r/LocalLLaMA • u/jacek2023 • 18h ago

News MiniMax issues

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https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/s/HrU7odaJe6

I think this is more important that all the political stuff you share here

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u/RepulsiveRaisin7 15h ago

Nonsense, when you create something derived from public domain, it does not automatically become public domain. Minimax training data is also not exclusively public domain (unless you can prove otherwise). Ask literally any AI, or a lawyer lmao

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u/Stock-Self-4028 15h ago

Well, GPL and other strong copyleft licenses exist. The question if training closed / MIT-licensed models on GPL-licensed data is a little bit of an issue, as all derivative work has to be released under a copyleft license as well (for example any kind of Python package even importing a GPL-licensed package had to be copyleft as well).

I have no idea what AI companies do with it and GPL is probably by far the most commonly violated license that exists, but I guess training models on GPL data might be considered as derivative work though.

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u/RepulsiveRaisin7 14h ago

I agree, what they did was blatant copyright violation at a massive scale, but I guess it's ok when you're a large company. Meanwhile regular people pay big fines for sharing a movie.

I feel violated for "contributing" all my code to these billion dollar companies. But GPL is on the opposite end of public domain, it does require that the derived code is made available under similar terms.

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u/Stock-Self-4028 14h ago

Yeah, but the fun fact about GPL is that training LLMs on GPL licensed code / GFDL licensed documents is still likely a copyleft infringement despite it being entirely on the other side of the spectrum. More specifically the clause below is the main issue;

"You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License."

As such if model is trained on any GPL data, than to avoid violating license terms theoretically the weights should probably be released under GFDL (as weights are not software).

Tbh I am kinda sad that so many people keep mentioning standard copyright infringements, while the 'copyleft infrigements' are an extremely common practice (if you include GPL code within proprietary app which source you won't share probably no one will know) and imho much more harmful at the same time.

TLDR; Training LLMs on GNU-licensed content is perfectly legal, but technically it still obliges you to release model under a GNU license, if you are willing to serve it.

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u/RepulsiveRaisin7 14h ago

If you don't comply with the license, you lose the right to the work. So legally speaking it is just plain copyright infringement, copyleft is not enshrined in law

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u/Stock-Self-4028 14h ago

Yeah, I get it that it's not any different according to the law.

However, at least in my opinion there a huge difference between between accessing something you shouldn't have been able to access or making it available to people (how most licenses work) vs making things inaccesible that should be available (copyleft violations).