Posts by spaceraser@polymaths.social
 (DIR) Post #B4JzUseo60eP11Mum0 by spaceraser@polymaths.social
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       Ok, so I’m curious as to our opinions, polymathsians.I want to know how we feel about the process at the heart of creating an LLM, “training” it on data that already exists. My first reaction was that this was theft and copyright infringement. The best good-faith argument that I have heard for the opposite side, the side that says training is fine and not ethically problematic, is that we train human language models with large amounts of the written word. It’s not “copyright infringement” for me to borrow a book from the library, read the entire thing, and integrate that data in to the language model that exists in my brain. That’s the analogy.I want to see if we can focus on this specific issue, and not the energy use and the awful companies and the job displacement etc etc. Is training a language model with material from the open web, library archives, basically any info that is free for a human to access for free, is that by itself theft or fair use? If you feel strongly one way, can you articulate an argument that it is definitely not the other?
       
 (DIR) Post #B4JzUu8GbxoHag9xKa by spaceraser@polymaths.social
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       @kabel42 @patrick One of the things that niggles at me a bit is that the same communities that get extremely righteous and picky about licenses and what's legal fair use and illegal piracy when it comes to a giant silicon valley AI company are (typically, on balance) pretty likely to either dismiss or outright defend the right of, like, a 14 year old learner to do all of the same things and more.That tells me that we (myself included in this statement) are not really that fussed over piracy, we're fussed over a bigass company making a shitton of money by ignoring rules that are inconvenient to them. That's not unique to AI. I sincerely doubt any internet connected device was made without similarly underhanded tactics. That doesn't make it right but that suggests that the LLM as a category is nothing special.