Gentoo AI Policy

> Was this meant in response to what I wrote or did you mean to post this elsewhere in the thread? If the former, I'm not sure what am I supposed to do with this.

You wrote:

  You may notice that opinions are like assholes: everyone 
  has theirs. They're literally just "thoughts and feelings". 
  They may masquerade as arguments from time to time, much to 
  my dismay, but rest assured: there's nothing to "refute", 
  debate, or even dispute on them. Not in general, nor in 
  this specific case either.

I provided analysis supporting my position that the project maintainers most likely did not make this policy based on "literally just 'thoughts and feelings'" and, instead, made an informed policy based on experience and rational discourse.

I am not a Gentoo maintainer so cannot definitively state possibility #3 is what happened. Maybe one or both of the other two possibilities is what transpired. I doubt it, but if you have evidence refuting possibility #3, please share so we may all learn.

> The idea that models are transformative is debatable. Works with copyright are the thing that imbues the model with value. If that statement isn’t true, then they can just exclude those works and nothing is lost, right?

I don't follow.

For one, all works have a copyright status I believe (under US jurisdiction; this of course differs per jurisdiction, although there are international IP laws), some are just extremely permissive. Models rely on a wide range of works, some with permissive, some with restrictive licensing. I'd imagine Wikipedia and StackOverflow are pretty important resources for these models for example, and both are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, a permissive license.

Second, despite your claim being thus false, dropping restrictively copyrighted works would make a dent of course I'm pretty sure, although how much, I'm not sure. I don't see why this would be a surprise: restrictively licensed works do contribute value, but not all of the value. So their removal would take away some of the value, but not all of it. It's not binary.

And finally, I'm not sure these aspects solely or even primarily determine whether these models are legally transformative. But then I'm also not a lawyer, and the law is a moving target, so what do I know. I'd imagine it's less legal transformativeness and more colloquial transformativeness you're concerned about anyhow, but then these are not necessarily the best aspects to interrogate either.

> AI being trained on copyrighted data is considered fair use because it transforms the underlying data rather than distribute it as is.

It's not a binary. Sometimes it fully reproduces works in violation of copyright and other times it modifies it just enough to avoid claims against it's output. Using AI and just _assuming_ it would never lead you to a copyright violation is foolish.

> uses same energy as more than 100 GPT questions.

Are you including training costs or just query costs?

> But the reasoning is motivated from a wrong place.

That does not matter. What matters is if the outcome is improved in the way they predict. This is actually measurable.

>That does not matter. What matters is if the outcome is improved in the way they predict. This is actually measurable.

Ok lets discuss facts.

>It's not a binary. Sometimes it fully reproduces works in violation of copyright and other times it modifies it just enough to avoid claims against it's output. Using AI and just _assuming_ it would never lead you to a copyright violation is foolish.

In the Anthropic case the Judge ruled that AI training is transformative. It is not binary as you said but I'm criticising what appears as binary from the original policy. When the court ruling itself has shown that it is not violation of copyright, it is reasonable to criticise it now although I acknowledge the post was written before the ruling.

>Are you including training costs or just query costs?

The training costs are very very small because they are amortised over all the queries. I think training accounts around .001% to .1% of each query depending on how many training runs are done over a year.

> You may notice that opinions are like assholes: everyone has theirs.

Maybe. There's a known condition in pigs that prevents them from forming one.