Calling it a “Distillation Attack” is wild. Get fucked Anthropic.

I’m not discussing the use of private data, nor was I ever. You’re presenting a false Dichotomy and trying to drag me into a completely unrelated discussion.

As for your other point. The difference between this and licensing for music samples is that the threshold for abuse is much, much lower. We’re not talking about hindering just expressive entertainment works. Research, reviews, reverse engineering, and even indexing information would be up in the air. This article by Tori Noble a Staff Attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation should explain it better than I can.

Private conversations are something entirely different from publically available data, and not really what we’re discussing here. Compensation for essentially making observations will inevitably lead to abuse of the system and deliver AI into the hands of the stupidly rich, something the world doesn’t need.

I mean realistically, we don’t have any proper rules in place. The AI companies for example just pirate everything from Anna’s Archive. And they’re rich enough to afford enough lawyers to get away with that. And that’s unlike libraries, which pay for books and DVDs in their shelves… So that’s definitely illegal by any standard.

You can make temporary copies of copyrighted materials for fair use applications. I seriously hope there isn’t a state out there that is going to pass laws that gut the core freedoms of art, research, and basic functionality of the internet and computers. If you ban temporary copies like cache, you ban the entire web and likely computers generally, but you never know these days.

Know your rights and don’t be so quick to bandwagon. Consider the motives behind what is being said, especially when it’s two entities like these battling it out.

You have to remember, AI training isn’t only for mega-corporations. By setting up barriers that only benefit the ultra-wealthy, you’re handing corporations a monopoly of a public technology by making it prohibitively expensive to for regular people to keep up. These companies already own huge datasets and have whatever money they need to buy more. And that’s before they bind users to predatory ToS allowing them exclusive access to user data, effectively selling our own data back to us. What some people want would mean the end of open access to competitive, corporate-independent tools and would leave us all worse off and with fewer rights than where we started.

The same people who abuse DMCA takedown requests for their chilling effects on fair use content now need your help to do the same thing to open source AI. Their next greatest foe after libraries, students, researchers, and the public domain. Don’t help them do it.

I recommend reading this article by Cory Doctorow, and this open letter by Katherine Klosek, the director of information policy and federal relations at the Association of Research Libraries. I’d like to hear your thoughts.