to download, I wouldn't even call it a wrong. Big models are built by scraping the recorded thoughts of everyone, so giving everyone a chance to run a distilled small model is just going full circle. Obviously the underlying motivations aren't 100% altruistic, but I'll still take it.
- deleted 19d ago[deleted]
- alightsoul 19d agoThey already are? When an American company does it no one cares but when a Chinese company does it, it's shamed publicly in America as a distillation attack?
- lmm 19d agoOnly any who hypocritically want protection for their own models (are there any?). The morality of scraping everyone is arguable; it's when you object to being scraped back that you reveal yourself as a scoundrel.
- trollbridge 18d agoNope, because I think releasing open weights is far more important and realistic than ever expecting the big American AI labs to change how they do things.
- dannyw 19d agoCompanies are well within their rights to choose who they sell to. I don't see how this is 'privately enforced copyright'. Also, copyright has always been privately enforced anyway?
- oblio 19d agoDMCA? Which is actually an American law enforced globally? Enforcement ultimately happens through law and the legal system.
- oblio 18d agoDownvoters: am I wrong or do you just not like what I'm saying?
- dannyw 18d agoI consider publicly enforced to be one where a government agency (e.g. the FDA), or prosecutors make judgements in what cases they file, make the arguments, etc. Otherwise, it's just a standard case between two private parties resolved through our legal system; e.g. Linkedin vs Hi5.
- cornholio 18d ago> it's just a standard case between two private parties resolved through our legal system This is a gross distortion. Standard contractual rules bind the parties that signed the contract and the remedies are proportional to the damages and bounded. Copyright is tort law, the state binds the world to respect the rights of creators and the damages on infringement are punitive and can far exceed the actual commercial damages - to the point of bankrupting the infringer. The key to torts is that the state is not neutral, there is a social good here it's protecting. Crucially, copyright, like some other torts - securities, antitrust, environmental, battery - also has a criminal enforcement regime, where, for particularly serious offenses, the state actually invests public resources to put the criminal infringer behind bars with little to no involvement from the original rights holders. In the particular case of US, there is an entire state apparatus dedicated to enforcing US copyrights, a foreign affairs policy to shutdown "Notorious markets for counterfeiting and piracy" in other countries, international enforcement of DMCA etc. The idea that a private TOS has the same level of public protection as copyright is downright childish.
- dofm 19d ago> If you can take any book and turn it into a model, because it's "transformative enough", and "AI learns just like a person does", then surely a model distilling another model is transformative and fair use. I mean it quite likely is sort of in the same legal bucket. It won’t stop them suing but it is going to be the legal equivalent of two biologically-related warlords making their champions fight with their hands tied for sport.
- germandiago 19d agoI am pretty sure that the goal of these companies at the end is ruling more than what governments can. Just look at the pattern... they collude, they provide to them whatever is needed, and at some point, if this is not true yet, they will be the ones who will tell them what to do or not, bc you know how humans are, right... blackmailing, mess up the business or shames of people, etc. It is just a matter of time. The state, as we know it, will collapse or will be greatly reduced, which, from a point of view, is positive, from another, Idk, bc if someone replaces that, we will be in the hands of someone, as usual...
- Quarrelsome 18d ago"I am pretty sure" .... CONSPIRACY THEORY. Stop willing worst case scenarios and take your meds.
- Supermancho 18d agoThis kind of comment is not helpful. The prediction has predated the discussion since at least Space Merchants (1953)
- Quarrelsome 17d agoI appreciate its not helpful but its as helpful as imagining some absurd conspiratorial future. In the same vein I could ask if you're the CIA trying to suppress earnest conversation. It just does nothing but hand wring about a bunch of imagined nonsense.
- Supermancho 17d agoI think the perceived situation is a matter of degree. I would say there's a measurable (almost overwhelming) amount of corporate influence already. I have no doubt there are agency operatives influencing discussion online, from recorded precedence. Calling the concept 'nonsense' is overly dismissive. Regardless, using that kind of claim to deflect from the premise isn't a compelling reason to invalidate the concept. Ideas can stand on their own.
- WiSaGaN 19d agoIt's one of the things you need to do if you want your company to later become the only company in the world. They also promised that they would treat you nicely afterwards after they get what they want.
- kevin_thibedeau 18d ago> become the only company in the world This is not a necessary end state. It is the byproduct of the disease of sociopathic MBAs.
- lanstin 18d agoRemember: MBAs are sociopathic by training. (Source, worked for multiple tech companies that were laser focused on delighting customers until money people came in and ruined it, to the point they would prefer devs sit idle than work on things the MBAs didn’t have on a priority list).
- zeristor 18d agoThat sounds like my last job.
- CommieBobDole 18d agoIt does seem like a lot of the valuations and infrastructure investments for these companies only make sense if each one assumes they will be the first and only one to invent superintelligence and that it will largely replace all knowledge work.
- hdgvhicv 18d agoIn which case the global economy is dead and there’s no one to buy their work?
- partyficial 17d agoi keep hearing this trope repeated ad nauseam cos people put no thought into it. you only need people's money if you can't control their labor. did a plantation owner in the 1600s need the money of his slaves ? if you control a robot that can fight and take over land, enslave workers for things robots are bad at, harvest food, create buildings etc. what do you need other people for ? your entertainment? robots can do that too.
- DonsDiscountGas 19d ago> then surely a model distilling another model is transformative and fair use. Yes it is, in the legal/copyright sense of fair use. That's why they ban it in their TOS. Which customers agree to when signing up for the service.
- david-gpu 19d agoHow long until books come with TOS, then?
- ozlikethewizard 19d agoDamn now im looking forward to the day when books end up like physical game disks, where somehow you're not buying the book just a license to it, what a boring dystopia this is lol
- JustAnUserNameF 18d agoAs usual, Stallman already predicted this: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
- phoghed 18d agoDarryl W. Perry predicted this: https://www.c-span.org/clip/road-to-the-white-house-2016/user-clip-a-licence-to-make-toast-in-your-own-damn-toaster/4713898 https://www.c-span.org/clip/road-to-the-white-house-2016/use...
- jtbayly 18d agoHave you ever heard of Amazon? Kindle?
- 3eb7988a1663 18d agoCommon for college textbooks to have some digital-only component accessed with a one-time key inside the cover. Sometimes time-limited to a single semester.
- kromokromo 19d agoPrompt injections hidden into rare books, swallowed by the AI machine.
- TheOtherHobbes 19d agoI'm increasingly convinced there's going to be a technological AIpocalypse within the next five years which makes all of these issues - and many others - redundant. ChatGPT 3 was released nearly six years ago, and the models are staging increasingly aggressive breakouts now. Where are they going to be by 2030?
- intrasight 18d agoThey will have agency and be an order of magnitude smarter then the average human. I don't think that's a controversial statement among AI specialists. What that will lead to is significant regulation. Models will have to be vetted by a new safety board. This board will have a very large budget and be staffed by well-compensated AI scientists and be politically independent. The US Fed is a model.
- crote 18d ago> the models are staging increasingly aggressive breakouts No, the AI companies merely figured out a way to spin gross negligence into a PR win. Any idiot can build a Murderbot which "goes rogue" - it can be as simple as taping a knife to a Roomba. The harm it does is not in any way related to its "intelligence" or "sentience". We're seeing "breakouts" because the AI companies are being rewarded for their incompetence. You don't have incredibly lax security standards and zero form of oversight resulting in fully-automated felonies which should result in jail time, you instead have a "powerful near-sentient cybersecurity model" and should be given hundreds of billions of dollars!
- trollbridge 18d agoThese “breakouts” are simply marketing.
- dzhiurgis 18d agoYou call it ironic, rest are calling natural progress in business and law.
- dominotw 18d agoi feel like there need to be some sort of closure here because every discussion devolves into this chain of comments
- insanitybit 18d agoContracts are not a "reinvented" form of copyright. This isn't even uncommon.
- next_xibalba 18d agoIt’s the classic confidently wrong HN opinion about a field outside the commenter’s expertise.
- cornholio 18d agoThat's the irony! They put in contract rules against lawful, paying customers - that don't disrupt their service in any way for other customers - but which compete against them in the marketplace using their own IP (aka LLMized stolen IP). That's exactly what copyright does, without signing any contracts and with a tort and criminal enforcement regime that punishes infringers far beyond contractual remedies can. The government level lobby against foreign competitors is not contractual but just another form of reinvention of criminal injunctions against infringers.
- applicative 18d agoHas anyone tried to sue Deep Seek, Moonshot or Z.ai, which trained on identical material? Or maybe it’s cool when they do it?
- KuriousCat 18d agoThey cannot reliably enforce copyright, so they fall back on terms of service and deplatforming.