Itâs all made from our data, anyway, so it should be ours to use as we want
It wonât really do anything though. The model itself is whatever. The training tools, data and resulting generations of weights are where the meat is. Unless you can prove they are using unlicensed data from those three pieces, open sourcing it is kind of moot.
What we need is legislation to stop it from happening in perpetuity. Maybe just ONE civil case win to make them think twice about training on unlicensed data, but theyâll drag that out for years until people go broke fighting, or stop giving a shit.
They pulled a very public and out in the open data heist and got away with it. Stopping it from continuously happening is the only way to win here.
They pulled a very pubic and out in the open data heist
Oh no, not the pubes! Get those curlies outta here!
Legislation that prohibits publicly-viewable information from being analyzed without permission from the copyright holder would have some pretty dramatic and dire unintended consequences.
Not really. The same way you canât sell live and public performance music for profit and not get sued. Case law right there, and the fact itâs performance vs publicly published doesnât matter. How the owner and originator classifies or licenses it is the defining classification. Itâs going to be years before anyone sees this get a ruling in court though.
Thatâs not whatâs going on here, though. The LLM model doesnât contain the actual copyrighted data, itâs the result of analyzing the copyrighted data.
An analogous example would be a site like TV Tropes. TV Tropes doesnât contain the works that itâs discussing, it just contains information about those works.
Itâs already illegal in some form. Via piracy of the works and regurgitating protected data.
The issue is mega Corp with many rich investors vs everyone else. If this were some university student their life would probably be ruined like with what happened to Aaron Swartz.
The US justice system is different for different people.
If we canât train on unlicensed data, there is no open-source scene. Even worse, AI stays but it becomes a monopoly in the hands of the few who can pay for the data.
Most of that data is owned and aggregated by entities such as record labels, Hollywood, Instagram, reddit, Getty, etc.
The field would still remain hyper competitive for artists and other trades that are affected by AI. It would only cause all the new AI based tools to be behind expensive censored subscription models owned by either Microsoft or Google.
I think forcing all models trained on unlicensed data to be open source is a great idea but actually rooting for civil lawsuits which essentially entail a huge broadening of copyright laws is simply foolhardy imo.
Unlicensed from the POV of the trainer, meaning they didnât contact or license content from someone who didnât approve. If itâs posted under Creative Commons, thatâs fine. If itâs otherwise posted that itâs not open in any other way and not for corporate use, then they need to contact the owner and license it.
They wonât need to, they will get it from Getty. All these websites have a ToS that make it very clear they can do whatever they want with what you upload. The courts will simply never side with the small time photographer who makes 50$ a month with his stock photos hosted on someone elseâs website. The laws will be in favor of databrokers and the handful of big AI companies.
Anyone self hosting will simply not get a call. Journalists will keep the same salary while the newspaperâs owner gets a fat bonus. Even Reddit already sold itâs data for 60 million and none of that went anywhere but spezs coke fund.
But wouldnât that mean making it open source, then it not functioning properly without the data while open, would prove that it is using a huge amount of unlicensed data?
Probably not âburden of proof in a court of lawâ prove though.
Making it open source doesnât change how it works. It doesnât need the data after itâs been trained. Most of these AIs are just figuring out patterns to look for in the new data it comes across.
So youâre saying the data wouldnât exist anywhere in the source code, but it would still be able to answer questions based on the data it has previously seen?
in civil matters, the burden of proof is actually usually just preponderance of evidence and not beyond a reasonable doubt. in other words to win a lawsuit, you only need to have more compelling evidence than the other person.
But you still have to have EVIDENCE. Not derivative evidence. The output of a model could be argued to be hearsay because itâs not direct evidence of originating content, itâs derivative.
Youâd have to have somebody backtrack generations of model data to even find snippets of something that defines copyright material, or a human actually saying âYes, we definitely trained on unlicensed dataâ.
Just a little note about the word âmodelâ, in the article itâs used in a way that actually includes the weights, and I think this is the usual way of using it! If you change the weights, you get a different model, though the two models will have the same structure.
Anyway, you make good points!
So banks will be public domain when theyâre bailed out with taxpayer funds, too, right?
They should be, but currently it depends on the type of bailout, I suppose.
For instance, if a bank completely fails and goes under, the FDIC usually is named Receiver of the bankâs assets, and now effectively owns the bank.
At the same time, if a bank goes under, that means they owe more than they own, so âownershipâ of that entity is basically worthless. In those cases, a bailout of the customers does nothing for the owners, because the owners still get wiped out.
The GM bailout in 2009 also involved wiping out all the shareholders, the government taking ownership of the new company, and the government spinning off the newly issued stock.
AIG required the company basically issue new stock to dilute owners down to 20% of the company, while the government owned the other 80%, and the government made a big profit when they exited that transaction and sold the stock off to the public.
So itâs not super unusual. Government can take ownership of companies as a condition of a bailout. What we generally donât necessarily want is the government owning a company long term, because thereâs some conflict of interest between its role as regulator and its interest as a shareholder.
With banks this is also true if they do not have enough liquid assets to meet the legal requirements. So the bank might not be able to count all bank accounts as assets but the FDIC is. Also they can then restructure the bank and force creditors to take a haircut.
This is why investment banks should be separate from banks that have consumer accounts that are insured by the government.
Then you can just let the investment bank fail. This was the whole premise of glass steagall that was repealed under clintonâŚ
Public domain wouldnât be the right term for banks being publicly owned. At least for the normal usage of Public Domain in copyright. You can copy text and data, you canât copy a company with unique customers and physical property.
Just FYI of the bank bailouts in the US, the banks paid back the bailout plus interest back to the government. Meaning the govt actually made a profit off the bailout. Thereâs a lot of things wrong with both banks and the govt, but generally this is not one of them. https://www.propublica.org/article/the-bailout-was-11-years-ago-were-still-tracking-every-penny
A similar argument can be made about nationalizing corporations which break various laws, betray public trust, etc etc.
Iâm not commenting on the virtues of such an approach, but I think it is fair to say that it is unrealistic, especially for countries like the US which fetishize profit at any cost.
I donât think it should be a âpunishment.â It should be done on principal.
Not sure making their LLMs public domain would really hurt their principal, their secret sauce is in the code around the model.
And yes, I do recognize that you meant âprincipleâ.
Thatâs not true though. The models themselves are hella intensive to train. We already have open source programs to run LLMs at home, but they are limited to smaller open-weights models. Having a full ChatGPT model that can be run by any service provider or home server enthusiast would be a boon. It would certainly make my research more effective.
We already have multiple trained models, here are a bunch. The model isnât nearly as interesting as what you do with it.
Itâs not punishment, LLM do not belong to them, they belong to all of humanity. Tear down the enclosing fences.
This is our common heritage, not OpenAIâs private property