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AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

axelk.ee

761–770 of 783 posts

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#761

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (recommended for humans, but abhorrent for machines). That's not the criticism, that's the straw man used to dodge the criticism. Of course the straw man makes no sense, that's why it gets put up. Machines aren't doing anything, humans are doing things, with or without machines. "It's fine to raise the temperature of your surroundings by 0.0001 degrees by exhaling. It's less fine to set a house on fire, and even le…

Sorry, but the point stands for you because of you feel about this topic. It does not stand logically. Ultimately we have to reckon with the fact that there's nothing which is recommended to do X of, but is abhorrent to do 10X of.

> there's nothing which is recommended to do X of, but is abhorrent to do 10X of.

No we don't, because that's nonsense. You can ask a stranger in the street for the time of day once, and they will react very, very differently if you ask them 10 times in a row. You can drive N miles per hour in a school zone, you cannot drive at 10x the speed, and so on.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#762
post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contracts are legally binding even if they weren't written by a lawyer. Copyright is legally binding even if no copyright claim is explicitly stated. I looked into this a bit (not a lawyer) and it seems that robots.txt isn't legally binding to either party, but this seems to have two major implications for AI agents (and crawlers/scrapers in general). First, even if the robots.txt says you can crawl the site, that is…

But there is no contract. You assume that they read your robots.txt, they don’t have to. There is no contract.

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Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#763
post #721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair use was built around human limitations. The mass scraping campaigns done by the AI giants were clearly an overreach in spirit, if not letter. Most people's intuition is that these massive operations that are valued in the trillions can't have been drawn from some untapped common resource, and they're correct. Someone, somewhere is not being properly compensated. I have no problem with taxing AI companies so that…

Fair use is the balance between creators and those that in someway use the content. Somehow it has become excuse not to compensate the creators in anyway. To me AI training part really looks something that should be treated separate and thus give the creators compensation when their works are used. Now how much and should it be based on revenue from output is open discussion. And it might also be that there is no fai…

The nature of how LLMs work makes it impossible to connect a derivative work to its source data in the training. However, the weights couldn't exist without that training data - the works of the creators were used during training - and the entity making money off the use of that training data is primarily the LLM platform owners. So they should pay.

We are trying to avoid another situation where "resource wealth" goes uncompensated, producers remain poor while processors, marketers, and merchants reap all the benefit. Unless your aim is something else, in which case you should state it.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#764

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a total non-sequitur. You think you found flaw in one of the examples, instead of seeing if you can come up with better ones, you say it so it can't be this, therefore it's a completely different thing that makes zero sense. Machines aren't "doing" anything, they're being wielded by humans. And they're doing it at scale, to other humans, via the force multiplication of machines.

There are no such examples (recommended for humans, but abhorrent for machines).

> There are no such examples (recommended for humans, but abhorrent for machines)

claiming to be human

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#765
post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not the only scale to create on. Also, Linux is free. There’s more than one way to make something available.

Just a fundamental disagreement then. I want to live in the world that created The Lord of the Rings.

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Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#766
Maybe the problem is not the artificial intelligence, but the thing we call copyright, and AI training is just showing us how weird the concept of copyright is.

I mean, it seems to be okay to replicate information if it has been remixed with other information enough, but not okay if the remix was too little. But then again, there does not seem to be a clearly executable definition of where this line is.

There are good reasons why we have copyright (like protecting/fostering artists/education/entertainment in our modern society), but the concept itself is a bit weird and artificial after all.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#767

There’s a fallacy that gets used a whole lot to justify things like this (not just with LLMs), and I see it in many of the comments here: If it’s OK (or at least negligible on a small scale), then it must be OK on a large scale. It usually goes something like: If I can make money by learning something from a web page, why does a computer making money by learning everything from everyone upset people so? It’s the same…

> It’s like if I go to Golden Gate Park and pick one flower, I shouldn’t do that, but no one cares. But if I build a machine to automatically cut every flower in the park because I want to sell them, that’s different. It's not like that, because flowers are a physical object and moving them to one place deprives their original location of the flowers. When an LLM learns something from a webpage, the webpage is still…

Can you apply your philosophy to the U.S. dollar ? I am sure producing copies is a "theft" that is entirely in your head. You were deprived of nothing by someone else making a copy of your dollar.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#768

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but the point stands for you because of you feel about this topic. It does not stand logically. Ultimately we have to reckon with the fact that there's nothing which is recommended to do X of, but is abhorrent to do 10X of.

> there's nothing which is recommended to do X of, but is abhorrent to do 10X of. No we don't, because that's nonsense. You can ask a stranger in the street for the time of day once, and they will react very, very differently if you ask them 10 times in a row. You can drive N miles per hour in a school zone, you cannot drive at 10x the speed, and so on.

Ok, I see your point. We live with tiny inconveniences, that we would not at 10x.

But I don't see how that relates to copyright or llm at all. 'Learning', at scale, is not an inconvenience, atleast in any forward looking society.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#769
post #27

The broader problem of original sources not being given credit in a way that rewards them remains. Websites owners are paying to host their content so that spiders can come and crawl them and index it into the AI and then if they’re lucky, they might get a citation, but otherwise there’s very little reward for being a provider of content. And of course, this is something that’s getting worse and worse. Why look at a…

>> put everything behind a login

May not always work. I then click on back button and look for the info elsewhere and in most cases I find it. Same with paywalled websites. If you are ok with a small audience (or you provide a unique content) then it makes sense. But I think in most cases you just cut off a lot of people this way and actually you can simply stop creating content if you don't want consumers of it and let others provide the content.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#770
post #171

if theres just one good thing coming out of ai its breaking copyright law forever. no one should be able to "own" ideas. royalties for commercial use is another thing and i support it but what we know as (non commercial) piracy and unlicensed fan art should be 100% legal

The problem is that something like (say) a song is much more than an idea. It’s an idea + work (arrangement, production, performance, etc. depending on the situation). The argument for owning work, at least for X number of years in a limited way (vs. our current system), seems reasonable to me.

the real problem is that the duration of the protection is both too long, and that the same protection is afforded to very small fragments of works too (for example to samples of songs)

of course coming up with a more fair fair use system would help, and automatic royalty revenue sharing, and so on. but of course it's very hard to find a one size fits all ruleset, and also somehow dividing up creative spheres is itself bound to lead to nasty boundary dilemmas.

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