Amazon- and Google-backed AI firm Anthropic says “general-purpose AI tools simply could not exist” if AI companies had to pay licences for the training material

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) company Anthropic has claimed to a US court that using copyrighted content in large language model (LLM) training data counts as “fair use”, however.

Under US law, “fair use” permits the limited use of copyrighted material without permission, for purposes such as criticism, news reporting, teaching, and research.

In October 2023, a host of music publishers including Concord, Universal Music Group and ABKCO initiated legal action against the Amazon- and Google-backed generative AI firm Anthropic, demanding potentially millions in damages for the allegedly “systematic and widespread infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics”.

EmergMemeHologram, (edited )

Google and Amazon both have massive corpuses of this data that they would allow only themselves to use.

Anthropic isn’t saying this to help content creators, they’re saying this to kill OpenAI so they don’t have to actually compete

0x815,

Data Leak at Anthropic Due to Contractor Error

TL;DR - Anthropic had a data leak due to a contractor’s mistake, but says no sensitive info was exposed. It wasn’t a system breach, and there’s no sign of malicious intent.

Midnitte,

Interesting that Anthropic is making this argument, considering their story in the AI space. They’re certainly no OpenAI.

Moira_Mayhem,

This is not actually true at all, you could train very good LLMs on public domain only info, especially science oriented ones.

But what people want is a chatbot that can call on current events, and that is where the cost comes in.

Floon,

You don’t get to both ignore intellectual property rights of others, and enforce them for yourself. Fuck these guys.

Moira_Mayhem,

Serious Question: When an artist learns to draw by looking at the drawings of the masters, and practicing the techniques they pioneered, are the art students respecting the intellectual property rights of those masters?

Are not all of that student’s work derivative of an education based on other people’s work who will never see compensation for that student’s use?

DdCno1,

I think there is a fundamental difference here. People are not corporations. People have always learned like this and will always learn like this. Do we really want to allow large corporations to take knowledge from people, then commercialize it and put these very same people out of work?

Moira_Mayhem,

Your distinction is mostly philosophical. Legally corporations have more protections than people.

I’m probably one of the most anti-corporate people you’ll meet today, I don’t even think publicly traded companies should exist.

Floon,

One, let’s accept that there is a public domain, and cribbing freely from the public domain is A-OK. I can reproduce Michaelangelo all I want, and it’s all good. AI can crib from that all it wants.

AI can’t invent. People can invent: i can have a wholly new idea that no one has ever had. AI does nothing but recombine other existing ideas. It must have seed data, and it won’t create anything for which it has no initial input: feed it photographs only, and it can’t create a pencil drawing image. Feed it only black and white images, and it can’t create color images.

People do not require cribbing from sources. Give a toddler supplies, and they will create. So, we have established that there is a fundamental difference between the creation process. One is dependent on previous work, and one is not.

Now, with influences, you can ask, is your new creation dependent on the previous creation directly? If it is so utterly dependent on the prior work, such that your work could not possibly exist without that specific prior art, you might get sued. It will get debated and society’s best approximation of a collective rational mind will determine if you copied or if you created something new that was merely inspired by prior art.

AI can only create by the direct existence of prior art. It fakes invention. Its work has to come from somewhere else.

People have shown how dependent it is on its sources with prompts that say things like, “portrait of a patriotic soldier superhero” and it comes back with a goddamned portrait of Chris Evans. The prompt did not include his name, or Captain or America, and it comes back with an MCU movie poster. AI does not create. People create.

chahk, (edited )

I agree with you on principle. However… How long do you think it will be until these very same “AI” companies copyright and patent every piece of content their algorithms spew out? Will they abide by the same carve-outs they want for themselves right now? Somehow I doubt it.

They want to ignore the laws for themselves, but enforce them onto everyone else. This “Rules for thee but not for me” bullshit can’t be allowed to pass. Let’s then abolish all copyright, and we’ll see how long these companies last when everyone can just grab their stuff “for learning”.

Moira_Mayhem,

How long before a self-owned AI company that does every administrative job better than humans because it trained on human behavior for 100 years?

What do you think an entity like that would be capable of?

chahk,

A bit off-topic, but I’d be fine with that. The more mind-numbingly dumb work that computers can do for us, the less time we have to spend doing it ourselves. Administrative jobs holders disagree with this, but so did every person whose job and livelihood was replaced by automation, ever. UBI (universal basic income) is the only answer that will save all of us from starvation when automation eventually replaces us too.

Moira_Mayhem,

I agree with everything in your post but the simple truth is administrative jobs are the modern equivalent of fluff court positions handed out to the 2nd+ born children of nobles and the modern owner class will never give up that eternal source of easy wealth.

Which is also why they fight so hard to keep anyone not in the owner class out of management.

el_bhm,

I guess people are finally catching up to the big con with LLMs should not be copyrighted ampliganda. It is astroturfing at its best.

The end goal is controlling rights to what corporations produce with LLMs without spending a dime. All the while cutting jobs.

Writing was in CAPITAL LETTERS on the walls for the past two years. Why did twitter restrict API access? Why did Reddit restrict API access? Why did Github/Bitbucket/Gitlab restricted web ui functions for unlogged?

They knew and wallgardened the user generated data.

Cmon people.

And the hypocrisy of this all. If it is bad, it is user data, if we can mine nuh ah bitch, ours.

Also, for people arguing for free use of anything to build LLMs. Regulations will come. Once big players control enough of the LLM market.

Eggyhead,
@Eggyhead@kbin.social avatar

Well how about consent at the very least?

intensely_human,

Yup. Same as the way the rest of use and learn from the internet. We basically wouldn’t have the internet as we know it if it weren’t 99% free content.

Pratai,

And yet, it seems when you say anything anti-ai, lemmy bites your head off.

Moira_Mayhem,

We are allowed to have nuance, nothing is inherently good or bad. A knife can wound or make dinner.

Trying to reduce nuance lessens the public discourse, do not be tempted by lowest common denominator memery.

Whether anyone likes it or not LLMs are here and even if we strictly regulate them there will be organizations and governments that do not.

WHAT WE SHOULD be focusing on is how to prevent low effort AI content from just basically overtaking the web.

We are already mostly there.

not_amm,

You can’t prevent it without regulations. Companies won’t care while gaining money from it unless they’re obligated to, and even then, some won’t comply either.

BTW, that mentality of “other countries vs mine” is absurd. War crimes shouldn’t be committed by a country just because the other commits them; others bad ≠ I good.

LLMs can’t and should NOT replace a human, at least not yet (they’re not even that good either). If we can’t have guaranteed basic needs such as housing, food and healthcare or a BUI, then they should not keep leaving people without jobs because no one will be able to afford anything.

Moira_Mayhem,

You can’t prevent it WITH regulation.

Just like illegal dumping: If it makes the company more than the fine, it is just a cost of business.

BTW, that mentality of “other countries vs mine” is absurd.

China will never agree to a limitation of tech advancement because that is their primary source of wealth, and frankly your comment shows a tragic lack of understanding on international affairs.

This isn’t ‘us good them bad’, this is 'China has a history of ignoring technology patents and restrictions in order to gain international advantage. The fact that you assumed that I had petty reasons makes it clear you have nothing to contribute to this conversation.

Stillhart,

It doesn’t matter what business we’re talking about. If you can’t afford to pay the costs associated with running it, it’s not a viable business. It’s pretty fucking simple math.

And no, we’re not talking about “to big to fail” business (that SHOULD be allowed to fail, IMHO) we’re talking about AI, that thing they keep trying to shove down our throats and that we keep saying we don’t want or need.

intensely_human,

Why are people publishing so much content online if they aren’t cool with people downloading it? Like, the web is an open platform. The content is there for the taking.

Until one of these AIs just starts selling other people’s work as its own, and no I don’t mean derivative work I mean the copyrighted material, nobody is breaking the rules here.

I read content online without paying for a license. I should only have to obtain a license for material I’m publishing, not material I read.

zaphod, (edited )
@zaphod@lemmy.ca avatar

Until one of these AIs just starts selling other people’s work as its own, and no I don’t mean derivative work I mean the copyrighted material, nobody is breaking the rules here.

Except of course that’s not how copyright law works in general.

Of course the questions are 1) is training a model fair use and 2) are the resulting outputs derivative works. That’s for the courts to decide.

But in general, just because I publish content on my website, does not give anyone else license or permission to republish that content or create derivative works, whether for free or for profit, unless I explicitly license that content accordingly.

That’s why things like Creative Commons exists.

But surely you already knew that.

blindsight,

Right, but I think it’s going to be a tough legal argument that using a text to adjust database weighting links between word associations is copying or distributing any part of that work. Assuming courts understand the math/algorithms.

Moira_Mayhem,

I don’t know if you noticed this but some really big companies with high stock valuations are only existing because investors poured tons of capital into them to subsidize the service.

Uber could not do taxis cheaper than existing if they didn’t have years of free cash to artificially lower prices.

We are in the beginning of late state capitalism, profitable companies go under due to private capital firms and absolute ponzi frauds get their faces on time magazine.

Enjoy the collapse.

Stillhart,

I don’t know if you noticed this but some really big companies with high stock valuations are only existing because investors poured tons of capital into them to subsidize the service.

Exactly, they PAID MONEY to make it work. No they don’t make the money back and depend on outside capital, but they are still paying their employees (not enough) and suppliers, etc.

Moira_Mayhem,

Yes, we are in late stage capitalism where the market eats itself.

Why do you think we have seen so much large scale fraud in the last 15 years?

megopie,

“Ai” as it is being marketed is less about new technical developments being utilized and more about a fait accompli.

They want mass adoption of the automated plagiarism machine learning programs by users and companies, hoping that by the time the people being plagiarized notice, it’s too late to rip it all out.

That and otherwise devalue and anonymize work done by people to reduce the bargaining power of workers.

SnotFlickerman,
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

They also don’t care if the open, free internet devolves into an illiterate AI generated mess, because they need an illiterate populace that isn’t educated enough to question it anyway. They’ll still have access to quality sources of information, while ensuring the lowest common denominator will literally have garbage information being fed to them. I mean, that was already true in the sense that the clickbait news outsold serious investigative news, and so the garbage clickbait became the norm and serious journalism is hard come by and costly.

They love increasing barriers between them and the rest of the populace, physically and mentally.

sonori,
@sonori@beehaw.org avatar

Silicon valley’s core business model has for years been to break the law so blatantly and openly while throwing money at the problem to scale that by the time law enforcement caches up to you your an “indispensable” part of the modern world. See Uber, whose own publicly published business model was for years to burn money scaling and ignoring employment law until it could drive all competitors out of business and become an illegal monopoly, thus allowing it to raise prices to the point it’s profitable.

Zaktor,

Fucking scooters lying all over the sidewalk.

Drewelite,

A.I. exists. It will continue to get better. If letting people use it becomes illegal, they’ll just use it themselves and cut us out. A world where the general population have access to A.I. is the only one where we’re not totally fucked. I’m not simping for Google or Facebook, I’d much prefer an open source self hostable version. The only way we can stay competitive is if these companies continue to develop these in the open for the consumer market.

General purpose artificial intelligence will exist. Full stop. Intelligence is the most valuable resource in the universe. You’re not going to stop it from existing, you’re just going to stop them from sharing it with you.

megopie, (edited )

What they have, is miles from artificial general intelligence, it is not AI in even a limited sense. It is AI in the same way a mob in a video game is AI.

Their claims to be approaching it are marketing fluff at best, and abject lies at worst.

Drewelite,

I think if we sit here and debate the nuances of what is or is not intelligence, we will look back on this conversation and laugh at how pedantic it was. Movies have taught us that A.I. is hyper-intelligent, conscious, has it’s own objectives, is self aware, etc… But corporations don’t care about that. In fact, to a corporation, I’m sure the most annoying thing about intelligence right now is that it comes packaged with its own free will.

People laugh at what is being called A.I. because it’s confidently wrong and “just complicated auto-complete”. But ask your coworkers some questions. I bet it won’t be long before they’re confidently wrong about something and when they’re right, it’ll probably be them parroting something they learned. Most people’s jobs are things like: organize these items on those shelves, mix these ingredients and put it in a cup, get all these numbers from this website and put them in a spreadsheet, write a press release summarizing these sources.

Corporations already have the A.I. they need. You gatekeeping intelligence is just your ego protecting you from the truth: you, or someone dear to you, are already replaceable.

I think we both know that A.I. is possible, I’m saying it’s inevitable, and likely already at version 1. I’m sure any version of it would require access to training data. So the ruling here would translate. The only chance the general population has of keeping up with corporations in the ability to generate economic value, is to keep the production of A.I. in the public space.

lvxferre,
@lvxferre@mander.xyz avatar

Most things that I could talk about were already addressed by other users (specially @OttoVonNoob), so I’ll address a specific point - better models would skip this issue altogether.

The current models are extremely inefficient on their usage of training data. LLMs are a good example; Claude v2.1 was allegedly trained on hundreds of billions of words. In the meantime, it’s claimed that a 4yo child hears something between 45 millions and 13 millions words through their still short life. It’s four orders of magnitude of difference, so even if someone claims that those bots are as smart as a 4yo*, they’re still chewing through the training data without using it efficiently.

Once this is solved, the corpus size will get way, way smaller. Then it would be rather feasible to train those models without offending the precious desire for greed of the American media mafia, in a way that still fulfils the entitlement of the GAFAM mafia.

*I seriously doubt that, but I can’t be arsed to argue this here - it’s a drop in a bucket.

sonori,
@sonori@beehaw.org avatar

The thing is, i’m not sure at all that it’s even physically possible for an LLM be trained like a four year old, they learn in fundamentally different ways. Even very young children quickly learn by associating words with concepts and objects, not by forming a statistical model of how often x mingingless string of characters comes after every other meaningless string of charecters.

Similarly when it comes to image classifiers, a child can often associate a word to concept or object after a single example, and not need to be shown hundreds of thousands of examples until they can create a wide variety of pixel value mappings based on statistical association.

Moreover, a very large amount of the “progress” we’ve seen in the last few years has only come by simplifying the transformers and useing ever larger datasets. For instance, GPT 4 is a big improvement on 3, but about the only major difference between the two models is that they threw near the entire text internet at 4 as compared to three’s smaller dataset.

lvxferre,
@lvxferre@mander.xyz avatar

My point is that the current approach - statistical association - is so crude that it’ll probably get ditched in the near future anyway, with or without licencing matters. And that those better models (that won’t be LLMs or diffusion-based) will probably skip this issue altogether.

The comparison with 4yos is there mostly to highlight how crude it is. I don’t think either that it’s viable to “train” models in the same way as we’d train a human being.

ApeNo1,

“today’s general-purpose AI tools simply could not exist” … “as a profitable venture”

thefartographer,

Free for me, paid by thee

revv,

To me, this reads like “Giant-ATV-Based Taxi Service Couldn’t Exist If Operators were Required to Pay Homeowners for Driving over their Houses.”

If a business can’t exist without externalizing its costs, that business should either a. not exist, or b. be forced to internalize those costs through licensing or fees. See also, major polluters.

davehtaylor,

Then it shouldn’t exist.

This isn’t an issue of fair use. They’re stealing other people’s work and using it to create something new and then trying to profit from it, without any credit or recompense.

intensely_human,

Just like I do with literally all content I’ve ever consumed. Everything I’ve seen has been remashed in my brain into the competencies I charge money for.

It’s not until I profit off of someone else’s work — ie when the source of the profit is their work — that I’m breaking any rules.

This is a non-issue. We’ve let our (legitimate) fear of AI twist us into distorting truth and motivated reasoning. Instead of trying to paint AI as morally wrong, we should admit that we are afraid of it.

We’re trying to replace our fear with disgust and anger. It’s not healthy for us. AI is ultra fucking scary. And not because it’s going to take inspiration from a copyrighted song when it writes a different song. AI is ultra fucking scary because it will soon surpass any possibility of our understanding, and we will be at the whim of an alien intelligence.

But that’s too sci fi sounding, to be something people have to look at. Because it sounds so out there, it’s easy to scoff at and dismiss. So instead of acknowledging our terror at the fact this thing will likely end humanity as we know it, we’re sublimating that energy through righteous indignation. See, indignation is unpleasant, but it’s less threatening to the self than terror.

It’s understandable, like doing another line of coke is understandable. But it is not healthy, not productive, and will not play out the way we think. We need to stop letting our fear turn our minds to mush.

Reading someone else’s material before you write new material is not the same as copying someone else’s material and selling it as your own. The information on the internet has always been considered free for legal use. And the limit of legal use is based on the selling of others’ verbatim material.

This is a simple fact, easy to see. Except recognizing it nullifies the righteous indignation, opening the way for the terror and confusion to come in again.

Moira_Mayhem,

Now that it exists how do you propose we make it not exist?

Even if we outlaw it Russia and China won’t and without the tools to fight back against it the web is basically done as anything but a propaganda platform

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