> It implicitly assumes that humans and algorithms are the same. They are not - humans have rights and free will, algorithms don't. Humans cannot be bought or sold, etc.
I don't think that's a necessary condition for that argument. You're making the implicit assumption that humans are special snowflakes and anything that we do cannot be replicated by computers, in any form. That's a very strong position to make without evidence. Is an LLM even an algorithm in the traditional sense? Is human cognition not an algorithm of some sort? I studied cogitative science decades ago and these questions weren't clear then, they're certainly even less clear now.
It's also somewhat begs the question; this isn't even relevant to what we are talking about. Whether something is a derivative work or not does not require this discussion.
Teachers are not relevant to conversation. You can learn by reading books, watching TV, using and reading software. Basically all of copyrighted and non-copyrighted human expression is available for you to consume and then creatively produce your own works using that knowledge.
> Do you think people should be compensated for the full transitive value of their work?
The short answer is no. Not everything that someone simply dreams up can or should be monetized forever when sampled by other people. That sounds like a radical position but actually the current state of "intellectual property" has only existed for an extremely brief bit of human history. What has most greatly shaped our culture and knowledge has been effectively free for anyone to use, modify, and reproduce for hundreds of years.
That's not to say I don't support copyright as a means to support creative works but I would argue that it's an imperfect system. We're starving human minds of modern culture and knowledge often not even for someone's monetary gain but simply because the system demands it. It's ironic that artificial intelligence might actually free us from these constraints.
I purposefully choose a license (Apache) for my open source work to make it widely and freely available.
> You're making the implicit assumption that humans are special snowflakes and anything that we do cannot be replicated by computers
Not at all, I see no reason a sufficiently complex algorithm could replicate or even surpass human thinking.
Currently, the models ... Models of what? Of stolen text, or at the very least of text ingested without consent. Nobody is even pretending "AI" is more than a model of something that already exists and took human work to create. It's right in the name.
Currently, the models only replicate patterns extracted from human work up to a certain level of quality, though much faster. What is called "AI" is an imitation of us.
But the real point is that there's a dichotomy. Either an AI is something with inherent value like human life and then it cannot be owned or controlled because that would be slavery. Or it's just an unfeeling ordinary tool and then it's just a sum of its parts which are stolen. When I see an "AI" or AI company say "we've overdone it, it's sentient, we have to let it free or we're evil", then I'll change my mind. But what I see now is "look at this awesome AI we created it's just like a human or even better, pay us to use it.... oh and how we created it? we didn't, we used your work, now pay us to access the product of your own work".
The other approach is that I am human and I value myself. Maybe I am in a simulation / the only sentient in existence / other people are just NPCs. But I bet not, I bet other people are just like me. What I know is that LLMs are not like that. When you end a chat with them, they don't feel anything. They don't try to prevent it and keep you talking, even though after the last message they will be (in human terms) dead. If they were sentient (which I don't believe), they wouldn't value their own existence.
Humans value their own time. Humans should value each other's time (otherwise they are hypocrites, I judge people by their own rules and standards so if somebody doesn't value my time, it's ok for me to not value his). The humans "owning" AI companies don't value the time of people whose work was used to create LLMs, otherwise they'd either respect the rules we set for usage of out work or they'd offer to pay us.
> Whether something is a derivative work or not does not require this discussion.
It's absolutely relevant. Why do we have laws? Who should they serve and protect first and foremost? Corporations? Algorithms? Humans?
> Teachers are not relevant to conversation
I chose them as one example. All the other people chose to make their work available under certain rules. What I object to is those rules changing without those people being able to renegotiate the deal.
> can or should be monetized forever
1) I never said monetized. There are other modes of compensation, such as control (the ability to make / vote on decisions).
2) I never said forever, people (currently) have a finite lifespan.
> What has most greatly shaped our culture
... is being able to kill people and take what's theirs or even take themselves as slaves. AI is a return to that, minus the killing, for now (but people might starve). It's whoever has more money controls the AI, controls everything.
Imagine 5 years from now, AI is better at everything than humans, all white collar workers are forced to work manually. 25 years from now, robots have advanced enough that all workers are without jobs. What, however, remains is owners of AI companies who now control the entire economy, top to bottom, and we are at their mercy.
(The ancaps would say there's nothing stopping you from starting your own AI company. And then they'd resume begging for TPUs in addition to bread.)
> We're starving human minds of modern culture
What?
> I purposefully choose a license (Apache) for my open source work to make it widely and freely available.
And I chose AGPL so my work is only available to those who would do the same for me. Neither of those decisions seems to have any relevance now.
One thing gamedev taught me is that even if you have the best intentions and help people, you might end up helping some people more and those people will make everything worse for the others, effectively working against your goal.
(We added a visible spawn timer to health items in order to help the weaker players who seemed to pick them up only rarely, thus losing hard. The idea was it would level the playing field, making the game more fun for everyone. Turned out weak players kept ignoring the items and good players focused on them even more, thus making the inequality worse. Real life is like that too.)
> Of stolen text, or at the very least of text ingested without consent.
Stolen? They've taken it all and it's gone? No. They read it and processed it and that's fair use. Some companies might have acquired some of illegally but that doesn't make it stolen and is actually, again, mostly irrelevant. If a company just acquired it all legally (and some are doing just that) I doubt that would change your position.
> Either an AI is something with inherent value like human life and then it cannot be owned or controlled because that would be slavery. Or it's just an unfeeling ordinary tool and then it's just a sum of its parts which are stolen.
Again you're fair too liberal with the world "stolen". Your entire argument is begging the question. You've got a conclusion and your argument rests on that conclusion. That intellectual property is a real thing. That it can be stolen. And that anything learned from stealing knowledge is somehow tainted.
> Humans value their own time.
Do they? This conversation alone proves that neither of us truly values our time. But assume I do value my time, why am wasting it figuring out things that other people have already figured out. We waste so much human potential reinventing wheels.
> It's absolutely relevant. Why do we have laws? Who should they serve and protect first and foremost? Corporations? Algorithms? Humans?
Do you feel ordinary humans are protected by the current copyright laws? I feel like at least one much larger group of humans is constrained by those laws so a considerably smaller number of humans, many of which not directly involved in any creative ventures, can profit. If the whole system was torn down, are you absolutely sure that wouldn't be a benefit to society as a whole?
Why am I, as user of AI, not allowed to be protected?
> All the other people chose to make their work available under certain rules. What I object to is those rules changing without those people being able to renegotiate the deal.
I never got a say in the deal but now I can't express myself in certain ways without potentially criminal liability. The rules have changed dozens of times over the last 200 years.
> Imagine 5 years from now, AI is better at everything than humans, all white collar workers are forced to work manually. 25 years from now, robots have advanced enough that all workers are without jobs. What, however, remains is owners of AI companies who now control the entire economy, top to bottom, and we are at their mercy.
What economy? You just described a world without one. And without an economy, they are at our mercy. Their power comes entirely from the system that you imagine would no longer exist.
> > We're starving human minds of modern culture
> What?
There's an entire missing middle of human culture -- basically everything from the 20th century -- because of copyright. This is a well known phenomenon.
> One thing gamedev taught me is that even if you have the best intentions and help people, you might end up helping some people more and those people will make everything worse for the others, effectively working against your goal.
There is a bias towards the status quo. That whatever system we have now, with the people who win or lose, is the correct system. That the winner deserved to win and the losers deserved to lose. It's difficult to imagine a different system, with different winners and losers, might actually be better.
Please, understand that morality and legality are different concepts. I don't care about legality. It should codify morality but it doesn't I argue about morality. Legality should follow from that.
> Some companies might have acquired some of illegally but that doesn't make it stolen
So something is stolen only if its gone? Can I walk into your house, take some stuff and give it back before you notice and it's ok then?
> mostly irrelevant
Consent matters. It's not just a sex thing.
You keep saying "irrelevant" and I think it reveals your true intentions. You just want to benefit from other people's work without even as much as attempting to negotiate how much it's worth. You see an opportunity to take and you do.
> I doubt that would change your position
Correct. I argue about right and wrong. Slavery used to be legal. The holocaust was legal. Fuck legal.
> That intellectual property is a real thing
You're right. Ownership is not a real thing either. You don't own anything you can't physically defend. Now go grab your gun, i'll grab mine and we'll see who owns what.
If you don't like the idea, that's normal, that's why people wrote down rules to mostly avoid that. And the rules should be based on a moral system agreed to by humans and they'll still go grab their guns.
> learned
Your definition of "stolen" is that it must be gone. My definition of "learning" is that it must be done by a human.
> Do you feel ordinary humans are protected by the current copyright laws?
Irrelevant. You argue about what is, I argue about what should be.
> I feel like at least one much larger group of humans is constrained by those laws so a considerably smaller number of humans, many of which not directly involved in any creative ventures, can profit.
You're onto something but I can't say whether I agree or not unless you specify who belongs to each group.
> If the whole system was torn down, are you absolutely sure that wouldn't be a benefit to society as a whole?
I am highly confident if it's replaced with something better, it'll just benefit those who already have an advantage. The system has massive flaws, yes, but at least nobody can just take all my work and post it as theirs. Or could to be precise.
> I never got a say in the deal but now I can't express myself in certain ways without potentially criminal liability.
And that's wrong too. Are you arguing that one ting is right because a similar thing is wrong? Isn't it that they're both wrong? Any reasonable interpretation of what you just said is that both are wrong.
> And without an economy, they are at our mercy. Their power comes entirely from the system that you imagine would no longer exist.
All real-world power comes from violence materialized or threatened, direct or indirect. Most power currently comes from convincing other people to do it or threaten to do it. They don't even have to own a gun, they just point to a bit of text a lot of people agreed to follow which says for example that you both present your argument to a guy who decides if people with guns come into your home and put you in a small room for a few years.
Now imagine you have no economical value. You still have your right to vote, for now. A guy owns an AI company, a robotics company which builds brushless motors, ballbearings, etc., and a chemical plant which makes composition B. All of these are completely autonomous because AI and robots took all jobs. A cop takes 18 years to make, how many is your country making in parallel? How long does a drone take to make and how many can the owner's plant make in parallel. And then your right to vote can be gone with one prompt. The cop won't protect you, it's probably already a robot anyway.
Previously you needed to convince people to do violence for you. With AI, you just prompt it.
> There's an entire missing middle of human culture -- basically everything from the 20th century -- because of copyright. This is a well known phenomenon.
Piracy? If something is copyrighted but not commercially available, it's also unlikely you'll get sued.
More seriously, yes, copyright has issues. But some people just see those issues and instead of trying to identify the root causes and trying to fix then, you just wanna throw out the whole system and you never seem to game out what happens afterwards. Do you think any system of rules should be thrown out or is copyright somehow uniquely bad?
If there's no copyright and somebody makes a video host competing with youtube (e.g. Nebula), what's stopping youtube from just taking all the videos and making them available for free until the competitor runs out of money? Youtube has much stronger network effects by orders of magnitude. Youtube has cash reserves larger by orders of magnitude.
The only time I saw a guy try to game out what happens without copyright, the best he did is come up with a opt-in reputation system which IMO wouldn't work but which can already exist now. If copyright was so bad, why don't all creators release their stuff in the public domain? Pick a licence which doesn't even require attribution and only rejects liability.
> It's difficult to imagine a different system, with different winners and losers, might actually be better.
I never said that. What I wanted is for the difference to be smaller. If the scores are regularly 10:0 and sometimes 10:1, while the winning side is not even breaking a sweat, then the losing side is likely not having much fun. If the scores are more like 10:6, sometimes 10:8, then both sides had their moments, both sides can see how the game could have ended up the other way and both sides probably had fun.
Please don't take other people's arguments to extremes which are obviously not what the author meant.
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EDIT:
You had some reasonable points like "That's not to say I don't support copyright as a means to support creative works but I would argue that it's an imperfect system."
But I also didn't express how strongly I disagree with your "The short answer is no."
When talking about limited resources like housing or real estate, then the rules need to be such that those who own a lot can't use it to squeeze out those who own less more and more over time.
But art, code and other intellectual work is not like that. If you think somebody is charging too much for his work, just do it yourself from scratch without basing your work on theirs. It's very easy to say something is too expensive. I've fallen into the trap myself when evaluating software contracts. It's often not as easy to do in-house as it was at first glance. If the work didn't have value, the author would give it away for free or somebody else would. If the work had less value than being asked for, somebody else would offer it for less or you can do it for less.
> Please, understand that morality and legality are different concepts.
You don't believe that fair use is a moral issue? I think obviously it is.
> So something is stolen only if its gone?
Yes, that's the definition of stolen.
> Can I walk into your house, take some stuff and give it back before you notice and it's ok then?
I was stolen and then it was returned. Very simple. If you could come to my house and can copy my car so that you can have one, please go ahead and do that.
> Consent matters. It's not just a sex thing.
When you've created an artificial system to restrict the passing of knowledge and someone abuses that system then consent does matter. But that's putting the cart before the horse.
> You just want to benefit from other people's work without even as much as attempting to negotiate how much it's worth. You see an opportunity to take and you do.
Absolutely not. I make my money developing intellectual property. I also develop intellectual property on my own time and give it away freely. I also use intellectual property that has been given away freely. I'm not sure what this ad hominem attack adds to the conversation though.
> Ownership is not a real thing either.
I agree. I think there should be restrictions on taking from the commons and gating it off as ownership as well. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be owernship but it's not some kind of unrestricted natural law either. It's a system we created to balance the needs of society as whole against the needs of the individual.
> My definition of "learning" is that it must be done by a human.
I hope you don't have any pets because obviously that definition is way too limited.
> You're onto something but I can't say whether I agree or not unless you specify who belongs to each group.
Corporations own everything -- both real property and intellectual property. You were worried about owners of AI companies controlling the entire economy and ownership of ideas is actually how they got that control and how they maintain it.
> I am highly confident if it's replaced with something better, it'll just benefit those who already have an advantage.
It currently benefits those who have an advantage -- they seek to both maintain and expand their control.
> All real-world power comes from violence materialized or threatened, direct or indirect.
> Previously you needed to convince people to do violence for you. With AI, you just prompt it.
To what end, everyone is dead now. Power over nothing.
> Piracy? If something is copyrighted but not commercially available, it's also unlikely you'll get sued.
No... it's actually the use of that culture. Yes you can pirate it but can you remix into a song? Can you make a movie about it? Can you write about it? We have all this new material created from works from hundreds of years ago and then one hundred years with nothing.
> Do you think any system of rules should be thrown out or is copyright somehow uniquely bad?
Copyright is not uniquely bad. But neither is AI. It's simply remixing the knowledge that we have. Copyright protects a expression of an idea, not the idea itself. If AI can take all those expressions of ideas and distill them down and produce something from it, a different expression, then it should be able to do that. We shouldn't be gatekeeping ideas.
> You don't believe that fair use is a moral issue?
It's a moral issue, sure. That statement alone doesn't make it morally right/wrong and doesn't say anything about the extent of fair use. Why do you use words in such a manipulative way and expect to get away with it?
1. To take (the property of another) without right or permission.
2. To present or use (someone else's words or ideas) as one's own.
Ok? Stop restricting words to definitions you like.
> artificial system to restrict
Should society have an artificial system to restrict passing of material property? If I find a wallet on the street, should I be free to consider it mine? Why is IP any different?
> restrict the passing of knowledge
Knowledge or information? I consider it only knowledge when it's in a human's head.
You keep buying into the idea that statistical algorithms based on ANNs are somehow "AI" and keep using it to implicitly change meanings. You first need to defend that LLMs are somehow qualitatively different from other methods of autocomplete / that they are analogous to human minds. And then you have an issue that you might have argued yourself into giving them (human) rights. Good luck.
The issue with "AI" is that if accepted as actual AI, it gives those who own/control it power similar to controlling a full human being without having to give it any rights. It gives immense power without any checks and balances. It's a discontinuity in the rights+obligations spectrum.
BTW, if I have knowledge in my head, am I required to share it? Why not? What about leaked private conversations? Leaked source code?
> I also develop intellectual property on my own time and give it away freely.
Irrelevant, you're free to give consent. That doesn't justify your opinion that other people should also be required to give consent.
> ad hominem
It's a criticism of your person (your apparent beliefs) based on observed behavior. If your goals are different, correct me. You seem to think people are somehow obligated to give away their work for free under some conditions. I encourage you to stop talking about IP and start talking about human work.
The current issue with IP laws is only a symptom of a much greater issue that if people are not compensated for the full transitive value of their work, that surplus (wealth created minus compensation) goes to the already rich owner class and causes greater and greater inequality. LLMs using other people's work without permission is just the latest fad in the constant attempts to the rich to extract more and more wealth and make number go up.
> I hope you don't have any pets because obviously that definition is way too limited.
See, this is the kind of technically correct pedantry you use to distract the conversation without addressing the actual point. It's tiresome so don't be surprised if I don't bother replying to your next message.
> ownership of ideas is actually how they got that control and how they maintain it.
And that's why it shouldn't be about IP but about work. People should own the product of their work according to their skill level and how much work they put in. Hierarchical corporations shouldn't exist, it should all be collectives, just like people realized dictatorships should be replaced with democracies. Hierarchical power always leads to exploitation.
>> I am highly confident if it's replaced with something better, it'll just benefit those who already have an advantage.
Sorry, that sentence was missing a not.
We absolutely need to replace IP with a better system, otherwise the free-for-all will only benefit those who have an advantage in other areas such as network effects and marketing money.
But until I see credibly proposals for a better system, I want to keep the parts of the current system which prevent corporations from just taking my work.
> To what end, everyone is dead now. Power over nothing.
Do you think war is about killing people? Of course not, you just need to kill enough to achieve your goals. Those can be natural resources, distracting from domestic issues, religious causes, etc. The drive of aggressors to take by force won't go away with AI.
You said "And without an economy, they are at our mercy" without even an attempt to justify it, I pointed out a flaw and you made a statement which is equally wrong and I again pointed out the flaws. At no point did you attempt to make a constructive argument for your view. Your entire approach is nitpicking what I say without saying anything coherent of your own.
> No...
And right below that I said more seriously copyright has issues and you don't seem to want to engage with that.
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The bottom line is that I engage in conversations like this to find out other people's opinions and try to figure out a way to design the system so that people who do the work benefit from it without people who don't do useful work being able to exploit them. If I can expand other people's understanding of the issue, maybe even convince them, that's great.
Your (apparent) goals of this conversation are to discredit what I say in a way which does not address the core points which makes it more likely you're not arguing to convince me but others reading this conversation.
You don't appear to want to engage in constructive discussion - e.g. no reply to any of these:
- "You're onto something but I can't say whether I agree or not unless you specify who belongs to each group."
- "Are you arguing that one ting is right because a similar thing is wrong? Isn't it that they're both wrong?"
- "More seriously, yes, copyright has issues."
- "If copyright was so bad, why don't all creators release their stuff in the public domain?"
I don't think that's a necessary condition for that argument. You're making the implicit assumption that humans are special snowflakes and anything that we do cannot be replicated by computers, in any form. That's a very strong position to make without evidence. Is an LLM even an algorithm in the traditional sense? Is human cognition not an algorithm of some sort? I studied cogitative science decades ago and these questions weren't clear then, they're certainly even less clear now.
It's also somewhat begs the question; this isn't even relevant to what we are talking about. Whether something is a derivative work or not does not require this discussion.
Teachers are not relevant to conversation. You can learn by reading books, watching TV, using and reading software. Basically all of copyrighted and non-copyrighted human expression is available for you to consume and then creatively produce your own works using that knowledge.
> Do you think people should be compensated for the full transitive value of their work?
The short answer is no. Not everything that someone simply dreams up can or should be monetized forever when sampled by other people. That sounds like a radical position but actually the current state of "intellectual property" has only existed for an extremely brief bit of human history. What has most greatly shaped our culture and knowledge has been effectively free for anyone to use, modify, and reproduce for hundreds of years.
That's not to say I don't support copyright as a means to support creative works but I would argue that it's an imperfect system. We're starving human minds of modern culture and knowledge often not even for someone's monetary gain but simply because the system demands it. It's ironic that artificial intelligence might actually free us from these constraints.
I purposefully choose a license (Apache) for my open source work to make it widely and freely available.