Live data from Hacker News

Things are about to get worse for generative AI

garymarcus.substack.com

461–470 of 769 posts

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#461
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If making money is the only reason to create maybe it’s good if they stop.

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 ?

[deleted]

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#462
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…

Or they can be forced to destroy or retrain their models without any copyright materials for which they don't have or do not now attain licenses for. These are multi-billion/trillion dollar companies. They can afford to be responsible members of society here, however much their shareholders and C-suite might hate it.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright should be the problem of the person using the works and not the problem of the AI generating it. Unless Nintendo plans on busting down the doors of every person who tries to draw Mario or preventing little Timmy from making a parody of Coca-Cola, making it where AI cannot generated copyrighted works is insane imo. Those brands should be proud to be such a big part of the cultural fabric that it is difficult…

Copyright shouldn't be a problem for anyone. It's simply a bogus idea that artificial scarcity of information is a benefit to society.

Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? 'No!' says the man in Washington, 'It belongs to the poor.' 'No!' says the man in the Vatican, 'It belongs to God.' 'No!' says the man in Moscow, 'It belongs to everyone.'

Are you trying to say that no one is entitled to their own inventions? Cause that is a rapid descent into a capitalist hellhole where only those who can steal ideas the most effectively are able to profit.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really see no difference between someone drawing a piece of fan art and trillion dollar corporations stealing other people's works and reselling it for their own profit with no regards to anyone or anything else? And yes, obviously society cares about many things depending on the scales in question. It's okay if a dude goes onto a lake on his small rowboat and catches a few fish for dinner, it's a completely d…

> Do you really see no difference between someone drawing a piece of fan art In the history of the world only a single person has ever drawn fan art? No, I don't think that's the case. Instead it is widespread. It is everywhere. > depending on the scales in question The scale argument supports me, not you. This type of "infringement" is everywhere. > reselling it for their own profit with no regards to anyone or anyt…

> In the history of the world only a single person has ever drawn fan art?

That's a disingenuous take of my comment at best, the equivalent to my scenario is a bunch of unrelated individuals with small boats going out into whatever lake is nearest to them and fishing. Even if you put all of them together and counted how many fish the hobby fishermen catch, it's still nowhere near the scale of the commercial fisheries, which is why they're treated differently both by society at larger but also legally.

Same thing with these AI models, Dall-E and all the other ones have probably generated more images than all of humanity has in its entire history so far, and if not quite yet they're definitely gonna get there sooner rather than later. They can generate dozens if not hundreds of images in a split second, whereas a single artist (or even many artists collectively) can't.

> And yet, nobody cares.

I think we've already established that, because scales absolutely matter for most things. If you want to be an absolutist about it, sure be my guest, but I think in reality the large majority of people are fine when your average Joe Schmoe the artist makes a commission on a random Disney character, whereas they definitely would NOT be okay with a massive conglomerate like Disney stealing Joe Schmoe's original art and repurposing it without compensating Joe, because there's an inherent power disbalance between the two and the consequences of that power disparity matters.

I mean, Disney does have every right to go after Joe for his commissions if they really wanted to, similarly to how Nintendo is hyper aggressive with taking down anything relating to their IPs. It's just not really worth it for most companies, they will absolutely go for another company trying to pull the same shit though, as can be seen with the NYT case.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rounding up a transaction and taking the leftovers wouldn’t be a crime worthy of the FBI for one transaction but it would be for a million or a billion. Scale matters and impact matters. If you’re making an ethical argument “it’s okay because it’s already happening to a lesser degree somewhere else” isn’t the flex you think it is. If you’re talking ethics, talk about impact. Who does it help the most who does it hurt…

> “it’s okay because it’s already happening to a lesser degree somewhere else” isn’t the flex you think it is. It actually is. It shows that we as a society are completely OK with this, and nobody is complaining about a very standard and common thing that all artists do. It shows that the outrage is fake, and people don't actually care about the issue.

Humans decided scale matters. Our legal systems explicitly say so. Sentencing guidelines for fraud are quite explicit. Society makes those laws.

Society is effectively ok with you ripping me off for $1. They are not when it's $100k.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is dystopian, and it already exists, e.g. printers refusing to print anything that looks sufficiently like money. There is no fair or private use of hyper-realistic fake money. There are fair uses of copyrighted materials unless you want to start suing children for copyright infringement when they draw a character.

> There is no fair or private use of hyper-realistic fake money. What about every movie ever made where two people trade a briefcase full of cash?

This is actually a really fascinating topic!

I am not sure how far Photoshop takes their filters but those bills aren't actually replicas nor can they be mistaken on reasonable examination (a cashier glancing at them)

Typically their texts read "For movie use only" over the seals in the middle or other things that make it clearly distinguishable as fake money that isn't legal tender. I think some of them flip the heads backwards or do other things so it immediately fails the sniff test.

Adam Savage actually has multiple videos on how it is made, super fascinating stuff! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drLzVcgnBfI

(Thank you for asking this, I was dying to gush about how cool movie money is)

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#467
I did an interesting thing and looked at how well the Llama2 models could compress text. For example, I took the first chapter of the first Harry Potter book and recorded the index of the 'correct' predicted token. The original text, compressed with 7zip (LZMA?) to about 14kB. The Llama2 encoded indexes compressed to less than 1kB. Then, of course, I can send that 1kB file around and decode the original text. (Unless the model behaves differently on different hardware, which it probably does)

What I get from this is that Llama2 70B contains 93% of Harry Potter Chapter 1 within it. It's not 100% (which would mean no need to share the encoded indices) but it's still pretty significant. I want to repeat this with the entire text of some books, the example I picked isn't representative because the text is available online on the official website.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#468

As I understood it, the legal precedent for generative AI is the same one that allows google to scrape websites in order to index them for search for the common good. Google also can display cached versions of websites which is the original content of those sites. No one is going to say that google is copyright infringement just because it is showing content from other websites verbatim. So I think this is a weak arg…

No legal precedent has been set as of yet. The "precedent" you describe is the argument AI companies have been using (that training their models on information available on the Internet should be considered "fair use") but whether AI training actually satisfies the four-factor test for fair use remains to be seen.

It's a null question. Training itself is neither publication nor distribution, so copyright can't be relevant at that point. "Fair use" just isn't a concept applicable to training.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until they are.

Even then, society exists by and for humans.

> Even then, society exists by and for humans.

150 years ago society exists by and for men specifically (as in: not women) in most nations; 220 years ago, US society was by and for rich white (specifically white) land owners.

I don't know when AI will count as people in law, or even if they ever will; we may well pass laws prohibiting the creation of any mind in danger of coming close to this threshold.

But be wary, for AI acting enough like people is different to being anything like a person on the inside, and that means being wrong in either direction can have horrifying consequences. To appear but not to be conscious, leads to a worthless future. To be but not to appear conscious, leads to a fate worse than the history of slavery, for the slaves were eventually freed.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#470
Everybody just buying into the corporate narrative that anyone can actually own these sorts of things.

Who truly owns the tales of Snow White and Cinderella?

These stories didn't originate with Disney; they are part of a rich tapestry of folklore passed down through generations. Disney's success was partly built on adapting these existing narratives, which were once shared and reshaped by communities over centuries.

This conversation shouldn't just be about the technicalities of AI or the legalities of copyright; it should be about understanding the deep roots of our shared culture.

At its core, culture is a communal property, evolving and growing through collective storytelling and reinterpretation.

The current debate around AI and copyright infringement seems to overlook this fundamental aspect of cultural evolution. The algorithms might be new, but the practice of reimagining and repurposing stories is as old as humanity itself.

By focusing solely on the legal implications and ignoring the historical context of cultural storytelling, we risk overlooking the essence of what it means to be a creative society.

As a large human model, (no really I could probably lose some weight) I think it's just silly how we're all sort of glossing over the fact that Disney built their house of mouse on existing culture, on existing stories, and now the idea that we might actually limit the tools of cultural expression to comply with some weird outdated copyright thing is just...bonkers.

Post reply on HN