I have the privilege of working for a robotics company small enough that I (a SW dev) can walk a few doors down the hallway and talk to anyone from mechanics, to electronics, to sales, to the people who actually operate the robors on customers' sites. And I have a lot of respect for people who pull a 16 hour shift in freezing cold or with water pouring down their necks.
For the company to function, it requires a lot of people with different skills to come together and each do what they're best at.
As Doctorow says, this is why huge corps segregate people into casts - to keep them from seeing the other's contribution and to keep them hating the other instead of hating those who exploit both.
> As Doctorow says, this is why huge corps segregate people into casts - to keep them from seeing the other's contribution and to keep them hating the other instead of hating those who exploit both.
This is my point. I've grown tired of telling people to hate those who exploit us all when they're tossed crumbs from their master's table and decide that is sufficient to make common cause with him.
I'll shed a tear for the common coder when they can spare a tear for the rest of us.
I always say humans are not smart enough. First they came for the communists... You know the rest but how many of you would pick up a rifle and stand against evil?
Well, first they came for the manual workers and many on HN were happy to help. Now they and their autocompletes came for open source devs, taking our work without consent, credit or respecting the licenses and almost nobody stands up against it. They expect me to pay for me own stolen code and most devs are OK with it because it's not their stolen code and they can get their job slightly faster.
So how long before they come for you? Because by then you will be economically irrelevant and unable to do anything about it.
How far back do you want to go? Programmers have been automating jobs away for a long time. Some historical context:
When Craig Newmark created Craigslist (along with Ebay), it was devastating for the economics of newspapers. Lots of jobs selling classified ads went away, as well as funding for the other jobs.
Wikipedia made other encyclopedias obsolete.
It used to be that you had to do things by mail, by phone, or in person. The websites that we now take for granted probably eliminated lots of jobs processing transactions.
Companies used to have typing pools.
Were these bad improvements? How is it different now?
a) a new technology unrelated to the original job, which made the job redundant - the printing press was not made by watching scribes doing their mechanical movements faster, it was a fundamentally different principle. It was fair competition between independent 2 options, neither of which exploited the other.
In contrast, LLMs cannot exist without programmers first writing immense, astronomical amounts of code as training data.
b) people coming together and making something for free which was paid. Wikipedia is not just subsidized by some corporation which makes money from ads, it is made by people who willingly spend their time to make the world a better place for everyone. And none of them, neither a megacorp stand to become rich from it.
In contrast, LLMs are trained on people's work without their consent, quite offer against explicitly stated wishes. And it's not a common good, it's a for-profit business which ultimately funnels the gains to the top.
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I am not even against LLMs, they are a tool - neither good or bad. I am against how they are created - LLMs trained on AGPL shoud be AGPL and their output should be AGPL. And I am against how they are used - they extract value from people and redirect the reward for work to people who didn't contribute any work.
Fundamentally, people should (collectively) own the product of their work and should negotiate how the reward is distributed on equal footing.
Wikipedia utterly depends on knowledge found elsewhere, often in newspapers or books. They have a "no original research" rule. They didn't get anyone's consent.
If I was given a choice between robust journalism and whatever Craigslist is the choice seems rather plain. A dispassionate analysis of the majority of tech industry "improvements" reveals similar choices.
Attempting to lecture me on what journalism was is a misstep on your part. My first professional development gig was supporting software integrations between 33 local newsrooms, their printing floors, and their (at the time fledgling) online presence. In addition to my normal development work I was frequently called upon to work directly with editorial and newsroom staff on specialty projects and provide on-site support at industry events. As a result I spent a lot of time in the room where shit was going down.
While it's always been possible to find shills in the media landscape the overwhelming majority of the men and women I worked for were the kind of intense scary-obsessive anti-authoritarian types that literally skipped meals and sleep (sometimes days at a time) just for a chance at catching industry or government fucking around. And with literally hundreds of newsrooms scattered across the country staffed similarly journalism was a force to be reconned with. But hey, having to pay $5 to sell your couch to a stranger was kind of a drag so I guess this is better.
If you think that every comment on social media is an "attempt to lecture" you, a random nobody on the internet, who once basically worked as support staff to journalists, you have personal problems beyond my powers to fix...
There are several subtypes of narcissism - overt (=grandiose), covert (=vulnerable), malignant, communal. (Some also use antagonistic as a further subtype of malignant.)
Normally, they are considered separate categories. However, how I like to think about them is a 2D spectrum.
Overt X covert is one axis, malignant X communal is another.
Overt X covert is defined by how the narcissist sees himself/herself:
- Overt thinks they are better than others and feel wronged when they are not treated the way they think they deserve - always respected even if they are wrong, or even admired, worshiped, celebrated. There's this implicit "I am the center of everything / I am the main character" about them. Many people accept this dynamic in order to avoid conflict or simply because they are natural pleasers and end up reinforcing it.
- Covert thinks they are worse than others and feel attacked by the smallest innocent things which threaten to expose some real or perceived weakness of theirs. You either end of walking on eggshells around them or end up triggering them in some ways you don't even recognize until you are their designated enemy.
Malignant X communal is defined by where they get their self-worth from:
- Malignant simply enjoys hurting others - they feed on other people's suffering and feel energized and empowered by getting away with it.
- Communal is driven by being seen as helping. This is not altruism but might look similar at first glance. However, altruism is about actually helping others, communal narcissism is about being perceived that way, that's their end goal. Actually helping is just a method to achieve that and becomes secondary when disagreement/conflict arises. This often happens when you don't show the appreciation they think they deserve.
Every narcissist is somewhere on this 2D spectrum (they are purely one subtype if they are at 0 on the other axis). But very commonly you see combinations like covert+communal and overt+malignant.
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A common misconception is that narcissists think they're better than others. They don't (only overt subtype does). But all narcissists think they are more important than others. They are the center of the world in their mind. This is implicit, they'd never describe it that way because that's what they consider normal. It would be like saying the air around us has transparent color - we don't say that because we consider it so normal to essentially ignore it.
What they do is they implicitly expect to be treated that way. Sometimes they manage to behave in ways which elicit this in others subconsciously. But if you don't, you get various antagonistic reactions depending on the combination of subtypes.
Fleas are behaviors a person picks up by interacting with narcissists too often. In this way, narcissism can be said to be a socially transmissible disease.
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Disclaimer, I am not a psychologist, I have only read about this (and other disorders such as ASPD/psychopathy/sociopathy) extensively. However, that gives me freedom to express my thoughts more openly - a psychologist cannot for "ethical reasons" say certain things such as making value judgements of such people.
I don't have that limitation. I consider it a disease which should for example prevent the person from holding positions of power - the same way psychosis would. The only difference is psychotic people are harmful to both themselves and others and don't hide it, narcissistic people are primarily harmful to others and a re lucid enough to cover it up.
Thank you. It seems a common human experience to me that we’re all updating our inexact-but-useful view of the world. And every now and then I encounter someone who isn’t. Or, someone public who in private is contrastingly reflective compared to their off-putting public representation.
Because people don't have real power, it's all indirect through politicians who are manipulated or paid by professionals.
Democracy should be direct and the gating function shouldn't be age but a test of intelligence, logical reasoning, general knowledge and ability to detect manipulation.
1) Do they really? I honestly don't know, are there independent polls about this?
2) What makes them think they have any right to decide for other people's children? I would be OK with them genuinely thinking they need to surveil their own children but if 1) is true then there is this underlying need of people to control others and I am not OK with that. This is how minorities are suppressed and harassed - same mechanism, different target.
If you wanna surveil your children, surveil your own fucking children. You have no say in other people's lives.
Now, as for solutions, it's also simple but unpopular. People shouldn't be so rich they have transnational power. All this is happening because we let a tiny group of mostly anti-social people get so much money the only way they can spend it is this kind of BS.
It's great that LLMs helped you but do you recognize that they are trained on thousands, perhaps millions of lifetimes of human work without the consent of the original authors and often quite explicitly against their will and their chosen license?
These people (myself included) made their work available free of charge under some very friendly conditions such as being credited or sharing work built upon theirs under the same license. Now we are being shit on because obscenely rich people think we are no longer relevant and that they can get away with it.
What happens to you if, say 2 years down the line, "AI" or AI has absorbed all your knowledge and can do all of your work instead of you better and faster? Do you imagine you'll keep paying for AI and having it work for you or can you also imagine a future where AI companies decide to cut out the middle-man (you) and take over your customers directly?
They might not care. Products win not by quality or features but by advertisement, hype and network effects.
The original implementation would still have the upper hand here. OTOH if I as a nobody create something cool, there's nothing stopping a huge corporation from "reimplementing" (=stealing) it and and using their huge advertising budget to completely overshadow me.
Given how hard companies like Nintendo and Microsoft have been taking down leaks or fan creations, it seems they very much do care about keeping this stuff locked down.
I've been thinking this for over two years, that's why I stopped contributing to open source at that time - my work was only gonna be exploited to make rich people richer regardless of the license.
Crazy that only now we're seeing a bunch of articles coming to the same conclusion now.
I think copyright should still apply, but if it doesn't, we need new laws - ones which protect all human work, creative or not. Laws should serve and protect people, not algorithms and not corporations "owning" those algorithms.
I put owning in quotes because ownership should go to the people who did the work.
Buying/selling ownership of both companies and people's work should be illegal just like buying/selling whole humans is. Even if it took thousands of years to get here.
Money should not buy certain things because this is the root cause of inequality. Rich people are not getting richer at a faster rate by being more productive than everyone else but by "owning" other people's work and using it as leverage to extract even more from others.
Maybe LLM and mass unemployment of white collar workers will be the wakeup call needed for a reform. Or revolution.
Last time this happened was during the second industrial revolution and that's how communism got popular. We should do better this time because this is the last revolution which might be possible.
1) Legality and morality are obviously different and unrelated concepts. More people should understand that.
2) Copyright was the wrong mechanism to use for code from the start, LLMs just exposed the issue. The thing to protect shouldn't be creativity, it should be human work - any kind of work.
The hard part of programming isn't creativity, it's making correct decisions. It's getting the information you need to make them. Figuring out and understanding the problem you're trying to solve, whether it's a complex mathematical problem or a customer's need. And then evaluating solutions until you find the right one. (One constrains being how much time you can spend on it.)
All that work is incredibly valuable but once the solution exists, it's each easier to copy without replicating or even understanding the thought process which led to it. But that thought process took time and effort.
The person who did the work deserved credit and compensation.
And he deserves it transitively, if his work is used to build other works - proportional to his contribution. The hard part is quantifying it, of course. But a lot of people these days benefit from throwing their hands up and saying we can't quantify it exactly so let's make it finders keepers. That's exploitation.
3) Both LLM training and inference are derivative works by any reasonable meaning of those words. If LLMs are not derivative works of the training data then why is so much training data needed? Why don't they just build AI from scratch? Because they can't. They just claim they found a legal loophole to exploit other people's work without consent.
I am still hoping the legal people take time to understand how LLMs work, how other algorithms, such as synonym replacement or c2rust work, decide that calling it "AI" doesn't magically remove copyright and the huge AI companies will be forced to destroy their existing models and train new ones which respect the licenses.
> The person who did the work deserved credit and compensation.
That's the part of the argument in favor of copyright that is inherently flawed.
Doing some amount of work doesn't entitle you to anything besides whatever you've agreed to get for that work, or possession of the output, in case you did it for yourself. But that's all you're entitled to get.
Work itself doesn't have any intrinsic value, only output does. The scarcity of output is what dictates what is actually valuable.
Creative work has the characteristic of its marginal cost being very high for the first copy, but nearly zero for additional copies. That's true simply because of the nature of such work, it isn't something that is unfairly imposed upon creative workers. Whenever you choose to engage in creative work, you know that, or at least you should. And if you choose to give away the first copy for free, or very cheap, that's your prerrogative, but it doesn't inherently entitle you to anything else besides the value of that first copy.
Yes, there are laws such as copyright laws that exist to artificially inflate the value of additional copies, but they go against how things work naturally, so you shouldn't rely on them, and you certainly shouldn't base your moral compass on them.
Now, I do still prefer copyleft licenses over permissive ones for the work I choose to give away for free, but only to stop corporations from taking that work and then using copyright laws to keep it exclusive to them. Once copyright is no longer an issue, they won't be necessary anymore.
> it doesn't inherently entitle you to anything else besides the value of that first copy
What if many people want to buy a copy but nobody wants to be the first because he'd pay the full cost and the others could get the next copy for free? What if they instead agree to share the cost equally?
But then this group doesn't wanna be the first because the next group could get it for free? So what if they get the whole country together and agree to share the cost?
How much? They agree to determine that by supply and demand.
Congratulations, we're just reinvented copyright laws.
Anarchists and especially ancaps never game things out in their heads because they'd arrive at some variation of the current system. Sad because they usually could come up with an improved version. But they choose to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
I see this argument sometimes and it's annoying because:
1) People phrase it as a question even when they've already made up their mind (whether that's your case or not).
2) 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.
To your question:
a) If you're asking whether teachers should get compensated according to how good a job they do, I think so. They are very often undervalued, especially the good ones - but of course that means the job attracts people who do it because they enjoy it (and are therefore more likely to be good at it) rather than those who chose jobs according to money and then do the bare minimum.
b) There's a critical difference - consent. Teachers consented to their knowledge being used by those they taught. I did not consent to my code being used for training LLMs. In fact I purposefully chose a licence (AGPL) which in any common sence interpretation prohibits this used unless the resulting model is licensed under the same license - you can use my work only if you give back. Maybe there's a hole in the law - then it should be closed.
I am now gonna pose a question to you in turn.
Do you think people should be compensated for the full transitive value of their work?
> 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 have the privilege of working for a robotics company small enough that I (a SW dev) can walk a few doors down the hallway and talk to anyone from mechanics, to electronics, to sales, to the people who actually operate the robors on customers' sites. And I have a lot of respect for people who pull a 16 hour shift in freezing cold or with water pouring down their necks.
For the company to function, it requires a lot of people with different skills to come together and each do what they're best at.
As Doctorow says, this is why huge corps segregate people into casts - to keep them from seeing the other's contribution and to keep them hating the other instead of hating those who exploit both.
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