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0 pointstempfile9mo ago0 comments

Of course some people want that. And at the moment they can prevent it. But those methods may stop working. Will it then be alright to do it? Of course not, so why bother mentioning that they are able to prevent it now - just give a justification.

Your license is probably not relevant. I can go to the cinema and watch a movie, then come on this website and describe the whole plot. That isn't copyright infringement. Even if I told it to the whole world, it wouldn't be copyright infringement. Probably the movie seller would prefer it if I didn't tell anyone. Why should I care?

I actually agree that AI companies are generally bad and should be stopped - because they use an exorbitant amount of bandwidth and harm the services for other users. At least they should be heavily taxed. I don't even begrudge people for using Anubis, at least in some cases. But it is wrong-headed (and actually wrong in fact) to try to say someone may or may not use my content for some purpose because it hurts my feelings or it messes with my ad revenue. We have laws against copyright infringement, and to prevent service disruption. We should not have laws that say, yes you can read my site but no you can't use it to train an LLM, or to build a search index. That would be unethical. Call for a windfall tax if they piss you off so much.

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bayindirh9mo ago

> I can go to the cinema and watch a movie, then come on this website and describe the whole plot. That isn't copyright infringement.

This is a false analogy. A correct one would be going to a 1000 movies and creating the 1001th movie with scenes cropped from these 1000 movies and assemble it as a new movie, and this is copyright infringement. I don't think any of the studios would applaud and support you for your creativity.

> But it is wrong-headed (and actually wrong in fact) to try to say someone may or may not use my content for some purpose because it hurts my feelings or it messes with my ad revenue.

Why does it have to be always about money? Personally it's not. I just don't want my work to be abused and sold to people to benefit a third party without my consent and will (and all my work is licensed appropriately for that).

> We should not have laws that say, yes you can read my site but no you can't use it to train an LLM, or to build a search index.

This goes both ways. If big corporations can scrape my material without asking me and resell it as an output of a model, I can equally distill their models further and sell it as my own. If companies can scrape my pages to sell my content as theirs, I can scrape theirs and unpaywall them.

But that will be copyright infringement, just because they have more money. What angers me is "all is fair game because you're a small fish, and this is a capitalist marketplace" mentality.

If companies can paywall their content to humans that don't pay, I can paywall AI companies and demand money or push them out of my lawn, just because I feel like that. The inverse is very unethical, but very capitalist, yes.

It's not always about money.

P.S.: Oh, try to claim that you can train a model with medical data without any clearance because it'd be unethical to have laws limiting this. It'll be fun. Believe me.

tempfileOP9mo ago

> This is a false analogy.

I think you are describing something much more like stable diffusion. This article is about Perplexity, which is much closer to "watch a movie and tell me the plot" than it is like "take these 1000 movies and make a collage". The copyright points are different - stable diffusion are on much shakier ground than perplexity.

> Why does it have to be always about money?

Before I mentioned money I said "because it hurts my feelings". I'm sorry I can't give a more charitable interpretation, but I really do see this kind of objection as "I don't want you to have access to this web page because I don't like LLMs". This is not a principled objection, it is just "I don't like you, go away". I don't think this is a good principle to build the web on.

Obviously you can make your website private, if you want, and that would be a shame. But you can't have this kind of pick-and-choose "public when you feel like" option. By the way I did not mention, but I am ok with people using Anubis and the like as a compromise while the situation remains unjust. But the justification is very important.

> If companies can scrape my pages to sell my content as theirs, I can scrape theirs and unpaywall them.

This is probably not a gambit you want to make. You literally can do this, and they would probably like it if you did. You don't want to do that, because the output of LLMs is usually not that good.

In fact, LLM companies should probably be taxed, and the taxes used to fund real human AI-free creations. This will probably not happen, but I am used to disappointment.

> P.S.: Oh, try to claim that you can train a model with medical data

Medical data is not public, for good reasons.

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