411–420 of 783 posts
It's the biggest theft in history.
Well, it really depends on your definitions, but I'll probably put the biggest theft in history on European imperialism in the 14-19th centuries, seizing unfathomable amounts of land, resources and slave labor from other civilizations.
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It's more complicated than that. Quite a bit more. Commercial use counts _against_ a fair use defense, but is not dispositive: it's not accurate at all to say it "generally does not cover" commercial use. This is the "purpose and character" test, one of four in contemporary (United States) fair use doctrine. Purpose and character also includes the degree to which a use is _transformative_. It's clear that the degree…
It is of course true that it is unsettled law, and that fair use is more complicated than my offhand comment suggested. > Courts have never once accepted "it would be impossible for defendant to write his biography without reading plaintiff's" as valid, and it's been tried. The standard for plagiarism is higher than that. This I think misses the thrust of my argument, though. Its hard to find an exact human analogy,…
But pretending you said "infringement", for me it comes all the way back to the Constitution: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". I cannot possibly twist the development of large language models into something which violates the spirit of that purpose. I don't see how anyone can.
Your point about the scale is valid, and the alienness of it, sure. But you haven't made the case that the vastness of the scale should affect the conclusion.
Something I left out in the first post is that copyright is meant to protect expression, and not ideas: this is the deciding factor in the 'nature of the copyrighted work' test for fair use. More expression, more protection: more ideas, less.
I think the visual arts have a strong case that image generators directly infringe expression: I'm not convinced that authors do, and I think software should never have been protected under copyright because the ideas-to-expression ratio is all wrong for the legal structure. There's clearly no scale case to be made for ideas: "but what if it's _all_ the ideas" fails, because the ideas are not protected at all. Nor should they be, that's what patents are for, and why patents are very different from copyright.
LLMs are remarkably good at 'the facts of the matter', hallucination not withstanding. They're very poor at authorial 'voice transfer', something image generators are far too good at. It's when I start asking myself "well what even _is_ this 'expression' thing anyway?" that I conclude that we're out over our skis on the LLMs-and-IP question: precedent can't tell us enough, and that leaves legislation.
That leaves two possibilities: either another AI winter comes as people fail to capture long term value, or we get less swampy models that are much more useful and trained the correct way.
It usually goes something like: If I can make money by learning something from a web page, why does a computer making money by learning everything from everyone upset people so? It’s the same thing!
It’s like if I go to Golden Gate Park and pick one flower, I shouldn’t do that, but no one cares. But if I build a machine to automatically cut every flower in the park because I want to sell them, that’s different.
“You say I can pick one flower, but you get upset when I take a bunch. That’s inconsistent. Check and mate.”
But quantitative changes in an activity produce qualitative changes. Everyone knows this, but sometimes they seem to find it inconvenient to admit it. Not that effects of the qualitative change are always bad, but they are often different, and worth considering rather than dismissing.
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Ironically this phrase was said by Jafar in Disney's 2019 live action remake of Aladdin, but wasn't part of the original 1992 version. And I personally would argue that this corporate remake is a worse creative "theft" than what random people are doing with GenAI.
Disney owns the 1992 production of Aladdin so who exactly are they "stealing" from?
The argument, as I understand it is that the "theft" is in quotes because it's not literally copyright infringement, but fair use of an old public-domain folk tale that ends up consuming the latter.
Today, when kids know "Aladdin" they know the copyrighted/trademarked Disney character, not the traditional folk tale- that's the "theft" that happened.
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Exactly. It looks like GP is guilty of the thing they accused others of - their understanding of what FLOSS is about is so shallow it resembles an aesthetic.
I’m not saying this is aligned with FLOSS, FLOSS is a collaboration model. I’m saying the outcome of easier access to knowledge should be celebrated by supporters of FLOSS. Licenses and copyright aren’t good for their own sake, they’re tools for increasing people’s freedom to use, study, modify, and build on existing software. LLMs are another tool for increasing people’s freedom to make new software or improve exist…
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You assume that I think using language models is unethical. I do not agree that it is. Now what?
The argument that you're ignoring is about whether they're ethical or not. Your priors may land you on either side of that argument, but ideally you're willing to have your mind changed if the other side makes a strong enough case. But intentionally blinding yourself to the debate and plowing ahead anyway (which is how I interpreted your parent comment) sounds like willful ignorance.
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You should check out this thing called open source software
You should check out this thing called GPL that is the standard license of open source projects like Linux, and heavily depends on copyright laws. Or are you suggesting open source software is public domain?
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I’ve been thinking of a proof-of-work scheme for accessing content where you effectively need to mine some crypto for the author, but, this idea might not fly today
This is already a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anubis_(software)
> Although Anubis could be altered to mine cryptocurrency to serve as proof of work, Iaso has rejected this idea: "I don't want to touch cryptocurrency with a 20 foot pole."
Which in my mind is a shame. Crypto is an absolute mess, yes, but this seems like an elegant way to get something back for putting things out there.