“Information wants to be free“.

It’s not “theft of labor”; the work was already done. If anything it is theft of “intellectual property” (aka “copyright infringement”), if you believe that is a thing, but not of the “labor” that went into it.

My personal take: anyone producing content, everyone’s creativity, is fed by something that others did before. We’re all standing on the shoulders of giants composed of previous generations and their “content’s” distribution and dissemination. I have an immense gratitude for all the labor before me that I was and am allowed to partake; without that, I would be nothing. Sharing information is an act of love; gatekeeping it is short-sighted greed. New technologies have always “killed” previous “labor”, out of which new opportunity grows. I just wished the collected data was public. I hope we all get a mega-leak at some point.

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proc0 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"I just wished the collected data was public. "

That's the entire contention here. It's a double standard. Companies will sue the living hell out of anyone taking their IP, whether it's code or art, yet they have no qualms taking all the data they need from anyone and everyone. It was already a problem before, i.e. artists getting paid very little for work that companies profit a lot from like musicians or digital artists, but now with AI it's on steroids.

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Gareth321 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I agree. The double standard is the problem. People have been imprisoned for IP theft, but when these companies commit IP theft on the grandest scale ever imaginable, they're rewarded with trillion dollar IPOs. Either IP isn't protected, or it is. Legislators need to pick a lane. Right now it appears that poor people go to prison, and rich people get rewarded.

	▲	ndiddy 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		IP does not protect the little guy. This is nothing new. Draw a picture and then people start putting it on t-shirts and posters without paying you? Great, you can't do anything about it unless you have enough time and money to hire a lawyer to go after them. Self publish a book and then people start uploading PDFs of it? Better hope your real passion is filing takedown requests instead of writing.

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

I think the difference is that the companies are dumping billions of dollars into transforming that data into something useful, so they would like a return on their profits. Opening up the models for free is not a good business model if you want to make money.

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

Other companies have no qualms about distilling the first. Let's hop on gear and get the market to deliver a distilled Fable that runs on a smartwatch. Sooner is better.

	▲	cute_boi 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't think this trend of open sourcing LLM will continue for a simple reason: Money.

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DownGoat 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

On the flip side, output from an LLM is not copyrighted.

	▲	tremon 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That has not been decided. The only thing that's been decided is that the LLM itself does not have copyright on its output.

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cush an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yikes. That’s some deep entitlement.

Unfortunately in the real world there’s this thing called money, and we exchange it for goods and services. The reason information isn’t free is because it costs time to produce it and people need to be fed.

If you believe that a creator doesn’t need to consent and doesn’t deserve credit or compensation for their work, then you’re likely not someone who has many fundamental needs unmet

These AI companies actively chose not to get consent from creators and earn billions from their content with no compensation.

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equality_1138 11 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You wouldn't be standing on the shoulders of giants without IP laws, bub. Your "immense gratitude" is a farce.

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fwlr 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well the future we seem to be getting is “information wants to be free for the first ten thousand tokens, then $1 per million tokens after”.

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alentred 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Sharing information is an act of love

Most AI companies are not sharing it, though. They appropriated it and resell it.

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

Just because “information wants to be free” is a thing people say doesn’t mean it’s true.

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pier25 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There’s a difference between an individual creating something and the industrialization of creation. You can’t scale the creation of a single person 1000000x by the snap of a finger but you can with machines. This has severe implications.

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polytely 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I sort of agree, and i think strengtening IP Law is probably not great. But I do think it's very fucked that building generative ai is only possible by taking the works of countless artists and craftspeople and then the model produced from that data immediately gets deployed to destroy the careers of the people whose, work was vital to it being created, without compensation for them, while making a few evil nerds richer than god. I think if you work at one of these labs you owe an enormous debt to society and your earnings should be redistributed among it.

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juiceland 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> I think if you work at one of these labs you owe an enormous debt to society and your earnings should be redistributed among it.

Now we’re getting somewhere. Let’s start with redistributing the profits from AI companies and then move on to all profits from all companies because the logic is the same.

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tzs 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Nope. You are making one or both of these mistakes. (1) Overlooking that the same logic can lead to different outcomes depending on the premises to which the logic is applied. (2) Overlooking that real life is analog, not digital, and so thinking the premises are the same when they are not.

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juiceland an hour ago | parent [-]

The targeted outcome is the redistribution of wealth away from the capital class to the working class. Capitalist exploitation of labor was analog to begin with, and the same premise does apply: the capital class absorbs the fruits of labor, training, and education that is performed by the masses in order to enrich themselves. The capital class owes a tremendous debt to society and if they don't plan on paying we should plan to seize it.

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Nasrudith 42 minutes ago | parent [-]

And how has exproproation been working out for you? What is that? Massive poverty and nobody wants to trade with you?

	▲	juiceland 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The exploitation of labor has has a tremendous negative impact on the environment and the health of humans. Recall that it took dragging the factory bosses from their and beating them to death to get an 8 hour work day, a weekend, and restrictions on child labor. We can do it the easy way —- government redistribution of excess profits — or we can do it the hard way. I suspect the people in charge won’t realize they could have taken the easy way until it’s too late.

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DanielHB 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The key problem is that IP is either proprietary to the creator or it is a commons type of situation.

Even if you agree with the former exploiting the commons for personal profit is... not good.

One could make the argument that if these LLMs were all open weight it would be okay, but to keep the result of the training private and proprietary is not fair.

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

> “Information wants to be free“

What about the rest of that quote?

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ex-aws-dude 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> anyone producing content, everyone’s creativity, is fed by something that others did before

The thing I produce does not replace demand for the original though?

I can’t recite the original for a million people

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nisegami 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>"Information wants to be free".

I agree wholeheartedly and in keeping with that, I call upon frontier AI labs to release both their weights and training sets.

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bcjdjsndon 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Unpopular opinion on here

	▲	ambicapter 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Probably because it claims there’s no problem, and then makes a tiny little mention of the BIG problem at the very end.
	▲	newsclues 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The unpopular part is the hypocrisy where their work has already or must be rewarded while other people’s work is not.

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aners_xyz 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[flagged]

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jayd16 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So by definition creative labor cannot be stolen? Seems like flawed logic to me.

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beering 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Taking the original of a painting from your house is stealing. Copying is only potentially violating the government-granted limited-time exclusivity that allows you to decide who can copy your work.

BTW I hereby allow you or your browser to copy this comment into your computer’s RAM.

	▲	jayd16 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It's telling that you need to fall back to non-creative information in your argument. Clearly we're talking about the labor of creating a written or visual work, not the contents of your ram. I did not use the word copy either. My interpretation of the parent comment is that it was rationalizing by claiming all creativity is not fully original and therefore must have no rights. Extrapolated further, this is a collapse of creative works as a profession.