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Suppose you hired a consulting firm to write a report, and they delivered the report but not the internal conversations they had when developing it. You exploit a vulnerability in their phone system to get those conversations. You can argue over semantics of whether “theft” is what you did, maybe the right word is “espionage” or “spying”, but that either way we probably agree you are guilty of something? Paying for the final product didn’t entitle you to see how it was made, unless that was part of the agreement.

Anyway, you can distinguish this from the debate over copyright.

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I think a more fair comparison would be that you hired a consulting firm to create a report and give you a summary of it, but you’re charged for the report itself separately from the summary, and you are not allowed to access the unsummarized report.
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How is that a more fair comparison? The consulting firm in this case never promised you the interim reports, only the summaries of the reports. They also promised you the final output that the reports led to. You decided that report summaries + final output was worth paying for. You got exactly what you were promised.
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I personally read the thinking traces to know if the model is on the right direction
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I'm not saying they're not useful, of course they are. I am disputing that they are part of the agreed bargain between you and the proprietary LLM providers.

They explicitly do not promise reasoning traces. You (general you) agree to those terms and pay for that bargain anyways.

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We "agree" to many things that are deeply unfair.
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Yet we have the option to decide not to participate. That is an option.
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I’m just driving by here but they bill by tokens — it’s a stretch to turn around and deny your right to see them. And it’s especially egregious when the tokens admittedly, routinely do the opposite of what you instructed.

But personally it’s not about right and won’t it’s just blatant bullshit.

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And lawyers bill by 6-minute increments, yet that doesn't mean you get access to all of a law firm's internal discussions and notes about you and your case.

Just because you paid for the lawyer time/LLM tokens doesn't mean you get access to everything that happened within that time/tokens.

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It’s normal for consulting firms to charge for inputs like hours of labor, airfare etc.

> but you’re charged for the report itself separately from the summary, and you are not allowed to access the unsummarized report

This analogy works if the LLM provider promises you access to the reasoning tokens, and fails if they don’t.

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But they did deliver the internal notes, just told you to not look at them. Also the analogy doesn’t make a lot of sense to me since humans (or companies paying them) own the content they produce. Based on current precedent Anthropic doesn’t have any more rights to the LLM outputs produced by your inputs than you.

Whether that violates the ToS is another matter Anthropic is of course free to sue for damages or stop doing business with you.

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You paid the consulting firm for the outcome. If they sent you a bill for every piece of research they wrote down to get to the report, you bet I would want to see exactly what's inside and what I paid for.
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Except you paid for the words of the conversation..
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And how much of our output have the copied to train their models on?
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Except in this case the report is giving you conclusions while withholding the data and reasoning process that lead to those conclusions.

Alternatively, I paid for the tokens therefore I should have access to them. If the vendor wants to artificially hide them from me, I'll just find another way to access them.

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The only person calling it stealing is the author of this article, so this is a pointless discussion. The majority of this thread is just arguing with themselves.
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They are also encrypting it so they must see some reason to do this. I suspect they think it is proprietary or otherwise a way that people can “steal” their implementations.
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The reason for this is the LLM says some truly unhinged shit while in the thinking stage of the process, and Twitter would trip over itself to make fun of what it says.
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Anthropic and OpenAI made a big deal about how it's stealing.
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They also have made a big deal about how what they did to build their models is not stealing. And we all know that's bullshit.
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No, we actually don’t all know that.
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I'm pretty sure essentially all HN participants understand that the frontier labs indiscriminately sucked up every bit of human output they could, IP and ethical concerns be damned. Some of that cohort may indeed be okay with it, but that doesn't change the facts.
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Knowing that they trained on that data doesn't mean that you've demonstrated that they "stole" it. Certainly the courts haven't decided that in every case.
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You mean you didn't know that all frontier models stole all of our knowledge and are now charging for it? It's abysmal and disgusting and we should pitchfork them all! :D
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Stealing may be the wrong word, but I actually think this is important. I don't think the providers have been up-front about how we should be handling these thought signatures. A large system with a lot of users may be capturing these and even caching them to send them back with future requests. If data can be pulled out of these, then they need to be treated more like cookies than opaque, encrypted nonces.
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Liberating!
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No, you paid for the end result. The thought process is a step in between, a function. Think about it, who should get charged if the answer you received comes from a cache? Thinking tokens are the complexity-of-the-problem cost. I mean, you may not agree but both are valid points of view.
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> No, you paid for the end result.

No, I literally am paying for the thought process, per token. "Pay only for the result" is not how these things are billed.

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No I didn't. I buy my tokens from a provider that exposes the model reasoning so I can understand what it's doing and work with it, or interrupt if I see things going in the wrong direction.
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I agree with you in principle. I'm just pointing out that the latter is in some way another valid point of view.
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Thinking tokens aren't free though. This is not a valid point of view.

If I was being charged for the raw, output/input token count, excluding thinking/reasoning token costs, then sure. But at least via the API, you pay for tokens you cannot see.

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Is it really that unusual? When you attach an image or a video, it gets converted to tokens you don’t see, at a rate that is proprietary to the model. You pay for those tokens, but don’t see them. Even how text is converted to tokens is a property of the dictionary, which is opaque for proprietary models.

There are features of input and output that are opaque to you, but that you pay for. Part of how model providers chose to run their service.

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Nope. You are charged for the reasoning tokens as well. Actually, most of the expense is the reasoning part.
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> stop using morally charged terms made up by future monopolists

Lets not gloss over this claim. Being: “Stealing is a morally charged term made up by future monopolists.”

I strongly disagree. Stealing is not a made up term and property rights are foundational for any society. Your take is at least sensationalist if not malicious.

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No, and we collectively had this decades ago already. “Stealing” instead of “infringement” is originally MAFIAA language intentionally (ab)used to encourage emotional reaction despite original owner not losing their copy.

If you broke into a data center, pulled a hard drive and drive off with it - that’s stealing. If you accessed a copy of some information - that’s infringement, unauthorized access, or some other violation. But that’s not “stealing”, which fundamentally requires a loss or otherwise depriving original owner of the property that was stolen.

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One problem. He said stealing in general is a made up term.

Do you think stealing is real?

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Read it in the context. The “made up” wasn’t a general statement. No one argues stealing doesn’t exist at all. My friend’s bike was stolen. What’s made up is application of this word to situations that are incompatible with what stealing is supposed to mean.

Compare this to “the smell of soup and the sound of money” type “theft”.

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"copying is not theft/ stealing a thing leaves one less left/ copying it makes one thing more/ that's what copying's for"
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Yes. Although, to be pedantic - stealing relocates (it doesn’t leave one less, it moves the only thing into another person’s possession), while copying duplicates.

Copy vs move is IMHO accurate semantics.

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i dont know what you're talking about: it's certainly one less for the victim! and if no theft occurred, nobody would be left with one less.
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"Stealing" of non-rivalrous goods?

I don't "think" it's not real. I know.

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Reread what he called a morally charged, made up term by future monopolists. Stealing. Not distilling, not stealing “non rivalrous goods.” Just stealing.

Do you agree with what he actually said?

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Yes, "tokens, trained on the sum of human knowledge", are the most absolutely, unambiguously clear example of a non-rivalrous good I've ever seen.

The current copyright status quo has them placed in the public domain. There is literally nothing wrong with "stealing" those tokens. They have exactly zero legal protection. "Stealing" those AI output tokens is so fundamentally impossible that it wouldn't be "stealing" in this case even if you subscribe to the copyright monopolist propaganda that copyright infringement is "stealing", and I most certainly do not.

Hilariously, that means we don't even fall prey to things like DMCA anticircumvention laws. If they encrypt the reasoning traces and we break the encryption somehow, we've done nothing wrong since the data wasn't copyrighted in the first place!

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There are bunch of legal protections. They may not fall under copyright, but depending, you could be looking at breach of contract, trade secret misappropriation, CFAA, and also, if you buy them off someone else, now we’re into tortious interference.
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when you steal my bike you deprive me of my ability to use it. if i copy your notes, you still have access to them and may make use of them. unless somehow copying destroys the original, it is not stealing.
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Sticking to what was literally said and not meant by a person in a casual comment/conversation is certainly a strategy that can be used.
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If you already know the answer and everyone already knows the answer you asking this question is wasting everyone's time.
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I’m pretty sure the person you’re replying to means stealing in the context of information, IP, copyright, etc.

This thread and this entire topic isn’t about stealing physical goods or money. We can all agree that if I break into your house and take your TV then that’s the ancient, obvious crime of stealing.

Grice’s maxims and common sense indicate that we’re talking about the word “stealing” as applied to infringement or unauthorized copying.

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There's nothing foundational about the idea that data can be owned. It conflates these things:

- This is about me

- I created this

- Neither of the above, but according to some story I get to control who sees it

Maybe some of those ideas are worth building into our society, but let's not pretend that The Code of Hammurabi gave a damn about intellectual property. IP was invented by the church so they could censor editions of the bible they didn't like and has been used to justify similar kinds of censorship ever since.

The foundational thing about property is that when it gets stolen, somebody else has it, and you don't.

We can hold the AI companies responsible for their actions without contributing to notions about property that encourage censorship.

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Data?

Stealing pertains to more than just data. I think you agree with me that stealing isnt a made up term.

Please reread what he said. He didnt say “distilling” was morally charged made up term by future monopolists. He said “stealing.” Thats insane.

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Yeah, that's what we're talking about, data. You can't steal data, because you can't own data. People who try to upgrade data related crimes to "theft" are participating (knowingly or otherwise) in propaganda, and many of us wish they would stop.

You're fixating on a few clumsily placed words and coming away with a meaning which that poster did not intend. Consider absorbing the whole context before going on the offensive. The link they shared makes it pretty clear what they were trying to say even if they fumbled the words a little.

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> property rights are foundational for any society

arguable, and even more tenuous for intellectual "property", which was a relatively recent invention. plenty of interesting arguments over this way back to even the 19th century.

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How much did anthropic pay to book publishers, and everybody else whose content they stole, for stealing their content ???
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$1.3 billion, iirc.
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They definitely stole the data to make the models, but they do not say that they stole the data to make the models, but they do say that others using their outputs for unauthorized purposes is stealing. Do you see the point?
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Crawling the internet and dumping it to disk is not "stealing".
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If they were only copying, for example, New York Times articles and many publishers to a disk, I don't think NYT and the publishers would have sued OpenAI. But OpenAI isn't just copying things to disk. NYT reported ChatGPT (before Dec 2023, [0]) was returning near verbatim sections of NYT articles.

Is this stealing? Is it depriving NYT or publishers/writers from money via lost sales/subs? I don't know, but it certainly could be.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/business/media/new-york-t...

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Then distilling models and deobfuscating reasoning traces isn't.

Mass downloading copyrighted works is. Which they did. Aaron got threatened with 20 years, they got pentagon contracts.

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Is everything licensed in the same way? Are there any copyrighted works available to be had through crawling?
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It's not stealing but arguing that it's not infringement because its on the internet is pretty obviously nonsense.
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You miss the point. Do you think “stealing” is a made up term? That is what he said. He didnt say “distilling models”.

Dont you agree thats either sensationalist hyperbole or a genuinely crazy idea?

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