kouteiheika • last Saturday at 11:34 AM

> are often used to make fake news, slander people, or other illegal content.

That's not how these models are used in the the vast majority of cases.

This argument is like saying "kitchen knives are often used to kill people so we need to ban the sale of kitchen knives". Do some people use kitchen knives to kill? Sure. Does it mean they should be banned because of that?

> I agree research is exempt from copyright, but people cashing in on unpaid artists works for commercial purposes is a copyright violation predating the DMCA/RIAA. We must admit these models require piracy, and can never be seen as ethical. =3

So, may I ask - where exactly do you draw the line? For the sake of argument, let's imagine something like this:

    1. I scrape the whole internet onto my disk.
    2. I go through the text, and gather every word bigram, and build a frequency table.
    3. I delete everything I scraped.
    4. I use that frequency table (which, compared to the exabytes of the source text I used to build it, is a couple hundred megabytes at most) to build a text generator.
    5. I profit from this text generator.

Would you consider this unethical too? Because this is essentially how LLMs work, just in a slightly fancier way. On what exact basis do you draw the line between "ethical" and "unethical" here?