As authors of this post, we strongly advocate against such unlawful means of training models to exhibit similar behaviour to frontier counterparts.
As merely a reader of this post, I strongly advocate precisely the opposite, and encourage whatever means one chooses to employ to improve one’s models’ capabilities relative to their frontier counterparts, on the grounds of the moral principle of turnabout being fair play superseding all the laws of Man.
I understand the turnabout intuition, but the key issue for me is that distillation violates terms the user explicitly agreed to. “Turnabout is fair play” would also justify copying someone’s private manuscript after agreeing not to, simply because they had previously learned from other authors. That still seems wrong to me. If you think breaking such an agreement is justified anyway, then I think we’ve reached a difference in moral intuitions, which I still respect.
If those terms bound only by honor, I would agree, and frown even upon breaking the spirit of such an agreement, but backed by law (or some other threat), you get only what you can enforce.
I would say this perspective helps me think along a new axis. I don’t fully agree with the statement that breaking the spirit of an agreement, which is backed by law but has fragile enforceability, necessarily equates to not being a wrong act, because there are many examples where the law can be broken because enforceability is weak, even though it’s not advisable to do so. But I do see your point in this case where the terms are not exactly bound by honour. At this juncture, I will do more introspection on this because this seems like a really interesting take.
We were very specific in certain use case of words to ensure we don’t convey the wrong point. As far as we are concerned, we never said violating terms of service is immoral but rather unlawful . If we did say so, we’d appreciate your feedback on where we said this, and change our wording where appropriate.
As merely a reader of this post, I strongly advocate precisely the opposite, and encourage whatever means one chooses to employ to improve one’s models’ capabilities relative to their frontier counterparts, on the grounds of the moral principle of turnabout being fair play superseding all the laws of Man.
I understand the turnabout intuition, but the key issue for me is that distillation violates terms the user explicitly agreed to. “Turnabout is fair play” would also justify copying someone’s private manuscript after agreeing not to, simply because they had previously learned from other authors. That still seems wrong to me. If you think breaking such an agreement is justified anyway, then I think we’ve reached a difference in moral intuitions, which I still respect.
If those terms bound only by honor, I would agree, and frown even upon breaking the spirit of such an agreement, but backed by law (or some other threat), you get only what you can enforce.
I would say this perspective helps me think along a new axis. I don’t fully agree with the statement that breaking the spirit of an agreement, which is backed by law but has fragile enforceability, necessarily equates to not being a wrong act, because there are many examples where the law can be broken because enforceability is weak, even though it’s not advisable to do so. But I do see your point in this case where the terms are not exactly bound by honour. At this juncture, I will do more introspection on this because this seems like a really interesting take.
If breaking the Terms of Service of a software product is a moral violation, then we’re all monsters.
We were very specific in certain use case of words to ensure we don’t convey the wrong point. As far as we are concerned, we never said violating terms of service is immoral but rather unlawful . If we did say so, we’d appreciate your feedback on where we said this, and change our wording where appropriate.