alt Hacker NewsIt may be legally trained, but is it ethically trained? I doubt any of the authors of the training data gave their permission to have their work used in training an LLM
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bcjdjsndon • yesterday at 10:13 AM
They mean ethically as in doesn't break any copyright laws... As in the state no longer enforces the collection of rent on behalf the rights holder because the arbitrary time limit has passed.
I'm reasonably sure that all of the authors are long dead. (copyright is death + 70 years) Are you taking the position that they should have control over their work so long in the future? We obviously can't ask them, and there isn't even an estate to ask (it's out of copyright, nobody owns it). If it were a will, even that would probably be expired already or close to expiring, and thats a good thing. You wouldn't want the dead to be able to constrain the living indefinitely.
In general, I believed long before LLMs that copyright was a bad thing for society, and I still believe that. Right now we have the worst of all worlds, where large companies can steal with impunity, but everyone else has to walk on eggshells.
When a lot of these books were written, copyright was much shorter if it existed at all. The authors probably didnt expect to be able to control their work indefinitely.