451–460 of 817 posts
The timezone checks for Shanghai and Urumqi, but not Hong Kong. All of these are the same actual time (China does not use time zones internally), not sure how these three were picked (why not Beijing or Macau etc). And all of them are prohibited by ToS, so not sure why they only flag mainland time zones. Interestingly, my device is in Shenzhen right now, but macOS has assigned Shanghai as the "closest city" rather th…
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I love the asymmetry. When small fish tries to protect itself, big fish hits small fish with "It's not illegal" pole. When small fish points out that what the big fish is crying about is "not illegal", big fish has the right to be above the law to prevent the problem themselves. Having values requires equality. They have lost the right to cry foul when they trained their model with "but it's fair use" card. Life work…
> I love the asymmetry. Much as I hate to defend companies climbing to success and pulling up the ladder afterwards, this asymmetry you note is kind of the whole point a company would want to grow big . Growing an organization has some super-linear costs and generally sucks for most individuals living through it - including the management - but it's still considered worth it, precisely because big entities can do thi…
We can see with our current crop of large organisations that they really struggle to create anything new; most of their new products or services were developed by a small organisation and then acquired. A lot of those products are then enshittified and badly managed because large organisation politics screws things up.
Large organisations are inefficient (everyone has stories of people in large organisations literally doing nothing all day). They are horrible to work for because of the politics. They mistreat their customers and their employees. Their executives tend to lose touch with reality, surround themselves with yes-folk and descend into authoritarian psychopathy.
My personal opinion is that we would be much, much, better off if we had fewer large organisations and more smaller organisations.
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That's true, I am less familiar with the workings of cloud services than some are (as relevant as that may be in a discussion about a client that users run on their local machines). However, it sounds like you do understand how cloud services work. In interest of educating those less informed than yourself perhaps you could share with us why the reasoned points I've brought up are incorrect by actually addressing the…
If you have a problem with this, you should have a problem with Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, etc.
If that's also the case, then no problem.
But what Anthropic is doing here is nothing new.
The conclusion of this blog post is a bit hysterical. The intent of this steg is excruciatingly clear (identifying usage by Chinese firms that may be conducting model distillation). It's unclear on how this "punishes normal developers" in any shape or form.
The software is written in a deliberately obtuse way, presumably in service of some (unknown to us) goal. This is a deceptive and anti-social thing to do, it is by nature an adversarial stance to adopt. An already adversarial actor may be "punished" by this, but in such a relationship, hostility can be expected. A non-adversarial actor -- a normal developer / user -- is being harmed by this because the software is treating them as an adversary.
Further, lets assume your guess is correct and, in addition, that Anthropic elects to alter/downgrade/poison their service[0] for users that fit a particular pattern of markers. It's obvious how this system would "punish normal developers" (i.e. not the intended target/victim) that happen to fit those patterns.
[0] to some extent, the service already has been altered as its behaviour depends on the prompt text
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> I love the asymmetry. Much as I hate to defend companies climbing to success and pulling up the ladder afterwards, this asymmetry you note is kind of the whole point a company would want to grow big . Growing an organization has some super-linear costs and generally sucks for most individuals living through it - including the management - but it's still considered worth it, precisely because big entities can do thi…
I disagree with your assessment that large organisations are beneficial. We can see with our current crop of large organisations that they really struggle to create anything new; most of their new products or services were developed by a small organisation and then acquired. A lot of those products are then enshittified and badly managed because large organisation politics screws things up. Large organisations are in…
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Whether or not you find Anthropic's behavior bad, theybhave been very loudly stating the foreign labs have been distilling their models for a while now. This seems like an obvious response to me that would be a mechanism to make that obvious.
From my understanding, distilling the model with another model is not illegal per se. Also, the output of the LLM is public domain by law, too. So, why all this "effort" to protect the model? This is a free market, and moving fast and breaking things is the norm. If they are so adamant on protecting their IP, maybe they can start by respecting others' IP, so we can start talking about ethics, equality and playing fai…
Because it's their model and business and they are free to use the free market to do exactly that?
That's their free market rights too. If you don't like it, use another model (which they would be fine with).
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"It's not illegal" is only an argument against lawsuits / law enforcement involvement. Those PoW anti-AI things people put on pages aren't illegal either.
No. From my interactions, I have understood that some people use the same argument to wash their consciences from any guilt. What they do is unethical, but not illegal, and they hide under the same argument to drown the ethical angle. In other words, being honest to oneself is important. Anti-scraping measures people utilize are neither unethical nor illegal. That’s the difference.
They could detect the other AI labs and also silently burn the tokens at a faster rate providing fewer tokens for money, which does sound illegal to me.
The comments only further prove that without more regulation around this, big AI wouldn't have a "don't be evil" attitude going forward.
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People keep throwing this idea around haphazardly, but U.S. courts have pretty consistently decided that training on copyrighted works falls under fair use. You may not like it, but that doesn't make it "illegal".
You have to admit that "downloading every book ever written for free from a repository of books that is itself illegal to compile and to run, in order to write a text generation tool" being legal is at least unintuitive, to put it mildly.
Just like I can learn from a book and nobody can make that illegal, so can other people transformative do the same with computers.
Fair use is fair use.
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So they’re watermarking requests according to your environment variables and maybe changing a string format if you’re in a certain time zone? Am I missing something here? Where’s the five alarm fire?
No fire, just people looking for a reason to be upset. "They didn't tell us they were secretly checking for ToS violations" is their reason this time.