Fairness isn’t the relevant lens. Copyright isn’t the right lens either. This is purely might-makes-right, where the winner is whoever has the best offence and best defence.

It is only hypocritical when they bitch about things being unfair, or try to use copyright arguments in the court system.

Which is what they actively do exactly at the same time.

Is it? Has Anthropic taken someone to court for infringing their copyright?

> copyright arguments in the court system

Where else are you going to make those arguments?

Copyrighted works plainly have value for Anthropic. Why aren't they paying for that value?

As a vigorous, thrusting company surely Anthropic has the wherewithal to pay for it. And if they don't, if all they can do is steal, if all they represent is the theft of the labor of others, then what good are they?

Anthropic likes to talk big on ethics: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claudes-constitution

When will they start showing some?

I'm describing reality as it is, not how I wish the world to be. Copyright is a legal construct that makes intellectual works ownable. But those works aren't merely property; they're also culture. And borrowing from, building upon and transforming existing works has been fundamental to human creativity since the very beginnings of human creativity.

I support copyright in a narrow sense, but I think it's proving to be increasingly archaic, conceived for a 19th-century world of mechanical printing presses and far too absolutist for the 21st-century world of memes, sampling, and LLMs.

Well their justification is that distillation is bad because it means baddies can get their own models without their safeguards and then make anthrax nukes or whatever. Even though it's self serving, it's at least self-consistent.