41–50 of 168 posts
> Back in the day, programs like Napster had everyone believing that we shouldn’t have to pay for music. Back in the day, broadcast radio stations had everyone believing that we shouldn't have to pay for music. In 2023, we have youtube to thank for that. > If I own something, why shouldn’t I be able to share it with whoever I want? Good argument, especially since many intangible goods, such as MP3 files, are non-riva…
I have no idea how the courts will end up resolving this legally. In the meantime I've been thinking a lot about the morality of this alleged theft. Most of us would agree that duplicating and selling someone's book is immoral. Similarly I think we'd all agree that reading multiple books to learn about a topic and then writing your own is perfectly fine. So where does an LLM trained on millions of books fall? Persona…
When you are out in public, you don't have an expectation of privacy. People can see you, they can take photos of you. The worker at the cafe will probably remember you and your order. This is fine. But when tech does the exact same thing but with scale where everywhere you go, everything you buy, etc is tracked and analyzed, it's now questionably immoral despite legally being fine.
That's how generative AI is to me. Its doing something people have been doing themselves forever, but now it's doing it faster and easier than ever before which changes the equation. The arguments of "its not real creativity" are a coping mechanism. We are upset that something that was previously quite unobtainable behind years of learning and hours of effort is now trivially accessible to anyone with a computer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a question along the similar lines. Let's extend your analogy. Someone read all J.K Rowling books and created a work in that style. Would that be a copyright violation? I'm assuming not. In that case, is that difference here that it's not humanely possible to train on world's information compared to a single human getting inspired by specific works. And hence an algo doing that is violation?
> Would that be a copyright violation? Quite possibly, it depends on what specifically is meant by style and the degree to which the new work is transformative.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a question along the similar lines. Let's extend your analogy. Someone read all J.K Rowling books and created a work in that style. Would that be a copyright violation? I'm assuming not. In that case, is that difference here that it's not humanely possible to train on world's information compared to a single human getting inspired by specific works. And hence an algo doing that is violation?
> Would that be a copyright violation? Quite possibly, it depends on what specifically is meant by style and the degree to which the new work is transformative.
https://www.amazon.com/Tanya-Grotter-i-pensne-Noya/dp/569984...
You can’t copyright the idea of a wizardry school for preteens. You can’t copyright a style.
You can definitely trademark your own name.
Using this logic, every writer who has learned to read and write by reading books, or every artist who improved their craft by studying works, or every musician who learned the piano by practicing pieces, is also "stealing" in whatever they "originally" create due to learning via pattern recognition "tiny pieces of every work" in their data set. It's ridiculous to compare agents that generalize well to "stealing" pie…
AI is not writers artists or developers, it’s software that ingests data and generates an output. Anthropomorphism is going out of fashion fast.
How would you even know which way I did it?
Any IP protections lasting longer than 20 years are theft from human civilization.
1 year.
I feel obliged to say that piracy is not theft... but more relevantly, I like how AI is showing us more clearly that everything is essentially a derivative work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Before we can agree on anything, we have to define what qualifies a human as any of those things. We will be here all night debating that. - "They call themselves an artist but they are not that good." - "Copying and pasting shell scripts in a terminal does not a software developer make." - "The story that writer created is yet another permutation of " You see what I mean? There is a good probability that today alone…
I see what you mean but i think we are digressing. A human has certain rights while a machine doesnt. If we give ai learning rights then who’s to say a database is not like a human memorising things at a highly accurate level and as such we should make databases not liable for the storage of any copyrighted material. I dont mind ai generating code or art as long as that code and art it was trained on is not our publi…
It sounds good but mandating this will be death of AI in the west. This is relatively unprecedented situation where the use of copyrighted works actually helps you build tools useful for doing work. Training on DeviantArt makes the AI better at Photoshop-esque tasks.
Any country that doesn't implement this restriction will immediately be able to produce smarter more useful AIs.
> we should make databases not liable for the storage of any copyrighted material
I think this would actually be allowed right now legally speaking. That's basically a library or Google Cache. The hypothetical database wouldn't expected to be super useful because you can't "perform" any of the works outside of fair-use cases but it's up in the air of running inferences on that data (Google snippets) or training AI is a performance.
I feel obliged to say that piracy is not theft... but more relevantly, I like how AI is showing us more clearly that everything is essentially a derivative work.
Not a new observation: "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun." Ecclesiastes 1:9
It's interesting to compare two scenarios. The first is if you feed an LLM solely the works of a famous current author, say J.K Rowling, and ask it to create a new work in the style of her franchise. The second is if you include all of her works but also throw in every other book written in the last several years and ask it to create a work in the style of her franchise. Is the latter somehow "better" than the former…
I have a question along the similar lines. Let's extend your analogy. Someone read all J.K Rowling books and created a work in that style. Would that be a copyright violation? I'm assuming not. In that case, is that difference here that it's not humanely possible to train on world's information compared to a single human getting inspired by specific works. And hence an algo doing that is violation?
If we had these LLMs 30 years ago would J.K Rowling's books ever have existed?