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Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

Copyright covers the words not the ideas/concepts/facts. If I read a StackExchange post, I can absolutely use those ideas/concepts/facts to write a new document, which I can choose to copyright and sell, and there's no need for me to cite the SE post.

Now, as a matter of academic courtesy it's nice to cite the SE post if it's feasible, but it's impossible for me to remember where I learned everything I've learned over the years. Likewise, an LLM shouldn't be forced to cite where it learned facts, which might be technically hard/impossible, but if there is a clear best source then as a matter of politeness it should. And LLMs mostly do this when they can!

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> Now, as a matter of academic courtesy it's nice to cite the SE post if it's feasible, but it's impossible for me to remember where I learned everything I've learned over the years. Likewise, an LLM shouldn't be forced to cite where it learned facts, which might be technically hard/impossible, but if there is a clear best source then as a matter of politeness it should. And LLMs mostly do this when they can!

Scientific papers have included references for as long as I can remember. It's not about courtesy, but precision and acknowledgement.

So, are we letting LLMs run free and do things that would be frowned upon if they were done by humans?

When LLMs are used to write academic papers, then there is definitely a stronger requirement on the authors deploying them for identifying the source of ideas, as a matter of professional ethics (not law). But this isn't the issue being discussed, and it's not anything new with LLMs. Long before LLMs, academic authors occasionally got ideas from other places StackExchange without citing them properly in papers. (They frequently learn things from StackExchange, but most of the time they don't need to cite them because it's part of common knowledge. Cases where they got novel, cite-necessary insights is much rarer, as it will be for LLMs.)

LLMs don’t learn facts. They don’t think, cogitate, daydream, hallucinate, lie, or any other activity that requires intelligence, a mind, or a personality. Writing about them the way you did just advances the scam that is the current AI industry.

When I say "my thermostat tries to keep the temperature at 72", this doesn't mean I'm asserting anything about the thermostat having "goals" in some deep philosophical sense. It just means that the behavior of the thermostat can be usefully understood, in the relevant context, as goal-directed. (Likewise, "legs are for walking" even though legs were designed through a evolutionary process, etc.) We use this sort of language all the time, it's very useful, and it's mere pedantry to demand people not to. Likewise here, a machine can absolutely "learn" facts in the sense that it extracts them from the copyright-able creative choices in the text written by a human author.

You can't say I'm using the word learn as a metaphor for some purely mechanistic and deterministic process and not like when people say learn as in middle school kids learning algebra and then switch to using the second definition to absolve OpenAI from following the license.

That'd be like saying my computer learned the film Oppenheimer when bittorrent copied it to my computer's storage system, transcoding it to a lower bitrate, and claim I'm free of copyright law because my computer just learned some facts.

All of OpenAI's products are databases with highly lossy compression applied. Using language that implies a mind is pure scam.

I’m not using anything about “learn” to justify what’s copyrightable and what’s covered by fair use. Those things are defined by the output, not the process that produced them. The point is that LLMs are very effective at extracting non-copyrightable facts from the words and other creative choices made by an author.

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