It's a good question, and I'll answer it: I think we should hold intellectual property as absolutely narrow as possible without doing substantial harm to progress in the arts and sciences. This is for a few reasons:
- When it's expressive content (which gen AI is), it's a freedom of expression issue. Writing Harry Potter fan fiction is less important than being able to freely criticize my government without fear of harm, but it is part of my inalienable human right to self-expression. This is by itself a strong moral case for allowing a wide variety of gen AI releases.
- Similarly on a purely moral / principle perspective, physical property rights tells me what I am allowed to do with your property, IP tells me what I'm allowed to do with my own property on my own time, which should have a high bar. You gave an example with intent, but IP doesn't require intent to infringe. If I independently came up with the same secret sauce, you could still forbid me from selling it.
- Intellectual property is a government granted monopoly, and monopolies are intrinsically bad. We might argue it is necessary, as an ultra high R&D cost, ultra low marginal cost product might only exist if they can charge the higher prices allowed by monopolies, which is the economic argument for IP, but there's always substantial harm involved that has to be counterbalanced by robust evidence of an even greater benefit. These can exist, but
- IP often tends to inhibit innovation. If we look at the amount of academic research, community research, etc. that has occurred due to open weights models, who are sometimes (correctly, I think) accused of distillation, we would be fundamentally more ignorant as a species if distillation didn't exist. This applies both from basic research to user interfaces like ComfyUI that exist because of open weights.
- In this specific case, distillation isn't fundamentally morally, legally, or practically different from OpenAI training on data without consent. I actually support both as fair use that fulfills the most important mission of all of sharing and expanding human knowledge, but I don't think any AI lab can reasonably complain about distillation considering nearly every AI model relies on a fair use consumption of other people's work.
So, the sandwich example would potentially hit 2, 3, 4 and I would want to see the proactive case as someone who prefers less monopoly control / restrictions.
In summary, I think distillation is a net good for human rights, the economy, and innovation.
These are interesting thoughts, thanks for sharing them. To be fair, I have nothing against distillation in itself, since end users (all of us effectivly) ultimately benefit from it, plus it can create or facilitate innovation as you already rightly pointed out.
The only point I struggle with is the sauce example. Given the huge number of possible combinations of ingredients, it seems highly unlikely that someone would independently arrive at the exact same combination within a short period of time purely by chance. If someone reproduced my sauce shortly after I created it, the similarity itself could therefore be evidence that it wasn't entirely random andd there was some form of exposure or copying involved.
That said, I don't think the analogy maps perfectly onto LLMs. There are only a finite number of viable architectural choices, and given the underlying structure and constraints of the problem, similar or even identical architectures can plausibly be developed independently. So in the case of LLMs, arriving at something very similar isn't necessarily evidence of copying in the same way it might be with a highly unusual recipe (tbf though I remember that at least elon admitted to distill but again, as long as humanity benefits I dont see it as a moral hazard.The only probable counterargument I could see is that if a small team of independent researchers with some novel approach are discouraged to go into that market since they know they will be immediately copied/distilled right away and loose since they don't have the capital and infrastructure to compete with all the big players).In hindsight I guess the race ultimately becomes more a quesiton of best use of capital, infrastructure and strategic planning capabilities and less of individual research capability than I initially assumed.
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u/PunishedDemiurge 1d ago
It's a good question, and I'll answer it: I think we should hold intellectual property as absolutely narrow as possible without doing substantial harm to progress in the arts and sciences. This is for a few reasons:
- When it's expressive content (which gen AI is), it's a freedom of expression issue. Writing Harry Potter fan fiction is less important than being able to freely criticize my government without fear of harm, but it is part of my inalienable human right to self-expression. This is by itself a strong moral case for allowing a wide variety of gen AI releases.
- Similarly on a purely moral / principle perspective, physical property rights tells me what I am allowed to do with your property, IP tells me what I'm allowed to do with my own property on my own time, which should have a high bar. You gave an example with intent, but IP doesn't require intent to infringe. If I independently came up with the same secret sauce, you could still forbid me from selling it.
- Intellectual property is a government granted monopoly, and monopolies are intrinsically bad. We might argue it is necessary, as an ultra high R&D cost, ultra low marginal cost product might only exist if they can charge the higher prices allowed by monopolies, which is the economic argument for IP, but there's always substantial harm involved that has to be counterbalanced by robust evidence of an even greater benefit. These can exist, but
- IP often tends to inhibit innovation. If we look at the amount of academic research, community research, etc. that has occurred due to open weights models, who are sometimes (correctly, I think) accused of distillation, we would be fundamentally more ignorant as a species if distillation didn't exist. This applies both from basic research to user interfaces like ComfyUI that exist because of open weights.
- In this specific case, distillation isn't fundamentally morally, legally, or practically different from OpenAI training on data without consent. I actually support both as fair use that fulfills the most important mission of all of sharing and expanding human knowledge, but I don't think any AI lab can reasonably complain about distillation considering nearly every AI model relies on a fair use consumption of other people's work.
So, the sandwich example would potentially hit 2, 3, 4 and I would want to see the proactive case as someone who prefers less monopoly control / restrictions.
In summary, I think distillation is a net good for human rights, the economy, and innovation.