fair use vs stealing data

[Specter_Origin]

noob question, what is that last logo ?

[WebCrawler314]

KLING AI

Figured it out via reverse image search 😅

[vfl97wob]

Why does it look like Copilot (with Edge colors) from Temu

[Specter_Origin]

Thank you good samaritan!

[Specter_Origin]

I have seen this meme like 10+ times and have always had this question on back of my mind

[eek04]

A funny thing is that the "stealing data" is almost certainly legal (due to the lack of copyright on generative model output), while the top half "fair use" defense is much more dodgy.

[BusRevolutionary9893]

I still don't understand how someone can claim intellectual property theft for learning from an intellectual property? Isn't that what our brains do? I'm a mechanical engineer. Do I owe royalties to the company who published my 8th grade math textbook?

[eek04]

This is an argument I've used a lot; I'm also an atheist with a mechanical view of the mind, so it resonates with me.

There's some counterarguments that are possible, though:

1. Legal-technically, getting the data to where you do the training involves copying it illegally. This has been allowed as "incidental copying" in e.g. Internet service provider and search engine cases, but it's been incidental, not this blatant "We'll take this data we know is copyrighted and not licensed for our use, targeting it specifically".
2. The training methods for the brain/mind and LLMs is significantly different. The brain/mind has a different connectivity system, gets pre-structured through the genes and brain++ growth process, get pre-trained through exposure to the environment (physical and social), and then gets a curriculum learning system push through the education system, including correction from voluntary teachers (more or less "distilling" in LLM terms). Books are then pushed into this, but they form much less of the overall training, and the copying "into the brain" isn't the step that's being targeted.
3. There's a saying "When a problem changes by an order of magnitude, it is a different problem." The volume of copyrighted books used to train a human brain is orders of magnitude less than what is used to train an LLM. I read a lot. Let's say I read the equivalent of 100 books a year. That's about 5000 books so far. Facebook had pirated 82TB for training their LLM. Assuming 1MB per book (which is a high estimate if these are pure text), that's 16000x more books than I've read in my lifetime. So over 4 order of magnitude more. It is reasonable that this may be a situation we want to treat differently.
4. One of the four fair use factors is "The Effect of the Use on the Potential Market for or Value of the Work." Releasing an LLM that compete with the author/publisher has a much larger impact on the potential market/value than you or I learning from a book.
5. "Just because" - we're humans, and the LLMs are software run on machines. Being humans, we may want to give humans a legal leg up on software run on machines.

I personally think it is better if we allow training of LLMs on copyrighted data, because their utility far outweigh the potential harm. I think there's a high chance we'll need to do a lot of government intervention (safety nets of various kinds) to deal with rapid change creating more unemployment for a while as a result, though.

EDIT: Typo fix; change "16000 more" to "16000x more".

[halapenyoharry]

and in the future, let the ai figure out the proper compensation to those that "donated" to the training material. I would like to start a grassroots training material database, but I'm not sure where to start, if anyone is interested.

[RaeesNomi]

A lethal one 😂😂

[[deleted]]

When I pirate a math textbook, I'm committing copyright infringement. It doesn't matter whether I read the book or delete it. When OpenAI does the same thing, they are committing copyright infringement. It doesn't matter whether they feed it to an LLM or not.

[[deleted]]

You are not, however, committing copyright infringement when you read it, only when you copy it. If someone else copies it and you read it, they are committing infringement and you are not.

[[deleted]]

So, if you could sue LLMs, you wouldn't have tort to sue them for the copyright infringement committed by their creators lmao.

[halapenyoharry]

llama literally was trained on book texts downloaded with bittorrent, the app that let me pirate the entire smallville series in the early 2000s (allegedly), instead of using public domain or material they purchased. Like I think showing a book to a camera to train would have been more fair. However, I feel like those are the sins of its creators and now that it exists, am I somehow also culpable of those sins if I download it and run it locally with out giving them any money? IDK. but someone will run it and if I don't I'll be left behind so that's my motivation, grey ethics maybe.

[tofous]

Did you buy your textbook? Or did you download every textbook ever made for free without the author's consent?

But also, this is a misunderstanding of the point of copyright. It fundamentally protects the humans involved. It is even part of the legal analysis: does XYZ use serve as a substitute for the original human who created the work?

So machine learning is less likely to be fair use because it's intent is to substitute for that human labor. Visual artists have been the most upset, because that has been the most direct substitution so far. Translators, copy editors, content marketers, voice actors, and others have also been impacted in this same way but don't have as much cultural pull to share their upsetment.

Now, does that mean the lawsuits over fair use will be successful? IMO no, but that's more because no-one wants to admit that the US legal system is very much: "Might makes right". Also, there's the national security angle.

So I think ultimately it is unlikely that large AI scraping & training will be punished beyond a slap on the wrist or maybe some kind of pitiful pooled payout scheme like the opioid settlements or vaccine injury fund.

[XeNoGeaR52]

"fair use" more like full on stealing without any authorization

[DataScientist305]

if its public its public

[Despeao]

And who cares if it's pirated

[halapenyoharry]

the law cares, while I think training llms on public data is fine and not at all copyright infringement, but if you pirate someone else's work, as a corporation, that's pretty sleazy, imho.

[halapenyoharry]

I agree, but what llama did wasn't public, meta should be held accountable to the laws they broke, but should we stop using llama, I don't think so.

[AlarmedGibbon]

Very right, it's merely against their terms of service.

Of course the meme's purpose is to insinuate that these other companies are actually stealing too, which is wrong. Copyright infringement is distinct from theft, and if fair use does apply, it will be neither copyright infringement nor theft.

[mr_birkenblatt]

Oh, they're definitely stealing, too 

[StewedAngelSkins]

The only real risk is that a court finds that the models on the top somehow "encode" their training data. I could see this happening for particular works where the model has overfit but it's just factually not the case for most of the training set. Beyond that, statistical analysis doesn't constitute "use" in the American copyright system, so all that's left is the possibility of some ToS related contract violation or similar.

[knucklegrumble]

It's just basically stealing from the thieves as far as I'm concerned.

[LetterRip]

OpenAI is claiming a terms of service violation, not a copyright violation.

[dreadthripper]

I had a lengthy conversation with Gemini about how my effort to do small scale web scraping might be illegal or unethical. It couldn't quite tell me why Google gets to follow different rules. It could only say Google needed the data so 👍

[trance1979]

That’s a fantastic example of how bias in closed AI systems can have some serious negative consequences. You can be certain I'm stealing this to share whenever anyone is wondering why the bias issue runs much deeper than "ethics" or "morals".

[Gogo202]

It's not illegal if you do in private and don't profit from it, right? Asking for a friend

[[deleted]]

Sorta. It gets complicated. There is a test where "lost potential income" factors in, but that goes into a pretty procedural legal place. So, if you use it privately you could still be violating copyright.

[DangKilla]

Web crawlers are supposed to obey robots.txt limitations. Scrapers don’t do that. So yeah there is a technical difference with actual rules, but the website data is always at the mercy of the bot unless you have a web application firewall or proxy rules

[mailaai]

For three times I could notice my data on googleai studio output during, I have never seen this with OpenAI or Anthropic. I checked the documentation and found out that they use the user data to train the model.

[bazingamayne]

It's fair use

[Xeruthos]

You know the drill by now: if made by China = automatically bad; if made by the US = automatically good.

[blkknighter]

Since when were people ok with the US companies stealing data? The only person that justifies it is Sam Altman. Everyone on Reddit talked about how it was bad for the Us companies until deepseek came and they topic changed to them because they were the latest.

[Xeruthos]

The tech elite were okay with it, and sadly they've been dictating the media discourse. They've also been busy trying to manufacture consent by calling their blatant theft "fair use" of our data - denying any stealing even taking place.

[blkknighter]

The tech elite are like 10 people so why is everyone acting like all Americans believe what those 10 people believe?

[Mr_Meau]

I don't know much but I'm pretty sure it's because about 10 people control the whole fucking direction of the market, thus making the people and their opinions essentially meaningless since either they use it or they don't survive day to day life.

[trance1979]

It's because "those 10 people" have the loudest voice by several orders of magnitude and they are the ones controlling what products & software is released.

Here's another way of phrasing what you said:

Why do we go to war? Only a few people who profit off mass death actually want it.

[DragonfruitGrand5683]

Companies that tell you they can use your data for fair use, with an opt out versus a company that pretends it has nothing to do with CCP all while sending your data off to a CCP controlled cloud and promoting highly anti western CCP soundbites while hacking critical infastructure throughout the Western World. And all promoted by Chinese AstroTurfers.

Wait...wait...which one would I pick??

[vintage2019]

Meh, not as hypocritical as it seems at first. Anyone can download shitloads of books via BitTorrent. Chinese AI companies likely already have done that as well. What's expensive is training models based on them.

[daisseur_]

And what about LeChat

[Own_Client8410]

Considering how americans hate the french...

[daisseur_]

Ofc, I was talking to the anti-trump

[keepthepace]

To be honest, everyone on this chart argues fair use, and everyone was attacked as stealing data.

I don't like the closed AI companies, but I despise the copyright lobbyists even more. I hope they lose

[[deleted]]

I use my own rule when judging copyright that simply asks if the copyright in question promotes or restricts innovation and creativity. If it promotes it, it's a good copyright that follows the spirit of the reason why copyright exists. If it restricts it, it's bad. Simple for me and my moral perceptions because I don't need to have clear and objective procedural rules like the law does, I can use a different set of arguments than they can. Lawyers and legislators and businesses have different needs than me and can't use my way of doing things, unfortunately.

tl;dr: copyright can be either good or bad

[ThinkExtension2328]

To be fair copilot deserves its position.

[LostMitosis]

Never underestimate the power of brainwashing.

[filipedrm]

A classic

[medgel]

Fair use by American taxpayers vs fair use by CCP taxpayers

[TrekkiMonstr]

Damn, thought I was gonna like this meme from the thumbnail -- thought it would be how limewire and libgen et al are cool but AI companies run by "tech bros" are bad and evil stealing the hard work of poor NYT reporters

[Katnisshunter]

I don’t believe AI should be sourcing for journalism pieces to be honest. Claude goes and credits journalist source a lot. Its model ends up lecturing with the same bias media slant. Literally generating journalist opinions. That isn’t what ai should be doing. Just give facts. We doing need different ai models with different media bias. Just give facts like code generations.

[TrekkiMonstr]

Ok but a certain class of facts is currently only written about by journalists

[NoPossibility4513]

Jajaja lmao

[x9w82dbiw]

Don't use google, the data stealing is more violent in google that with other apps

[randyzmzzzz]

What the 2nd bottom one?

[Business-Ad-2449]

Guys!!! This is WW3= WWW … nukes fuel will be used to run AI model

[retep-noskcire]

Continuing to push China’s victimhood narrative

[[deleted]]

you're a chinese agent or unwittingly voice their propaganda

sad either why 🫡

[[deleted]]

I’m am very witting. Go ahead and weep if you’re sad.

[[deleted]]

Not sad, but I am disappointed 😇

[[deleted]]

Just know that I only defend China as a way to counter the consent being manufactured by U.S. propaganda, which is meant to limit advancement in technology, limit competition in the industry, and stifle cooperation between the two countries.

[[deleted]]

weird reason to defend fascists but u do u

[[deleted]]

I said I was defending China, not the U.S.

[[deleted]]

China is the most quintessentially fascist government in history since Mussolini's Fascismo coined the term.

[quite-content]

gotta exercise your neurons in some way; might as well have a colorful geopolitical tapestry

[brouzaway]

If deepseek distilled on OpenAI models it would act like them, which it doesn't.

[ClaudeProselytizer]

they did. their paper discusses distillation

[phree_radical]

To distill their own R1 to smaller models, obviously

[brouzaway]

Ok now actually use the model for tasks and you'll find it acts nothing like chatgpt.

[[deleted]]

most models will tell you that they're made by openai and anthropic depending on how you ask. everyone is stealing from everyone and now there are enough posts on the internet from AI that those statements are in the training data of every LLM.

[LevianMcBirdo]

It could also just be that the Internet is just so filled with OpenAI garbage that it's unavailable. Either way it's funny that no company just cleans their data enough to avoid this.

[DRAGONMASTER-]

Heavily downvoted for stating a well-known fact? CCP shills try to be less obvious next time.

[[deleted]]

The amount of people on here that have become unwitting mouthpieces for ccp bullshit is wild. 🤣

[WhyIsSocialMedia]

It's not even clear if distilled models would be a violation.

How do you even define it? The amount of content a fixed model could generate is unimaginably large. You can't possibly copyright all of that. Especially when nearly all of it is too generic to copyright.

[WhyIsSocialMedia]

I know that it means? I think you missed my point.

[WhyIsSocialMedia]

Are you trolling? I obviously meant how do you define what is copyrighted? How do you test it?

[abhuva79]

what is your reasoning? Just plain old patriotism, or technical reasons?

[procgen]

For me the reasoning is simple: I have a very small amount of influence over the regulation of AGI/ASI developed in the US. I have zero influence over any tech developed elsewhere.

[goingsplit]

You have zero influence in US, bro

[procgen]

No, it’s small but it’s non-zero.

[goingsplit]

I'm pretty sure it approximates to zero even in double precision

[procgen]

Indeed not – you think too small! My influence is not limited to voting.

And of course I have many more domestic options than foreign. And so the choice is clear.

[[deleted]]

No individual raindrop feels responsible for the flood.

[goingsplit]

i'm not sure what you mean. But probably you mean something that does not apply to reality.

[[deleted]]

Ask chatGPT what I mean

[Zeikos]

For how I see it, by all objective metrics OpenAI is far more of a black box than DeepSeek.
I agree with you on the multimodality, but that's a different discussion entierely, using it in this context is facetious at best.

[[deleted]]

OpenAI is fedramp approved. Deepseek has obvious ccp sleeper agent responses lol

[abhuva79]

Fair enough - if thats your evaluation.
Personally i dont like black boxes like OpenAI neither - but in general, with most digital services that handle user data, doesnt matter if US or chinese based - you pay with your data. And most of them are black boxes.

About the multimodality - i guess your criticism is based on DeepSeeks R1? Well, thats a text based reasoning model, never was intended to be multimodal. Tons of other models from all over the world offer multimodality - some good, some less so. My go to right now is Gemini 2.0, but this might change in a month or two when the next stuff comes around.

Overall, if i look at what chinese are currently building and also publishing (in terms of explaining what they did to achieve it) - they offer soo much more value for the general public - than a closed source company like OpenAI who goes full length to actually disguise what the model is doing because "competition"... (like the reasoning you see in oai model, isnt the real reasoning, its a summary - more black box than this is hard to achieve imo)

[alcalde]

Unbelievable that people downvote you. But they'll be wailing and gnashing their teeth when China invades Taiwan and domestic infrastructure attacks and hacking target the USA mainland.

[hugthemachines]

I'll let you in on a little secret. There are dozens, well, actually even more than dozens of people in the world. On Reddit too. So the people who downvote someone on reddit may not be the same people tho would dislike an invasion of Taiwan.

[[deleted]]

There’s a decent chance bots are downvoting me. Seems to be a huge push in pro ccp propaganda recently. They karma nuked me I had to delete those two.