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1 day ago“Intellectual property” is mostly a capitalist idea. To give a direct example of the harm caused by LLMs using others’ work without attribution or credit, there is the recent case in which one of the models was being portrayed as finding a mathematical proof which was actually in it’s training data. The original authors will not get the credit, academic support, exposure and funding they would have gotten otherwise.
Also, even if information is not “owned”, it’s epistemology and source are an important part of it. Consumption by LLMs degrades the information by removing such metadata, and even worse hallucinating sources.
Unfortunately the proof found by the LLM combines work by different teams of mathematicians that cannot individually be published as proofs. It’s the equivalent of a scoop in investigation journalism by someone who was spying on journalists instead of doing any investigating. It’s on lemmy/wired: https://lemmy.world/post/52843754
It’s good that some do cite sources, however one major problem with generative AI is that it can produce volumes of output much faster than they can be verified. “You can always cross-check” is not viable at scale, and by the time LLM output gets cited, it becomes a quagmire potentially unlimited levels deep.
LLM output should never be treated as original until they can show their work transparently.