The existing industry that’s popped up around LLMs has conveniently ignored that what these models are doing may have been illegal the whole time and a lot of the experts knew it. This is why it’s so important for folks to realize that the industry is not just thin wrappers around ChatGPT (and that interesting applications of this technology are largely being pushed out by the lowest hanging fruit). If this is ruled as not fair use then the whole industry will basically disappear overnight and we’ll have to rebuild it from scratch either with a new business model that pays authors or as open source/crowd sourced models (probably both). All that said we’re almost certainly better off. Open AI may have kicked off the most recent “gold rush” but their methods have been terrible for both the industry at large and for further development of the tech.
It always should have had the right business model where they paid for this access for AI training. They knew it was wrong but in their rush to be known they decided it was better to take without asking and then ask for forgiveness later. Regardless what happens now, people have already made a name for themselves swindling the likes of Microsoft out of it and will have long well-paying careers from it.
It seems like it was almost necessary to go through this phase for the sake of developing the tech. Doesn’t a lot of CS research uses web crawling algorithms to gather data without identifying that the information is licensed for such use? What about the fediverse? it remains unclear what the copyright and licensing will be should it come into question. There is no EULA to access fedi, just a set of open protocols.
The existing industry that’s popped up around LLMs has conveniently ignored that what these models are doing may have been illegal the whole time and a lot of the experts knew it. This is why it’s so important for folks to realize that the industry is not just thin wrappers around ChatGPT (and that interesting applications of this technology are largely being pushed out by the lowest hanging fruit). If this is ruled as not fair use then the whole industry will basically disappear overnight and we’ll have to rebuild it from scratch either with a new business model that pays authors or as open source/crowd sourced models (probably both). All that said we’re almost certainly better off. Open AI may have kicked off the most recent “gold rush” but their methods have been terrible for both the industry at large and for further development of the tech.
It always should have had the right business model where they paid for this access for AI training. They knew it was wrong but in their rush to be known they decided it was better to take without asking and then ask for forgiveness later. Regardless what happens now, people have already made a name for themselves swindling the likes of Microsoft out of it and will have long well-paying careers from it.
It seems like it was almost necessary to go through this phase for the sake of developing the tech. Doesn’t a lot of CS research uses web crawling algorithms to gather data without identifying that the information is licensed for such use? What about the fediverse? it remains unclear what the copyright and licensing will be should it come into question. There is no EULA to access fedi, just a set of open protocols.