I love this. I hope big-tech/big-AI destroys big-copyright industry.
Meanwhile some Italian YouTuber was raided because some portable consoles already came with roms in their memory, they only go after individuals.
Is this how Disney becomes the owner of all of the AI companies too? Lol
I am holding my breath! Will they walk free, or get a $10 million fine and then keep doing what every other thieving, embezzling, looting, polluting, swindling, corrupting, tax evading mega-corporation have been doing for a century!
Would be better if the fee were nominal, but that all their training data must never be used. Start them over from scratch and make it illegal to use anything that it knows now. Knee cap these frivolous little toys
This is how corruption works - the fine is the cost of business. Being given only a fine of $10 million is such a win that they’ll raise $10 billion in new investment on its back.
I myself don’t allow my data to be used for AI, so is anyone did, they do owe me a boatload of gold coins. That’s just my price. Great tech though.
Well maybe they shouldn’t have done of the largest violations of copyright and intellectual property ever.
Probably the largest single instance ever.
I feel like it can’t even be close. What would even compete? I know I’ve gone a little overboard with my external hard drive, but I don’t think even I’m to that level.
We just need to show that ChatGPT and alike can generate Nintendo based content and let it fight out between them
They will probably just merge into another mega-golem controlled by one of the seven people who own the planet.
Mario, voiced by Chris Pratt, will become the new Siri, then the new persona for all AI.
In the future, all global affairs will be divided across the lines of Team Mario and Team Luigi. Then the final battle, then the end.
*dabs, mournfully*
Now they’re in the “finding out” phase of the “fucking around and finding out”.
Good fuck those fuckers
Fucking good!! Let the AI industry BURN!
What um, what court system do you think is going to make that happen? Cause the current one is owned by an extremely pro-AI administration. If anything gets appealed to SCOTUS they will rule for AI.
The people who literally own this planet have investigated the people who literally own this planet and found that they literally own this planet and what the FUCK are you going to do about it, bacteria of the planet?
^
What in the absolute fuck are you talking about?! Your comment is asinine, “bacteria of the planet” the fuck?! Do you have the same “worm in the brain” that RFK claims to have because you sound just as stupid as him.
You claim people “own” this planet… um… what in the absolute fuck? Yes, people with money have always push an agenda but “owning” it, is beyond the dumbest statement.
I hope LLMs and generative AI crash and burn.
I’m thinking, honestly, what if that’s the planned purpose of this bubble.
I’m explaining - those “AI”'s involve assembling large datasets and making them available, poisoning the Web, and creating demand for for a specific kind of hardware.
When it bursts, not everything bursts.
Suddenly there will be plenty of no longer required hardware usable for normal ML applications like face recognition, voice recognition, text analysis to identify its author, combat drones with target selection, all kinds of stuff. It will be dirt cheap, compared to its current price, as it was with Sun hardware after the dotcom crash.
There still will be those datasets, that can be analyzed for plenty of purposes. Legal or not, they are already processed into usable and convenient state.
There will be the Web covered with a great wall of China tall layer of AI slop.
There will likely be a bankrupt nation which will have a lot of things failing due to that.
And there will still be all the centralized services. Suppose on that day you go search something in Google, and there’s only the Google summary present, no results list (or maybe even a results list, whatever, but suddenly weighed differently), saying that you’ve been owned by domestic enemies yadda-yadda and the patriotic corporations are implementing a popular state of emergency or something like that. You go to Facebook, and when you write something there, your messages are premoderated by an AI so that you’d not be able to god forbid say something wrong. An LLM might not be able to support a decent enough conversation, but to edit out things you say, or PGP keys you send, in real time without anything appearing strange - easily. Or to change some real person’s style of speech to yours.
Suppose all of not-degoogled Android installations start doing things like that, Amazon’s logistics suddenly start working to support a putsch, Facebook and WhatsApp do what I described or just fail, Apple makes a presentation of a new, magnificent, ingenious, miraculous, patriotic change to a better system of government, maybe even with Johnny Ive as the speaker, and possibly does the same unnoticeable censorship, Microsoft pushes one malicious update 3 months earlier with a backdoor to all Windows installations doing the same, and commits its datacenters to the common effort, and let’s just say it’s possible that a similar thing is done by some Linux developer believing in an idea and some of the major distributions - don’t need it doing much, just to provide a backdoor usable remotely.
I don’t list Twitter because honestly it doesn’t seem to work well enough or have coverage good enough.
So - this seems a pretty possible apocalypse scenario which does lead to a sudden installation of a dictatorial regime with all the necessary surveillance, planning, censorship and enforcement already being functioning systems.
So - of course apocalypse scenarios were a normal thing in movies for many years and many times, but it’s funny how the more plausible such become, the less often they are described in art.
It’s so very, very, deeply, fucking bleak. I can’t sleep at night, because I see this clear as day, I feel like a jew in 1938’s Berlin, only unlike that guy I can’t get out, because this is global. There is literally nowhere to run.
Either society is going to crash and burn, or we will see global war, which will crash and burn society.
There is no escape, the writing is on the fucking wall.
Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.
And yet, despite 20 years of experience, the only side Ashley presents is the technologists’ side.
An important note here, the judge has already ruled in this case that "using Plaintiffs’ works “to train specific LLMs [was] justified as a fair use” because “[t]he technology at issue was among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes.” during the summary judgement order.
The plaintiffs are not suing Anthropic for infringing on their copyright, the court has already ruled that it was so obvious that they could not succeed with that argument that it could be dismissed. Their only remaining claim is that Anthropic downloaded the books from piracy sites using bittorrent
This isn’t about LLMs anymore, it’s a standard “You downloaded something on Bittorrent and made a company mad”-type case that has been going on since Napster.
Also, the headline is incredibly misleading. It’s ascribing feelings to an entire industry based on a common legal filing that is not by itself noteworthy. Unless you really care about legal technicalities, you can stop here.
The actual news, the new factual thing that happened, is that the Consumer Technology Association and the Computer and Communications Industry Association filed an Amicus Brief, in an appeal of an issue that Anthropic the court ruled against.
This is pretty normal legal filing about legal technicalities. This isn’t really newsworthy outside of, maybe, some people in the legal profession who are bored.
The issue was class certification.
Three people sued Anthropic. Instead of just suing Anthropic on behalf of themselves, they moved to be certified as class. That is to say that they wanted to sue on behalf of a larger group of people, in this case a “Pirated Books Class” of authors whose books Anthropic downloaded from the book piracy websites.
The judge ruled they can represent the class, Anthropic appealed the ruling. During this appeal an industry group filed an Amicus brief with arguments supporting Anthropic’s argument. This is not uncommon, The Onion famously filed an Amicus brief with the Supreme Court when they were about to rule on issues of parody. Like everything The Onion writes, it’s a good piece of satire: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-293/242292/20221003125252896_35295545_1-22.10.03 - Novak-Parma - Onion Amicus Brief.pdf
The site formatting broke it. Maybe it’ll work as a link
Yup, seems to work
Thanks! That was a good read.
Would really love to see IP law get taken down a notch out of this.
People cheering for this have no idea of the consequence of their copyright-maximalist position.
If using images, text, etc to train a model is copyright infringement then there will NO open models because open source model creators could not possibly obtain all of the licensing for every piece of written or visual media in the Common Crawl dataset, which is what most of these things are trained on.
As it stands now, corporations don’t have a monopoly on AI specifically because copyright doesn’t apply to AI training. Everyone has access to Common Crawl and the other large, public, datasets made from crawling the public Internet and so anyone can train a model on their own without worrying about obtaining billions of different licenses from every single individual who has ever written a word or drawn a picture.
If there is a ruling that training violates copyright then the only entities that could possibly afford to train LLMs or diffusion models are companies that own a large amount of copyrighted materials. Sure, one company will lose a lot of money and/or be destroyed, but the legal president would be set so that it is impossible for anyone that doesn’t have billions of dollars to train AI.
People are shortsightedly seeing this as a victory for artists or some other nonsense. It’s not. This is a fight where large copyright holders (Disney and other large publishing companies) want to completely own the ability to train AI because they own most of the large stores of copyrighted material.
If the copyright holders win this the the open source training material, like Common Crawl, would be completely unusable to train models in the US/the West because any person who has ever posted anything to the Internet in the last 25 years could simply sue for copyright infringement.
Anybody can use copyrighted works under fair use for research, more so if your LLM model is open source (I would say this fair use should only actually apply if your model is open source…). You are wrong.
We don’t need to break copyright rights that protect us from corporations in this case, or also incidentally protect open source and libre software.
Or it just happens overseas, where these laws don’t apply (or can’t be enforced).
But I don’t think it will happen. Too many countries are desperate to be “the AI country” that they’ll risk burning whole industries to the ground to get it.
Copyright is a leftover mechanism from slavery and it will be interesting to see how it gets challenged here, given that the wealthy view AI as an extension of themselves and not as a normal employee. Genuinely think the copyright cases from AI will be huge.
My last comment was wrong, I’ve read through the filings of the case.
The judge has already ruled that training the LLMs using the books was so obviously fair use that it was dismissed in summary judgement (my bolds):
To summarize the analysis that now follows, the use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative and was a fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act. The digitization of the books purchased in print form by Anthropic was also a fair use, but not for the same reason as applies to the training copies. Instead, it was a fair use because all Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library with more convenient, space-saving, and searchable digital copies without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies. However, Anthropic had no entitlement to use pirated copies for its central library, and creating a permanent, general-purpose library was not itself a fair use excusing Anthropic’s piracy.
The only issue remaining in this case is that they downloaded copyrighted material with bittorrent, the kind of lawsuits that have been going on since napster. They’ll probably be required to pay for all 196,640 books that they priated and some other damages.
In theory sure, but in practice who has the resources to do large scale model training on huge datasets other than large corporations?
Distributed computing projects, large non-profits, people in the near future with much more powerful and cheaper hardware, governments which are interested in providing public services to their citizens, etc.
Look at other large technology projects. The Human Genome Project spent $3 billion to sequence the first genome but now you can have it done for around $500. This cost reduction is due to the massive, combined effort of tens of thousands of independent scientists working on the same problem. It isn’t something that would have happened if Purdue Pharma owned the sequencing process and required every scientist to purchase a license from them in order to do research.
LLM and diffusion models are trained on the works of everyone who’s ever been online. This work, generated by billions of human-hours, is stored in the Common Crawl datasets and is freely available to anyone who wants it. This data is both priceless and owned by everyone. We should not be cheering for a world where it is illegal to use this dataset that we all created and, instead, we are forced to license massive datasets from publishing companies.
The amount of progress on these types of models would immediately stop, there would be 3-4 corporations would could afford the licenses. They would have a de facto monopoly on LLMs and could enshittify them without worry of competition.
The world you’re envisioning would only have paid licenses, who’s to say we can’t have a “free for non commercial purposes” license style for it all?
