> believes that AI training data is built on the theft of people's labor

I mean, this is an ideological point. It's not based in reason, won't be changed by reason, and is really only a signal to end the engagement with the other party. There's no way to address the point other than agreeing with them, which doesn't make for much of a debate.

> an 1800s plantation owner saying "can you imagine trying to explain to someone 100 years from now we tried to stop slavery because of civil rights"

I understand this is just an analogy, but for others: people who genuinely compare AI training data to slavery will have their opinions discarded immediately.

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zaptheimpaler 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We have clear evidence that millions of copyrighted books have been used as training data because LLMs can reproduce sections from them verbatim (and emails from employees literally admitting to scraping the data). We have evidence of LLMs reproducing code from github that was never ever released with a license that would permit their use. We know this is illegal. What about any of this is ideological and unreasonable? It's a CRYSTAL CLEAR violation of the law and everyone just shrugs it off because technology or some shit.

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ReflectedImage 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

All creative types train on other creative's work. People don't create award winning novels or art pieces from scratch. They steal ideas and concepts from other people's work.

The idea that they are coming up with all this stuff from scratch is Public Relations bs. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger never taking steroids, only believable if you know nothing about body building.

	▲	oreally 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Precisely. Nothing is truly original. To talk as though there's an abstract ownership over even an observation of the thing that force people to pay rent to use.. well artists definitely don't pay to whoever invented perspective drawings, programmers don't pay the programming language's creator. People don't pay newton and his descendants for making something that makes use of gravity. Copyright has always been counterproductive in many ways. To go into details though, under copyright law there's a clause for "fair use" under a "transformative" criteria. This allows things like satire, reaction videos to exist. So long as you don't replicate 1-to-1 in product and purpose IMO it's qualifies as tasteful use.
	▲	zaptheimpaler an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		What the fuck? People also need to pay to access that creative work if the rights owner charges for it, and they are also committing an illegal act if they don't. The LLM makers are doing this illegal act billions of times over for something approximating all creative work in existence. I'm not arguing that creative's make things in a vacuum, this is completely besides the point.

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shkkmo 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You keep conflating different things.

> We have evidence of LLMs reproducing code from github that was never ever released with a license that would permit their use. We know this is illegal.

What is illegal about it? You are allowed to read and learn from publicly available unlicensed code. If you use that learning to produce a copy of those works, that is enfringement.

Meta clearly enganged in copyright enfringement when they torrented books that they hadn't purchased. That is enfringement already before they started training on the data. That doesn't make the training itself enfringement though.

	▲	zaptheimpaler an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> Meta clearly enganged in copyright enfringement when they torrented books that they hadn't purchased. That is enfringement already before they started training on the data. That doesn't make the training itself enfringement though. What kind of bullshit argument is this? Really? Works created using illegally obtained copyrighted material are themselves considered to be infringing as well. It's called derivative infringment. This is both common sense and law. Even if not, you agree that they infringed on copyright of something close to all copyrighted works on the internet and this sounds fine to you? The consequences and fines from that would kill any company if they actually had to face them.

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Alex2037 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>We know this is illegal

>It's a CRYSTAL CLEAR violation of the law

in the court of reddit's public opinion, perhaps.

there is, as far as I can tell, no definite ruling about whether training is a copyright violation.

and even if there was, US law is not global law. China, notably, doesn't give a flying fuck. kill American AI companies and you will hand the market over to China. that is why "everyone just shrugs it off".

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zaptheimpaler an hour ago | parent | next [-]

China is doing human gene editing and embryo cloning too, we should get right on that. They're harvesting organs from a captive population too, we should do that as well otherwise we might fall behind on transplants & all the money & science involved with that. Lots of countries have drafts and mandatory military service too. This is the zero-morality darwinian view, all is fair in competition. In this view, any stealing that China or anyone does is perfectly fine too because they too need to compete with the US.

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goatlover 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The "China will win the AI race" if we in the West (America) don't is an excuse created by those who started the race in Silicon Valley. It's like America saying it had to win the nuclear arms race, when physicists like Oppenheimer back in the late 1940s were wanting to prevent it once they understood the consequences.

	▲	Alex2037 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		okay, and? what do you picture happening if Western AI companies cease to operate tomorrow and fire all their researchers and engineers?

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mmooss 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's very much based on reason and law.

> There's no way to address the point

That's you quitting the discussion and refusing to engage, not them.

> have their opinions discarded immediately.

You dismiss people who disagree and quit twice in one comment.

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tombert 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> It's very much based on reason and law.

I have no interest in the rest of this argument, but I think I take a bit of issue on this particular point. I don't think the law is fully settled on this in any jurisdiction, but certainly not in the United States.

"Reason" is a more nebulous term; I don't think that training data is inherently "theft", any more than inspiration would be even before generative AI. There's probably not an animator alive that wasn't at least partially inspired by the works of Disney, but I don't think that implies that somehow all animations are "stolen" from Disney just because of that fact.

Obviously where you draw the line on this is obviously subjective, and I've gone back and forth, but I find it really annoying that everyone is acting like this is so clear cut. Evil corporations like Disney have been trying to use this logic for decades to try and abuse copyright and outlaw being inspired by anything.

	▲	mmooss 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It can be based on reason and law without being clear cut - that situation applies to most of reason and law. > I don't think that training data is inherently "theft", any more than inspiration would be even before generative AI. There's probably not an animator alive that wasn't at least partially inspired by the works of Disney ... Sure, but you can reason about it, such as by using analogies.

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refulgentis 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

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beepbooptheory 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What makes something more or less ideological for you in this context? Is "reason" always opposed to ideology for you? What is the ideology at play here for the critics?

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zwnow 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I mean, this is an ideological point. It's not based in reason

You cant be serious