Hacker News
points by Sha1rholder 2 days ago | 0 comments
Humanity is suffering from large scale distillation attack from Anthropic.
[–] paxy 2 days ago
A few books are getting pirated and the knowledge in those books is furthering our understanding of the world (among many other helpful uses).

I’d call that the opposite of “suffering”.

[–] Sha1rholder 1 day ago
If so. Then Anthropic will be enjoying distillation from open-source models.

I absolutely agree that the opposite of "suffering".

[–] bigstrat2003 2 days ago
I have yet to see any benefit from LLMs. I think "suffering" is apt here.
[–] JK-Swizzle 2 days ago
To preface, AI is a complex matter that I don’t know well enough to claim a net positive or negative.

But I do not think anyone using technology can say they have not seen “any benefit”. While it may be a small benefit for many, it is a useful tool that has contributed to a significant amount of code and information retrieval.

You could say “the downsides vastly outweigh the upsides” or “the societal impact causes suffering”. But to say there is 0 benefit seems like a lie.

If you have ever used an LLM chat bot to gather information and it was correct. If you have ever used a program that was written in part or full by an LLM. If you have read an article that used an LLM to find sources. If you have had an interesting discussion about the ethics of LLMs. All of these are a benefit, no matter how small.

[–] lambdaone 2 days ago
That is an excellent way of looking at things - if a distillation attack against a model is bad, so should be a distillation attack against mankind. I'd argue that this suggests the former should be legal, rather than the latter becoming illegal.
[–] esjeon 2 days ago
Exactly. Either information flows freely, or everyone pays every bit of it. It’s clear which one is more beneficial to society. Barring distillation is an extraction of social wealth.
[–] cute_boi 2 days ago
I think they should rename company to Misanthropic due to the excessive scale they are distilling humanity.