Modern copyright law is so far behind the times and broken in more ways one can count. The only sensible way one can deal with it is to ignore it and keep their mouth shut.

Say for example, the Mistral AI approach. The released Mistral 7B and destroyed every other model in its class in performance while giving it a much less restrictive license. They gave zero info about what they trained on... and nobody is asking. A very smart move from both sides that benefits just about everyone.

The only winning move is not to play.

I suspect they’re covered under fair use (for now) but also nobody cares because the larger models are the ones that get used by people who would care enough to be upset about it.

Everyone claims fair use, but the terms for that are pretty narrow and wouldn't hold up anywhere afaik. Unless you're doing a news report or a review with actual criticism it probably won't pass the smell test. An LLM definitely doesn't fit that description in the slightest.

I maintain my position that despite whatever moral or ethical quandaries you feel are being violated, “no one cares”.

"Hey chief, I stole all this data but the scores are great!"

I think the entitlement to the work of others I've seen in software engineering generally has been so gross with regards to this technology. Copyright isn't just some antiquated idea from the middle ages, it's how artists and writers eat. They rightly spiked your paper.

Just a brief reminder of the last hundred years of copyright: large lobbies like UMG, Disney, or Elsevier have hugely circumscribed the public domain for all but historical purposes (copyright lengths increased from 28 years to *128*). Open access in academic publishing (for public funded research, even!) has been a decades-long fight that is not fully won. The DMCA has created myriad abuses and denied the freedom to control your own hardware, like allowing companies like John Deere to prevent right to repair. Six studios own most movies, a few labels control most music. The cultural heritage of the last hundred years, which should be the collective property of humanity, is locked up in the coffers of a few megacorps: who, by the way, don't much care how well their artists are eating. Yes, there are edge cases, but spare me the sympathy for the poor artist on Fiverr with five images in LAION: this is a fight between tech titans and copyright monopolists, where the little people are always going to be an afterthought. Come out and say the original copyright term of 28 years (well long enough to eat!) should be brought back, condemn the DMCA and the naked abuse of democracy in the Sonny Bono act, and THEN maybe we can get to chiding the lapses of a few researchers just wanting to understand the world better.

Artists who perform earn money by performing not by restricting others from re-viewing a previous performance.

Artist who create unique pieces are not worried about re-prints.

Writers who connect get followers who will pay for there next word.

Artists in the past needed a patron and we have providers today who do that

Most of the actual artists I've spoken to really hate this technology.

Just for the record, the domain I'm working in is educational (like literally afterschool teacher chaperone kind of thing). They have had a long tradition of open sourcing their data going back literally decades in word documents, and before computers, ripping stuff out of books. The dataset I contributed was doing nothing more than taking these word documents and parsing the data out and making it easy for NLP systems to use it.

Besides the clear fair use exemption due to the educational nature of the activity it targets, it's also an activity that a significant amount of judges in the legal system participated in. For that reason, I think that there's very little risk of the dataset being considered "actually infringing". If it were litigated, and this dataset were deemed illegal, than the entire activity itself it targets would be shattered.

But, I can also tell you that I think the majority of people should share their creative things for access to all. I have very little sympathy for artists or writers who are scared of LLMs because LLMs are coming for coders at literally the exact same time, but coders have been open source fanatics ideologically for awhile. It's time for writers and artists to embrace open source. Particularly since so many academic intellectuals have left-wing/socialist sensibilities anyway - it's time for them to practice what they preach.