alt Hacker News> 1. All modern LLMs are (in my eyes) inherently morally problematic. They were trained on stolen information, and where they didn't break the law they corrupted social contracts.
It's bizarre to me that over what feels like less than a year, enforcement of intellectual property and copyright laws has become the most important moral principle. Suddenly, it's your moral duty to enforce Disney's trademark of Mickey Mouse.
I reject this moral framing completely. Information wants to be free!
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Much longer than a year. First time I recall was when Stable Diffusion dropped, on HN everyone was suddenly a copyright hawk.
On the one hand, I agree with you about, e.g., Disney. I think the way they have deliberately manipulated the formation of modern copyright law for their purposes is also problematic.
But I do care about, for example, a recently published author, or someone who posts their paintings on social media. Regardless of where the law stands in each particular case, I think it's repugnant that statistical models were trained on these inputs with the intent of offering the ability to produce similar outputs without any payment or even attribution to the original artist.
> Information wants to be free!
If someone chooses to make their information free, then so it may be, but the issue at hand is very obviously not about the use of, e.g., copyleft materials. The AI companies knowingly chose to take material that they knew they should not have and used it to make their copycat machines, building those machines in such a way that those responsible can cower behind the letter of the law to defile its spirit.
I agree with this.
Further:
> They were trained on stolen information, and where they didn't break the law they corrupted social contracts.
I completely reject this framing. Learning on something has always been part of the social contract (public libraries are a great example).