> To that end, here’s an even more interesting question around distillation: why exactly is it bad? After all, what are large language models but the distillation of all of the knowledge on the open Internet, scraped by the frontier labs and distilled into the models that are themselves being distilled? Who is exactly being wronged here?

Frontier labs that thought they could Rupoor[0] the entire creative class, transferring the coercion premium of copyright ownership from Hollywood to themselves. In their eyes, copyright should not apply to them, but also their models should have exactly the same value as a copyrighted work.

Stratechery also argues the US should explicitly make training fair use and forbid terms of service that prohibit distillation. I'm in support of the latter, but NOT the former, even though I normally hate copyright. My reasoning is primarily that copyright is one of the few legal paths available for a rando to go and put the work of an AI frontier lab in legal jeopardy. In the EU and Japan, such legal action has already been foreclosed by similar law. And while free distillation would obviously be preferable, it's also much more of a legal long-shot. Getting America to do anything that even smells like taking property away from the powerful is impossible[1] - it's our zeroth amendment. But we can at least hack the property laws that currently exist to cause problems for the frontier labs.

And, to be clear, if distillation is OK but training is not fair use, distillation is still OK. The output of an AI model is never copyrightable, because copyright only protects the human element. Essentially, this would say "don't train on humans, but absolutely rip off and steal the shit out of other AI labs and give it to the rest of us."

[0] In the Legend of Zelda series, Rupoor is anti-money - collecting it decreases the amount of money you own. I am using it to mean "turn someone's asset into a liability".

[1] Given that America was literally created to protect a wealthy land/slave owner class from disenfranchisement, either from above or below, and the last time we did this we literally had to fight a civil war against that same owner class that installed a new owner class that has largely remained today