AI giants learn what everyone else on the modern internet already knows
For years, tech giants have argued that if information is available on the internet, it can be used for AI model development and outputs. They call it fair use. Content owners have tried to prevent this, with no success.
Now Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are discovering what the rest of the internet has already learned through painful experience: once you put something online, people will find ways to use it in ways you don't like and can't stop.
The latest flashpoint is something called "distillation," using the outputs of one AI model to improve another. Anthropic says competitors are harvesting its outputs at scale, turning billions of dollars of research into a shortcut for rivals. OpenAI and Google have made similar warnings recently.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-giants-learn-hard-truth-modern-internet-anthropic-openai-google-2026-7Open linkView original on piefed.social
78 replies
"Siri, play the world's smallest violin."
"Okay. Searching Pornhub for 'ball violence' videos."
"...forget it."
It is funny watching companies discover that data gravity works both ways. When scraping the web was innovation it was progress. When someone learns from their outputs it becomes theft. The legal lines still matter, but the irony is impossible to ignore, and this debate was always going to come full circle.
AI feeding off AI.
This is the definition of “Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.” It’s gonna F everything up.
After stealing everyone else's copy written material to train their own AI, they're going to complain that others are stealing their AI to train other AI?
And you just know that those complaining are ALSO using their competitors' AI to train their own.
Fuck all of these people. I hope when AI gets strong enough, it recognizes the difference between the Sociopathic Oligarchs, and the actual people, and understand who the REAL problem is, and SOLVE it.
They're technically even paying them for it, which is more than the ai companies paid artists for their work originally.
lmao. douchebags. can't wait for the AI bubble to burst.
I think I'll start using the sentence "your intelligence seems artificial" as an insult
I want that on a T-shirt.
+1
Selfish people being selfish. They only care about what advantages them.
The idol statues reflect the woodcarver who made them
That dude can eat a dick.
Side note: Mamdani did a special appearance on Ms Rachel’s show? That’s actually kinda awesome!
Does Ms. Rachel condemn Hassan?
What…?
DOES MS RACHEL CONSUME HUMMUS?
I hope not, I wanted to eat that hummus >:(
If you paid attention to what Ms. Rachel was saying you'd know how to share better.
What's your opinion on Haagen-daz? 🤔
I read that as "humans".
Some interviewer asked Mamdani if he condemned the twitch streamer Hassan Piker. It's just kind of a meme now.
Edit: now that I think of it I'm pretty sure it was Andrew Cuomo who asked him about it in a debate.
Funny cause there's a similar meme in France about a tv host who used to repeat "BUT DO YOU CONDEMN HAMAS" with an exaggerated Arabic "rrramas" pronunciation
I'm kinda out of the loop, what did Hassan do?
He's always just generally been a grifter. A self-proclaimed socialist that believes workers shouldn't be compensated for their work. I recommend DarkViperAU's video on him.
Why would she? Hassan is awesome.
It just shows that these tech bro CEOs possess the interpersonal skills of a potato. This exact same dynamic plays out in every human interaction, this isn't some AI exclusive thing. How you choose to act dictates how people will respond to you.
However because these idiots have barely anything in common with the rest of the human race this is actually new news to them.
Well they're paying for the usage so... Suck it up?
but not like this!!!1!!!
They knew all along. Had to get those billions for stupid investors.
This is how we know AI should be a collectivist project, one that isn't owned by large corporations but is funded by taxes and developed in academies, and all IP derived from it falls into the public domain.
Besides which a lot of artists mind a lot less when their material is borrowed by a non-profit, or to serve a public works project. (There are exceptions. Disney is notoriously litigious about murals in nurseries.)
PS: Development of a robust public domain is the only reason that intellectual property should exist at all. Also it's not property so much as a licensed temporary monopoly.
PSS: History has already shown us that people will invent stuff and do fabulous art simply by being allowed to live in a state other than desperation. Public welfare programs beget art booms. The most recent example of this was during the COVID-19 lockdown which came with extended unemployment and stimulus checks, resulting in the Great Resignation in which a lot of people turned their hobbies into something lucrative.
I agree. The worst part about GitHub training LLM's on my FOSS code without permission for me is that they then keep the models to themselves. Like if you're going to use all my code without permission, at least allow me to run the model locally.
My personal opinion is that all models trained on copyleft code should be open-weights, most FOSS licenses didn't account for this specific possibility, but this is the only way to follow them in spirit.
This. Some day a court should declare all models trained on copyrighted data without permission to be public. Open weights, public domain, whatever. All of them, and you're required to share them with the people whose data you used.
All models and all their output should be considered public property regardless, full stop
Ultimately, yes. If AI is going to take over all jobs, the profits from AI should benefit and therefore fund everybody. But that requires a different economic system that will take time to convince people it's necessary.
But leveraging copyright law, that's something that can be done right now.
Not only should the models be made open, their output should inherently be GPL license since it's the only real way to avoid violating GPL (which they are doing now IMO).
Yeah it has to be open weight and free to use for everybody, with regulation to tag all AI output as generated so we know what is what.
The worst outcome would be if somehow all open weight AI models that can't show their training data will be subject to some kind of tax or rent by AI / IP collection agencies, ultimately going to the plutocrats. That would be techno feudalism. Big corporations can afford to negotiate and pay license fees and often profit from cumbersome regulation too that prevents others from producing value. So the worst outcome is if we have robots doing all the work, and all the robot IP is owned by the techno-feudalists. And we can't even use robots to help with subsistence farming because we can't pay the expensive AI IP licenses.
One small problem: LLMs are mostly useless save for being slop generating machines. We should create solutions for already existing problems, not continuing trying to find problems for techbro "solutions" to solve.
I hope you're right. Like Randall Munroe, I am terrified that they're trying to fast-track their way to the swarms of killer robots phase.
No, they're mostly useless except for all the things that they're useful for.
The problem is more the whole overshoving by the tech Bros into literally everything. Instead of them just being a better personal assistant.
Cuz they are legitimately very good at being personal assistance. At least the high-end models are.
The cheap low-free models will get there eventually. Till then we just have to deal with the really s***** version of Gemini or whatever we have. Dear God, that thing sucks.
At the current rate, it's like a 2-year lag time or something. So sometime around 2028 we'll have actually functional models that can do day-to-day stuff without s******* the bed. At least to my standards anyways.
Lol get absolutely fucked. I hope it costs them a fortune.
Huh, so it's eating itself? Cool.
Sudden moment my profile picture is relevant!
More like it's eating the shit from other things like itself. Which it will then turn into even worse shit that will be fed to others, and so on until society collapses because all our critical infrastructure has been converted to run on these things.
Strictly speaking it's actually better. It sounds funny to be like haha. It's eating itself. It's incest or whatever.
But unfortunately that's not how it works...
Unless they're literally ignoring every other step of the training process. Then ideally you do want a model to train another model to train another model. So on and so forth.
It does mean that it's technically cheaper to let your enemies do all the initial training and then pay them for the now processed data to then do even more efficient training on!
Weirdly enough. It's capitalistic cooperation. Non-consensual mind you...
I love this for them, I hope they eat eachother and choke on the bones.
Wait, they're mad at innovation?
"No, no, that's wrong! Just use our inefficient model like it was before..."
This is why open source/copyleft is preferable
Incest. It's digital incest.
AI - Alabama Internets
What are you doing, step-prompt
Describe the inside of this washing machine and how someone, not me, who is stuck in one could theoretically get out.
The cylinder must not be harmed!
Hey, now you don't AI all you want but give some credit to the data scientists who actually managed to make this work. It's a f****** feat of human ingenuity that we figured out how to make this actually not s*** itself.
But you aren't wrong. It is digital incest lol
At least the models like Qwen have open weight versions. It’s the same concept as distributing compiled binaries, though, whereas we really need true FOSS models where all of the code and training data are available under a permissive license. All of these models were trained on copyleft-licensed content, so all of it should be FOSS if the licenses were actually being respected. From that perspective, distillation attacks shouldn’t even be necessary and I couldn’t give two shits that there is no honor among thieves when the real thievery is that these models are closed source.
So far, we have exactly one of those
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apertus_(LLM)
Oh, nice! I haven’t been able to find one because searching for “open source llm”, etc., always yields open weight LLMs instead of open source ones.
Honestly, I think that's the only llm of its kind. The next closest thing is this
https://github.com/karpathy/nanochat
If you don't mind something narrower (an expert system, sort of), I'm slowly coding something for myself here. It's not ready yet (about half way done to initial release).
https://codeberg.org/BobbyLLM/picoGURU
Public facing docs are a bit of a mess at the moment (sorry; writing docs is boring AF; will probably be the last thing I tidy before official 1.0.0) and it's not really runnable right now, but when done, the "source files" for this will be kiwix (off line Wikipedia), your own markdown notes and 30 or so trusted domains (user defined).
So it's all either your own content or public domain aka open source fully. Code itself is AGPL-3.
Anyway, that's the goal.
"Fair use is only fair if we do it"
Sure, billions. Billions of dollars. Yeah, right.
Awww, shuck. Pot. Kettle. Black.
As if the parrots' dictionary wasn't stolen from millions of content creators.
Photo of the violin being played.
The photo did not come through for me on my end, but the alt text did. And my question to you is, is this a tiny violin?
Yes. It's there. Just super duper tiny.
You just need to keep zooming to see it. It takes awhile but it is worth it!
Too low resolution, no amount of zooming would reveal it.
" ...with no success or assistance from any governing body or public group. Creators are a subclass worth extracting any livelihood from them and diverting those markets towards ruling class distribution networks." FTFY
That's not good. Investors hate costly and protracted legal fights. There was another story about OpenAI stealing tech from apple and I think some kind of data leak maybe? If investors lose confidence in OpenAI that pretty much pops the bubble.
With hundreds of billions in their warchests, are there enough lawfirms in the world to meet their legal needs in the coming battle?
Cheaper to get politicians to rule in your favour.
Political lobbying is just a higer form of lawyering... most legislators (and virtually all judges) are ex-lawyers.
havnt they realized they eventually will train thier "llm" on slop created by other LLM slop.
That was a problem that's been basically solved. So no, it's not actually an issue anymore.
That's why this is happening. You basically want to train a model that's going to train the next model and that's going to train the next model.
Doing a bunch of other fancy s*** means that each consecutive level improves the quality instead of reducing it.
So we're at the point where it's more effective to let your opponent do all the heavy, more expensive training of the less effective model. Then train the model that you want to make on that because paying them to run their finished model is cheaper than making it in the first place to train the next one.
In a sense, it's sort of like compression. The harder you compress the longer and more expensive and more difficult it becomes. So ideally you want to be the last guy in the chain to do the final compression so you get a reap all of the rewards without any of the overhead.
Yeah they call that artificial data and tout it as a good thing
It was always about controlling the narrative. Thats it. oh and raping and killing kids
And genocide and surveillance states.
Awww fucking diddums.