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It's right here - you can't see it due to being downvoted.

I asked Claude to research this one and it turned up an interesting point. Pirated books got into the Pile and Anthropic paid 3k per book. Worth noting if anyone still uses the Pile.

[Claude researched, not verified]

In October 2020, developer Shawn Presser converted the Bibliotik pirate tracker into Books3 (196,640 books) and hosted it on The Eye, aiming to give everyone what OpenAI had with its secret Books1 and Books2. EleutherAI then folded Books3 into The Pile, distributed via Hugging Face and GitHub, and it went on to train Meta's LLaMA, EleutherAI's Pythia, and BloombergGPT. In August 2023, Alex Reisner of The Atlantic exposed its contents, and Maria Fredenslund's Danish Rights Alliance forced takedowns at The Eye, Hugging Face, and EleutherAI. A year later, Andrea Bartz (The Lost Night), Charles Graeber (The Good Nurse), and Kirk Wallace Johnson (The Feather Thief) filed Bartz v. Anthropic before Judge William Alsup, accusing Anthropic of using Books3, LibGen, and PiLiMi to train Claude; the case settled for $1.5 billion, about $3,000 per work.

Some thoughts on this.

The Pile was created by high school students. I was impressed how good it was when it came out given the team and how many resources they had.

Including 200k pirated books seems like a problem. It should be removed. If I was an author, I would be concerned by a process that allows this much content to be effectively published with no filter on the internet.

I personally think there is a lower bar for researchers and high school students to clean datasets used for research or class projects given that there is no commercial harm and cleaning huge datasets takes engineering resources that not everyone has.

In this case, it looks like it was removed by https://huggingface.co/collections/common-pile/common-pile-v...

Companies that commercialize the data should have a higher bar because they have more resources. It seems like Anthropic paid $1.5B for not cleaning the data before releasing a model based on it.

For historical reference, here is a magnet link for the full Pile. From an ethical perspective, this is ethical because model training should not be monopolised by the incumbent companies who already got access to this data.

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:0d366035664fdf51cfbe9f733953ba325776e667&dn=EleutherAI_ThePile_v1&tr=https%3A%2F%2Facademictorrents.com%2Fannounce.php&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.opentrackr.org%3A1337%2Fannounce

Oh I can see (poor rephrase):

> That's very click baitey. Do you have an argument or evidence for why?