| ▲ | voidUpdate 3 days ago |
| It may be legally trained, but is it ethically trained? I doubt any of the authors of the training data gave their permission to have their work used in training an LLM |
|
| ▲ | RugnirViking 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| I'm reasonably sure that all of the authors are long dead. (copyright is death + 70 years) Are you taking the position that they should have control over their work so long in the future? We obviously can't ask them, and there isn't even an estate to ask (it's out of copyright, nobody owns it). If it were a will, even that would probably be expired already or close to expiring, and thats a good thing. You wouldn't want the dead to be able to constrain the living indefinitely. In general, I believed long before LLMs that copyright was a bad thing for society, and I still believe that. Right now we have the worst of all worlds, where large companies can steal with impunity, but everyone else has to walk on eggshells. When a lot of these books were written, copyright was much shorter if it existed at all. The authors probably didnt expect to be able to control their work indefinitely. |
| |
| ▲ | voidUpdate 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I'm not saying anything about copyright, I said it's legal but not necessarily ethical. Copyright deals with legality. I don't consider Generative AI to be ethical unless all training data is acquired with informed consent, which the original authors of these victorian works did not give | | |
| ▲ | RugnirViking 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I understand you're talking about ethics. I'm talking about how we conceive of ethics as relates to artistic works which I see as tied to time and law. Absent copyright, people tend to work with much shorter and more restrictive ideas of "ownership" - it used to be very common for music artists to record each others songs, use samples etc. Similar in painting, and other art forms. It wasnt theft, thats just how you did stuff. Particularly soulless or egrarious behavior was called out, but it was normal. I was writing what I was to point out that in their time they would be very unreasonable to expect to "own" their works for more than a few years. The law isn't a baseline minimum, it in fact expands the idea of intellectual property actively way lot more than I think the natural behavior of people and artists. I dont think any of them would have had many thoughts at all about what happened a hundred or more years after their death other than they hoped they were remembered at all |
|
|
|
| ▲ | bcjdjsndon 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| They mean ethically as in doesn't break any copyright laws... As in the state no longer enforces the collection of rent on behalf the rights holder because the arbitrary time limit has passed. |
|
| ▲ | weregiraffe 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Do you know what public domain is? |
| |
| ▲ | throawayonthe 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | i don't disagree but you're arguing past the parent comment; public domain is a legal concept that is not universally applicable to the relevant ethics here | |
| ▲ | voidUpdate 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes. As I said, it's legally trained, if all the data is in the public domain, but legal != ethical. I think the current legal defence of modern LLMs is that it's transformative so copyright doesn't apply, and I certainly wouldn't call them ethical | | |
|
