One starts to wonder whether the LLM vendors laissez-faire approach to the legality of ingesting copyrighted / licensed material will start to infect the industry in general?
replies(4):
Do you owe everyone you have ever read a royalty for influencing your writing style or voice? How about for all the other things you have leaned and become competent in?
There is a bigger issue here that is related to what humanity actually is and how we have been abused for many decades and several generations now, to the point that the abused generations have become the abusers of future generations simply because they are mentally trapped, addicted even.
A good uncontroversial example of this may be the excessive and deficit spending of governments, all based on what otherwise would be considered loan fraud, which is called national debt. It is used to keep perpetuating this system we call an economy because it has been so “successful” over ~100 years of “line go up”, solely because everyone wants the gravy train of reckless good times to continue forever.
Unfortunately for some generation of the future (maybe even our own), it simply cannot go on forever, so it won’t, because it is by definition unsustainable. But the goods times and “success” everyone sees everyone else having, keeps people from stopping the insane and utterly suicidal process of not only consistent, but accelerating addiction to every greater deficit and debt loan frauds called the national debt. It isn’t “Trumps fault” it “Biden’s fault”, or any other totem that can excuse or own actions. These are forces we don’t even understand any more than we are blindly changing at breakneck speeds. And if anyone tells you they understand these forces they are simply lying, when we cannot even understand the most basic concept of the fact that there is no alternative to this planet… as we destroy its ecosystem that produced us at ever accelerating speeds, in millions of different ways.
It’s quite similar if not the same as any other process we call addiction; we know it will cause ruin, yet we cannot extract ourselves from the endorphins, so we just keep lying to ourselves.
Humans don't read other codebases en masse. Hell, I haven't read the entirety of our own codebase. I learned by doing, from books (that I paid for or legally borrowed), and yes, by looking at a small amount of other people's code (permitted by the respective licenses).
Humans are not remix machines, AIs (currently) are.
Moreover humans learn and evolve their knowledge from other experiences other than books and others’ code.
As you said LLMs just remix something semi randomly according to a weighted graph with no underlying knowledge or understanding whatsoever.
An LLM unburdened by restraint could like produce page upon page of story nearly identical to the original.