dekhn 12 hours ago

I believe it was already known that anything trained on The Pile contained references to copyrighted material from scihub. It seems unlikely that folks who chose to use these sources were completely unaware of the nature of the data. Presumably, given the urgency in the last 2-3 years to be a leader in this space, a number of shortcuts were taken.

  • nobrains 5 hours ago

    Zuck did a calculation: "Does the risk of lawsuits and bad PR outweigh the benefits of being early?".

    If u remove morals from the equation, nearly every CEO would have made that same decision if in that position.

    • throw5959 4 hours ago

      You talk about morals, but did you consider that they are releasing the model as open source, and given that OpenAI and others do the same, Zuck is really the only current option to have a reasonably comparable open source model? Also, did you consider that it might be more moral to create an AI model than to uphold copyright law, which actually many on this site deem immoral?

      IMHO this is a moral win on Zuck side.

ungreased0675 13 hours ago

I would speculate this is true of all the leading commercial LLM models. Don’t have enough training data? Just steal some!

  • Havoc 12 hours ago

    On true for all - you’d need to split it by era I think

    During the early Llama 1 days The Pile dataset was in heavy use by many. Bit later people figured out that a subset of it - Books 3 - was especially problematic.

    I’m guessing all the big houses threw that piece out in later models since it’s extra radioactive

    • archerx 7 hours ago

      What was problematic about it?

      • Havoc 5 hours ago

        Thousands of pirated copyrighted books

  • gooosle 6 hours ago

    Copy some*

    • pera 12 minutes ago

      It depends who you are:

      - if you are an individual then it's called "pirating copyrighted work"

      - if you are a multi-billion dollar corporation then it's called "use of uncleared material for training"

    • BSDobelix 4 hours ago

      That's exactly the difference, one does not steal in the digital world. If i could download/copy a car i would do it ;)

    • dehrmann 6 hours ago

      Courts have yet to decide on which it is, and it might depend on how well the model can transform vs. recite.

      • vidarh 2 hours ago

        The point is that whatever courts decide, it is not theft. It may or may not be copyright infringement, but copyright infringement is not theft.

        • exe34 2 hours ago

          but muh shareholders!

Havoc 12 hours ago

Stripping out the copyrights is quite damning.

There is wrongdoing and there is obvious evidence that you known what you’re doing is wrong. That really limits options on Defence

vivzkestrel 10 hours ago

Stupid question: I have 400000 ebooks (yup pirated ones) what happens if I build an LLM with this?

  • fooker 2 hours ago

    Depends on the parameter count.

    Too high? Straight to jail.

    Too low? Believe it or not, straight to jail.

  • rcakebread 8 hours ago

    You'd still ask stupid questions?

  • blitzar 5 hours ago

    You would have a net worth of 1bn

  • covofeee 3 hours ago

    You also need $100m to train it

  • wil421 2 hours ago

    Build Chappie.

  • anothername12 6 hours ago

    You’ll be fine. It’s like laundering money.

  • gooosle 6 hours ago

    You go to jail forever.

  • solumunus 9 hours ago

    What do you imagine could happen?

alightsoul 2 hours ago

Given how things are going, maybe it will be ruled as "fair use" whereas something like controlled digital lending at the internet archive was ruled as "infringing" disgusting. So AI might become the only "legal" way to access a lot of knowledge for free you otherwise wouldn't have access to.

rurban 6 hours ago

Jail time? Or just multi-million fines.

Will he be allowed to lead Meta if convicted as criminal?

  • covofeee 3 hours ago

    You saw the WP cartoon right?

  • exe34 2 hours ago

    he should run for election!

htrp 4 hours ago

i was under the impression that almost everyone trained on books3

asdefghyk 13 hours ago

Its also reported elsewhere ( in media articles linked to by Hacker News ) they torrented copyright material. AMAZING

cma 3 hours ago

A book's copyright is no more valid than a website's

musicale 9 hours ago

"I'm shocked, shocked to find out that piracy is going on here!"

"Your LLM, Captain Zuckerberg."

"Oh, thank you very much!"

udev4096 8 hours ago

Everyone knows that LLMs are trained on shit ton of pirated content

atulvi 11 hours ago

Good. These laws are anti progress.

  • covofeee 3 hours ago

    Copyright is your friend.

    • horsawlarway 3 hours ago

      No.

      There is a theoretical implementation of copyright that is your friend.

      The realities of the laws as implemented today are abusive and hostile.

  • ulfw 11 hours ago

    What "progress"?

    • pizza 10 hours ago

      Exfiltration of information from the economy

      • exe34 2 hours ago

        does the economy lose this information? are pages now missing from the books on your bookshelf?

  • idiotsecant 8 hours ago

    We're literally extracting, refining, and re-using the information, art, and thoughts of fellow humans to make billionaires money.

    This isn't the 90s. Computing isn't about discovery, not in the big leagues. Its about grinding up authenticity and feeding it into a machine to convert it into shareholder value.

    If they want the value, let them pay for it or release the models open source for all to benefit.

    • archerx 7 hours ago

      They have released all the models for free so far unlike other companies like OpenAI who are most likely doing the same but keeping it private and proprietary.