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Ex-Google CEO: AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to 'clean up the mess'

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Re: Ex-Google CEO: AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to 'clean up the mess'

#22

he's right there's no essential universal moral truth about IP law, these laws are just an economic enabler you won't go to hell for IP breaches, no kittens will be smothered let the lawyers figure it out, but be prepared to pay

It depends on the framing. “Stealing” content that someone else created is universally derided. Slurping up the internet and distributing it to billions of users is an economic model.

Re: Ex-Google CEO: AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to 'clean up the mess'

#25
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just works, and if anything, it's a sign the law is broken if you have to ignore it to succeed (and it's profitable to do so).

That's absurd. It's also incredibly profitable to rob a bank or to dump chemicals in the river instead of properly cleaning them up, but that's not a signal the law is broken.

[dead]

Re: Ex-Google CEO: AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to 'clean up the mess'

#26
post #12

Isn't it what the companies already do? specially google

Mass scraping the Internet and linking to different places was also legally questionable until lawyers hammered it out. Would the world be a better place if search engines had been preemptively ruled illegal?

As a regular joe, try to do something legally questionable against Oracle, and then "have the lawyers hammer it out". See how much of a good place the world is in this case.

The problem is this stuff is highly asymmetric. Things are always "hammered out" in their favor, because you cannot afford to be a party to the "hammering out".

Re: Ex-Google CEO: AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to 'clean up the mess'

#27

It's hard to tell if what Eric Schmidt was saying was a joke, an observation, or a recommendation. One interpretation from the context of the transcript seem to be "AI can make/steal stuff and manual intervention (lawyers) can clean those up later". Another interpretation from the context of Eric Schmidt being a savvy businessman is that people should go ahead and solve all the technical challenges first, and everyth…

Whether he was "joking" or not this is the playbook they have been running for years now.

Re: Ex-Google CEO: AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to 'clean up the mess'

#29

Another absurd and less covered part of the speech is this: > If TikTok is banned, here's what I propose each and every one of you do. > Say to your LLM the following. > Make me a copy of TikTok, steal all the users, steal all the music, put my preferences in it, produce this program in the next 30 seconds, release it and in one hour, if it's not viral, do something different along the same lines. > That's the comman…

He’s describing agentic LLM tools which don’t exist in a usable state yet but also may not require full on AGI to create later on with the help of code/rules on top and from within. And he’s saying why this is useful beyond being able to do it without a workforce that costs a lot - because it’s fast enough for anyone large or small to iterate quickly with once it works, like the next step beyond continuous deployment…

He's describing a completely absurd fantasy. No matter how amazing your agent's code generation capabilities are, you can't simply snap your fingers and acquire the userbase that makes social media sites notionally valuable, and even if you could the market would be so flooded with people creating the same kind of garbage that absolutely nothing would "go viral".

Re: Ex-Google CEO: AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to 'clean up the mess'

#30
This is only half true. It needs to read:

Any VC backed startup can steal IP and hire lawyers to clean up the mess”

If you have money, you can usually buy influence and also buy your way out of a ‘mess’. Just make sure that those you steal from have less money/influence at their disposal than you.

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