Distinction without a difference. They pirated books for the purpose of using them to train their models.
The noteworthy thing here, IMO, is the judge seems to have explicitly stated that using legally-acquired works to train AI models falls under fair use.
I think it's a significant distinction. The original title implies that the training was illegal when the court actually found that the training was fair use. It implies that Anthropic was required to ask the professors for permission to train on their books.
What the actual ruling found was that the professors should have been paid some tens of dollars for 1 copy of their book.
(Whether you agree with it or not is another matter)
How does it open the door to that? That's literally the argument that was rejected by saying the fair use defense only counts for the legally-acquired media.
> “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different,”
That's my mistake.
I went back and read the actual opinion, and while I'm disappointed that training an LLM is fair-use transformative, I'm hopeful about a trial on the subject of the pirated copies. But I'm also worried that the argument seems like it might succeed if such training is "one-shot" without the central library or repository of intermediate copies. And that doesn't seem like a good outcome. But maybe my pessimism here is also misplaced.
It's like fan fiction: sneaking into theatre to watch a movie without paying for admission is illegal, but writing fan fiction about the movie and publishing it on AO3 is legal.
Assuming canadian or dane, but maybe there are other places he’s threatened. There are canadian inference providers running deepseek, and definitely eu ones idk about ones based in denmark.
The economic sovereignty of any nation, but especially smaller ones like canada and denmark, is harmed by sending our money out of the country when there are options available in country.
> The economic sovereignty of any nation, but especially smaller ones like canada and denmark, is harmed by sending our money out of the country when there are options available in country.
I respectfully disagree. I subscribe to the comparative advantage economic principle, so I'm fine with international trade.
What I am saying isn’t inconsistent with comparative advantage. International trade is fine, but only when it’s not a commodity easily obtained inside your own nation. Open model inference is a commodity. There is no real lost opportunity cost from using canadian owned GPUs or chinese owned ones. In fact, as a country with abundant cheap power, and physical space, canada’s probably a better place than many to run inference. That’s what I meant by “when there are options in country”.
I hear you, but as I said, I hope that buying from Deepseek gets more Deepseek. Maybe they get the same amount (or more) from a Canadian provider, and if so I might reconsider.
The 'clean power' would factor in a well, but I haven't really looked in to it. I know China is installing a ton of renewable and has a carbon market while Canada's building a new pipeline and building Alberta data centres running on natural gas, so I'm not willing to take on faith that switching is cleaner.
Fair point. Personally i don’t see value in closed models, be they chinese or american. So, it’s pretty much against my religion to pay the model creator to provide inference. Even a situation where model makers license models to providers seems better than deepseek hosted deepseek provided models.
Also, re: power. I said canada has lots of cheap power, clean was your word.
RE: clean power - China is by far the biggest leader in getting renewables off the ground, but they are also still comfortably the biggest polluter, so it's difficult to compare.
The unfortunate truth behind at least the solar PV boom in China is that it's driven in large part by the exploitation of Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region. One of the reasons they can sustain the pace they're going at is because while nowadays PV modules exports increasingly gravitate towards offshore fabs (Vietnam, Malaysia), domestically all the biggest PV players make full use of modern slavery within Xinjiang's re-education camps.
>International trade is fine, but only when it’s not a commodity easily obtained inside your own nation
It might be a minor nitpick, but that part is just not how the macroeconomic principle works. Abundance of a good/service within a country is irrelevant to the concept of a comparative advantage - this is counter-intuitive but but that was David Ricardo's entire point. It's not about whether production is more efficient domestically, it's whether comparative allocation of resources between multiple countries is more efficient by specialization within the different goods.
Even if you can produce "good 1" cheaper in Country A vs Country B, if Country A can instead produce "good 2" that Country B cannot, it's better for Country A to produce "good 2" domestically and import "good 1".
Now, I still agree with the original notion. It's unnecessarily risky to use services from "democratically-challenged" nations (especially imperialist ones), when safer options are available. But there's no need to twist macro 101 concepts to justify that view. Modern trade policy takes more into account than basic market efficiency.
China has annexed (or it claims so) several countries already, so it sounds like you're only concerned with yourself - probably not what you wanted to achieve.
(But I'd concede that in the field of genocide China doesn't come up as bad)
We (most of the world) also have to deal with well funded external government organisations constantly pumping out propaganda attempting to make sure we don't work together or have empathy/understanding of each other's views.
Push that through a media filter that optimizes for engagement and it's no wonder these things are happening.
Would you be happy if they bought exactly one copy of each book? That might be a dozen sales between the AI labs, some tens of dollars to the author. Is this really what you're so upset over?
And the solution to avoid this piracy has been to buy up rare editions of old books, cut them up and scan them. Better?
Is it okay to rob a bank for a billion if each individual customer only loses $10? Stealing $10 is fine right, why don't we just let every company with your credit card steal a little $10 from you? You don't mind right?
Excusing illegal behavior creates a moral hazard and over time leads to the kind of amoral and corrupt government and business leaders we have today. There's a pervasive sense in society that money can buy you out of any consequences and morality is basically irrelevant, every little thing like this is how it happens. It's the same dynamic as SF failing to police minor shoplifting for years, which led to stores closing and metal bars everywhere that we have today. Even then we actually do punish a few shoplifters for stealing $100 worth of goods, but we don't punish these companies for stealing billions worth?
If this is the issue you actually care about then you're in the minority. Most seem to be using it as a proxy for complaining about how the LLM uses the content, not that they didn't pay $10 for the content to start with.
People care about rich and powerful entities being completely immune to any law or consequences, over and over again. It's a caste system with money. The law needs to actually be enforced without fear or favor. This issue is widespread and is a centerpiece of midterm elections. Calling it a minority view is a convenient way to disengage after I showed your argument of "eh its just $10" is nonsense.
Have you run your numbers recently because a 20+ year break-even isn't common? I wonder if you have some highly subsidized power or something because most places would be under 10.
The decision to not do solar was made last year, so that's how old the numbers are. It was made together with the people selling solar. It's very dependent on the direction your roof is facing and how much roof space you have. Also, installing solar is expensive (20k€ to 30k€) here in Germany, so despite power also being super expensive it still makes no sense. There's one neighbor that did it and kinda regrets it, since it's more expensive all around.
Huh. That's funny. I have no log in yet I read the article entirely free. I clicked on a link on a post in twitter but then I copied the URL directly from the article. I can't see a difference in the two URLs though but there's probably a redirect. Can't check easily now.
Report: https://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector/50314699
hnslop: https://hnslop.nilsherzig.com/
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