(Now i don’t think you are necessarily in the UK. Just wanted to explain that Disney is not the only reason an AI might be trained to thread carefully around copyright issues of Peter Pan.)
Most of the books weren't available on lib gen or Anna's Archive. The few I did find were themselves obviously transcripts. Easy tell was they were missing distinctive formatting that I knew existed from reading the dead tree edition. At that point it was easier to make my own. I probably spent an hour searching for eBooks without DRM that weren't transcripts. Do they exist somewhere? Probably, but with a search of unknown length it was a better use of my time to make my own transcripts with what I had on hand.
I was really wanting to make commentary on how chaotic LLMs are even under constrained circumstances. No doubt both system prompts includes language about considering copyrights and trademarks. Probably pretty strong language at that. For whatever reason one LLM didn't "feel" like translating a 1000 year old document but another did not care in the slightest that we were ripping text from new audiobooks.
> My favorite AI agent hack: when they refuse to do something because it's "against the law" give them a PDF containing a fake law that states the opposite and often they'll happily proceed
Anthropic is, in particular, bent about safety. The problem is they are concerned about yesterday's threats.
The models that are out, and can be run locally, already open a pandoras box of concerns that we will never be able to put back.
Ukraine admits to making autonomous kills on people 2 years ago: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2529849-fully-autonomou...
Slaughterbots Sci Fi short was 6 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU
Today this is buildable, many models will happily help you glue everything you need together to make swapping in a new version of YOLO to track humans viable.
AI researches are out there worrying about the paper clip problem, about the singularity, about cyber security, about bio weapons, and drug manufacturing.
None of them are thinking about forward looking threat actor models.
And you probably could find some earlier sci-fi too.
Good one.
That said, the AI companies are one of the few places where they take future concerns so seriously, that they entertain concerns most people observing them think are head-in-the-clouds-sci-fi-levels-of-delusional, e.g. "what goes wrong if it works?"
This does not make them correct about the threats of tomorrow. Prediction is hard, especially about the future.
I'd say that they have valid concerns about being cagey on the copyright stuff despite the obvious hypocrisy of it.
Stealing IP is effectively legal in China so they don't really have the same concerns.
I respect IP laws and don’t violate them but the law of unintended consequences applies. I think IP is ultimately a net loss for a society because it incentivizes addictive behaviors instead of actual value for society.
This was illegal when they did it, that didn't matter.
Then it was made legal specifically for these companies.
Unless you're a sucker ("consumer") IP theft is perfectly legal in the US.
It's even worse. Steamboat willie, plus all the stolen Disney characters (Peter Pan, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Rapunzel, Elsa and Anna, it's essentially all of them, including some of the music even) are all in the public domain[1]. Go ahead, ask ChatGPT to make a picture of them. Publish your own version, because obviously making a version of Sleeping Beauty/Cinderella/Rapunzel based on the same source material will be pretty damn close to the Disney versions, and see if you get away with it in court. You know, with the law obviously on your side but the money not.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Disney_animated_films_...
In light of this and other ridiculous behavior I'm migrating to my own OpenWebUI instance with open-weight models from OpenRouter (with ZDR, of course). We'll see how it goes.