Comment on đ¤ Interesting
mechoman444@lemmy.world â¨5⊠â¨weeks⊠agoOk. Fine. Sure.
Not sure though what this has to do with llm companies making money. Since they write their own code and llms are trained on data⌠Like wikipedia.
đ¤ˇ
Comment on đ¤ Interesting
mechoman444@lemmy.world â¨5⊠â¨weeks⊠agoOk. Fine. Sure.
Not sure though what this has to do with llm companies making money. Since they write their own code and llms are trained on data⌠Like wikipedia.
đ¤ˇ
balsoft@lemmy.ml â¨5⊠â¨weeks⊠ago
LLMs are absolutely trained on FOSS software, including GPLâd stuff. Accelerating software development is also a large part of how they are making money. I believe training on GPLâd software and then charging for access is copyright infringement, but it doesnât really matter because entities supposed to be enforcing copyright are paid for by the same billionaires who run the AI companies, so literally nothing will happen.
mechoman444@lemmy.world â¨5⊠â¨weeks⊠ago
This argument has never made much sense to me.
Copyright protects the expression itself, not the ideas, facts, patterns, grammar, writing styles, or knowledge learned from that expression. Humans learn from copyrighted books, articles, movies, and music every day. Nobody claims that someone who read 10,000 copyrighted novels is committing copyright infringement every time they sit down and write a new story.
Thatâs the part I keep seeing people ignore.
If learning from copyrighted material is infringement, then every author, journalist, musician, engineer, and artist on the planet is infringing copyright because they all learned their craft from copyrighted works created by other people.
The real question is whether an AI is reproducing copyrighted content, not whether it learned from copyrighted content. Those are two completely different issues.
You donât get to argue that learning is legal when humans do it and suddenly becomes theft when a machine does it. Either learning from publicly available information is allowed, or it isnât. The standard cannot magically change because you dislike the technology.
balsoft@lemmy.ml â¨2⊠â¨weeks⊠ago
Copyright absolutely does protect âideas, patterns, grammar, writing stylesâ. It does not cover material facts, but this is beside the point here.
Actually, if they take certain elements from other works it often can be considered copyright infringement, but this is also beside the point.
This is the crux of the issue. The LLM is not a person from a legal perspective, therefore it cannot âlearnâ. What is happening is that a legal person - a company - is consuming a bunch of copyrighted material and transforming it into a bunch of data to be interpreted by a computer program. This makes that data definitionally a derivative work made by the company. Sure, the transformation process is probably âcreativeâ enough for the company to be able to claim copyright on the resulting weights, as long as that company gains explicit or implicit approval from all the copyright holders of the works they used to create the weights. Legally speaking, this is no different from you pirating a bunch of movies and making a compilation of the funniest moments - see how the legal system would react to you doing that.
Of course, I find the entire concept of modern copyright system to be an awful idea whose entire purpose is impeding the human creativity for the purposes of monetization. But if we read the law as it is - the AI companies are absolutely doing copyright infringement by training their models on GPL code and not releasing the weights under a GPL-compatible license.
mechoman444@lemmy.world â¨2⊠â¨weeks⊠ago
The explanation above comes from the Big Law Dictionary app, which is available on the Google Play Store for Android.
Copyright protects the expression of an idea, not the idea itself. If ideas could be copyrighted, it would be absurd. I donât even know how that could realistically be enforced.
This is the problem with so many people talking out of their backsides on this platform. They donât know what these legal terms actually mean or how they function. They see something they donât like and immediately start making claims about it.
LLMs do a lot of things that deserve criticism. Copyright isnât necessarily one of them.
If a company developing or operating an LLM is committing copyright infringement, then it should be prosecuted. If it has violated the law and hasnât been held accountable, that is a separate issue that should be remedied. But that is a completely different argument from claiming that LLMs are inherently infringing copyright.
An LLM uses training data to generate novel responses. That means it produces new output rather than copying source material verbatim. Simply using publicly available information to learn patterns is not, by itself, copyright infringement. If a company unlawfully obtained private or copyrighted material, or reproduced protected works in a way that violates copyright law, then it has broken the law and should be prosecuted.
But the existence of an LLM, by itself, is not copyright infringement.
So, moving forward, this can go one of two ways: either you concede that you were incorrect, or you double down and make even more absurd claims. Either way, I donât know⌠Iâve had this argument so many times on this platform that itâs ridiculous.
As of right now, there are multiple lawsuits against major LLM developers. In some of those cases, the courts have ruled that training on publicly available data can qualify as fair use.
At this point, not a single court has issued a final ruling in favor of a plaintiff holding that LLM training itself is copyright infringement.
I genuinely donât know what else Iâm supposed to do to prove this to you people.