I mean they stole people's actual work already, so they're the bad kind of pirates.

I'm pretty sure those things are trained on content which was obtained without paying royalties to the creators, hence by definition pirated content - so that would count as "piracy around them".

On the opposite side, as far as I know the things created with Generative AI so far can't be copyrighted, hence by definition can't be pirated as they've always belonged to the Public Domain.

As for the engines themselves, there are good fully open source options out there which can be locally installed (if you have enough memory in your graphics card) and there seem to be thriving communities around it (at least it looks like it from what bit I dipped into that stuff so far). I'm not sure if it's at all possible to pirate the closed source engines since I expect those things are designed to be deployed to very specific server farm architectures.

That makes no sense. Define pirated AI first.

There already is. You can download copies of AI that are similar or better than ChatGPT from hugging face. I run different models locally to create my own useless AI slop without paying for anything.

Not pirated. But my country, Spain, released an open AI model completely for free. Everything is open. The training data the models and everything. It's supposedly ethically trained with open data(I have not personally dig in the training data but it's there published).

It's focused on spanish and regional languages of spain. But I think it can also do things in English.

Not piracy per se, as it's completely legal. But there's something you don't depend on any bussiness to run.

Some of the "open" models seem to have augmented their training data with OpenAI and Anthropic requests (I. E. they sometimes say they're ChatGPT or Claude). I guess that may be considered piracy. There are a lot of customer service bots that just hook into OpenAI APIs and don't have a lot of guardrails, so you can do stuff like ask a car dealership's customer service to write you Python code. Actual piracy would require someone leaking the model.

Meta's model was pirated in a sense, someone leaked it early last year I think, but Llama isn't that impressive, and after using it on whatsapp seems like nothing got better.

Not sure it it counts in any way as piracy per say, but there is at least jail broken bing's copilot AI (Sydney version) using SydneyQT from Juzeon on github.

There are groups that give access to pirated AI. When I was a student, i used them to make projects. As for how they get access to it? They usually jailbreak websites that provide free trials and automate the account creation process. The higher quality ones scam big companies for startup credits. Then there are also some leaked keys.

Anyways thats what i would call "pirated AI". (Not the locally run AI)

Well... sufficient local processing power would enable personalized "creators" which are pre-trained to provide certain content (e.g. A game). Those thingies will definitely be pirates, hacked and modded.

As they currently already are...

Jailbreaking LLMs and Diffusers is a thing. But I wouldn't call it piracy

Its already free, you cant pirate cloud services but stable diffusion is free, deepspeek is free, you just need the hardware to run it

@incognito08 AI could be a direction in piracy too imo

I'm not sure what you're asking, but it seems you're not aware of the huge AI model field where various AI models are already being publicly shared and adjusted? It doesn't need piracy to see or have alternatives.

The key to hosted services like ChatGPT is that they offer an API, a service, they never distribute the AI software/model.

Other kinds of AI gets distributed and will be pirated like any software.

Considering piracy "around" them, there's an intransparent issue of models being trained on pirated content. But I assume that's not what you were asking.