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.
It'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.
It 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.
i 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.
(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).
I 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...
"Monopoly on the lawfully usage of force" + "regular and peaceful change of government" can go a very long way against "corporations governing the world".
I'm curious if we'll ever get a form of civil war where corporate militias (corporate _robot_ militias in the case of xAI, of course) draw fire on good old meat policemen coming to bring the CEO to court.
Sure, it may happen, but I suspect the alternatives (bribing, sending a scapegoat to jail, buying the elections, etc... and focus on the "making money" part) will stay preferable for a while.
The monopoly on the use of force has gotten kinda blurry as well these days. As long as people keep electing anti-government governments, the risk of technocracy is very real.
Unfortunately this will keep happening in capitalist systems without hard wealth caps, because capitalists would rather risk the extermination of entire groups of people than risking their wealth, so they will inevitably keep spreading & stoking fascist ideas.
"For the general election of 5 March 1933, the Nazis were allied with other nationalist and conservative factions. At a secret meeting on 20 February, major German industrialists had agreed to finance the Nazis' election campaign."
Did we not watch every single supposedly powerful US tech CEO immediately drop in supplication and kiss Trump's ring as soon as he became president? And when Jack Ma got mouthy, Xi locked him in a basement for 3 months and then kept him in exile for another 5 years.
> Did we not watch every single supposedly powerful US tech CEO immediately drop in supplication and kiss Trump's ring as soon as he became president?
Why fight someone who is so open to corruption? The important thing is that they got everything they wanted, and all they had to do was throw a few million at the clown, attend his parties, and maybe take down some diversity programs they didn't believe in anyway.
> Did we not watch every single supposedly powerful US tech CEO immediately drop in supplication and kiss Trump's ring as soon as he became president?
Because they know it will work. You don’t have to watch Trump speak for very long to know he’s not very intelligent. Similarly, you don’t have to be much smarter than him to know how easily he can be manipulated with adulation.
> It is just a matter of time. The state, as we know it, will collapse or will be greatly reduced
Doubt.
The networking between people in power at the top will, in my opinion, most likely assure that they remain in power, because at the end of the day that is what they want most.
I expect government will seize control of the most advanced models (if they haven't already), and the rest of us will be throttled, and status quo will be maintained. I do not expect that either super advanced agents or the owners of the hardware they run on will be able to pull off the kind of coup you describe. At all.
"We have every location associated with you in the crosshairs of tamper proof missiles and surrounded by infantry with heavy vehicles. Do what we say or we will destroy you and everything you care about."
And that's just the most obvious one. There are many other kinds of threats which are much more subtle.
That is how governments traditionally stay in charge, and I expect the pattern to continue. Citizens simply don't have access to the levels of destruction the state is capable of, by design. The common people can have all the advanced technology they want, so long as it doesn't threaten our leaders' monopoly on violence.
You think all those lawyers and bar tenders and whatever MTG was serving in Congress are out there tilling fields and sewing shirts? Nope. Without that tech they are f...
"They"
Who are you talking about? Because if you haven't noticed the people in charge now will die.
Most of the Fortune 500 of the 1900s have been gone for decades. The olds are vastly outnumbered by youth who either hate them or wouldn't mind just getting to beat someone who can't fight back up
With measles and food contamination going wild now it's just as likely the rich and pols kill themselves.
There is no beating physics and Elon, Thiel, and such rely on a lot of people to do the work for them. If society implodes all bets are off. Their wealth is coupled to legitimacy of America. Those body guards aren't going to abandon families for a broke former billionaire
There's no upside for the rich is things implode or the divide is not believed to exist; they become common rabble and get a pick axe too
The rich and politicians are just stupid meat suits too. They misread a room and screw up alot
In that situation, it depends how much physical force the government has to compel the tech leader, and how much physical force the tech leader has to counter it.
Usually, the number of bodies who will comply is the proxy for power, but with automation, it could be different in the near future.
But it can clearly be seen that the power will not be as monopolistic as before indeed. The rebalance leans towards losing power for states vs tech in part.
Regulation alone cannot control if it cannot be made effective.
I can’t imagine any agency in their right mind training an LLM on their top secret data… especially considering that essentially it would collapse all need to know data in one easily leakable single access domain. The models have no feasible or reasonable way to implement rbac. So you would end up in a situation where people who need to know who killed A, also know who killed B, not to mention cell A knowing potentially data on Cell B who is meant to watch them, etc, etc.
The idea is silly because most of it is complete garbage anyway. You'd wind up with a model that might know a very small amount of actionable information, and the rest of it just speculative. Or extremely time sensitive, useful for only a relatively short slice of time (which has already passed).
> it would collapse all need to know data in one easily leakable single access domain. The models have no feasible or reasonable way to implement rbac
Oh my sweet summer child...
This has been the continual goal of the US defense and intelligence agencies since 9/11, which was blamed on a lack of information sharing. Why do you think Edward Snowden had access to everything? Because it was consolidated post-2001.
You think there is any access control at the upper levels of the dark intelligence agencies? They have access to the whole take.
And it used to be that was pretty useless unless you had an actual lead. You'd need a East German Stasi level of labor to read everyone's secrets at scale... Now you don't, thanks to AI.
Snowden had mass access to a mass surveillance program, not mass access to N dark programs or particular bits of high value intelligence. The thing you are describing is primarily around sharing threat intelligence or in other words, spying on us plebes.
High value target intelligence and other bits of fun are still kept quite seperate.
I 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.
Your TOS matters insofar as you can prove a person actually read and agreed to it. These are illegal in different ways:
1. Copyright violations (can put you in jail)
2. TOS violations (will be a fine at worst)
Companies do get away with drive-by legal shittiness way too often and frankly the practice needs to be reined in, but at the end of the day the only damages are the financial ones you can prove in court.
Incidentally, this suggests that once an LLM is capable of accessing and distilling a competitor's LLM without human intervention, then any legal argument about TOS violation is moot. But somehow I doubt that will fly in court.
Yes - yours is just some optional text nobody reads or understands and is probably not legally required to adhere to. Theirs is a contract signed by their customer who they know did understand it.
Accessing the site may already mean that you agree to TOS. Also if you don’t see an explicit copyright terms on some text on the internet it doesn’t mean that it’s public domain. Same as checking a checkbox. Text being small and somewhere is not an excuse for a corporation to steal and sell other people’s work.
I know that text isn't public domain by default. I'm not talking about pirating IP. I'm talking about reading a website - which is a right that supersedes copyright - even using a computer that learns from it without storing a copy of it or distributing it.
No, you don't need to agree to TOS. I'm sure you never actually agree to them and you're not going to jail for it. If you believe that, I hope you never visited cnn.com, for example. Their Terms of Use is 11,000 words. Are you sure you have agreed to that when you clicked on some random news link? Are you sure you're happy to to surrender your legal defense and its expenses to them if they make a claim against you? You're OK that they have no liability for sharing your PII when they're not authorized to? You won't complain if you pay for a subscription and they don't give you access to the subscription content, don't refund your payment, and don't even tell you why?
> what makes theirs not “optional text nobody reads or understands”?
You accept it. You pay consideration for it. If your website has a TOS dickover, that requires someone attest with their legal name and pay you $1, yes, it may be enforceable under some circumstances.
So what you are saying is that, if I can somehow get my hands on a copy of Fable, it's fair use to use it to train any models and serve those, since I'm no longer bound by the TOS of the service provider?
Damn 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
Common 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.
Pick up nearly any published book. Turn to the ~3rd page. There will be either a whole page, or sometimes the second half of a page, dedicated to a copyright notice. Very nearly every published book I've ever seen has that identical page. This isn't a recent thing. I grabbed my copy of Diaspora by Greg Egan and opposite the table of contents is a page that starts like this:
Copyright (C) 1998, 2015 by Greg Egan
First Night Shade Books edition 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, blah blah (it felt very ironic to transcribe that bit in particular to make this point)
If you read the whole copyright page of a book and come away with the conclusion that it's anything but terms of use for the book, then we'll just have to agree to disagree.
So far, we have one ruling that says "model distillation by vendor A from vendor B with the intent to use the results to compete with vendor B in vendor B's domain is not fair use". Which makes a degree of sense.
It's possible that distillation for other reasons, with no intent to harm the vendor you distill from, would have been ruled to be fair use. But in law, intent matters.
What was the intent of the original ai companies (anthropic, OpenAI, etc) when they mass-distilled the entire internet to create their training data set?
One could make arguments for OpenAI and Anthropic. But Google Search displays AI results above the SERP - clearly in competition with them. No premise or excuse there.
On the one hand, yes; on the other hand, so much of the training data comes from scraping the web that it feels wrong for them to do what they deny others the right to do.
On the third hand, the settlement Anthropic famously had to pay was for copyright infringement because they didn't actually have the right to even access some of the training data they used, so I can see how this might be compatible with the law.
On the fourth hand, I'm saying that as someone who absolutely isn't a lawyer and sometimes gets surprised when reading about copyright cases that sure sound like they ought to have been trademark cases given my limited understanding.
Companies that didn't give away all their content for free to anyone have actually denied AI companies from training on all their data without paying a fee. Reddit, Associated Press, etc.
For those who chose to give it all away, the ship has sailed, but they did choose to give it away for free to anyone so they can't complain that they succeeded.
How exactly other websites “gave it all away”? Also examples you list are websites putting some explicit rule eg in their robots.txt or filtering web crawlers. This is all a reaction to existing situation, so Reddit for sure has been scrapped before Reddit realised what was happening.
If the AI company bought their book, then they didn't give it all away. If the AI company obtained it indirectly like a library or 2nd hand, then the author has already been paid when he first sold it. In either case, he could have refused to be so liberal in sharing it if he didn't want it to be used like that, but he preferred to make some money instead.
I 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.
> 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.
That'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.
> 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.
They 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?
Only 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.
If 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.
Nope, 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.
I'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?
> 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!
They 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.
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.