If we are going to have a general discussion about copyright reform at a national level, I'm all for it. If we are going to let billion dollar corporations break the law to make even more money and invent legal fictions after the fact to protect them, I'm completely against it.
Training a model is not equivalent to training a human. Freedom of information for a mountain of graphics cards in a privately owned data center is not the same as freedom of information for flesh and blood human beings.
You’re setting court precedent that will apply equally to OpenAI as it does to the llama.cpp and stable diffusion models running on your own graphics card.
I don’t know about that, we seem to be so deeply into double standards for this stuff that we’ve forgotten they are double standards. If I aggressively scrape content from anywhere and everywhere ignoring robots.txt and any other terms and conditions, then I’ll probably be punished. Corporate crawlers that are feeding the beast just do this on a massive scale and laugh off all of the complaints, including those from smaller corporations who hire lawyers..
oh they hate it so much when this hypocrisy is pointed out. better put the high school kids downloading books on pirate bay in jail but I guess if your name starts with Alt and ends in man then there's an alt set of rules for you.
also remember when GPU usage was so bad for the environment when it was used to mine crypto, but I guess now it's okay to build nuclear power plants specifically for gen-ai.
Great, let's legislate corporate liability for excessive data use from crawlers. I'm fully there with you.
SGTM.
Honestly, seriously. Imagine some weird Thanos showed up, snapped his fingers and every single bit of generative AI software/models/papers/etc. were wiped from the Earth forever.
Would that world be measurably worse in any way in terms of meaningful satisfying lives for people? Yes, you might have to hand draw (poorly) your D&D character.
But if you wanted to read a story, or look at an image, you'd have to actually connect with a human who made that thing. That human would in turn have an audience for people to experience the thing they made.
Was that world so bad?
Imagine a world where Thanos snapped his fingers and photoshop (along with every digital application like it) was wiped from Earth forever. The world would keep on turning and artists would keep on creating, but creating art would be more difficult and fewer people would be able to do it (or even touch up their own photos).
Would that world be so bad? Was the world really so horrible before photoshop existed?
What if we lost youtube? What if we lost MP3s?
We could lose a lot of things we didn't always have and we'd still survive, but that doesn't mean that those things aren't worth having or that we shouldn't want them.
That world was worse. It wasn't much worse, because we haven't seen most of the benefit of GenAI yet, but yes I would say that it was worse.
It wasn't "so bad", but any history of improvement can be cut into slices that aren't "so bad" to reverse.
Obviously the former status quo wasn’t that bad. But the opposite is also true, AI democratizes access to pop culture. So now when I connect with a human it’s not to share memes, it’s higher order. IOW we can spend more time playing D&D because we didn't have to draw our characters.
> AI democratizes access to pop culture.
Pop culture was already democratized. That's literally what makes it popular culture.
> So now when I connect with a human it’s not to share memes, it’s higher order.
I suspect that improving the image quality of the memes does not measurably improve the quality of the human connection here.
> IOW we can spend more time playing D&D because we didn't have to draw our characters.
You never had to draw your characters. You can just play and use your imagination. Why would we let LLMs do our dreaming for us?
It's a rhetorical example. Suppose you need to create an avatar of your character. Why does it follow that it's not beneficial to have an AI help generate the avatar?
You're responding to the specific example, not the general argument. Unless your counter is that whatever humanity is doing that AI is helping is probably stupid and shouldn't be done anyway.
> Unless your counter is that whatever humanity is doing that AI is helping is probably stupid and shouldn't be done anyway.
No, my counter is that whatever generative AI is doing is worth doing by humans but not worth doing by machines.
As the joke comic says: We thought technology was going to automate running errands so that we had time to make art, but instead it automates making art while we all have to be gig workers running errands.
> No, my counter is that whatever generative AI is doing is worth doing by humans but not worth doing by machines.
There is no basis to this claim, why is one worth doing by a biological machine but not a silicon one? People cling too highly to biological exceptionalism not understanding that one arose due to certain processes in the world and universe where somewhere else we might have been silicon beings all along. That is to say, people have huge amounts of cognitive dissonance thinking that they are actually simply machines of a biological variety.
> As the joke comic says: We thought technology was going to automate running errands so that we had time to make art, but instead it automates making art while we all have to be gig workers running errands.
Hardware is harder than software. Soon gig workers will be automated by AI too. I have heard this refrain a thousand times but it never ceases to make me think that it's in a specific time and place of the early 21 century. In the 22nd century, given such progress, we might talk of these discussions the same way artists and weavers did in (and of) the early 20th.
> There is no basis to this claim, why is one worth doing by a biological machine but not a silicon one?
You're entitled to your own value system, but in mine, humans are worth infinitely more than computers.
Same in mine. But mine isn’t predicated on the irreplaceability of human labor to derive value from human life. If we automated literally everything and we could all just live off UBI and drink wine and look at the stars all day, humans would still be intrinsically valuable. Or, the ability of a machine to generate art good enough to serve as a fun D&D avatar does not devalue a human doing the same. You may be attaching a… market value… to humans by proxy of their capital output. Very capitalist of you. If you look at things that way, the value of a human life has been trending toward zero and will continue. So I prefer not to hold a belief system that only values humans by the value of their labor. Therefore I am not bothered when we invent a new tool that might compete with human labor.
You are interpreting "labor" in a purely economic sense, but that's choice of framing.
What I'm getting at is that our actions are rewarding and meaningful when we put effort into them and they provide value (in the general, not economic sense) to others.
If I spend a day drawing you a picture, you get a warm fuzzy feeling because of how much I must care to sacrifice one of my finite days on Earth to make a thing just for you. If I spend ten seconds writing a prompt and an AI spits out an objectively prettier picture, it's still less meaningful and less valuable in every sense that matters. I gave up nothing to produce it and you gained little by having it.
> Therefore I am not bothered when we invent a new tool that might compete with human labor.
This is likely a luxury you have by being economically stable enough to not have to worry about how you're going to put food in your stomach today. While it's fun to imagine idyllic post-capitalist societies, artists today need to be able to afford shelter and healthcare. Generative AI will destroy their livelihood.
That may be a sacrifice you are willing to make (since it likely isn't coming to take your job), but I care too much about other people to be delighted by that.
No one needs an avatar. You can draw a stick figure or take a selfie or whatever. This is all so silly and trivial.
> No one needs an avatar. You can draw a stick figure or take a selfie or whatever. This is all so silly and trivial.
This does not answer the question, this sidesteps the requirements. I can either have no avatar, or I can make one for the marginal cost of zero via an AI. This then belies that the true complaint of people against AI is one of an economic variety, not a technological one, in which case, fix the economics, and support open source AI so that all may have such tech, not just big tech.
Consider consulting documentation then. A model can help sift through orders of magnitude more literature than you can in the same timeframe.
OK? What does that have to do with pop culture IP rights?
If you're building an LLM for management or technical consulting then the valuable content is locked up behind corporate firewalls anyway so you're going to have to pay to use it. In that field most of what you could find with a web crawler or in digital books is already outdated and effectively worthless.
Can stable diffusion be created without using copyrighted content? Maybe we should have some exemption for non-commercial research but definitely not for commercial exploitation or generating copyrighted images using open-source models.
There is already exemptions for research. Look at licensing around things like ImageNet. There's similar licensing around things like LAION and Common Crawl[0] It's also not legal to just scrape everything without paying. There's a reason the NYT sued OpenAI and then got a settlement. It's still illegal for Meta to torrent terabytes of textbooks too.
[0] https://commoncrawl.org/terms-of-use
> In this regard, you acknowledge that you may not rely on any Crawled Content created or accumulated by CC. CC strongly recommends that you obtain the advice of legal counsel before making any use, including commercial use, of the Service and/or the Crawled Content. BY USING THE CRAWLED CONTENT, YOU AGREE TO RESPECT THE COPYRIGHTS AND OTHER APPLICABLE RIGHTS OF THIRD PARTIES IN AND TO THE MATERIAL CONTAINED THEREIN.Can an artist be created without using copyrighted content? Raise a child without movies, books, songs or the internet, see how much they contribute to "popular culture".
There is liberally licensed content like creative commons.
> invent legal fictions after the fact
You're reading into the situation...
For the US getting legislators to do anything is impossible: even the powerful fail.
When a legal system is totally roadblocked, what other choice is there? The reason all startups ask forgiveness is that permission is not available.
(edit). Shit. I guess that could be a political statement. Sorry