alt Hacker NewsSo many people whose life's work got appropriated without consideration, compensation or consent it is baffling.
Let's say hypothetically a solution was legislated globally, wherein each living individual whose work was scraped for LLM training is compensated with royalties relative to the work's value.
Would that resolve the injury caused by the intellectual osmosis? Of course many of the original thinkers are now dead, and this system would mostly benefit those writing before the LLM age rather than help people going forward.
The more fundamental objection seems to just be to the concept of a machine that "learns" by ingesting public information, which is maybe ultimately a feeling that reality itself constitutes a crime against humanity.
> Would that resolve the injury caused by the intellectual osmosis?
Monetary compensation doesn't address the lack of consent. This type of usage was not anticipated when people made their intellectual product available for other humans to use. Scale does matter.
What would resolve the injury would be to ask people if they are willing to have their content used in this way and to not train on material without consent. This includes open source software with particular licenses requiring attribution.
Obviously there is too much money involved for this approach to work, but it strikes me as the most moral.