From my perspective, the bad actors are the corporations and greedy people who turned copyright into a perpetual rent on IP. If copyright terms and IP laws were reasonable, I'd be 100% with you. But the idea that a novel written in 1940 is still not public domain, just so the heirs (or more likely, corporate purchasers of the rights) can continue to profit on a work that was itself but on the shoulders of thousands of years of civilization? Screw that.

The Walt Disneys of the world screwed themselves on this one. If copyright was still the 20+20 it started as, and if the bulk of people being "stolen" from (don't get me started on using theft to refer to IP), then I think most people would be much more up in arms over the AI industry.

But, in a world with sane copyright laws, perhaps AI companies would have different approaches. Today, if they want anything after 1930, they're either breaking laws or in uncharted territory.

And siloing our knowledge is a silly response even if you are a copyright maximalist.

> the largest theft of intellectual property in human history. Every digitised creative work, whether in the public domain or not was taken, often outright pirated, with the explicit intention of being able to trivially produce compelling forgeries

Is it theft?

Does knowledge belong to a person, or to the civilization? After all, their knowledge could not have come from nothing, as they too stand on the shoulders of giants - all of us do.

If we took the different route - opening knowledge up instead of focusing on gatekeeping - we'd probably allow people to achieve more.

Multiple times I've hit the gate when it was not necessary. Just yesterday: - Want to read a research paper? Pay up. - Want to access tax funded satellite images? Pay up. - Want to dig through some old parts of the public archives? Pay up. - Want to read an old publication that might contain knowledge, written for the public, which somehow ended up in a collection that requires you to pay up just so you can read 1 paragraph from a 188 paperbck or verify a certain catalogue number exists? Well well, open up your wallet.

In which case are we talking about theft?

Someone's NYT bestselling novel? Those are mostly so cookie cutter it ain't hard to copy them without an AI.

Music? How many times have musicians riffed and ripped off of one another? And now someone can just more easily create a similar song/tune.

Art? You cannot copy a physical art piece. You can reproduce it, but you cannot copy it - it won't have the same value as the original. Even in cases such as Warhol's mass produced art, the original prints have much more value than a random print on a dollar store t-shirt.

And after all, even Google and Open AI are sharing their models for free. You can use Gemini and ChatGPT without paying a dime to any of them. And they are also so kind to share the knowledge on how to build these magic machines AND even give you their machines for free so you can train one of your own.

So I wouldn't call all of this "the largest theft", more like "the largest liberation".

> The lineage of every LLM of relevance today was the largest theft of intellectual property in human history.

I can't say how strongly and completely I think this framing should be rejected.

What is the point of knowledge if not to learn from.

> Physical works are being enthusiastically destroyed

This makes me sad.

> I'm sympathetic to the idea that knowledge should be free but that isn't possible when bad actors like Google and OpenAI are preying on the commons.

Google and OpenAI are expanding access to the commons like nothing before.

interesting to me is, that the small entities are not protecting their gardens and are freely sharing it usually. and mostly the large corpos are building walls.

>We are siloing our knowledge out of desperation.

but why does knowledge need to be siloed? elsevier has every right to make a deal with the author of the research and put it behind a paywall or whatever they'd like to do to keep their multi-billion dollar business going, but is this something we should be defending and celebrating as a "solution" to prevent LLMs from making knowledge more available?

and in this instance, why should a researcher that is probably funded by public money, care if openai is disseminating their research?

Lots of this research work is paid for by the People - via government wealth transfers. The knowledge should rightly be distributed to the People.

If you want to argue that the cultivators of new knowledge should be treated better, I am in agreement, they should receive a greater share of rewards.

The real victims of a shift to open knowledge society would be the publishing cartels, and I can't say I'd feel too bad about it.

Theft/stolen implies it's been taken and the owner deprived of it. Pirated or copied is more appropriate, but still not quite exact as it's been encoded into what amounts to lossy memory. If I ask a person to tell me about a paywalled article, they'll share what they can remember and likely get some facts wrong. An LLM is the same (these days; GPT-3 was another story).

I do agree that the methods of obtaining much of the material (eg. the published works torrents) were stupidly wrong and they should pay for that. However, legally acquired media being "read" by the training process isn't so different than it being read by a voracious reader: it's lossily encoded in (what amounts to) memories.

The insane scraping levels and behaviors ... not wrong. If only there were companies who already did that responsibly they could contract with for data. Hmm. (But they have to "own" it, as is the SV fashion these days.)

Sorry but just because IP has somehow become the current "thing" on the self-described 'left' is not going to convince me that corporate IP & knowledge restriction is actually a good thing and elsevier are the good guys.

> exponentially increasing the cost of hosting

We're on a technical forum, everyone knows the cost of hosting plaintext and what an exponential is.