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.
Strictly speaking it’s actually better. It sounds funny to be like haha. It’s eating itself. It’s incest or whatever.
But unfortunately that’s not how it works…
Unless they’re literally ignoring every other step of the training process. Then ideally you do want a model to train another model to train another model. So on and so forth.
It does mean that it’s technically cheaper to let your enemies do all the initial training and then pay them for the now processed data to then do even more efficient training on!
Weirdly enough. It’s capitalistic cooperation. Non-consensual mind you…