Authors using a new tool to search a list of 183,000 books used to train AI are furious to find their works on the list.
Here’s an idea, legally force companies like OpenAI to rely on opt-in data, rather then build their entire company on stealing massive amounts of data. That includes requiring to retrain from scratch. Sam Altman was crying for regulations for scary AI, right?
Would search engines only be allowed to show search results for sources that had opted in? They “train” their search engine on public data too, after all.
They aren’t reselling their information, they’re linking you to the source which then the website decides what to do with your traffic. Which they usually want your traffic, that’s the point of a public site.
That’s like trying to say it’s bad to point to where a book store is so someone can buy from it. Whereas the LLM is stealing from that bookstore and selling it to you in a back alley.
AI isn’t either. It’s selling statistical data about the books.
It literally shares passages verbatim
First: There are mechanisms to opt out (robots.txt and meta noindex)
Second: There is some foreknowledge on the part of the web author. Even in the early days of the web — before you could’ve predicted the concept of search engines — in order to distribute anything you had to understand the basics of hypermedia, among which is the idea that anything can link to anything else and clients can be users or machines alike.
Third: Even though you are correct that search engines are tokenizing text and doing statistical analysis to recombine the tokens into novel forms in order to rank against queries, those novel forms are never presented to the user. Only direct quotes. So a user never gets a false reference to the supposed content of a page (unless the page itself lies to crawler requests).
Fourth: All of the technical points above are pretty much meaningless, because we are social creatures and our norms don’t stem from a mechanical flow chart divorced from real-world context.
Creators are generally okay with their content being copied into search DBs, because they know it’s going to lead to users finding the true author of those words, which will advance their creative pursuits either through collaboration or monetary support.
Creators are complaining about content being copied into LLMs, because their work will be presented out of context, often cited incorrectly, keep people away from the author of those words, and undermine the lifeblood of their creative pursuits – be it attracting new collaborators or making sales.
Whether it technically counts as IP infringement or not under current law? Who really cares? Current IP law is a fucking scam, designed to bully creators out of their own creations and assign full control to holding companies who see culture as nothing more than a financial instrument to be optimized. We desperately need to change IP law anyway – something that I think even many strident “AI” supporters agree with – so using it as a justification for the ethics of LLMs reveals just how weak the group’s position truly is.
LLM vendors see an opportunity for profit, if they can get away with it. They are offering consumers a utopian vision of infinite access to content while creating an IP chokepoint that they can enshittify once it blows past critical mass. It’s the same tactics the social media companies used 15 years ago, and it weighs heavy on my heart that so many Lemmy users are falling for it once again while the lesson is still so fresh.
Any AI model that uses publically available information for training should be open source by law.
This business where corporations (that includes authors, who are published by huge corporations) fight over who “owns” ideas is assinine. When it comes down to it, this is a fight about money being wrapped in an argument about “ideas.”
AI models were developed with the collective knowledge and wisdom of society. They’re like libraries and should be public like libraries. OpenAI, Google, all those fucks should be forced to open source their models, end of story.
should be open source by law.
That doesn’t make sense. The “source” of the AI model is the publically available information, which the creators have no right to redistribute.
The rules of Open Source simply do not work for AI models. You’d have to come up with some other rules.
My friend, there are already numerous open source models out there. It’s a thing.
The whole legal situation around AI models isn’t clear and common Open Source licenses are an ill fit for them because you aren’t distributing the source, but just a binary blob. You can’t just take any random accumulation of data and slap a Open Source license on it, especially when that accumulation is the result of proprietary data, incompatible licenses and all that.
Most people don’t care and just remix everything as they please, but just because you can download for free something doesn’t make it Open Source. Furthermore a lot of the models exclude commercial use or otherwise restrict the use in ways that are incompatible with the Open Source definition.
Has any of the model made it into Debian yet?
I’d say they should have to follow the most-restrictive license of all of their training data, and that existing CC/FOSS licenses don’t count because they were designed for use in a pre-LLM world.
It seems like a pretty reasonable request. But people like free stuff, and when they think about who will get screwed by this they like to imagine that they’re sticking it to the biggest publishers of mass media.
But IRL, those publishers are giddy with the idea that instead of scouting artists and bullying them into signing over their IP, they can just summon IP on demand.
The people who will suffer are the independents who refused to sign over their IP. They never got their payday, and now they never will either.
I certainly hope that none of these authors have ever read a book before or have been inspired by something written by another author.
That would be a much better comparison if it was artificial intelligence, but these are just reinforcement learning models. They do not get inspired.
just reinforcement learning models
…like the naturally occuring neural networks are.
The brain does not work the way you think… (I work in the field, bio-informatics). What you call “neural networks” come from an early misunderstanding of how the brain stores information. It’s a LOT more complicated and frankly, barely understood.
Are you saying the writers of these programs have read all these books, and were inspired by them so much they wrote millions of books? And all this software is doing is outputting the result of someone being inspired by other books?
Clearly not. He’s saying that other authors have done the same as the software does. The software creators implemented the same principle into their llm. You are being daft on purpose.
