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Things are about to get worse for generative AI

garymarcus.substack.com

141–150 of 769 posts

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can easily see it happening. "Content" is at least as big business as "tech", and the people in it are politically better connected.

Apple could buy most of the NYT, RIAA and MPAA companies combined with petty cash. The big ones are Disney and Sony with a combined market cap about 250b. Microsoft alone is worth over 10 times that.

Honestly I've always wondered what would happen (and how much the entertainment world would change) if a company like Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc did just that. Or heck, if it turns out you need the rights to train LLMs and its easier to do that with public domain stuff, they just flat out bought half the entertainment industry and assigned everything to the public domain. Every Disney work every for example.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#142
post #12

Or... things are about to get worse for copyright holders. I don't see any developped country pressing the brake on AGI in the near future to protect a few copyright holders from getting "stolen" in hypothetic scenarios.

> a few copyright holders By which you mean every copyright holder. > AGI in the near future Something that is purely speculative, undefined, and has been promised in the near future for 50+ years. I don't see copyright holders lying down for someone else's benefit and I don't see governments gutting copyright, contract law, and several other avenues of protection that copyright holders can deploy in the name of some…

If a child is instructed to read a copyrighted work at school, which later becomes a factor in his own derivative works, he won't be in breach of copyright.

Why should other intelligent entities be prevented from reading copyrighted works and gaining whatever there is to gain from those works the way any human might?

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can easily see it happening. "Content" is at least as big business as "tech", and the people in it are politically better connected.

Developing AGI is a matter of national security. "Content" isn't.

Developing AGI, as an abstract idea, is a matter of national security. That doesn't mean people are willing to accept the real-world consequences of it. Especially when it could affect them financially.

Additionally, I'm not even sure the US is capable of having national priorities at the moment. The Congress has become incapable of making decisions. While the executive and the judiciary branches have stepped up to compensate, they tend to handle each issue separately without any general direction.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#144
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people who create for a living aren't motivated purely by money, but are driven by the necessities of capitalism to do so. You're presenting a false dichotomy, pretending to care about the quality of art, but really like everyone, you just want other people's work for free. Great art - especially in modern times when that art involves expensive education (which if you're American must be paid for with interest)…

Im happy to pay the artist directly - which is why I use services like bandcamp or buy artworks directly from artists I know personally. I care little about paying „rightsholders“ and their ilk - so I have zero empathy if they complain about imagined losses. Don’t jump to conclusions about people who have never even talked to

Artists are "rightsholders" and their ilk. You didn't even separate the two in your former comment, so you clearly weren't talking about corporate owners of IP like Sony and Disney, exclusively.

Maybe you believe no artist who works for a corporation has any motivation but money, as opposed to purely "indie" artists, I don't know where the line in your head is drawn, but you do seem willing to throw most artists under the bus for some arbitrary standard of purity.

AI is harming working artists right now, and will likely never harm corporate rightsholders. They'll simply run their own AIs and fire as many people as they can get away with. The end result will not be that only the "true" artists survive but simply less art of any kind, everywhere. So I stand by my comment.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#145
post #68

In practice, what happens next when websites all start to block openai by default (or change their TOS to disallow OpenAI’s crawlers)? It seems like there’s little incentive not to do this, because unlike Google OpenAI isn’t bringing any traffic or eyeballs. It may end up being a default setting in Wordpress for example. But OpenAI presumably can’t afford to pay every single long tail source of content on the whole i…

> or change their TOS to disallow OpenAI’s crawlers Additionally, this TOS can be ignored if you're in a jurisdiction with TDM exceptions. > Finally, owing to the bar against contractual override, once a user complies with any conditions for gaining lawful access to a work (such as signing as a subscriber and/or making payment), he will be entitled to use the work for TDM purposes even if the terms of use expressly p…

That doesn't mean you can then use the output of generative AI in non-TDM jurisdictions without getting sued.

Also TDM exceptions are not necessarily going to be lawful/possible in many jurisdictions.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#146
post #55

To me that’s the wrong question. Everyone knew it was trained on copyrighted material and capable of eerily similar outputs. But it’s already done. At scale. Large corps committing fully. There is no chance of that toothpaste going back in the tube. It’s a bit like when big tech built on aggressive user data harvesting. Whether it’s right, ethical or even legal is academic at this stage. They just did it - effectivel…

That's a really eloquent way of saying "It's already happening, so give up on it." I'm sure it works out great for taking action and solving problems.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#148
I feel like the outcome is obvious, there will be a finite list of IPs who's owners have enough money to actually sue, which will get filtered out of the output of publicly available models. They will just slap a detector model on the end of the generator to filter them out.

Private models will not care, nor will things change for IP owners with lesser power.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#149
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright is the right to copy things. You don't even need to sell it. This is why Wikipedia images are mostly Copyleft images. Google gets a pass because nobody is suing Google. When people try to sue Google, Google simply stops indexing them and then they start begging Google to infringe their copyright again.

This interpretation of copyright only made sense while the transfer and storage of information was tied to physical objects. That time is long and we dont consider it infringement to remember a media or reproduce it at home. Furthermore, we are now entering an era where the production of information is also being untied from physical objects, so it'll only get worse for copyright. I made a post to diacuss this stuff…

I completely disagree. Tech exceptionalism makes no sense. We should be making technology to ensure people have their rights protected, not to come up with technobabble excuses to pretend such rights don't exist.

Just because people having been posting memes and reposting pictures and comics with cropped credits and pirating stuff that doesn't mean any of this is legal.

Legality isn't about what you can technically do thanks to how the computer works, or how HTTP works, or how the laws of physics work. Legality is just about what is law and what is not.

Redistributing copyrighted works without license has always been illegal. People don't get sued for it all the time because it isn't worth the hassle and most small time copyright holders simply lack the resources to pursuit action against random Internet strangers across the Internet. That doesn't mean they don't have a copyright, they merely chose to not exercise it. And that's not a W for technology. That's literally just more abuse than a person can cope with. It's an L for society. That's like if you started getting so much spam in your e-mail that you gave up marking them as spam. That doesn't make them not spam.

For example, if I wrote something in my blog and someone made a scrapper that reposted it entirely in their website full of stolen posts, I could take legal action against them. For a blog post. For something I wrote on the Internet. That's my right. But imagine how much time I'd have to spend to do this. It would be easier to check if Google has a way to tell someone stole my content and just get them delisted from Google than going through legal channels.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developing AGI is a matter of national security. "Content" isn't.

Two questions: (1) Do you think "developing AGI" a realistic, achievable goal? If so, what evidence do you see that we're making progress on the problem of "general" intelligence? Specifically, what does any of that have to do with Large Language Models? (2) Are there any "national security" applications of Large Language Models that you're aware of? It seems to me that it would be a very difficult case to make that…

Regarding (2), automating surveillance at scale.

If you manage to put a bunch of listening devices at a place you're moderately interested in, a cafeteria at an enemy base for example, you might end up with literally hundreds of hours of conversations, most of them completely uninteresting, but a few that might possibly contain nuggets of information of the utmost importance. Listening to all these conversations requires resources. This is even more difficult if the people there speak in jargon, in their own language, and nobody but an expert in the subject can determine which conversation snippets are significant.

If you have good LLMs, you can run all your recordings through extremely high-quality speech recognition and then use something like Chat GPT for summarization, classification, finding all mentions of the nuclear reactor in etc. Same goes for satellite image analysis.

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