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https://freedium-mirror.cfd/https://wlockett.medium.com/ai-distillation-attacks-are-profoundly-stupid-ea70556a0ab2>
“Anthropic recently sent a letter to US officials accusing Alibaba of
"brazenly" and "illicitly" attempting to extract its AI capabilities with the
largest known distillation attacks on them to date. Anthropic flagged 16
million interactions with its Claude chatbot across 24,000 fake accounts as
distillation attacks tied to Alibaba and the Chinese AI models it works with.
If you have never heard of distillation, it is a relatively common AI training
method where the output of a larger, more advanced model is used to train a
much smaller, lighter model. When conducted "legitimately", this is a great way
of making smaller, cheaper-to-run models that are still relatively capable. But
when an AI company uses the output of a rival's more advanced model to train
its small, lightweight model, it is considered an illicit distillation attack,
as the original developer isn't being paid for their work. If you have even a
passing understanding of how LLM chatbot AIs work, you may already see the
cosmic-sized hypocrisy at play here. But I guarantee you that Anthropic's
argument is far more stupid than you realise.
For those who don't know why this is hypocritical, let's start at the
beginning. Chatbot LLMs need to be trained on a truly colossal amount of data.
So much so that if AI labs like Anthropic or OpenAI actually paid the copyright
holders of said data, it would immediately bankrupt them. So, they just take
the data without paying.
Anthropic downloaded seven million books from LibGen's "shadow library" without
paying for a single one and shoved them into Claude. Reddit also sued Anthropic
for illegally scraping user data from its site over 100,000 times, again to
shove this data into its AI. To get around copyright laws, Anthropic bought
millions of physical books and scanned them all (destroying them in the
process) to create a digital copy to feed into Claude. This utilised a rather
dubious loophole in copyright law, as they did technically buy the works, but
the copyright holder did not agree for their works to be used in this manner
and wasn't appropriately compensated. On top of all of this, just like every
other AI company out there, Anthropic has been accused of scraping virtually
the entire internet for data, hoovering up a truly astronomical amount of
copyrighted material, and once again, feeding it all into Claude without paying
the creators a cent.
I don't think people realise the scale of this copyright-nicking scheme. Take
Common Crawl, a web scraping service used by Anthropic. Its dataset was a
whopping 9.5 petabytes in early 2024 and has since added 3–5 billion new pages
each month (roughly 380 terabytes of uncompressed data per month), meaning
their current total filtered dataset could quite easily be well over 20
petabytes.”
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
