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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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