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Do you think AI "things" like Midjourney or ChatGPT will have or are already having some kind of "piracy" around them?

Of course, I'm not in favor of this "AI slop" that we're having in this century (although I admit that it has some good legitimate uses but greed always speaks louder) but I wonder if it will suffer some kind of piracy, if it is already suffering or people simple are not interested in "pirated AI"

39 comments
  • I'm not sure what you're asking, but it seems you're not aware of the huge AI model field where various AI models are already being publicly shared and adjusted? It doesn't need piracy to see or have alternatives.

    The key to hosted services like ChatGPT is that they offer an API, a service, they never distribute the AI software/model.

    Other kinds of AI gets distributed and will be pirated like any software.

    Considering piracy "around" them, there's an intransparent issue of models being trained on pirated content. But I assume that's not what you were asking.

  • Weight leaks for semi-open models have been fairly common in the past. Meta's LLaMa1.0 model was originally closed source, but the weights were leaked and spread pretty rapidly (effectively laundered through finetunes and merges), leading to Meta embracing quasi-open source post-hoc. Similarly, most of the anime-style Stable Diffusion 1.5 models were based on NovelAI's custom finetune, and the weights were similarly laundered and became ubiquitous.

    Those incidents were both in 2023. Aside from some of the biggest players (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and I guess Apple kinda), open weight releases (usually not open source) have been become the norm (even for frontier models like DeepSeek-V3, Qwen 2.5 and Llama 3.1), so piracy in that case is moot (although it's easy to assume that use non-compliant with licenses is also ubiquitous). Leakage of currently closed frontier models would be interesting from an academic and journalistic perspective, for being able to dig into the architecture and assess things like safety and regurgitation outside of the online service shell, but those frontier models would require so much compute that they'd be unusable by individual actors.

  • Meta's model was pirated in a sense, someone leaked it early last year I think, but Llama isn't that impressive, and after using it on whatsapp seems like nothing got better.

  • Not sure it it counts in any way as piracy per say, but there is at least jail broken bing's copilot AI (Sydney version) using SydneyQT from Juzeon on github.

39 comments