[lukan]

"If you don't choose to share it, it's not used"

I am curious where your confidence that this is true, is coming from?

Besides lots of GPU's, training data seems the most valuable asset AI companies have. Sounds like strong incentive to me to secretly use it anyway. Who would really know, if the pipelines are set up in a way, if only very few people are aware of this?

And if it comes out "oh gosh, one of our employees made a misstake".

And they already admitted to train with pirated content. So maybe they learned their lesson .. maybe not, as they are still making money and want to continue to lead the field.

[simonw]

My confidence comes from the following:

1. There are good, ethical people working at these companies. If you were going to train on customer data that you had promised not to train on there would be plenty of potential whistleblowers.

2. The risk involved in training on customer data that you are contractually obliged not to train on is higher than the value you can get from that training data.

3. Every AI lab knows that the second it comes out that they trained on paying customer data saying they wouldn't, those paying customers will leave for their competitors (and sue them int the bargain.)

4. Customer data isn't actually that valuable for training! Great models come from carefully curated training data, not from just pasting in anything you can get your hands on.

Fundamentally I don't think AI labs are stupid, and training on paid customer data that they've agreed not to train on is a stupid thing to do.

[RodgerTheGreat]

1. The people working for these companies are already demonstrably ethically flexible enough to pirate any publicly accessible training data they can get their hands on, including but not limited to ignoring the license information in every repo on GitHub. I'm not impressed with any of these clowns and I wouldn't trust them to take care of a potted cactus.

2. The risk of using "illegal" training data is irrelevant, because no GenAI vendors have been meaningfully punished for violating copyright yet, and in the current political climate they don't expect to be anytime soon. Even so,

3. Presuming they get caught redhanded using personal data without permission- which, given the nature of LLMs would be extremely challenging for any individual customer to prove definitively- they may lose customers, and customers may try to sue, but you can expect those lawsuits to take years to work their way through the courts; long after these companies IPO, employees get their bag, and it all becomes someone else's problem.

4. The idea of using carefully curated datasets is popular rhetoric, but absolutely does not reflect how the biggest GenAI vendors do business. See (1).

AI labs are extremely shortsighted, sloppy, and demonstrably do not care a single iota about the long term when there's money to be made in the short term. Employees have gigantic financial incentives to ignore internal malfeasance or simple ineptitude. The end result is, if anything, far worse than stupidity.

[simonw]

There is an important difference between openly training on scraped web data and license-ignored data from GitHub and training on data from your paying customers that you promised you wouldn't train on.

Anthropic had to pay $1.5bn after being caught downloading pirated ebooks.

[lunar_mycroft]

So Anthropic had to pay less than 1% of their valuation despite approximately their entire business being dependent on this and similar piracy. I somehow doubt their takeaway from that is "let's avoid doing that again".

[ben_w]

Two things:

First: Valuations are based on expected future profits.

For a lot of companies, 1% of valuation is ~20% of annual profit (P/E ratio 5); for fast growing companies, or companies where the market is anticipating growth, it can be a lot higher. Weird outlier example here, but consider that if Tesla was fined 1% of its valuation (1% of 1.5 trillion = 15 billion), that would be most of the last four quarter's profit on https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSLA/tesla/gross-p...

Second: Part of the Anthropic case was that many of the books they trained on were ones they'd purchased and destructively scanned, not just pirated. The courts found this use was fine, and Anthropic had already done this before being ordered to: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...

[simonw]

Their main takeaway was that they should legally buy paper books, chop the spines off and scan those for training instead.

[lunar_mycroft]

Every single point you made is contradicted by the observed behavior of the AI labs. If any of those factors were going to stop them from training on data they legally can't, they would have done so already.

[Aurornis]

> I am curious where your confidence that this is true, is coming from?

My confidence comes from working in big startups and big companies with legal teams. There's no way the entire company is going to gather all of the engineers and everyone around, have them code up a secret system to consume customer data into a secret part of the training set, and then have everyone involved keep quiet about it forever.

The whistleblowing and leaking would happen immediately. We've already seen LLM teams leak and and have people try to whistleblow over things that aren't even real, like the Google engineer who thought they had invented AGI a few years ago (lol). OpenAI had a public meltdown when the employees disagreed with Sam Altman's management style.

So my question to you is: What makes you think they would do this? How do you think they'd coordinate the teams to keep it all a secret and only hire people who would take this secret to their grave?

[lukan]

"There's no way the entire company is going to gather all of the engineers and everyone around, have them code up a secret system "

No, that is why I wrote

"Who would really know, if the pipelines are set up in a way, that only very few people are aware of this?" (Typo fixed)

There is no need for everyone to know. I don't know their processes, but I can think of ways to only include very few people who need to know.

The rest is just working on everything else. Some work with data, where they don't need to know where it came from, some with UI, some with scaling up, some .. they all don't need to know, that the source of DB XYZ comes from a dark source.

[theshrike79]

> I am curious where your confidence that this is true, is coming from?

We have a legal binding contract with Anthropic. Checked and vetted by our laywers, who are annoying because they actually READ the contracts and won't let us use services with suspicious clauses in them - unless we can make amendments.

If they're found to be in breach of said contract (which is what every paid user of Claude signs), Anthropic is going to be the target of SO FUCKING MANY lawsuits even the infinite money hack of AI won't save them.

[lukan]

Are you refering to the standard contract/terms of use, or does your company has a special contract made with them?

[theshrike79]

Usually we have the standard contract if Legal approves.

We have stopped using major services because of their TOS wording, Midjourney being one.

[ben_w]

> Besides lots of GPU's, training data seems the most valuable asset AI companies have. Sounds like strong incentive to me to secretly use it anyway. Who would really know, if the pipelines are set up in a way, if only very few people are aware of this?

Could be, but it's a huge risk the moment any lawsuit happens and the "discovery" process starts. Or whistleblowers.

They may well take that risk, they're clearly risk-takers. But it is a risk.

[yunwal]

Eh they’re all using copyrighted training data from torrent sites anyway. If the government was gonna hold them accountable for this it would have happened already.

[ragequittah]

You're probably right [1]

[1]https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/anthropic-ai-copyright-sett...

[ben_w]

The piracy was found to be unlawful copyright infringement.

The training was OK, but the piracy wasn't, they were held accountable for that.

[blibble]

the US no longer has any form of rule of law

so there's no risk

[Aurornis]

> the US no longer has any form of rule of law

AI threads really bring out the extreme hyperbole and doomerism.

[ben_w]

The USA is a mess that's rapidly getting worse, but it has not yet fallen that far.