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Comment by 6gvONxR4sf7o | Hacker News Reader

So making libgen is illegal, but using it to train LLMs is legal? I know there's a whole issue of transitive liability (maybe you couldn't know you were getting an illegal thing from the thief, so it doesn't always make sense for you to to be liable too), but this kind of thing seems to power way too much of my industry for me to be comfortable.

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There's the concept of inducing copyright infringement (a la MGM v. Grokster), so much depends on whether those who train LLMs were inducing libgen's operations in some way, for example if payment or resources were being contributed to libgen.

Welcome to the future! Companies will make illegal or very expensive to access original information, like scientific papers. However, guess what, your friendly AI LLM, trained by your friendly tech monopoly on stollen data, will allow you to access all this research that was paid with your taxes, through monthly payments. But don't ask the AI where it got this information from, because it can get really upset with you...

if you ask it to explain how it arrived at this reasoning, they'll ban you.

It's actually amusingly easy to have ChatGPT criticize some OpenAI practice or another. Tell it to do a search for some controversial story, then to "analyze it from an ethical standpoint".

Seriously, who is running around here on HN downvoting such comments?

There is old group photo floating around with Sam Altman and Aaron Swartz.

One ended up in jail commiting suicide for scraping freely licensed JSTOR articles.

The other is considered hero for scraping JSTOR articles and every other article ever.

Lesson is dont waste peoples time with things that dont make money. More money it makes the safer you are.

RIP Aaron Swartz.

I live in the wrong timeline :(

Rule of Capitalism #1: If it is found to be good, but one can't make money off it, it must be made illegal to produce run, then replaced with something that sucks horribly, but can potentially be profitted off of.

The people training LLMs have billions of dollars and the people using it to read that can't afford a $300 journal do not.

So training is legal and reading is illegal.

So, the solution to legal problems is… money? Lots of money?

Always has been.

Meh, I’d say power, the power is just being conveyed through money in this scenario

Money and political/legal power are freely and effortlessly convertible both ways.

access to money. don't even need to use it.

beautifully put, thank you! it's the golden rule - those with the gold make up the rules.

Gold or money is a just proxy for power.

Power is the final crux here.

They are cross fungible and leverage able, so this is a silly empty distinction.

But money has historically been more effective at producing or controlling power than the other way around.

They are not cross fungible.

Money/gold is a proxy in the current social system.

that's right, the neanderthals didn't use gold, they hit each other with clubs.

I'm not sure I can agree with that, because historically speaking would include the time we had nobility. And in that time period, having money would not provide you with power, as nobles were beyond the law and could simply cease it for themselves.

money would buy you mercenaries to overthrow the nobility.

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