Item — HN Reader

> it's hilarious to see how all these HN intellectuals, who on any other day are rabidly against most DRM / IP issues all of a sudden become private property absolutists.

for the record, i've always been rabidly pro-copyright since i worked at a performing royalty organization (prs for music) circa 15 years ago, way before i joined hn.

i don't use llms for that reason.

> It's also sadly hypocritical to see all this rhetoric here on this thread decrying SOTAs for using a variety of content for their inputs as somehow sTeaLINg sTufF! ...

when i see a spade, i call it a spade. just because the US has utterly stupid copyright provisions that are wide open for abuse, i.e. fair use, doesn't mean abusing those provisions at scale is morally acceptable.

> ... but Chinese SOTA foundries directly using distillation as fair game.

two wrongs don't make a right, but the irony is at least something.

> I don't think there is any coherence to any of these arguments - other than 'we liking big companies'. That's the only common thread.

the corpos can get fucked as far as i'm concerned.

> What is more reasonable: ... There's some grounds for fair use by SOTA models to ingest content, so long as they are not reproducing it ... very roughly speaking.

*only in the US.

2 comments

I'm not attacking you, you don't have to defend yourself.

I'm just nothing that HN rhetoric is contradictory.

But this:

"when i see a spade, i call it a spade." -> this is anti intellectual absolutism.

If it were some true injustice, then fine, but that is clearly not the case.

There is ample room to contemplate that even copyrighted works could be considers fair use as training material.

"the corpos can get fucked as far as i'm concerned."

Ok that's fine - but then don't expect anyone to respect your principles if you don't have any other than 'screw that group!'.

I'm sympathetic to it (!!!) - but if we want to call a 'spade a spade' in a legitimate way, then we can do it in consistent and principled way.

> I'm just nothing that HN rhetoric is contradictory.

Periodic reminder that HN is not a collective or a singular entity and is actually a bunch of different people with different opinions. Often the people with the loudest opinions get upvoted to the top - and often the "side" represented at the top is different from thread to thread.

also, human beings themselves can be contradictory. as an example i will happily pirate films/tv shows, but refuse to do the same with music.

> two wrongs don't make a right

There is no second “wrong” here.

Model outputs are not copyrightable. I think that was already established?

Or do you think that Anthropic should own all the code generated by Claude? Surely that would be somewhat problematic?

If Anthropic feels that some of their customers are breaking their EULA (nothing to do with copyright infringement though) they are free to stop doing business with them. Maybe even sue them in civil court for breach of contract (again nothing to do with copyright infringement though)

there's a difference between a moral wrong and a legal wrong. in a heavily simplified view, moral wrongs are usually decided in the eyes of the victims -- you did bad thing to me so i'm not going to talk to you anymore. legal wrongs are decided by courts -- you did a bad thing so this court has decided you're not allowed to talk to that person anymore.

anthropic are essentially saying in this tweet they believe a moral wrong has been committed against them -- "unacceptable behaviour" etc.

plenty of people have been vocal about the fact anthropic have committed moral wrongs at scale in building the products in the first place, with the question of legal wrongs still being worked out.

so, two moral wrongs. legally, fuck knows.

Sure but it’s hard to read what Anthropic is saying in any other way than that they think that it’s morally wrong to engage in any behavior that harms their (potential) profit margins. The exact phrasing is just a way to justify their stance to other people.

I mean you are right in a way of course, it’s just a matter of degree and perspective, though. If one thing is moderately morally wrong and the other is potentially lightly morally wrong I don’t think it’s fair to equate them.

To me the situation is a bit like Google coming out and saying that its morally wrong for someone to build a competing open operating system on top of Android while stripping all Google services and “stealing” their ad revenue. Just seems silly and hypocritical.