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Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”

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Re: Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”

#161

Post by Taywee »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #102
safety1st wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "We" now want stricter copyright law when it comes to AI, but at the same time shorter copyright duration... This gross generalization of other people's views on important issues is really offensive. My view is that the Copyright Act of 1976 had it about right when they established the duration of copyright. My view is that members of Congress were handsomely rewarded by a specific corporation to carve out special…

Why does Disney have an "ill-gotten" monopoly? The people who worked for the company created something. Why shouldn't they get to control how it's used. Do you feel like you should have control over what you create? Why not others?

The people who worked for the company created something.

The people who work for the company collect rent on things they didn't make.

Re: Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”

#162

Post by readbeard »

ejb999 wrote: post #125
ramblerman wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure arguing for a company to rest on its laurels and keep feeding of an IP from 100 years ago is an argument for creativity and innovation.

but is it much different that descendants living off the interest and dividends of some large sum of money that their great-great grandparents accumulated a few hundred years ago? To me it is pretty much the same thing - not a fan of nepo-kids living off of trust funds they didn't earn - but if you are going to fix one problem, you should try to fix all of the almost identical ones at the same time and not get upset…

It would be similar if "intellectual property" was property in the same sense in which a table or a vast amount of money is property. However, it is not.

Normal property ownership is something we use to manage scarcity that already exists—that there is only one of something, and we have to decide where it will go and who will be able to decide how it is used. Intellectual property, by contrast, creates artificial scarcity by means of a government-enforced monopoly (in the case of copyright, the monopoly is on the right to produce a copy of a work).

It is unfortunate (and perhaps not accidental) that we settled on the term "intellectual property" as opposed to something more descriptive like "intellectual monopoly." "Intellectual property" encourages equivocating such monopolies with normal property, a mistake that tends to muddle debates on the subject.

Re: Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”

#163

Post by bachmeier »

samwillis wrote: post #6

Using robots.txt as a model for anything doesn't work. All a robots.txt is is a polite request to please follow the rules in it, there is no "legal" agreement to follow those rules, only a moral imperative. Robots.txt has failed as a system, if it hadn't we wouldn't have captchas or Cloudflare. In the age of AI we need to better understand where copyright applies to it, and potentially need reform of copyright to ali…

> All a robots.txt is is a polite request to please follow the rules in it, there is no "legal" agreement to follow those rules, only a moral imperative.

I don't know that this is true for the US. As far back as I can remember, there have been questions about whether a robots.txt file means you don't have permission to engage in those activities. The CFAA is one law that has repeatedly come up. See for example https://www.natlawreview.com/article/doj-revises-policy-cfaa...

It might be the case that there is nothing there legally, but I don't think I'd describe the actions of search engines as being driven by a moral imperative.

Re: Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”

#164

Post by kemotep »

butterfi wrote: post #158
lancesells wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't recruit me into some bullshit argument that rewrites history and entrenches Disney's ill-gotten monopoly. You don't think it's them being allowed to buy Marvel, Pixar, Lucasfilm? Is creativity ruined because I can't make a Mickey Mouse cartoon or t-shirt? Does the world need Luke Skywalker coming from any individual studio? People are free to make the Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Hunchback of Notre D…

"No one can do to the Disney Corporation what Walt Disney did to the Brothers Grimm." L. Lessig

I’m no fan of the life of the author plus 70 years copyright regime we have today but the Brothers Grimm died roughly 70 years before Disney started making cartoons.

So that is still something possible to do in roughly 20 years.

Re: Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”

#165

Post by CWuestefeld »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #107
safety1st wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "We" now want stricter copyright law when it comes to AI, but at the same time shorter copyright duration... This gross generalization of other people's views on important issues is really offensive. My view is that the Copyright Act of 1976 had it about right when they established the duration of copyright. My view is that members of Congress were handsomely rewarded by a specific corporation to carve out special…

> Reducing copyright term extension has everything to do with restoring competition and creativity to our economy Can you explain your line of thinking here? How does the ability to use another company’s intellectual property restore creativity? It just seems like a path to allow bootlegging.

Yesterday's conversation here about the Ed Sheeran lawsuit should explain much of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35868421

Here's one key bit from the OP: - - - - -

But the lawsuits have been where he’s really highlighted the absurdity of modern copyright law. After winning one of the lawsuits a year ago, he put out a heartfelt statement on how ridiculous the whole thing was. A key part:

There’s only so many notes and very few chords used in pop music. Coincidence is bound to happen if 60,000 songs are being released every day on Spotify—that’s 22 million songs a year—and there’s only 12 notes that are available.

In the aftermath of this, Sheeran has said that he’s now filming all of his recent songwriting sessions, just in case he needs to provide evidence that he and his songwriting partners came up with a song on their own, which is depressing in its own right.

Re: Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”

#166

Post by hombre_fatal »

What problem is this solving? Also why would anyone trust your description of your own site instead of just looking at your homepage? This is the same reason why other self description directives failed and why search engines just parse your content for themselves, something LLMs have no trouble with.

Why would I make a request to your low trust self description when I can make one to your homepage?

Re: Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”

#167

Post by guhcampos »

safety1st wrote: post #127
lancesells wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't recruit me into some bullshit argument that rewrites history and entrenches Disney's ill-gotten monopoly. You don't think it's them being allowed to buy Marvel, Pixar, Lucasfilm? Is creativity ruined because I can't make a Mickey Mouse cartoon or t-shirt? Does the world need Luke Skywalker coming from any individual studio? People are free to make the Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Hunchback of Notre D…

The three acquisitions you mentioned all took place many years after the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. Without the financial benefits conferred by that law (the timing and content of which benefited them more than it did their competitors), they might not have made all of those acquisitions. A lot of people in this thread seem to be undervaluing those old school Disney characters, yes now Disney is huge and h…

> A lot of people in this thread seem to be undervaluing those old school Disney characters

Right? There were even competitors back then. People all but forgot the Looney Tunes.

Re: Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”

#168

Post by LawTalkingGuy »

jeroenhd wrote: post #42

If AI needs explicit information and context, surely it should focus on improving its context recognition rather than trying to fix that by inserting even more training data. Regardless, I do agree that something like a robots.txt for AI can be very useful. I'd like my website to be excluded from most AI projects and some kind of standardized way to communicate this preference would be nice, although I realize most A…

> focus on improving its context recognition rather than trying to fix that by inserting even more training data.

That's how you improve its context recognition. You show it many contexts.

> most AI projects don't exactly care about things like the wishes of authors, copyright, or ethical considerations

Why is it 'ethical' that you get to add a bunch of restrictions to a pre-negotiated situation? You get copyright protections in trade for letting people use your work. There's a way to add restrictions - licensing - and you're looking to get the benefits of licensing, and to take away fair use right from other people, without paying the costs of doing so.

fwiw, I copy most pages I visit and store them. The website has given me the equivalent of a pamphlet and I store it instead of discarding it when I'm finished. This way I can go back and read it again later without having to track down the author and ask for another copy. It's not AI which has me doing this, I've been doing it for decades - it's censorship that has shown me the need.

Re: Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”

#169

Post by rzzzt »

Karellen wrote: post #105
rzzzt wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a composition vs. inheritance problem. I postulate that robots need at least a single manipulator in the physical realm: Mechanical arm assembling car doors = robot. CNC machine that follows a path = robot. Mechs with chicken legs = robot. Brain in a vat = not a robot... but can be embedded in a robot.

It's a nice idea, but it totally ignores literally decades of existing use of the word "robot" (or its abbreviation "bot") to describe pure software that accesses internet services. e.g. web crawlers (googlebot), chat bots, automated clickers, etc... Lexicography tends to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. If enough people use a word to mean a thing, that word means that thing. As least in some contexts. See al…

Hmm, "robot" in its spelled out form sounds weird to me for this use ("bot" is more frequent). Wikipedia redirects people looking for software agents to a separate page from the article about the beep-boop ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot

Re: Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”

#170

Post by renlo »

fsckboy wrote: post #147
csallen wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. The very nature of information is that it yearns to be free. Information cannot be "owned." The point of copyright should be to grant temporary monopolies to encourage creation, not to confer ownership. Thomas Jefferson put it beautifully: If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclus…

but copyright is not for information or ideas, information and ideas cannot be copyrighted; it's for creative expression

and why should "creative expression" be owned?
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