this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2026
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Do you believe we should be allowed to run open source / weight LLMs like deepseek locally, for our own gain, even though they too have been indirectly trained on our comments / articles / copyrighted books?
I'm sure everyone will have varying opinions on it, but if these models were fully open-sourced I'd have less of an issue. What does it for me is that these companies were unwilling to pay creators to use their work in the training data, instead choosing to pirate it to create expensive and locked down AI products which they expect us to pay for.
I believe it was logistical impossible. Many books used will probably be scanned and not even be available as ebook or drm protected or out of print. And e.g. Anna's archive has 64,416,225 books and 95,689,473 papers. Too large to even say what is pirated or nor, or buy every book in a lifetime. And if every book costs you ~$10 that's close to a billion dollars upfront. Basically creating LLMs wouldn't have been possible without piracy (or maybe the datasets aren't actually that extensive).
It's hypocritical, but ultimately the same argument for piracy that individuals use: IP laws creates unreasonable restrictions that prevent people from learning (or enjoy culture at a sensible price).
(I assume you're not saying you would need a negotiate a specific license to use a book or a public comment or article for machine learning).
Kinda reminds me of Year Zero by Robert Reid. The whole galaxy full of aliens loves Earth Music but only recently figure the concept of copyright. And how much quintillion moneys they now owe Earth lol.
Is that a genuine question that you want to know the answer for, or is it a setup for calling the person you replied to a hypocrit when they say "yes"?
I'm honestly curious. I generally agree with everything you said except the IP argument.
spoiler
I see a conflict between the argument that training LLMs on publicly visible comments (or books or articles) is stealing, and open weight LLM models. If intellectual property is interpreted like that, it will make free LLMs illegal to use, since the original creators of the training data have not licensed this use (even though this data is publicly readable on websites).I would consider it the worst possible outcome if only the AI corporations would be able to profit from the global treasure of our accumulated knowledge. And I suspect that is what is going to happen because they can lobby for some kind of broad licensing deal and pay them off, but for open source it will not work. I believe that is how they will monopolize AI. Then they will truly have stolen it, because they have taken it away from everybody else.
Courts have unfortunately already decided it's all legal, so it's more of a personal ethical issue now.
Of course. The cat's already out of the bag on that one. That data belongs to the public, not a handful of companies.