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The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

sanders.senate.gov

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Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#81

Post by vrganj »

Aunche wrote: post #52
fny wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do this in Alaska's fund with great success[0] and Alaska is a deep red state. It's primarily funded by oil and gas revenue and other mineral royalties. Also thats only (at least) 25% of total revenue, the other 75% the state spends directly. Norway's oil fund is another famous example mentioned in the article.[1] [0]: https://apfc.org/ [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...

The oil is on Alaska/Norway's land, so they can choose what they want to do with money from selling that oil including distributing it or purchasing assets. Sanders seem to be proposing to arbitrarily seize half of the companies.

> The oil is on Alaska/Norway's land

These AI companies are on American land.

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#82

Post by theLiminator »

This would have a massive chilling effect on the private sector as a whole. IMO it would completely destroy investment in America. American companies and markets get extraordinary investor interest due to strong property rights. Once those rights are gone there will be massive capital flight and greatly reduced investment.

Imo this proposal is even worse than a billionaire wealth tax (which has all sorts of implementation issues).

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#83

Post by reasonableklout »

rayiner wrote: post #41
TehCorwiz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because AI companies basically took everything we ever wrote, drew, recorded, posted, or thought and turned it into a product with the power to lie, propagandize, and manipulate the public with zero oversight. Walmart is a parasite using welfare to subsidize their operations but they didn't tell a judge that they were immune to copyright because they stole just so much damn information.

“Took?” AI companies aren’t removing the information from the public domain. What happened to “information wants to be free?”

I interpreted it to mean people feel as though they didn’t consent to having their information trained on, because for many folks, they published articles, open source projects, etc. assuming that they were only helping other people. It’s quite a shock to see megacorps use such data to create machines which threaten the livelihoods of the original authors themselves.

Also, much of the data used to train LLMs are not strictly public domain. For example, copyrighted books and source code with attribution-requiring licenses feature heavily in many corpuses. There are still pending lawsuits against the labs here, yet they continue to push forward. It’s no surprise that there is popular demand for redistribution.

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#85

Post by fhdkweig »

vrganj wrote: post #73
fhdkweig wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can tax something without owning it. It is the owning part that bothers me. It implies that the government is going to shovel ridiculous amounts of money into these things and when the bubble finally pops We The People get nothing out of it.

Who said anything about the government shoveling in money?

Usually to "own" something requires to spend money to get it.

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#86

Post by bitwize »

rayiner wrote: post #15

Why does the public have a right to expropriate the property if AI companies specifically, as opposed to other types of companies? Just make broad rules that apply to everyone based on abstract principles. I’m fine even with very liberal economic approaches. If we want to raise corporate tax rates to 30%, fine, do that. Want to get creative? Half the equity of every company goes into a public fund. But this case by c…

The idea is that AI companies expropriated our labor to train their sloppotrons first.

But given that this is Bernie, it's probably a stalking horse for future expropriations from other industries later.

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#87

Post by pessimizer »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #16
baliex wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > Let us be clear. Artificial intelligence was not created out of thin air. The data and language used by generative A.I. tools didn’t just pop into Sam Altman’s head or Elon Musk’s imagination. A.I. is built on our collective intelligence: our books, songs, artwork, journalism, computer code, scientific research, videos, conversations, images and ideas spanning generations.

And the ones spanning generations were completely fair game . The ones that were still under copyright are a different matter. (It has not, so far as I know, been legally decided, but it's probably going to depend on whether AI is a transformative use.)

> And the ones spanning generations were completely fair game.

No they weren't. Copyright at this point covers things for at least half a dozen generations back, and is intentionally made annoying enough that it is difficult to find out what is covered and what isn't. LLM companies didn't bother with any of that (they just pirated like your average online 13 year old), meanwhile archive.org got sued for pulling the music off ancient wax cylinders.

Clean up and dramatically shorten, restrict, or even eliminate copyright, and we can start talking about what's fair game or not. People were afraid to sing "Happy Birthday" in movies for probably 80 years, and the corporations that own all IP made it very clear at the time that they preferred for the status of "Happy Birthday" to remain unclear, and would send you a scary letter if you used it.

> probably going to depend on whether AI is a transformative use.

It's probably going to be entirely political, and decided through corruption. It's obviously a mechanical transformation. If rap DJ's got sued for cramming songs full of 80 extremely manipulated samples that you'd need a forensics expert to trace, and all sampled music had to revert to a form where they'd license a single song and re-release it with somebody rapping over it, LLMs are a violation. DJ's were doing an absolutely creative translation, and LLMs are not creative, they are Δ-following pinball machines.

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#88

Post by triceratops »

fhdkweig wrote: post #85
vrganj wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said anything about the government shoveling in money?

Usually to "own" something requires to spend money to get it.

The government gets half my paycheck without buying it from me.

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#89

Post by TehCorwiz »

rayiner wrote: post #41
TehCorwiz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because AI companies basically took everything we ever wrote, drew, recorded, posted, or thought and turned it into a product with the power to lie, propagandize, and manipulate the public with zero oversight. Walmart is a parasite using welfare to subsidize their operations but they didn't tell a judge that they were immune to copyright because they stole just so much damn information.

“Took?” AI companies aren’t removing the information from the public domain. What happened to “information wants to be free?”

Yes. Took. As in: without permission. Didn't ask before hand, didn't provide a way to opt-out (although that would also be problematic), didn't ask for volunteers. Took.

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#90

Post by triceratops »

rayiner wrote: post #41
TehCorwiz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because AI companies basically took everything we ever wrote, drew, recorded, posted, or thought and turned it into a product with the power to lie, propagandize, and manipulate the public with zero oversight. Walmart is a parasite using welfare to subsidize their operations but they didn't tell a judge that they were immune to copyright because they stole just so much damn information.

“Took?” AI companies aren’t removing the information from the public domain. What happened to “information wants to be free?”

Are you proposing the Aaron Schwartz treatment by the government for Zuckerberg, Altman, and Amodei?
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