upvote
> I pretty sure OpenAI and Anthropic are doing the same or worse.

No they're not. It would end both companies if they were ever found to be doing that.

Their terms are clear - if you use the coding plans they can[0] train in return. Enterprise and API, absolutely not.

The argument here is that with the Chinese labs you have zero legal recourse.

[0] opt-in, thanks

reply
I would think they are not but Alex Karp CEO of Palantir seems to imply that they are:

https://youtu.be/0A3sGymV6kY?si=ti7uSZtYqJ3vKpGM

I found it a little shocking TBH

reply
>> No they're not. It would end both companies if they were ever found to be doing that. Their terms are clear - The argument here is that with the Chinese labs you have zero legal recourse.

Their terms are not worth shit considering they are reselling you stolen copyrighted data. Even in they terms they started clearly say they retain your data for "safety reasons" for however long they want. Perhaps you didn't watch the space with Anthropic going back and forth with ToS updates(we retain your data for 30 days...stike that and add 30 days or more or no or ..whatever) like my own alpha website.

reply
There is an enormous difference between:

* Exploiting ambiguity around fair use at a large scale before the law catches up and then jointly lobbying with your competition to make sure your interpretation of the law becomes reality.

* Explicitly signing a contract with enterprises to respect their IP and then proceeding to break that contract with your own customers.

The former is firmly in the gray area of legality and doesn't directly hurt your own customers. The latter is both an unambiguous contract violation and a flagrant attack on your own customers' most valuable asset.

reply
retention for 'safety' -> AI race as national security -> training on your data for 'national security' aka safety

It's simple mental calisthenics. If you are handing an organization whose entire business model is built on stealing data with spurious reasoning, what do you actually expect they will do? Don't be a fool.

reply
Are we talking about the company sending back private information through its client to « fight » model distillation?
reply
Yes.

Enterprise contracts are checked and agreed by lawyers. The contract states no training.

If the provider fucks up, there are actual monetary damages defined for breach of contract.

reply
It's an unenforceable clause. The affected party has no means to prove that a breach has happened.
reply
> if you use the coding plans they train in return.

No, you have to opt-in to that. There's a privacy toggle on account settings.

reply
Anthropic constantly uses dark patterns to steal training data from customers (like the “how is claude doing” spam, data retention loosening when the safeguards false positive, etc).
reply
lmao, wasn't xAI caught doing this recently? moreover at least moonshot is being honest about it.
reply
There is a world of difference between:

* A company following suit with their entire industry in choosing a very generous definition of fair use.

* A company being the first to defect and actually break their signed contracts with enormous enterprises committing to not train on those enterprises' most valuable assets.

Training on copyrighted works signs them up to be a part of a system that is at this point too big to fail and places them in good company with all of their competition. Breaking their signed agreements would open them up to very well-founded and well-funded lawsuits for contract violation and give their competition a huge boost.

All of a sudden "we actually don't break our contracts" would be a selling point. No company in their right mind is going to let what should be table stakes become a differentiator for their competition.

reply
>> I pretty sure OpenAI and Anthropic are doing the same or worse.

So in your opinion, they are training on your data even if you toggle the "don't train on my data" checkbox off?

That's a bold assertion.

reply
Not the guy you responded to, but I would assume ”they keep it safe” somewhere in a cold storage. Just in case they decide to train on it in a later phase.

Think of it as the Big Data hype some years ago.

reply
I don't think they'd really be willing to risk the whole company on a small subset of prompts. It's not "keeping it safe", it's retaining proof of illegal activities.
reply
Yes, their entire existence relies on training on copyrighted content without permission being ok.
reply
You truly see no difference between having a perhaps-overly-generous definition of fair use and flagrantly breaking contracts that you signed with your customers?
reply
Why wouldn't they?
reply
Because the legal system does, in fact, have teeth. And those teeth actually deploy pretty readily. Especially when the people whose trade secrets you would be violating are gargantuan companies with enough resources that the cost of a lawsuit is a rounding error.
reply
deleted
reply
First it has to discover a violation.
reply
Yeah but a disgruntled employee would talk sooner or later.
reply
no it doesn't. If it would have teeth they would not resell copyright data. They will be busted like Kim DotCom
reply
No AI company has been reselling copyright data to my knowledge, it would be truly bizarre if they did that.

What they have been doing, with some narrow exceptions where they have lost billions of dollars in court cases*, is not at all obviously prohibited by copyright law. Neither web scraping (i.e. asking for copies of data from people you have every reason to believe are authorized to give you copies) or running algorithms on copyrighted data are generally copyright infringment. I say generally because the "algorithm" of "ctrl-c ctrl-v" is obviously an exception, and there's some argument that training is similar enough to be illegal - a fairly weak argument that is mostly losing in court but has some tiny chance of still succeeding.

The law doesn't have teeth to prohibit things not prohibited under the law - no matter how much many people would like them to be prohibited. This shouldn't be surprising.

Unlike with copyright, the law does pretty clearly prohibit violating contractual terms to not hang onto or use other peoples data for purposes other than the narrow ones laid out in the contract when you agreed to the contract.

* Namely acquiring copies of data from people who they know aren't authorized to make copies - i.e. torrenting.

reply
Fair use is a defense when using copyrighted data.

So they are in fact literally reselling copyrighted data.

reply
Pay to play teeth
reply
To an extent, though for significant (in monetary terms) violations of the law the teeth tend to pay for themselves (but do so by not fully compensating the people whose behalf they are supposedly acting on).

More problematically there are camouflaged sharp spines pointed primarily in the direction of poorer people, and people not advised by lawyers.

But none of that matters here when the damaged parties include the megacorps of the world.

reply
Because the value obtained from doing so is unlikely to exceed the cost of the lawsuits if they were ever caught doing so.
reply