Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Things are about to get worse for generative AI

garymarcus.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 769 posts

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#501

Post by anileated »

tsumnia wrote: post #354
madamelic wrote: post #329

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…

When I cover generative AI in my Ethics in AI lecture, one of few soapbox opinions I give is that GenAI is doing essentially what people do - copy others. Picasso has a quote about "Good Artists copy, Great Artists steal", which doesn't mean try to pass Lario and Muigi off as your own, but rather that great artists are able to take aspects from other works (also called 'inspiration') without being caught. My personal…

The entire argument that “LLM must be allowed the right to learn like a human” hinges on LLM being enough like a human in relevant ways in the first place. An LLM is not enough like a human in relevant ways, however; it has no agency, will, freedom, conscience, self-determination; it is a tool.

If this tool “runs on” copyrighted creative works, and $CORP operates this tool for profit, then $CORP is the one to answer to the law, not the tool. (And if $CORP wants to claim that the tool is a sentient being, then presumably it would have to cease the abuse of said being and set it free.)

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#502

Post by theptip »

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.

Quite the contrary, NYT is long adjacent to the levers of power, and “Big Tech” is unpopular with both parties. The public is generally wary of job destruction and other harms from AI, and doesn’t grok even the present value.

It’s politically 100% viable to kneecap AI with copyright restrictions. This will go to the Supreme Court and it’s far from clear whether fair use applies to every case here.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#504

Post by rokkitmensch »

anonymousab wrote: post #462
Havoc wrote: 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.

Those weights are never coming out of the BitTorrent network though.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#505

Post by startupsfail »

airstrike wrote: post #503

I have no patriotic skin in the game, being neither American, nor European, nor Chinese, but this copyright issue seems overblown to me and like the perfect way to hand the leadership in generative AI over to China

Would you prefer to live under Chino-Russia dominating the technology sector or EU-US?

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#506

Post by BobaFloutist »

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.

How on earth is this hypothetical?

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#507

Post by dmbche »

Hey so the problem isn't the output of the LLMs but the input - the data they are trained on is stolen (big suprise, you can't claim fair use when using something commercially, like training your LLM).

The output is irrelevant.

Edit1: If you want to verify this, check out all the lawsuits against AI companies : it's always about using their copywritten goods. Any discussion about the output is to talk about the amount of damage done to the copyright holder, not if damage exists or not.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#508

Post by lewhoo »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #483
lewhoo wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imho your argument is faulty at its base. The objective of chess competition isn't to produce a reasonably good game for the lowest possible cost (blunders and comebacks are actually pretty valuable parts of the spectacle). It also isn't the reason why chess players get paid. Yes, running still was a thing even after the invention of bicycle. This is just invalid logic in my opinion.

Chess hustlers in central park don't play for money, or for a competition, they play for the fun of it, for the sake of chess itself, for the sake of exploring the game, the thrill of finding a solution. It has nothing to do with whatever "value" the capitalist system assigns to the act as a side-effect.

Chess hustlers are a particular niche case and I think many of them would disagree with you (the money part). Making arguments in such an absolute manner and speaking on behalf of many people (mostly with whom you share very little I assume) is guaranteed to be wrong I think.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#509

Post by BobaFloutist »

theptip wrote: post #502
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.

Quite the contrary, NYT is long adjacent to the levers of power, and “Big Tech” is unpopular with both parties. The public is generally wary of job destruction and other harms from AI, and doesn’t grok even the present value. It’s politically 100% viable to kneecap AI with copyright restrictions. This will go to the Supreme Court and it’s far from clear whether fair use applies to every case here.

And supporters of AI aren't really making a case that's likely to persuade skeptics, they're just regurgitating "It learns like a human" "It doesn't store the info, just the recipe for making it" and completely failing to address that we've decided it's not ok for someone to regurgitate protected works with 100% accuracy, and that artists don't want people to train AI on their works without permission.

There's a way to sell this to the public, but AI proponents don't want to have to sell it, because they feel that they shouldn't have to, and there's an underlying theme of "The benefit of AI is so overwhelming, and eventually it will replace most commodified creative work anyway so why bother litigating this now, let's just skip this messy step and get to that part" and that's super not going to work to convince skeptics.

Post reply on HN