I've recently noticed this opinion seems unpopular, at least on Lemmy.
There is nothing wrong with downloading public data and doing statistical analysis on it, which is pretty much what these ML models do. They are not redistributing other peoples' works (well, sometimes they do, unintentionally, and safeguards to prevent this are usually built-in). The training data is generally much, much larger than the model sizes, so it is generally not possible for the models to reconstruct random specific works. They are not creating derivative works, in the legal sense, because they do not copy and modify the original works; they generate "new" content based on probabilities.
My opinion on the subject is pretty much in agreement with this document from the EFF: https://www.eff.org/document/eff-two-pager-ai
I understand the hate for companies using data you would reasonably expect would be private. I understand hate for purposely over-fitting the model on data to reproduce people's "likeness." I understand the hate for AI generated shit (because it is shit). I really don't understand where all this hate for using public data for building a "statistical" model to "learn" general patterns is coming from.
I can also understand the anxiety people may feel, if they believe all the AI hype, that it will eliminate jobs. I don't think AI is going to be able to directly replace people any time soon. It will probably improve productivity (with stuff like background-removers, better autocomplete, etc), which might eliminate some jobs, but that's really just a problem with capitalism, and productivity increases are generally considered good.
Here’s an analogy that can be used to test this idea.
Let’s say I want to write a book but I totally suck as an author and I have no idea how to write a good one. To get some guidelines and inspiration, I go to the library and read a bunch of books. Then, I’ll take those ideas and smash them together to produce a mediocre book that anyone would refuse to publish. Anyway, I could also buy those books, but the end result would still be the same, except that it would cost me a lot more. Either way, this sort of learning and writing procedure is entirely legal, and people have been doing this for ages. Even if my book looks and feels a lot like LOTR, it probably won’t be that easy to sue me unless I copy large parts of it word for word. Blatant plagiarism might result in a lawsuit, but I guess this isn’t what the AI training data debate is all about, now is it?
However, if I pirated those books, that could result in some trouble. However, someone would need to read my miserable book, find a suspicious passage, check my personal bookshelf and everything I have ever borrowed etc. That way, it might be possible to prove that I could not have come up with a specific line of text except by pirating some book. If an AI is trained on pirated data, that’s obviously something worth the debate.
You are equating traing an LLM with a person learning, but an LLM is not a person. It is not given the same rights and privileges under the law. At best it is a computer program and you can certainly infringe copyright by writing a program.
It's not "At best it's a computer program". It is a computer program, a program of probability that it's response should be X. The training data could be stolen, but it's output isn't.