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Things are about to get worse for generative AI

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#161

Post by d4mi3n »

squidbeak wrote: post #142
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

This argument might hold more water when generative models are more than fancy compression algorithms/text completion engines.

A more practical way of looking at this is: who is making money off of these models? How did they get their training data?

I’m not a fan of copyright in general, but we have serious outstanding issues with companies and organizations stealing or plastering work without compensating the original creators of said works. Thusfar, LLMs are becoming another method to concentrate wealth to whoever has the resources to train and sell these models at scale.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#162

Post by endisneigh »

sjfjsjdjwvwvc wrote: post #134
lewhoo wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah, I forgot artists are spiritual creatures who don't have to eat. It certainly isn't the only reason to create but a necessary condition to actually be a professional artist, no ?

Reread my comment again. If your __only__ motivation is money, you will have a problem. I agree it’s necessary to pay artists - but we don’t need copyright for that! There are many tried and proven alternatives.

So naive lol. How many independent, unconnected rich artists were born pre and post YouTube for instance?

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#163

Post by AlienRobot »

4bpp wrote: post #138
AlienRobot wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your unwillingness to pay doesn't give you the right to steal, that only gives you the right to not take the deal and walk away.

What exactly am I stealing if I don't take the deal, walk away and then enjoy an AI-generated artwork that just so happens to resemble the thing closely instead? I'd think that stealing requires taking something away from someone, regardless of how hard certain industries try to gaslight me into expanding the definition to protect their business model.

Stop trying to gaslight yourself into thinking what you are doing isn't morally wrong.

If you do not agree with their business model, don't get involved with their business, at all. Your disagreement doesn't give you the right to exploit flaws in their methods to protect their business. Just like the fact you don't want to pay for something doesn't grant you the right to exploit the fact that the laws of physics allow you to just grab something you didn't pay for with your hand and run away with it.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#164

Post by bhickey »

BlackJack wrote: post #46
Aerroon wrote: post #24

Aren't some of the examples basically asking for that content? Ask someone about two Italian brothers in a video game with a red and green hat that have M and L on them. What do you think you would get? If I describe "imagine a comic book duck that swims in a sea of gold in his vault" you would immediately think of Scrooge McDuck, no?

disclaimer: I work on GenAI at google, but views are my own The question is, how did the model create Mario&Luigi or Scrooge McDuck without training on copyrighted data? It can't just crawl Wikipedia because Fair Use in Wikipedia doesn't constitute Fair use for a commercial AI model. One possible outcome is more transparency on what datasets were used to train the models.

Disclaimer: ibid

> It can't just crawl Wikipedia because Fair Use in Wikipedia doesn't constitute Fair use for a commercial AI model.

Why not? The lawyers I've discussed this with socially think that questions like this are unresolved. There are certainly competing legal theories, but we're in uncharted territory. No one knows what the outcome will be until rulings come down or Congress acts.

I find the NYT's argument a little hokey. Where are the damages? No one is using ChatGPT to read NYT articles and the residual value of day old news stories is close to zero.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#165

Post by sanderjd »

AlexAndScripts wrote: post #94
sanderjd wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious: Have you seen indications that major militaries and politicians believe AGI , rather than special purpose ML for military purposes, is important for national security? I'm really not sure whether this is true, or whether military and political leaders think it's true.

They will once people start talking about an AI gap with China.

I mean, people already talk about this.

What it seems to me from the milieu of everything I've read and heard (that is: I can't cite examples, this is an aggregate developed from hundreds of articles and podcasts etc.) is that there is already an "AI" arms race underway, but that it has more to do with specialized ML systems than with consumer LLMs.

But I'm not really in the loop, and maybe OpenAI really is more important to the US DoD than Disney (as a stand-in for big copyright-based businesses generally) is to the politicians they donate to. But I dunno! That's why I asked the question :)

I would be more intrigued by the national security angle of this if copyright holders were going after, say, Palantir. But I just don't know how important they see these language models as being, or how interested they are in OpenAI's mission to discover AGI.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#166

Post by ben_w »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #111
Intox wrote: 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…

> Something that is purely speculative, undefined, and has been promised in the near future for 50+ years.

"Undefined", although not literally, in practice definitely: each letter of that initialism means a different thing to different people. To that extent, I'll even grant "speculative" despite many of those meanings being demonstrably met by us humans.

But as someone who (unfortunately) has just turned 40: who was it that was promising AGI "in the near future" for more than my entire lifetime? Including the second AI winter? Because even the biggest timeline-optimists I can remember (Kurzweil and Yudkowsky), who very few cared to listen to, put things more than 20 years ahead of when they were writing. (And yes, Yudkowsky was definitely wrong about a singularity in 2021, though as you say AGI is undefined I think if someone in 1996 had seen ChatGPT they'd have said "yes, this is AGI" despite its flaws).

Now the crowdsourced guess for AGI is 7 about years: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-...

> I don't see copyright holders lying down for one 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 something that doesn't exist and may not exist.

I tend to agree. Although I don't accept that contract law has much of anything to do with this discussion, to the extent that it does have implications, it isn't going anywhere.

But at the same time, Google exists by reading the entire public internet, indexing it, and presenting clips of it to its users. This has in fact resulted in copyright disputes, and I was surprised how long it took for that to happen. Likewise, while copyright holders must fight for their survival, mere LLMs even as they exist right now are economically relevant, so this isn't going to be a one-sided fight by just copyright holders.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#167

Post by loloquwowndueo »

squidbeak wrote: post #142
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

If the child / author then regurgitates entire paragraphs or sections verbatim in his own works and someone notices, you bet there will be a plagiarism lawsuit coming his way.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#168

Post by davidy123 »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #98
davidy123 wrote: post #80

The solution could be great. I really don't like the way culture always goes to the same tropes, calling any potential innovation "out of Star Trek" (with attendant distorted expectations), right down to expecting an interface based on literal hand-waving in Minority Report. If copyright held works ("USS Enterprise") could be removed, yet the actual essential concepts (space ship, naming things) retained, it would be…

Science journals are mostly under copyright of a few big publishers who are extremely hostile to any kind of ML being performed on the content.

That's not as true as it used to be, and there are still plenty of useful open journals/open science publications, though proper attribution would often be important.

[edit] you could pretty much say that on principle, any significant development should have a publication in the open.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#169

Post by mypastself »

marckrn wrote: post #77

I might be a bit idealistic, but I've always believed that the core purpose of art and publishing should be to influence culture and society, not just to make a heap of money. That's why I feel original work needs its protection, but it should enter the public domain much sooner to fuel creativity and inspiration. We should be thinking in terms of a few years for this transition, not decades.

The claim that art’s core purpose is societal impact seems to be a common refrain in today’s media, and I completely disagree. Its principal purpose is provoking emotion in the individual. This idea of art teaching you a lesson is likely why there’s so much ham-fisted “activist” fiction anowadays.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#170

Post by bnralt »

Baldbvrhunter wrote: post #2

I imagine the argument might be like this: I hire a session musician to play on my new single, paying him $100. I record the whole session. I ask him to play the opening to "Stairway to Heaven" and he does so. "Well, I can't use that as a sample without paying" "Ok play something like Jimmy Page" "Hmm, still sounds like Stairway to Heaven" "Ok, try and sound less like Stairway to Heaven but in that style" "Great, I'l…

But none of the images in the article are for commercial use, they're for private use. So it would be akin to copyright laws saying "If you hire a guitar teacher, they can't play or teach you to play any copyrighted songs. All songs must either be their own original creation or in the public domain."
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