Technology

Extremely well-said.

Also, it's important to point out that the one that empowers people is the one that is consistently punished far more egregiously.

We have governments blocking the likes of Sci-Hub, Libgen, and Annas-Archive, but nobody is blocking Meta's LLMs for the same.

If they were treated similarly, I would be far less upset about Meta's arguments. However it's clear that governments prioritize the success of business over the success of humanity.

It's the opposite. Closing down public resources would be regulatory capture and that would be consolidation of power.

Who do you think can afford to pay billions in copyright to produce models? Only mega corporations and pirates. No more small AI companies. No more open source models.

I wish we could be talking about the power imbalances of corporate bodies exercised through the use of capital ownership, instead of squabbling about how that differential is manifested through a specific act of piracy.

The reason we view acts of piracy different when they are committed by corporate bodies is because of the power of their capital, not because the act itself is any different. The issue with Meta and OpenAI using pirated data in the production of LMM's is that they maintain ownership of the final product to be profited from, not that the LMM comes to exist in the first place (even if it is through questionable means). Had they come to create these models from data that they already owned (I need not remind you that they have already claimed their right to a truly sickening amount of it, without having paid a cent), their profiting from it wouldn't be any less problematic - LLM's will still undermine the security of the working class and consolidate wealth into fewer and fewer hands. If we were to apply copyright here as it's being advocated, nothing fundamental will change in that dynamic; in fact, it will only reinforce the basis of that power imbalance (ownership over capital being the primary vehicle) and delay the inevitable (continued consolidation).

If you're really concerned with these corporations growing larger and their influence spreading further, then you should be directing your efforts at disrupting that vehicle of influence, not legitimizing it. I understand there's an enraging double-standard at play here, but the solution isn't to double down on private ownership, it should be to undermine and seize it for common ownership so that everyone benefits from the advancement.

I wonder if piracy could even benefit these corporations in the long term? Do people who pirate games and movies in their teens and twenties frequently go on to purchase such things when they're older? I honestly don't know, but I would love to see a study. I certainly have seen people make that claim.

To me it always seems to come back to nobility. Big corpo is the new nobility and they have certain privileges not available to the common folk. In theory it shouldn't exist but in practice it most certainly does.

So why are Meta, and say, Sci-Hub treated so differently?

They are not. Meta is being sued, just like Sci-Hub was sued. So, one difference is that the suit involving Meta is still ongoing.

In any case, Meta did not create the dataset. IDK if they even shared it. The researcher who did is also being sued. The dataset has been taken down in response to a copyright complaint. IDK if it is available anywhere anymore. So the dataset was treated just like Sci-Hub. The sharing of the copyrighted material was stopped.

Meta downloading these books for AI training seems fairly straight-forward fair use to me. I don't see how what Meta did is anything like what Sci-Hub did.