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Is it unfair for you to create content/products/etc after you have read and learned from various sources on the internet, potentially depriving them of clicks/i

Is it unfair for you to create content/products/etc after you have read and learned from various sources on the internet, potentially depriving them of clicks/income? People get internet hostile at me for this question, but it really is that simple. They've automated you, and it's definitely going to be a problem, but if it's acceptable for your brain to do the same thing, you're going to have to find a different angle to attack it than "fairness".

hannob 4y ago
You usually expect people to cite sources. Granted, that very often doesn't happen, and the amount of citing expected depends on the context. But ChatGPT just doesn't cite sources at all. I think there's a case to be made that they should.
- pixl97 4y ago
  Hello [Oxford Dictionary: 1827] Oh, wait, I'm not going to cite sources in a non-scientific work as this leads to madness. The following is a previous post of mine on HN "Your mind exists in a state where it is constantly 'scraping' copyrighted work. Now, in general limitations of the human mind keep you from accurately reproducing that work, but if I were able to look at your output as an omniscient being it is likely I could slam you with violation after violation where you took stylization ideas off of copyrighted work. RMS covers this rather well in 'The right to read'. Pretty much any model that puts hard ownership rules on ideas and styles leads to total ownership by a few large monied entities. It's much easier for Google to pay some artist for their data that goes into an AI model. Because the 'google ai' model is now more culturally complete than other models that cannot see this data Google entrenches a stronger monopoly in the market, hence generating more money in which to outright buy ideas to further monopolize the market."
- ericd 4y ago
  People don’t remember the sources that formed their opinions, it’s just baked into the structure of their brain after reading, same for the model.
  - stevesearer 4y ago
    With search engines, it does feel like there was is a more clear trade of scraping access in exchange for web traffic. With ChatGPT the traffic benefit isn’t there, so it feels like it isn’t a fair trade. Google adding the context and data to their search results page also started blurring this trade making it unnecessary to click to the site the info was cleaned from.
    - williamcotton 4y ago
      How does someone site a source when they are using GPT to convert a box score into an entertaining paragraph about a baseball game? Or to convert a natural language command into a JSON format ready for downstream processing?
      - ericd 4y ago
        Right, it’s a gestalt from a huge set of sources. It’s not copying single text sources verbatim into your output.
- rom-antics 4y ago
  Humans have a pretty good sense of when you need to cite sources, and when you don't. For example, long ago I learned from some website how to write a for-loop in python, and now I write them all the time without giving credit. I'm okay with ChatGPT writing a for-loop without citing its source. I would say most knowledge about words/grammar/laws of nature can be taken for granted without a citation, but there are some important exceptions where things must be cited. I don't know how you'd reliably teach the difference to a computer though.
  - candiodari 4y ago
    And yet, exactly in this example, I HATE that people don't put sources. Perhaps not for "for loops", but search anything simple in python. "Python JSON output", for example, and you will find a billion articles that describe a simple python library ... but DON'T link to python.org or the "javadoc". They're always dicussing the most blatantly obvious simple thing, never remotely complete, never link to where you can actually find more info (but jobs, courses, ads, ... those will be linked) It's getting me to the point of refusing to use Google, or only use Google with "site:...". I mean, the site varies, but without site limits Google's becoming useless.
- christkv 4y ago
  The bing leak seemed to mention sources.
- lolinder 4y ago
  ChatGPT doesn't have a concept of sources. It has weights that together define a function that allow it to guess the most likely next word from the context. As a neat side effect of this contextual next-word guessing, it often can share accurate information. If ChatGPT were to be required to share its sources, they would need a completely different approach. I'm not commenting on whether or not that would be a bad thing, but it would render the current iteration completely useless. You can't strap a source-crediting mechanism on top of a transformers-based model after the fact.
  - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    > You can't strap a source-crediting mechanism on top of a transformers-based model after the fact. I've read that ChatGPT is not connected to the net, but if it was: Couldn't you have it do a google search (or better yet corpus search) for the string it generated and then return the most significant matches (significance by string matching, not google rank)? It would be really crude, but wouldn't this just be a handful of lines of code that don't interfere with the "transformers-based model" code at all?
    - shagie 4y ago
      Why couldn't you, as a human do that to verify it? The other day I had GPT write a rap battle between Burger King and Ronald McDonald. One of the stanzas came back: Burger King: Your burgers are plain, your buns a bore. Your clown's been around since '63, I'm sure my flame-grilled taste will leave you impressed My burgers are fresh, my fries are the best It turns out that yes, Ronald McDonald was first introduced in 1963. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:McDonald%27s_commercial_(1963).webm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:McDonald%27s_commercial_(... (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_Scott#Created_Ronald_McDonald,_the_Hamburger-Happy_Clown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_Scott#Created_Ronald_M... ) So here's the challenge for you - who do you compensate for that line? The complaint that people have isn't that GPT isn't citing its sources but rather that it isn't compensating the people who created the data that has that information. ... and now, if you're ever asked about historical clown trivia and pull out the "Ronald has been around since 1963", who should you give a royalty to? Me (for writing this), GPT (for making me aware of it), Wikipedia (for the source of my links in this post), the estate of Willard Scott for the Joy of Living (which Wikipedia cites), some random blog author that had some clown trivia on it that happened to have been part of the training set for GPT?
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
At a human level it falls below the noise floor. It's a fact of life that humans will learn and build from experience. The difference is scale. At scale it becomes a problem. Edit: I don't know how to satisfy all parties. This shakes the foundation of copyright. Perhaps we are all finding out how valuable good information truly is and especially in aggregate. We have created proto-gods.
- ericd 4y ago
  At scale, it becomes a wonderful tool. Are the people in this thread so threatened or so invested in the current business models of the internet that you can’t see how amazing this sort of thing could be for our abilities as a species? Not just in its current iteration, but it will get better and better. This could be an excellent brain augmentation, trying to hamper it because we want to force people to drag themselves through underlying sources so those sources can try to steal their attention with ads for revenue is asinine.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
    It is a wonderful tool but I still feel that the creators of the training data are getting shafted. I'm both amazed and horrified at our creation and what it portends.
    - ericd 4y ago
      Yeah, there will probably have to be some adjustment. In the future, maybe an ML agent will hire people to go find answers for it about questions it has, using us as researchers/mechanical Turks :-) Quality matters more than quantity for something that’s trying to understand the world well and not just building a statistical language model, I imagine that it will be worth it to pay for quality when training heavily used models, to avoid using garbage info. You don’t need 30 different superficial product reviews with a bunch of SEO text if you have one that’s very thoroughly researched. And in the meantime, with ads no longer working, maybe crypto is actually useful for something here - lightning makes very small transactions possible with basically no fees, and makes it easy to programmatically pay for things. People hate being nickled and dimed, but a professional trying to construct an ML model could reasonably budget for use fees for fast unhindered access to quality training data. An agent could even evaluate its likelihood of learning something new/accurate vs the cost proposed by the server, and choose the subsets to pull. Just a random idea, but I hope we don’t fight tooth and nail to preserve the trash heap of the internet’s current state.
klpr 4y ago
No, it isn't that simple. The scale and totality of the scraping is out of reach for a human. If you previously interacted with people on this issue, you must know that. It is fair for a single human to breathe, but not for a machine to use all oxygen on this planet at once, killing everyone else in the process.
- ergonaught 4y ago
  It is in fact that simple. There are dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of legitimate, genuine, serious, real reasons to be concerned and "want something to be done". This isn't it. "Learning is unfair" is not an argument you want to win.
  - wiseowise 4y ago
    Love how you’ve conveniently ignored > The scale and totality of the scraping is out of reach for a human.
    - thrill 4y ago
      Because it's conveniently irrelevant.
      - wiseowise 4y ago
        Why?
  - nohuck13 4y ago
    > It is in fact that simple. Why?
- rom-antics 4y ago
  If I woke up tomorrow and breathed all the oxygen, nobody else could breathe. But If I woke up tomorrow and read all the websites on the internet, it wouldn't stop other people from reading them too. Air is zero-sum. Knowledge is not.
_qzu4 4y ago
> Is it unfair for you to create content/products/etc after you have read and learned from various sources on the internet, potentially depriving them of clicks/income? Because it's false equivalence? ChatGPT isn't a human being. It's a product that is built upon data from other sources. The question is if this data is legal to scrape, which it is: Web scraping is legal, US appeals court reaffirms [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31075396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31075396]. As long as the content is not copyrighted and it's not regurgitating the exact same content, then it should be okay.
- jMyles 4y ago
  > The question is if this data is legal to scrape ...it is? I didn't see that question raised in OP's text at all. What do legacy human legalities have to do with how AI will behave? > Because it's false equivalence? ChatGPT isn't a human being. Is this important? What is so special about human learning that it puts it in a morally distinct category from the learning that our successors will do? It sounds like OP is concerned with the ad-driven model of income on the internet, and whether it requires breaking in order for AI to both thrive and be fair.
  - venv 4y ago
    >Is this important? Well yes, it's the whole crux of the matter. Laws govern human behaviour. As of 2023, only living beings have agency. If I shoot someone with a gun, the criminal is me and not the gun. Being a deterministic piece of silicon, a computer is perfectly equivalent. Sure, it is important to start a discussion of potential nonhuman sentience in the future, but these AI models are not unlike any previous software in legal issues. It's bizarre to me how many people are missing this.
    - nowherebeen 4y ago
      > It's bizarre to me how many people are missing this. Very much this. I am too tired right now to engage with other responders, but thank you for articulating precisely the point I want to make.
beepbooptheory 4y ago
Do you think just maybe there is a diffence here because humans need money to survive, and maybe we should have compassion for humans who could hypothetically starve or freeze or suicide or whatever because they have no money? Or is it just silly to care about people like that?
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  This is a response to an argument the GP didn't make. One can still have grave concerns about generative AI's potential impact on human society while accepting there is nothing fundamentally unfair about how it scrapes publicly accessible data.
  - beepbooptheory 4y ago
    Ok, so, what is that argument then? Maybe you just want to say: "well this is such a big deal its going to change everything anyway, so we can't judge it on how it will affect today's society, but rather the society it will create." If so, all one can really say to such longtermism is: "well, good luck with that I guess, I will keep trying to survive over here."
- ergonaught 4y ago
  That's got nothing to do with whether or not it is "fair" for a learning system to produce content after it has learned. That is, instead, one of the larger and vastly more important sociocultural issues that actually warrants attention, but never receives it in sufficient degree to address the problem, because, for example, we're arguing whether automated learning is "fair".
  - beepbooptheory 4y ago
    If "fairness" isn't worth figuring out for a society, why is our entire economic order nominally built ontop of such a virtue? How is this not the very thing we are talking about? People starve on the streets right now because any other arrangement of resources has been deemed "unfair." Do we not sign a contract for our labor or for our homes because of shared idea of fairness? Fairness is the ultimate thing we appeal to in our world, it is the only thing that can sustain the intense individuality of the modern world. Dont ambiguate it as a Nietzchean moral fairness here, we are talking about the pseudo-algorithmic fairness of a market which guarantees certain things if you trade enough of your resources.
wiseowise 4y ago
> Is it unfair for you to create content/products/etc after you have read and learned from various sources on the internet, potentially depriving them of clicks/income? I don’t do it on an industrial scale.
CPLX 4y ago
Your argument contains the implicit assumption that we have the same rules for machines that we do for humans. That is trivially disproved, as is the rest of your argument that follows from it as a premise.
nCave 4y ago
Does anyone actually find these arguments persuasive? There is really no reason to believe that what chatGPT or stable diffusion does is anything like what "your brain" does--except in the most superficial, inconsequential way. Second, try applying this logic to literally anything else and you'll see why it's absurd: "You can't ban cars from driving on sidewalks! If it's acceptable for people to walk on sidewalks, then it has to be acceptable for cars to drive on sidewalks, since it's just automated walking" "You can't ban airplanes from landing in ponds. They fly 'just like' ducks fly! So if it's acceptable for them, it must be acceptable for airplanes too"
- dawsoneliasen 4y ago
  Yes, and: why shouldn’t it matter that in one case it is a person and in another it is a computer program? Why would it be incoherent to say “I’m okay with a person reading, synthesizing, and then utilizing this synthesis—but I’m not okay with a company profiting off of a computer doing the same thing.” What’s wrong with that? But again, like you and others have said, it’s really not the same thing at all! All ChatGPT (or any other deep learning model) is capable of doing is synthesizing “in the most superficial way.” What a person does is completely different, much more interesting.
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  I find the argument pretty persuasive. I also agree it's not the only argument and ultimate proof. I don't at, this point, have an answer. I'm sure this miraculous new technology will survive the luddite attacks, but there will probably be some tense moments, and some jurisdictions will choose to be left behind.
anileated 4y ago
It’s fair if you do this; neither fair nor legal [0] when a commercial for-profit entity, backed by a large corporation, does it at scale and capitalizes on that. Imagine if you were a webmaster and Google unilaterally decided to stop sending users to content you have worked to research and write, and instead aggregated it and showed the answer to user’s query entirely on its own pages, without any attribution or payment to you. Unimaginable, yet that is very much the scenario unfolding now. [1] Scraping at this kind of scale is out of your (or any given individual’s) reach. It is, however, within reach of the likes of Microsoft (on whose billions OpenAI basically exists) and Google (who, to be fair, have not abused it in such a blatant way so far). [0] It is clearly using someone else’s works for commercial purposes, including to create derivative works. (Again, it’s different from you creating a work derivative from someone else’s work you read previously, because in this case a corporation does it at scale for profit.) [1] And the cynic in me says the only reason we are not yet out with pitchforks is simply because OpenAI is new and shiny and has “open” in its name (never mind the shadow of Microsoft looming all over it), while Google is an entrenched behemoth that we all had some degree of dissatisfaction with in the past and thus are constantly watching out for.
xg15 4y ago
If you treat ChatGPT like a human, how high is the salary you are going to pay it?
nickfromseattle 4y ago
>Is it unfair for you to create content/products/etc after you have read and learned from various sources on the internet, potentially depriving them of clicks/income? The difference is in scale. A human video game designer can consume other' people's art, then sell their labor to a video game developer. The amount of value captured by the video game designer rounds down to zero in terms of percentage of economic value created by 'video game art'. OpenAI can consume all of the video game artists, ever, create an art design product and capture a significant percentage of the economic productivity of video game art.

hannob 4y ago

You usually expect people to cite sources. Granted, that very often doesn't happen, and the amount of citing expected depends on the context. But ChatGPT just doesn't cite sources at all. I think there's a case to be made that they should.

pixl97 4y ago
Hello [Oxford Dictionary: 1827] Oh, wait, I'm not going to cite sources in a non-scientific work as this leads to madness. The following is a previous post of mine on HN "Your mind exists in a state where it is constantly 'scraping' copyrighted work. Now, in general limitations of the human mind keep you from accurately reproducing that work, but if I were able to look at your output as an omniscient being it is likely I could slam you with violation after violation where you took stylization ideas off of copyrighted work. RMS covers this rather well in 'The right to read'. Pretty much any model that puts hard ownership rules on ideas and styles leads to total ownership by a few large monied entities. It's much easier for Google to pay some artist for their data that goes into an AI model. Because the 'google ai' model is now more culturally complete than other models that cannot see this data Google entrenches a stronger monopoly in the market, hence generating more money in which to outright buy ideas to further monopolize the market."
ericd 4y ago
People don’t remember the sources that formed their opinions, it’s just baked into the structure of their brain after reading, same for the model.
- stevesearer 4y ago
  With search engines, it does feel like there was is a more clear trade of scraping access in exchange for web traffic. With ChatGPT the traffic benefit isn’t there, so it feels like it isn’t a fair trade. Google adding the context and data to their search results page also started blurring this trade making it unnecessary to click to the site the info was cleaned from.
  - williamcotton 4y ago
    How does someone site a source when they are using GPT to convert a box score into an entertaining paragraph about a baseball game? Or to convert a natural language command into a JSON format ready for downstream processing?
    - ericd 4y ago
      Right, it’s a gestalt from a huge set of sources. It’s not copying single text sources verbatim into your output.
rom-antics 4y ago
Humans have a pretty good sense of when you need to cite sources, and when you don't. For example, long ago I learned from some website how to write a for-loop in python, and now I write them all the time without giving credit. I'm okay with ChatGPT writing a for-loop without citing its source. I would say most knowledge about words/grammar/laws of nature can be taken for granted without a citation, but there are some important exceptions where things must be cited. I don't know how you'd reliably teach the difference to a computer though.
- candiodari 4y ago
  And yet, exactly in this example, I HATE that people don't put sources. Perhaps not for "for loops", but search anything simple in python. "Python JSON output", for example, and you will find a billion articles that describe a simple python library ... but DON'T link to python.org or the "javadoc". They're always dicussing the most blatantly obvious simple thing, never remotely complete, never link to where you can actually find more info (but jobs, courses, ads, ... those will be linked) It's getting me to the point of refusing to use Google, or only use Google with "site:...". I mean, the site varies, but without site limits Google's becoming useless.
christkv 4y ago
The bing leak seemed to mention sources.
lolinder 4y ago
ChatGPT doesn't have a concept of sources. It has weights that together define a function that allow it to guess the most likely next word from the context. As a neat side effect of this contextual next-word guessing, it often can share accurate information. If ChatGPT were to be required to share its sources, they would need a completely different approach. I'm not commenting on whether or not that would be a bad thing, but it would render the current iteration completely useless. You can't strap a source-crediting mechanism on top of a transformers-based model after the fact.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  > You can't strap a source-crediting mechanism on top of a transformers-based model after the fact. I've read that ChatGPT is not connected to the net, but if it was: Couldn't you have it do a google search (or better yet corpus search) for the string it generated and then return the most significant matches (significance by string matching, not google rank)? It would be really crude, but wouldn't this just be a handful of lines of code that don't interfere with the "transformers-based model" code at all?
  - shagie 4y ago
    Why couldn't you, as a human do that to verify it? The other day I had GPT write a rap battle between Burger King and Ronald McDonald. One of the stanzas came back: Burger King: Your burgers are plain, your buns a bore. Your clown's been around since '63, I'm sure my flame-grilled taste will leave you impressed My burgers are fresh, my fries are the best It turns out that yes, Ronald McDonald was first introduced in 1963. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:McDonald%27s_commercial_(1963).webm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:McDonald%27s_commercial_(... (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_Scott#Created_Ronald_McDonald,_the_Hamburger-Happy_Clown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_Scott#Created_Ronald_M... ) So here's the challenge for you - who do you compensate for that line? The complaint that people have isn't that GPT isn't citing its sources but rather that it isn't compensating the people who created the data that has that information. ... and now, if you're ever asked about historical clown trivia and pull out the "Ronald has been around since 1963", who should you give a royalty to? Me (for writing this), GPT (for making me aware of it), Wikipedia (for the source of my links in this post), the estate of Willard Scott for the Joy of Living (which Wikipedia cites), some random blog author that had some clown trivia on it that happened to have been part of the training set for GPT?

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

At a human level it falls below the noise floor. It's a fact of life that humans will learn and build from experience. The difference is scale. At scale it becomes a problem. Edit: I don't know how to satisfy all parties. This shakes the foundation of copyright. Perhaps we are all finding out how valuable good information truly is and especially in aggregate. We have created proto-gods.

ericd 4y ago
At scale, it becomes a wonderful tool. Are the people in this thread so threatened or so invested in the current business models of the internet that you can’t see how amazing this sort of thing could be for our abilities as a species? Not just in its current iteration, but it will get better and better. This could be an excellent brain augmentation, trying to hamper it because we want to force people to drag themselves through underlying sources so those sources can try to steal their attention with ads for revenue is asinine.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  It is a wonderful tool but I still feel that the creators of the training data are getting shafted. I'm both amazed and horrified at our creation and what it portends.
  - ericd 4y ago
    Yeah, there will probably have to be some adjustment. In the future, maybe an ML agent will hire people to go find answers for it about questions it has, using us as researchers/mechanical Turks :-) Quality matters more than quantity for something that’s trying to understand the world well and not just building a statistical language model, I imagine that it will be worth it to pay for quality when training heavily used models, to avoid using garbage info. You don’t need 30 different superficial product reviews with a bunch of SEO text if you have one that’s very thoroughly researched. And in the meantime, with ads no longer working, maybe crypto is actually useful for something here - lightning makes very small transactions possible with basically no fees, and makes it easy to programmatically pay for things. People hate being nickled and dimed, but a professional trying to construct an ML model could reasonably budget for use fees for fast unhindered access to quality training data. An agent could even evaluate its likelihood of learning something new/accurate vs the cost proposed by the server, and choose the subsets to pull. Just a random idea, but I hope we don’t fight tooth and nail to preserve the trash heap of the internet’s current state.

klpr 4y ago

No, it isn't that simple. The scale and totality of the scraping is out of reach for a human. If you previously interacted with people on this issue, you must know that. It is fair for a single human to breathe, but not for a machine to use all oxygen on this planet at once, killing everyone else in the process.

ergonaught 4y ago
It is in fact that simple. There are dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of legitimate, genuine, serious, real reasons to be concerned and "want something to be done". This isn't it. "Learning is unfair" is not an argument you want to win.
- wiseowise 4y ago
  Love how you’ve conveniently ignored > The scale and totality of the scraping is out of reach for a human.
  - thrill 4y ago
    Because it's conveniently irrelevant.
    - wiseowise 4y ago
      Why?
- nohuck13 4y ago
  > It is in fact that simple. Why?
rom-antics 4y ago
If I woke up tomorrow and breathed all the oxygen, nobody else could breathe. But If I woke up tomorrow and read all the websites on the internet, it wouldn't stop other people from reading them too. Air is zero-sum. Knowledge is not.

_qzu4 4y ago

> Is it unfair for you to create content/products/etc after you have read and learned from various sources on the internet, potentially depriving them of clicks/income? Because it's false equivalence? ChatGPT isn't a human being. It's a product that is built upon data from other sources. The question is if this data is legal to scrape, which it is: Web scraping is legal, US appeals court reaffirms [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31075396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31075396]. As long as the content is not copyrighted and it's not regurgitating the exact same content, then it should be okay.

jMyles 4y ago
> The question is if this data is legal to scrape ...it is? I didn't see that question raised in OP's text at all. What do legacy human legalities have to do with how AI will behave? > Because it's false equivalence? ChatGPT isn't a human being. Is this important? What is so special about human learning that it puts it in a morally distinct category from the learning that our successors will do? It sounds like OP is concerned with the ad-driven model of income on the internet, and whether it requires breaking in order for AI to both thrive and be fair.
- venv 4y ago
  >Is this important? Well yes, it's the whole crux of the matter. Laws govern human behaviour. As of 2023, only living beings have agency. If I shoot someone with a gun, the criminal is me and not the gun. Being a deterministic piece of silicon, a computer is perfectly equivalent. Sure, it is important to start a discussion of potential nonhuman sentience in the future, but these AI models are not unlike any previous software in legal issues. It's bizarre to me how many people are missing this.
  - nowherebeen 4y ago
    > It's bizarre to me how many people are missing this. Very much this. I am too tired right now to engage with other responders, but thank you for articulating precisely the point I want to make.

beepbooptheory 4y ago

Do you think just maybe there is a diffence here because humans need money to survive, and maybe we should have compassion for humans who could hypothetically starve or freeze or suicide or whatever because they have no money? Or is it just silly to care about people like that?

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
This is a response to an argument the GP didn't make. One can still have grave concerns about generative AI's potential impact on human society while accepting there is nothing fundamentally unfair about how it scrapes publicly accessible data.
- beepbooptheory 4y ago
  Ok, so, what is that argument then? Maybe you just want to say: "well this is such a big deal its going to change everything anyway, so we can't judge it on how it will affect today's society, but rather the society it will create." If so, all one can really say to such longtermism is: "well, good luck with that I guess, I will keep trying to survive over here."
ergonaught 4y ago
That's got nothing to do with whether or not it is "fair" for a learning system to produce content after it has learned. That is, instead, one of the larger and vastly more important sociocultural issues that actually warrants attention, but never receives it in sufficient degree to address the problem, because, for example, we're arguing whether automated learning is "fair".
- beepbooptheory 4y ago
  If "fairness" isn't worth figuring out for a society, why is our entire economic order nominally built ontop of such a virtue? How is this not the very thing we are talking about? People starve on the streets right now because any other arrangement of resources has been deemed "unfair." Do we not sign a contract for our labor or for our homes because of shared idea of fairness? Fairness is the ultimate thing we appeal to in our world, it is the only thing that can sustain the intense individuality of the modern world. Dont ambiguate it as a Nietzchean moral fairness here, we are talking about the pseudo-algorithmic fairness of a market which guarantees certain things if you trade enough of your resources.

wiseowise 4y ago

> Is it unfair for you to create content/products/etc after you have read and learned from various sources on the internet, potentially depriving them of clicks/income? I don’t do it on an industrial scale.

CPLX 4y ago

Your argument contains the implicit assumption that we have the same rules for machines that we do for humans. That is trivially disproved, as is the rest of your argument that follows from it as a premise.

nCave 4y ago

Does anyone actually find these arguments persuasive? There is really no reason to believe that what chatGPT or stable diffusion does is anything like what "your brain" does--except in the most superficial, inconsequential way. Second, try applying this logic to literally anything else and you'll see why it's absurd: "You can't ban cars from driving on sidewalks! If it's acceptable for people to walk on sidewalks, then it has to be acceptable for cars to drive on sidewalks, since it's just automated walking" "You can't ban airplanes from landing in ponds. They fly 'just like' ducks fly! So if it's acceptable for them, it must be acceptable for airplanes too"

dawsoneliasen 4y ago
Yes, and: why shouldn’t it matter that in one case it is a person and in another it is a computer program? Why would it be incoherent to say “I’m okay with a person reading, synthesizing, and then utilizing this synthesis—but I’m not okay with a company profiting off of a computer doing the same thing.” What’s wrong with that? But again, like you and others have said, it’s really not the same thing at all! All ChatGPT (or any other deep learning model) is capable of doing is synthesizing “in the most superficial way.” What a person does is completely different, much more interesting.
BurningFrog 4y ago
I find the argument pretty persuasive. I also agree it's not the only argument and ultimate proof. I don't at, this point, have an answer. I'm sure this miraculous new technology will survive the luddite attacks, but there will probably be some tense moments, and some jurisdictions will choose to be left behind.

anileated 4y ago

It’s fair if you do this; neither fair nor legal [0] when a commercial for-profit entity, backed by a large corporation, does it at scale and capitalizes on that. Imagine if you were a webmaster and Google unilaterally decided to stop sending users to content you have worked to research and write, and instead aggregated it and showed the answer to user’s query entirely on its own pages, without any attribution or payment to you. Unimaginable, yet that is very much the scenario unfolding now. [1] Scraping at this kind of scale is out of your (or any given individual’s) reach. It is, however, within reach of the likes of Microsoft (on whose billions OpenAI basically exists) and Google (who, to be fair, have not abused it in such a blatant way so far). [0] It is clearly using someone else’s works for commercial purposes, including to create derivative works. (Again, it’s different from you creating a work derivative from someone else’s work you read previously, because in this case a corporation does it at scale for profit.) [1] And the cynic in me says the only reason we are not yet out with pitchforks is simply because OpenAI is new and shiny and has “open” in its name (never mind the shadow of Microsoft looming all over it), while Google is an entrenched behemoth that we all had some degree of dissatisfaction with in the past and thus are constantly watching out for.

xg15 4y ago

If you treat ChatGPT like a human, how high is the salary you are going to pay it?

nickfromseattle 4y ago

>Is it unfair for you to create content/products/etc after you have read and learned from various sources on the internet, potentially depriving them of clicks/income? The difference is in scale. A human video game designer can consume other' people's art, then sell their labor to a video game developer. The amount of value captured by the video game designer rounds down to zero in terms of percentage of economic value created by 'video game art'. OpenAI can consume all of the video game artists, ever, create an art design product and capture a significant percentage of the economic productivity of video game art.