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@jimgar the ethics of this stuff is incredibly complicated

I'm very optimistic about the models being trained on the RedPajama data - there's one out already and evidently more to follow very shortly https://simonwillison.net/tags/redpajama/

Claude is an interesting option that's one of the most promising closed alternatives to ChatGPT - they have an interesting approach to AI safety which they call "constitutional AI" https://www.anthropic.com/index/introducing-claude

@simon thank you so much, l’ll give these a look. Everywhere I look in tech it’s one ethical nightmare after another

@resing @jimgar I'm not convinced it's possible to train a usable LLM without including copyrighted material in they raw pretraining data

As such, personally think it's a necessary evil to avoid a monopoly on LLM technology belonging to organizations that are willing to train against crawler data

@simon @jimgar not sure I follow. Are you saying that crawler data, which includes copyrighted material shouldn’t be used by commercial companies and LLMs are inherently flawed because of that? If so, I’m not saying you’re wrong, just trying to understand.

@resing @jimgar I'm saying I'm not sure it's possible to build a useful LLM without including copyrighted data in the training set

The ethics of this entire field are incredibly murky - I wrote about that last year https://simonwillison.net/2022/Aug/29/stable-diffusion/#ai-vegan

@simon @resing it *all* feels fundamentally wrong, so long as the results rely on indiscriminate harvesting of people’s work without permission. Literally the only compelling argument I have heard is the “necessary evil” Simon mentions - doing it anyway but making it open source. I just find it sad that this is the position we’re in at all, and worse, how little the majority of people seem to care about providence and permissions full stop.

@jimgar @resing search engines work by indiscriminately harvesting people's work without their permission, and have done for decades

What's different here isn't how the things are built, it's what they can be used for

People mostly tolerated search engines because they saw them as useful - they helped people's work be found, they didn't (appear to) threaten their livelihoods

@jimgar @resing note that I'm not saying that search engines were morally/ethically pure here either!

The ethics around this are deeply complicated - there are no easy or obvious answers

@simon @jimgar the legal issue might be resolved soon. if @binarybits@instinctd.com is right, Stable Diffusion could lose the lawsuit against them. I buy his argument in favor of that. If that's the case, LLMs trained on sets that only allow that use might really take off https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/04/stable-diffusion-copyright-lawsuits-could-be-a-legal-earthquake-for-ai/