I think that, considering the goal of ensuring the LLM doesn’t directly reproduce the training data, it really doesn’t matter. I don’t think trillions of characters arranged into words so something can spit out the most likely combination of those words back at me really has anything to do with how those words are sourced.

To me it’s a question of “fair use”, is it fair for the richest for-profit tech corporations on Earth to scrape every book, painting and song from the internet without so much as basic consent or compensation for the benefit of their shareholders, or not?

You have to concede that all of these companies, be it OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Google, etc., wouldn’t have an LLM product at all without a massive quantity of high-quality training data. Even OpenAI themselves have admitted this fact in court, claiming that it would be impossible for them to achieve the desired result without infringing on other people’s works.

Are you the type of person who believes that “profit is exploitation” by any chance? Marxism is popular on here, right?

So let’s forget about copyright and start talking about “exploitation”…

By far the most influential theory of exploitation ever set forth is that of Karl Marx, who held that workers in a capitalist society are exploited insofar as they are forced to sell their labor power to capitalists for less than the full value of the commodities they produce with their labor. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/exploitation/#MarxTheoExpl

They have no product without our labor.

There is no “OpenAI Studio Ghibli filter” for Altman to profit off of, without the artwork of Hayao Miyazaki, Kazuo Oga, and multitudes of other lower-level workers who are certainly not as well off as the tech billionaires.

What the “AI” industry all comes down to is an unprecedented exploitation of other people’s intellectual labor for profit. It’s not some great talent equalizer as some delusional people seem to think it is. It is a vehicle by which the richest members of the corporate ownership class are taking the work of the creative class, and have now created an investment bubble in which just about all of the money flows up to the top.

Over the last few years of this bubble are we seeing any real benefit to society or humanity? No.

Oligarchs like Altman, Zuckerberg and Musk are the only people reaping the financial benefits of everyone else’s work.

Your moral compass is probably fine. But like the person above who compared LLMs to pirating photoshop, I think you’re just not seeing the forest for the trees. We can agree to disagree, but I’m not happy about what is effectively modern day robber barons.