AI giants learn what everyone else on the modern internet already knows

[highplainsdem]

https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-giants-learn-hard-truth-modern-internet-anthropic-openai-google-2026-7

The latest flashpoint is something called "distillation," using the outputs of one AI model to improve another. Anthropic says competitors are harvesting its outputs at scale, turning billions of dollars of research into a shortcut for rivals. OpenAI and Google have made similar warnings recently.

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From 30,000 feet, distillation looks an awful lot like what AI companies have been doing to the rest of the internet. Scrape web content for free and without permission. Turn it into a product you sell. Argue it's fair use. Hope the lawyers sort out the details later.

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And despite pitching itself as the most ethical AI company, Anthropic is by far the worst actor here. Its data-sucking bots crawl webpages thousands of times for every one referral the company sends back to the web.

Anthropic, OpenAI, and especially Google, frame this as a cybersecurity issue, pointing to swarms of bots "attacking" their models to extract intelligence. But, they've been doing the same to many websites, bombarding them with so much bot crawling activity that site owners have seen their operating costs skyrocket. Not only are some websites having their content used without permission, they are paying more for the privilege.

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The AI companies' theft of intellectual property to train their AI models was NOT fair use.

And since the entire generative AI industry was built on that theft, all the people those AI companies stole that intellectual property from were wronged more than the AI robber barons whining about distillation.

In fact, that distillation is a secondary damage to the people whose intellectual property was stolen to train AI.

None of those AI models would exist without that theft. Every AI company owes everything to those people originally victimized by AI companies.