No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

I find these image generators and LLM's in general fairly toy like. Not useful for serious work, but you can create mood boards and idea generators. Kind of like random word generators when you've got writer's block. As soon as you analyze any output from these you can see they are producing nonsense. And as we now know from the Claude paper recently released, these things are far from reasoning.

> In many cases they can't work, e.g. because of the analog hole

Careful not to confuse illegal with unable.

> [can't work because] the mechanism of operation is observable to anyone who buys the product.

That was my point about increasingly invasive DRM. Without IP law, the only way for large swaths of industry to sustain themselves would be to deal exclusively on extensively secured platforms. Imagine a scenario where all paid services (software, streaming, and quite literally everything else) was only available on hardware attested devices rooted with only one or a few players.

In the hypothetical scenario where it is explicitly legal to copy any binary that you gain possession of (ie copyright doesn't exist) I think that's what we would see.

> If someone had a secret video encoding strategy today, some hobbyists would reverse engineer it and post it on the internet.

Which is why patents exist. When companies decide how much to invest in what this is taken into account.

Notably due to the lack of popularity (and thus lack of adoption) of patent encumbered video and audio standards, anyone trying to make a direct profit effectively dropped out years ago. At this point it's driven by behemoths that realize significant downstream cost savings.

> Have you read a modern patent? They're inscrutable

Yes, I'm aware. Consider how much worse things could be though. No hint, every employee who worked on it under both NDA and non-compete. Imagine how much more difficult the labor market would be to navigate if the government didn't intervene to prevent overbearing terms in such a scenario. Consider what all of this would do to market efficiency.

My point was never to disagree with your broad strokes (that the free market is perfectly capable of functioning in the absence of IP law). Rather it was to point out that despite all the downsides, IP law does clearly offer some collective benefits by significantly reducing incentives that would otherwise drive greedy individuals to act against common interests.

We aren't in the Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism stage just yet, so labor is a necessary evil.

> Imagine a scenario where all paid services (software, streaming, and quite literally everything else) was only available on hardware attested devices rooted with only one or a few players.

We already have some content where this has been attempted. That content is on the piracy sites. And that's when breaking the DRM and piracy sites are both illegal.

They simply wouldn't use a business model where they first make something and then try to charge people for it after. Instead you might have a subscription service, but the subscription is patronage, i.e. you want them to keep producing content and if enough people feel the same way, they make enough to keep doing it. But the content they release is available to everyone.

> every employee who worked on it under both NDA and non-compete. Imagine how much more difficult the labor market would be to navigate if the government didn't intervene to prevent overbearing terms in such a scenario. Consider what all of this would do to market efficiency.

The assumption is that such NDAs would be enforceable. What if they're not?

> Rather it was to point out that despite all the downsides, IP law does clearly offer some collective benefits by significantly reducing incentives that would otherwise drive greedy individuals to act against common interests.

The greedy individuals could be addressed by banning their attempts to reconstitute copyright through thug behavior. The real question is, would we be better off without it, if some things wouldn't be created?

Likely the optimal balance is close to the original copyright terms, i.e. you get 14 years and there is none of this anti-circumvention nonsense which in practice is ineffective at its ostensible purpose and is only used to monopolize consumer devices to try to exclude works that compete with the major incumbents. But the existing system is so far out of whack that it's not clear it's even better than nothing.

AIs aren’t people. What we have is people using an algorithm to rip off artists and defending it by claiming that the algorithm is like a person learning from its experiences.

If I wrote a program that chose an image at random from 1000 base images, you’d agree that the program doesn’t create anything new. If I added some random color changes, it would still be derivative. Every incremental change I make to the program to make it more sophisticated leaves its outputs just as derivative as before the change.