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OpenAI asks White House for relief from state AI rules

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Re: OpenAI asks White House for relief from state AI rules

#371

Post by only-one1701 »

woah wrote: post #275
taurath wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It still warps my brain, they’ve taken trillions of dollars of industry and made a product worth billions by stealing it. IP is practically the basis of the economy, and these models warp and obfuscate ownership of everything, like a giant reset button on who can hold knowledge. It wouldn’t be legal, or allowed if tech wasn't seen as the growth path of our economy. It’s a hell of a needle to thread and it’s unlikely…

"IP" is a very new concept in our culture and completely absent in other cultures. It was invented to prevent verbatim reprints of books, but even so, the publishing industry existed for hundreds of years before then. It's been expanded greatly in the past 50 years. Acting like copyright is some natural law of the universe that LLMs are upending simply because they can learn from written texts is silly. If you want t…

“The Venetian Patent Statute of 19 March 1474, established by the Republic of Venice, is usually considered to be the earliest codified patent system in the world.[11][12] It states that patents might be granted for "any new and ingenious device, not previously made", provided it was useful. By and large, these principles still remain the basic principles of current patent laws.“

What are you talking about.

Re: OpenAI asks White House for relief from state AI rules

#372

Post by ben_w »

triceratops wrote: post #351
dylan604 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about checking out eBooks? If you had an app that checked those out and scanned it at robot speed vs human feed, that would be the same thing. The idea that reading something that does not belong to you directly means stealing is just weird and very strained. theGoogs essentially did that by having the robot that turned each page and scanned the pages. that's no different than having the librarian pull material…

> If you had an app that checked those out and scanned it You mean...made a copy? Do you really not see the problem? > How they acquired the text would be a better thing to critique Well...yeah that's what I said in the comment that started this discussion branch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43355147 This isn't about humans or robots reading books. It's that robots are allowed to violate copyright law to rea…

> You mean...made a copy? Do you really not see the problem?

In precisely the same way as a robot scanning a physical book is.

If this is turned into a PDF and distributed, it's exactly the legal problem Google had[0] and that Facebook is currently fighting due to torrenting some of their training material[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43125840

If the tokens go directly into training an AI and no copies are retained, that's like how you as a human learn — except current AI models are not even remotely as able to absorb that information as you, and they only make up for being as thick as a plank by being stupid very very quickly.

> It's that robots are allowed to violate copyright law to read the books, and us humans are not.

More that the copyright laws are not suited to what's going on. Under the copyright laws, statute and case law, that existed at the time GPT-3.5 was created, bots were understood as the kind of thing Google had and used to make web indexes — essentially legal, with some caveats about quoting too much verbatim from news articles.

(Google PageRank being a big pile of linear algebra and all, and the Transformer architecture from which ChatGPT get's the "T" being originally a Google effort to improve Google Translate).

Society is currently arguing amongst itself if this is still OK when the bot is a conversational entity, or perhaps even something that can be given agency.

You get to set those rules via your government representative, make it illegal for AI crawlers to read the internet like that — but it's hard to change the laws if you mistake what you want the law to be, with what the law currently is.

Re: OpenAI asks White House for relief from state AI rules

#373

Post by pessimizer »

iteratethis wrote: post #280

I'm disgusted by the mindset that companies should be able to do whatever they want when it comes to technology as impactful and revolutionary as AI. AI sucks up the collective blood, sweat and tears of human work without permission or compensation and then re-monetizes it. It's a model that is even more asymmetrical than Google Search, whom at least gives back some traffic to creators (if lucky). AI is going to deci…

> AI has the ability for convincing deepfakes, attacking the essence of information and communication in itself. This needs regulation, accountability, at least a discussion.

We're going to eventually have to have a serious discussion about, and to generate a legal and moral framework covering, identity rights. I'm going to guess that people will be able to locally generate high-quality pornography of celebrities and people they know that will be indistinguishable from the real thing imminently; at most it's 5 years away.

Getting hung up on the sex is a distraction. This is no different than anybody collecting a identifiable dossier on you, packaging it, and selling it. This has been a problem for everyone for the entire period of advertising on the internet, and before that with credit agencies and blacklists, and no progress has been made because it has been profitable for everybody for a long time.

Websites got a few decisions about scraping, saying that they were protected to some extent from people scraping to duplicate a particular compilation of otherwise legally copyable information. Individuals are compilations of legally copyable information. We're going to need publication rights to our own selves.

But like you say, we're not discussing any of this. Rich people are just doing what they want, and paying the appropriate politicians to pretend not to understand what's going on. Any pushback? Just Say China A Lot.

Re: OpenAI asks White House for relief from state AI rules

#374

Post by dylan604 »

triceratops wrote: post #351
dylan604 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about checking out eBooks? If you had an app that checked those out and scanned it at robot speed vs human feed, that would be the same thing. The idea that reading something that does not belong to you directly means stealing is just weird and very strained. theGoogs essentially did that by having the robot that turned each page and scanned the pages. that's no different than having the librarian pull material…

> If you had an app that checked those out and scanned it You mean...made a copy? Do you really not see the problem? > How they acquired the text would be a better thing to critique Well...yeah that's what I said in the comment that started this discussion branch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43355147 This isn't about humans or robots reading books. It's that robots are allowed to violate copyright law to rea…

but you keep saying to read the books. there is no copyright violation to read a book. making copies starts to get into murky grounds, but does not immediately mean breaking the law.

Re: OpenAI asks White House for relief from state AI rules

#375

Post by pessimizer »

napsterbr wrote: post #137
tasuki wrote: post #133

I heard the theory that Elon Musk has a significant control over the current US government. They're not best pals with Sam Altman. This seems like it might be a good way to see how much power Elon actually has over the government?

I think we are beyond the "theory" phase by now. Just yesterday I saw the president of a country advertising the products of a private company (Trump making an obvious marketing ploy for Tesla). How can this ever be acceptable?

> the president of a country advertising the products of a private company

I think you're inventing new norms. It has never been unusual or interesting for the president of a country to do PR for some company in their country that has hit a rough patch (as long as this isn't a legal rough patch.)

Most of what our diplomats do is sell US products to other countries. They certainly have always played favorites.

> How can this ever be acceptable?

The horror. What if he says that he's going to Burger King?

Re: OpenAI asks White House for relief from state AI rules

#376

Post by pitaj »

only-one1701 wrote: post #371
woah wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"IP" is a very new concept in our culture and completely absent in other cultures. It was invented to prevent verbatim reprints of books, but even so, the publishing industry existed for hundreds of years before then. It's been expanded greatly in the past 50 years. Acting like copyright is some natural law of the universe that LLMs are upending simply because they can learn from written texts is silly. If you want t…

“The Venetian Patent Statute of 19 March 1474, established by the Republic of Venice, is usually considered to be the earliest codified patent system in the world.[11][12] It states that patents might be granted for "any new and ingenious device, not previously made", provided it was useful. By and large, these principles still remain the basic principles of current patent laws.“ What are you talking about.

Patents and copyright are very different beasts.

Re: OpenAI asks White House for relief from state AI rules

#378

Post by seanmcdirmid »

sva_ wrote: post #323
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chinese AI must implement socialist values by law, but law is a much more fluid fuzzy thing in China than in the USA (although the USA seems to be moving away from rule of law recently).

> Chinese AI must implement socialist values by law I don't doubt it but am interested to read a source? I know the models can't talk about things like Tiananmen Square 1989, but what does 'implementing socialist values by law' look like?

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/18/chinese-regulators-begin-tes...

"Socialist values" is literally the language that China used in announcing this.

Here is a recent article from a Chinese source:

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202503/1329537.shtml

Although censorship isn't mentioned specifically, it is definitely 99% of what they are focused on (the other 1% being scams).

China practices Rule by law, not Rule of law, so you know...they'll know its bad when they see it, so model providers will exercise extreme self censorship (which is already true for social network providers).

Re: OpenAI asks White House for relief from state AI rules

#380

Post by Terr_ »

samstave wrote: post #368
mystified5016 wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No amount of exposure so far has had any effect on corruption. That AI will somehow improve this is just magical thinking.

No - I mean the accessibility to the information and blatant use of power whereby we always knew it existed, but now we can tabulate and analyze it.

> now we can tabulate and analyze

Very doubtful: The current "AI" hype craze centers on LLMs, and they don't do math.

If anything they capabilities favor the other side, to obfuscate and protect falsehoods.

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