Anthropic's distillation complaints expose an awkward question: does AI's fair use argument cut both ways?

For years, tech giants have argued that if information is available on the internet, it can be used for AI model development and outputs. They call it fair use. Content owners have tried to prevent this, with no success.

Now Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are discovering what the rest of the internet has already learned through painful experience: once you put something online, people will find ways to use it in ways you don’t like and can’t stop.

The latest flashpoint is something called “distillation,” using the outputs of one AI model to improve another. Anthropic says competitors are harvesting its outputs at scale, turning billions of dollars of research into a shortcut for rivals. OpenAI and Google have made similar warnings recently.

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  • qaz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 hour ago

    I agree. The worst part about GitHub training LLM’s on my FOSS code without permission for me is that they then keep the models to themselves. Like if you’re going to use all my code without permission, at least allow me to run the model locally.

    My personal opinion is that all models trained on copyleft code should be open-weights, most FOSS licenses didn’t account for this specific possibility, but this is the only way to follow them in spirit.