LLMs create statistical distributions of words and phrases based on ingested data, and then sample those distributions given conditional probabilities.
Why should for-profit companies have the right to create these statistical distributions based on our written works without consent? They’re not publishing these distributions, and the purpose of ingesting these texts is not to report on the distributions.
They’re just bottom-trawling the internet and acting as if they have every right to use other peoples’ written works. While people are having “serious discussions” around it, they’re moving forward, ignoring the discussions entirely, and trying to force the conclusion of those discussions to be “well, it’s too late now, anyway”.
Original analysis of public data is not stealing. If it were stealing to do so, it would gut fair use, and hand corporations a monopoly of a public technology. They already have their own datasets, and the money to buy licenses for more. Regular consumers, who could have had access to a corporate-independent tool for creativity and social mobility, would instead be left worse off with fewer rights than where they started.
LLMs create statistical distributions of words and phrases based on ingested data, and then sample those distributions given conditional probabilities.
Why should for-profit companies have the right to create these statistical distributions based on our written works without consent? They’re not publishing these distributions, and the purpose of ingesting these texts is not to report on the distributions.
They’re just bottom-trawling the internet and acting as if they have every right to use other peoples’ written works. While people are having “serious discussions” around it, they’re moving forward, ignoring the discussions entirely, and trying to force the conclusion of those discussions to be “well, it’s too late now, anyway”.
Original analysis of public data is not stealing. If it were stealing to do so, it would gut fair use, and hand corporations a monopoly of a public technology. They already have their own datasets, and the money to buy licenses for more. Regular consumers, who could have had access to a corporate-independent tool for creativity and social mobility, would instead be left worse off with fewer rights than where they started.