> Ethical concerns. The business side of AI boom is creating serious ethical concerns. Among them: Commercial AI projects are frequently indulging in blatant copyright violations to train their models. Their operations are causing concerns about the huge use of energy and water. The advertising and use of AI models has caused a significant harm to employees and reduction of service quality. LLMs have been empowering all kinds of spam and scam efforts.

Highly disingenuous. First, AI being trained on copyrighted data is considered fair use because it transforms the underlying data rather than distribute it as is. Though I have to agree that this is the relatively strongest ethical claim to stop using AI but stands weak if looked at on the whole.

The fact that they mentioned "energy and water use" should tell you that they are really looking for reasons to disparage AI. AI doesn't use any more water or energy than any other tool. An hour of Netflix uses same energy as more than 100 GPT questions. A single 10 hour flight (per person*) emits as much as around 100k GPT prompts. It is strange that one would repeat the same nonsense about AI without primary motive being ideological.

"The advertising and use of AI models has caused a significant harm to employees and reduction of service quality." this is just a shoddy opinion at this point.

To be clear - I understand why they might ban AI for code submissions. It reduces the barrier significantly and increases the noise. But the reasoning is motivated from a wrong place.

> AI being trained on copyrighted data is considered fair use because it transforms the underlying data rather than distribute it as is.

It's not a binary. Sometimes it fully reproduces works in violation of copyright and other times it modifies it just enough to avoid claims against it's output. Using AI and just _assuming_ it would never lead you to a copyright violation is foolish.

> uses same energy as more than 100 GPT questions.

Are you including training costs or just query costs?

> But the reasoning is motivated from a wrong place.

That does not matter. What matters is if the outcome is improved in the way they predict. This is actually measurable.

The idea that models are transformative is debatable. Works with copyright are the thing that imbues the model with value. If that statement isn’t true, then they can just exclude those works and nothing is lost, right?

Also, half the problem isn’t distribution, it’s how those works were acquired. Even if you suppose models 44are transformative, you can’t just download stuff from piratebay. Buy copies, scan them, rip them, etc.

It’s super not cool that billion dollar vc companies can just do that.

> AI doesn't use any more water or energy than any other tool. An hour of Netflix uses same energy as more than 100 GPT questions. A single 10 hour flight (per person*) emits as much as around 100k GPT prompts. It is strange that one would repeat the same nonsense about AI without primary motive being ideological.

We should stop doing those things too. I'm still surprised that so many people are flying.

I don't get this idea. Transformative works don't automatically equal fair use - copyright covers all kind of transformative works.

That's quite a strawman definition of "copyright infringement" especially given the ongoing Anthropic lawsuit

It's not a question of if feeding all the worlds books into a blender and eating the resulting slurry paste is copyright infringement. It's that they stole the books in the first place by getting them from piracy websites

If they'd purchased every book ever written, scanned them in and fed that into the model? That would be perfectly legal

> Highly disingenuous. First, AI being trained on copyrighted data is considered fair use because it transforms the underlying data rather than distribute it as is.

Your legal argument aside, they downloaded torrents and trained their AI on them. You can't get much more blatant than that.