My how fast the AI tech bros move to protect corporations but don’t move to protect the average coder, artists, writers.
Don’t worry! Its STILL okay to reverse engineer the work of photographers artists writers actors voice over musicians modelers animators academics etc etc (feel free to add. the exploitation is literally everywhere!)
Only if you’re a corporation! If you’re a filthy worker then you have no rights.
Corporations are people, my friend
Jokes on them when they face the consequences of usurping the jobs of all these professions, causing mass exit, and replacing with their error prone output of their slop and unoriginal thinking/artistry. I’m excited to see this outcome, not going to lie.
“It’s so powerful! You’re only allowed to use it how we want you to”.
Allowed eh? How about go fuck yourself?
Another reason not to use a closed models
So this is how these companies are going to safeguard against IP theft lawsuits! Leave our theft be, or we’ll tell everyone how to get in.
Also it’s incredibly telling how Anthropic doesn’t add code to stop suicide ideation in teens (what they are their ilk are being sued for) but can somehow very quickly stop reverse engineering. A tool that values the captial holders through & through. Their “democratization of intelligence” schtick is obvious now.
OpenSource frontier models ASAP! Obviously never gonna happen, but a fool can dream atleast.
Also it’s incredibly telling how Anthropic doesn’t add code to stop suicide ideation in teens (what they are their ilk are being sued for) but can somehow very quickly stop reverse engineering.
This.
Hot take:
This is a good thing.
Claude Code is the “lowest common denominator.” It’s the default, zero research option. Its where you go if you follow popular trends.
If you actually want to reverse engineer, help code a game or something, there are hundreds of capable, uncensored LLM APIs to do that. Hacker communities will eventually figure that out, and finally realize Claude isn’t unique, and that Anthropic is toxic.
But for lazy spammers who don’t know that and aren’t motivated to seek stuff out… well, if this makes their life more difficult, good. If this sabotages Anthropic, that’s good too.
It’s not ok when the commoners get some power back huh. What a shame, I’ve been loving playing my favorite console fps games as a kid, now with keyboard and mouse support.
The task Large Language Models are best at is pattern correlation. Out of all the possible applications, reverse-engineering seems the most reasonable use case to me.
But figuring out how stuff works is the exact opposite of what they want vibe coders to do: Don’t think, don’t train your own skills, just trust the machine. And if it doesn’t work, just prompt again and keep wasting more tokens, pushing the usage metrics to convince investors they’re constantly growing, burning the planet and your company’s money.
Is this in response to that new “reverse engineer anything” tool from the people that reverse engineered the Adobe suite?
of course. anyone who thinks AI can be used as a tool for independence is deluding themselves
anyone who thinks AI can be used by us commoners for much longer is deluding themselves. it is so obvious that these big LLM companies want to capture the market by making everyone dependent and then crank prices way up.
I’m really tired of the lie that ArtCraft is “reverse engineered Photoshop”.
It’s a slop factory. If you don’t believe me, download it and run it yourself. It’s just a frontend for tons of image and video GenAI bullshit. It doesn’t resemble Photoshop in the slightest, that narrative is pure marketing.
And it’s only “free” in the sense that you can download it for free. The first thing they ask you to do when you launch the program is buy tokens from them.
Even if it did work, Adobe’s legal team will obliterate them. I’m also not sure about the legality of using it for any paid work. It’s a moot point, though, since it’s slop, and better off using a cracked version that at least works.
The adobe suite was not reverse engineered, in the sense in which the term is applied to binary, closed-source softeware. Rather, it was cloned.
This is technically and often also legally very different. Cloning is a new implementation of a system which reproduces the abstract API of an existing System. Since APIs are not subject to copyright law, this is legally unproblemaric. It is also a creative process (so far). For exsmple, Linux is a clone of AT & T Unix.
Reverse engineering uses techniques like analysing the internal behaviour and decompiling the binary code of an existing product. It is im general not illegal, but it can violate license agreements and is more in a grey area. Laws like the DMCA might also apply if some kind of copy protection is used.
BTW, many Linux drivers are reverse enginnered to some degree.
For exsmple, Linux is a clone of AT & T Unix.
Unless your definition of “clone” is very different from the mainstream one, you’re talking out of your ass here. Linux was written from scratch. The only thing they’ve got in common is being POSIX-compliant.
Yeah, it clones the Unix / POSIX API: Programs written for Unix will run on Linux. In the same way, the Photoshop/Office lookalikes are clones, they were written from scratch to yield a result compatible to the original.
Look at the explanations I linked.
I’m hopeful this is positive, they’ll start loosing a lot more to Chinese models and I can assure you local models will blow up too.
I can assure you local models will blow up too.
Why?
Misanthropic: Characterized by a hatred or mistrustful scorn for humankind.
It’s like watching the Nazi party ban the rape of Jewish women in 1944
To those who say “but what about game preservation?”:
GenAI slop ruined communities around game preservation. And for every time a AAA dev getting this treatment, there’s at least 3 indies getting it worse.
More power and value to the open weight models, cool
The “There’s no way we can stop our agents from going rogue” people, suddenly have a burst of ability to reign in their creation when it suits their interests.
Funny that…
Does anyone think that perhaps what they are afraid is that source code of such clone would be compared to the original and show evidence that maybe the model was already trained on the code of the game?
I think this is definitely a concern, yes.
I think it’s very likely that these models are effectively being tricked into retrieving source code of projects from memory of seeing the actual source code in the biases. This is why some project are much easier to uncover than others.
They aren’t being tricked. They are doing exactly what they were designed to do
Fair fair. Ih suppose what I mean is that it’s not really reverse engineering so much as it is recollecting from training samples.
I’m no expert, but if my understanding of LLMs as ‘probability calculators’ is correct, then if you prompted one properly to produce code which does x (a Photoshop function for example) and it had only been trained on one example of this (the Photoshop source code) it would reproduce the PS source code because that has the highest probability of that being the correct ‘answer’.
This is baasically correct, though what the models actually produce is a little more randomized than that. Though, if there aren’t any words that are anywhere cllose to being likely to follow next, then there won’t be a any other valid options to choose.
Where would they get the source code from so they can include it in the training data in this scenario?
Looks like everywhere companies mandate employees to install copilot or equivalent.
I think originally they were saying they won’t be using the proprietary code for training, but I don’t trust those companies when they already broke laws.
From the stolen math research for tha NS, from the company response that they can’t guarantee that the model didn’t train on the mathematician sessions, we know for sure they are using the inputs for training lol
This is full conspiracy from me, but could the terms of service for github grant the right to “enhance tools” based on private github projects. These then get moved around as ‘anonymized’ data to train off?
The models don’t store access to their training data. So no, there’s no source code in the model to retrieve.
It’s long been proven that LLMs can produce exact copies of their training data. Not every piece of training data, of course, but enough where spitting out exact replicas of proprietary code is a legitimate concern. Not to mention that copies don’t need to be exact in order to be a problem.
The models are essentially a giant lossy compression applied to the training data.
They don’t store the loseless version of the training data sure, but that doesn’t mean it can’t reproduce something close enough to it, it’s literally how the whole thing works.
My understanding of it is that it’s far more complex than “lossy compression”. Of course it can generate text that is close to something in its training data, but I don’t think people have the right mental model if they think the model itself somehow has whole chunks of code in it. It does not.
My understanding of it is that it’s far more complex than “lossy compression”. Of course it can generate text that is close to something in its training data, but I don’t think people have the right mental model if they think the model itself somehow has whole chunks of code in it. It does not.
So they took out two of the most useful things that LLMs can do.
Yes, apparently they’re suddenly worried that stealing other people’s work—which is their business model—might backfire on them. I assume this is a measure intended to give the impression—in the face of one of the countless lawsuits against Anthropic—that they’re actually taking licensing or intellectual property rights seriously. I can’t think of any other explanation, because Anthropic simply can’t afford to have questions raised about where the training data used by their models actually comes from.
Pulling up the stolen ladder before anyone can steal it to use to steal more stuff while it’s still enforceable to do so.
Mabey just make all ladders illegal, unless you have a government contracted monopoly.
The entire idea of copyright is going to be tested at many levels, and most people don’t even understand why yet.
Interesting times.
Government contracted monopoly
You mean like when that town tried to force an xAI data center to not use methane turbines, and they got shut down by the government because the military was allegedly using Grok?
No, they just enabled Chinese LLMs to be the forefront of reverse engineering. Because people will do what they want to do.
No, they just enabled Chinese LLMs to be the forefront of reverse engineering. Because people will do what they want to do.
Their goal is simple… everything they are doing right now is striving to make the US ban individual hardware.
Chinese models are open, anyone can get them… stopping the flow of data on private computers is impossible. Hardware however is getting more expensive, hardware manufacturers are already deciding to move out of the consumer market on their own. The US government is already establishing laws to prevent shipping foreign hardware into the country.
Altman’s giving the game away when he does this “it’s so sad that all this ram is sitting around in people’s home computers unappreciated when it could do so much more in a data center”.
The idea is to sell the message "AI is out of the bag, and it’s world ending technology. Basically they are going to imply that the guardrails in their data centers are the only thing that’s preventing all AIs from destroying the software industry, and teaching teenagers to build bombs and hacking the CIA, and the only possible response would be to stop all direct to consumer hardware sales with anything more than the bare minimum needed to stream a PC out of a data center.
This is all pretty obvious and I agree. They can no longer protect their imaginary property if they allow it to be ran in your computer’s memory or stored on your computers hard drive.
The cat is definitely out of the bag, as in their own AI models are making them obselete. The race to make money before the end is what motivates them. They will ride the roller coaster to our societal demise because they only care about money. These people shouldn’t be in charge of a small fast food restaurant let alone multi-billion dollar companies.
If private hardware becoming scare would send America back to the stone age, completely choke technological progress.
probably, but don’t you know, everything in the cloud is the FuTuRe!! owning things yourself is the way of the past, it’s like physical disks you can resell or something.
Sad thing with the exception of price, it’s probably not that far off that most average people’s usages will be similar. but yeah the idea of paying by the hour or cpu grade etc… for a computer is going to suck… and be far more expensive for gamers, hobbyists etc…
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Rules for thee!
