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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

#591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this what most of the world is saying to environmental activists who argue that we should go back to pre-industrial levels of production to "save the Earth"? I for one think that indeed there are many cases like this where the only feasible way out is forward. The film GATTACA expressed this very human sentiment well: > You want to know how I did it? This is how I did it, Anton: I never saved anything for the s…

Which environmental activists are saying that? That's a pretty specific claim.

Thankfully not that many these days, but it was a core element of Ted Kaczynski's (The Unabomber) manifesto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Society_and_Its_Fut...

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#592
post #40

We need clearer laws that only apply to Generative AI. Too many comparisons and parallels are being drawn to actual people. "Like what if someone learned how to draw by watching trademarked material, and then accidentally produced it" But these models aren't people and they exist in a category of their own. I do think it's somewhat trademark infringement by these models, also that it should be allowed and that ultima…

That's where I'm at. Dall+E spitting out C3PO should be entirely ok, unless I'm making money with the output, Disney should pound sand.

How does "unless I'm making money with the output" not apply to openai as well? They make money on the output.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#593
post #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.…

Did you read the article? Who owns Mario? Nintendo owns Mario, full stop. Your argument completely eschews the legal system of which modern society depends on to function as effectively as it does. There’s a reason you can’t steal other people’s work.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search engines are ruled fair use because they use the copyrighted material in a limited way, they provide a public good and they benefit the copyright holder. Generative AI is more or less the opposite of that. It ingests the whole work, generates output that substitutes for the used work and profits the user of copyrighted work to the detriment of the copyright holder. Throw in the fact that it is purley a mechanic…

But transformative use is an exception to copyright. And I think it's going to be pretty hard to argue that the matrix of parameters inside an LLM is not sufficiently transformative from the input image.

Legally, "transformative" means semantically, not pixel-level. It's hard to argue that all matrix transformations done by the LLM would be transformative in that sense.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#595

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…

> I think generative AI should be able to provide links to similar source material in the training data Except these aren't databases, so that's generally not possible, in the same way that it's not possible for your provide links to the source material it took to write your reply. How much learning led to the weights on your neurons that allowed you to generate that? Where did you learn about using italics and it's…

Well said. Extending copyright to control content consumption and learning is a recipe for converting all of our mass media into businesses as abusive and usurious as textbook companies.

This is a power grab by publishers.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#596
They are just going to have to inform the AI in some sense of the current copyright situation and ask it not to infringe.

It's the same for human writers. If you are writing an article for Wikipedia say, you should read relevant source articles and then rewrite in a way that isn't a copy and paste beyond a few words.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. Framing reading as fair use is a huge and dangerous expansion of copyright.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#598
post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They’ll What if I asked you to list all our source material that led you to use that particular contraction. Heuristics will not do, you must list each. Can you do it? Do you believe AI should. > I agree that it should be possible to implement Those exact words appear in another forum post from 2006: https://discourse.igniterealtime.org/t/cm-3beta-compression-... Should you have quoted that as a source for your rep…

I believe they should be able to, to the degree that their output can constitute copyright infringement. Obviously, the fewer sources from the training data a given output matches, and the longer the match, the more relevant it is, and the easier it should be. I believe it should be feasible exactly because of that correlation. The examples you present are largely irrelevant to the problem, because they are largely i…

>> Those exact words appear in another forum post from 2006. Should you have quoted that as a source for your reply? What if we knew you'd read that post back in 2006, affecting your neurons, then should you?

> I believe they should be able to, to the degree that their output can constitute copyright infringement.

But not you? The inference behind the AI-violates-copyright movement is that machine obligations should be brought to a parity with our obligations - that AI and you be fully subject to the same copyright overlordship.

I would independently agree that having AI divulge sources could be a good thing.

I do not agree with this attempt to twist copyright into yet another misshapen hammer, so copyright holders can bludgeon out some result they want.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#599
post #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.…

Copyright has never been based on a moral stance. It has always been determined by the lobbying power of various groups. The idea that we should dispense with it to let generative AI companies make even more money seems totally bizarre.

> The idea that we should dispense with it [copyright] to let generative AI companies make even more money seems totally bizarre.

The idea is that we should remove abuses of copyright to allow our society to move forward, and thereby continue to exist.

Imagine if there was a law at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution that said when non-human labor was used, the Animal Welfare Office had veto power. Then imagine that the Animal Welfare Office declared steam engines to be immoral, and so steam engines were never used in industry, at least not in the Wester World. The Orient would eventually rise as the world's only industrial power.

In the same way, if we let the copyright industry veto generative AI, it will destroy the Western World.

Our students are already at a huge disadvantage compared to Chinese students who get every book ever translated into Chinese for free (except a few immoral works that they would not want to see anyway.)

Those who pose an existential threat to our civilization are rent seekers who abuse copyright in the US to go beyond protecting "science and the useful arts," who seek infinite copyright terms, who grab every creative work We The People create and register lying paperwork to ensure they can steal our creative genius to enrich their cabal.

If this was only a for-profit scheme, it would not be so bad. Do you remember when they Hollyweird degenerates sued a Christian company that wanted to put our G-rated versions of the movies aimed at children? The Christian company never suggested they not pay for the movies. No matter what the Christian company was willing to pay, they were not allowed to publish child-friendly versions of the movies. This proves Hollyweird's goal is to push degeneracy.

The battle against abuses of copyright is a fight for Western Civilization. The fight against abuses of copyright if a fight for our souls.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#600
post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two questions: (1) Do you think "developing AGI" a realistic, achievable goal? If so, what evidence do you see that we're making progress on the problem of "general" intelligence? Specifically, what does any of that have to do with Large Language Models? (2) Are there any "national security" applications of Large Language Models that you're aware of? It seems to me that it would be a very difficult case to make that…

As for 1, pass an image to a multimodal LLM and simply ask 'what is going on in this image'. Robot LLM models are already turning this in to actionable data they of which they can interact with the world. As in you can send a Robot into a room it has not been before and tell it "bring back a sock, a blue one not a red one" and get an actionable response with a higher degree of success. This takes some degree of gener…

Well the real test of all this stuff is "what can I use it for?". And I can sort my own socks, so that's not super compelling ;). More seriously, the real world is complex.

Let's say I want to replace the forklift operator at my local lumberyard with a robot forklift that can ostensibly outperform a human employee. Even if there is some magical AI program which could theoretically drive the forklift around, identify boards by their dimensions, species, dryness, location, etc., there's a whole bunch of sensory problems that a human body solves easily that are super hard to solve in the environment of a lumber yard. There's dust, rain, snow, mud--so if you're relying on cameras how will you keep them clean? You can't visually determine how dry a board is, you have to put a moisture meter on it and read the result. My point is, even if you have a "brain" capable of driving the forklift you still have a massively complex robotics problem to solve in order to automate just the forklift. And we haven't even begun to replace the other things the operator does in addition to driving the forklift. He can climb out of the forklift and adjust the forks, move boards by hand, affect repairs on equipment, communicate with other equipment operators, customers, etc.

Good luck replacing him in a cost-effective manner.

So what am I supposed to use it for?

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