I do agree that the methods of obtaining much of the material (eg. the published works torrents) were stupidly wrong and they should pay for that. However, legally acquired media being "read" by the training process isn't so different than it being read by a voracious reader: it's lossily encoded in (what amounts to) memories.
The insane scraping levels and behaviors ... not wrong. If only there were companies who already did that responsibly they could contract with for data. Hmm. (But they have to "own" it, as is the SV fashion these days.)
Nope! Theft of the proceeds.
The media may have been legally acquired, but it was done so by violating the intentions and purposes of the content creators.
In other words, people poured their time and attention into something hoping for a return, and got this, instead. And now this is obviating the venues by which creators hoped to receive their social/cultural dividend.
Violating the intentions and purposes of the creators is in some cases an IP violation, and in others it isn't -- it all depends on the details. A lot of AI training on IP-protected materials can fit into the bucket that isn't an IP violation (or any other legal violation), though much of the historical actual training data wasn't collected this way.
IP creators don't have an amorphous right to "a return" or to have their intentions and purposes strictly respected. They have very specific rights in law, and those often don't match up 1:1 with expectations, and almost never with a specific set of the creator's intent (except where that aligns with already-existing law).
Agreements with publishers after the fact shouldn't even count, particularly since all copyright holders weren't consulted. I wouldn't have given my permission, for example.
It's important to stress that the media were not legally acquired by most US frontier AI companies if not all of them.
The Walt Disneys of the world screwed themselves on this one. If copyright was still the 20+20 it started as, and if the bulk of people being "stolen" from (don't get me started on using theft to refer to IP), then I think most people would be much more up in arms over the AI industry.
But, in a world with sane copyright laws, perhaps AI companies would have different approaches. Today, if they want anything after 1930, they're either breaking laws or in uncharted territory.
And siloing our knowledge is a silly response even if you are a copyright maximalist.
but why does knowledge need to be siloed? elsevier has every right to make a deal with the author of the research and put it behind a paywall or whatever they'd like to do to keep their multi-billion dollar business going, but is this something we should be defending and celebrating as a "solution" to prevent LLMs from making knowledge more available?
and in this instance, why should a researcher that is probably funded by public money, care if openai is disseminating their research?
> exponentially increasing the cost of hosting
We're on a technical forum, everyone knows the cost of hosting plaintext and what an exponential is.
It just goes to show how fluid people's beliefs can be when they have identified a "bad guy". Everything they do is wrong, even when it aligns with their ethos.
multiple parties can be opposed to each other's goals with all of them still being the "bad guys".
The lineage of every LLM of relevance today was the largest theft of intellectual property in human history. Every digitised creative work, whether in the public domain or not was taken, often outright pirated, with the explicit intention of being able to trivially produce compelling forgeries. Physical works are being enthusiastically destroyed to digitise them to further feed the hunger. And outside of a few court cases, the original creators across the world have been paid nothing for their work having been stolen and repurposed to put them out of a job.
Meanwhile, those same digitisation efforts have resulted in badly behaved scrapers from all comers absolutely thrashing the entire web, in many cases exponentially increasing the cost of hosting for smaller entities. Larger entities care less about that but are still enthusiastically walling their gardens so they can monetise the output of their communities rather than continuing to allow it to be stolen freely.
We are siloing our knowledge out of desperation. I'm sympathetic to the idea that knowledge should be free but that isn't possible when bad actors like Google and OpenAI are preying on the commons.