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I commend the likes of Adobe for providing training models that can stand up to legal scrutiny. The more anarchist parts of the "AI" community (which is to say

I commend the likes of Adobe for providing training models that can stand up to legal scrutiny. The more anarchist parts of the "AI" community (which is to say the majority of it) will very likely be in for a rude reckoning if they don't become civilized. Society can live without "AI", much less "AI" with no respect for peoples' properties.

recursive_loops 4y ago
But suppose the government dropped the hammer and banned any AI. Is it even possible to enforce? It kind of seems like the genie is out of the bottle here.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  We enforce copyright law, even though the actual act of copying is technologically trivially easy these days.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    >> But suppose the government dropped the hammer and banned any AI. Is it even possible to enforce? It kind of seems like the genie is out of the bottle here. > We enforce copyright law, even though the actual act of copying is technologically trivially easy these days. Exactly. Many software engineers have this weird misunderstanding of law that seems to come from misapplying mathematical standards to the legal system. A law isn't a fucking proof, it doesn't have to be 100% airtight, completely preventing all cases of the undesired behavior to work and be valuable.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    >We enforce copyright law Eh... "enforce-ish" I'll make up an analogy on how we enforce it. Imagine that you're watching a bunch of unruly kids on a playground and you have a strict 'no violence' set of rules. The problem is all these children are straight out of hell and just love hitting each other as much as possible. You'd be physically worn out trying to cover lessor acts of violence your actual rule is "If there is bloodshed there is punishment" That is more how enforcement of copyright actually works. You really, really have to screw up pretty big time for it to be enforced. Now imagine the "Copyright Absurdism Universe". This is a place where any copyright infringement is immediately detectable by magic the moment it occurs. Do you think this universe would have anything even close to the laws we have? I do not believe so at all. Effectively it would cause society to fall apart very quickly since society and civilization are built on the sharing of all kinds of ideas including language and imagery where any form of copyright maximalism would cause people to be afraid to use any new ideas for fear of being fined by the owner of said ideas.
- waboremo 4y ago
  It's very possible to enforce when you realize most AI stems from a very select bunch of platforms, and even "rogue" AI makers rely on these choke points. In the current stage, enforcing a ban against current AI tools would be quite devastating. For clarity, I'm not in favor of banning, just that we're still a very long way away from the genie being out of the bottle here. Maybe within the next 5 years if pace keeps up.
- blibble 4y ago
  government could force nvidia/amd to add circuitry to their products to detect the linear algebra operations and slow down in the same way it was done for crypto on gamers cards of course this doesn't fix china but they don't have the technology anyway due to sanctions
  - staunton 4y ago
    > they don't have the technology anyway due to sanctions that won't be true for long
  - ronsor 4y ago
    The same way it was done for crypto and then cracked not long after?
  - BeFlatXIII 4y ago
    > they don't have the technology anyway due to sanctions As if they don't use shell buyers.
    - blibble 4y ago
      theres like 3 EUV machines made over a 3 year period made by one company (ASML) if you aren't Intel, TSMC or Samsung you aint getting one
      - MichaelZuo 4y ago
        I think the parent is implying that someone in Vietnam or Kazakhstan could just buy the finished product and drive across the border. So the restriction is effectively an inconvenient tax.
        blibble 4y ago
        how does that help if the finished product has been made to detect LLM workloads in hardware and slow down?
- carlosjobim 4y ago
  > Is it even possible to enforce? Not a chance. But it can be added to the list of laws that everybody breaks all the time, that can come in handy when law enforcement wants to get you for other reasons.
- pca006132 4y ago
  You can't even draw a clean line between AI and optimization, so I don't think it is possible to enforce.
- brookst 4y ago
  It’s next to impossible to ban outcomes. That’s why the idiotic war on drugs is all about banning ingredients for drugs, and still doesn’t work. The only practical way to ban AI is to ban the hardware that makes it possible. Maybe ban silicon with more than X transistors, or ban clusters with more than Y total transistors. It would be dumb and would not work (you can still AI on a one CPU, just very slowly). But that would be the angle prohibitionists would have to take.
- antifa 4y ago
  Maybe this actually a good idea, then "AI" companies will say things like "It's not AI, it's Machine Learning" instead of everyone claiming everything they do is AI.
logicchains 4y ago
>Society can live without "AI", much less "AI" with no respect for peoples' properties IP is not real property; it's fundamentally different in an economic sense. If you have an apple and I steal it from you, you can no longer consume that apple. If you have poem and I make a copy of it, you still can consume (read) the poem. The notion of IP is fundamentally incompatible with a free society, because it necessitates a huge apparatus for violence and surveillance such that if Bob memorises your poem and tells it to his friend without your permission you're able to notice this and punish Bob for doing so.
- LiquidPolymer 4y ago
  This is fundamentally incorrect. I'd also wager that more than 50% of the commenters on here benefit from robust IP protection.
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    While this is true, 100% of the commenters here also give up a "natural" right to copy certain information for robust IP protection. At the extreme end, this can result in absurdities like the attempt to ban dissemination of the DeCSS key for DVDs.
    - EntrePrescott 4y ago
      > give up a "natural" right to copy certain information Practical as it may be, that's not a natural right but merely a physical possibility. More generally, the concept of natural rights - except for a very narrow niche of special subjects closely centered on the individual's own life and bodily autonomy - is a shortcut to total subjectivity at best. And even for that very narrow niche, the "rights" part is a normative civilizational convention/construct, whereas nature conspicuously ignores such "rights" (as do humans for the most part when it comes to other species)
  - chrismsimpson 4y ago
    Many here benefit from the industry and economy associated with IP, only a very small few actually benefit from ownership of IP.
anonylizard 4y ago
It is magical thinking to think 'the government' can stop a truly revolutionary technology. No, the technology will change the government, not the other way around. AI is not the internet, not the mobile phone, not social media, it is the printing press, it is the horse. The roman empire and its legions were replaced by feudal kingdoms and knights. The knights, armed with massive improvements in horse-breeding, saddles and horseshoes, became massively more powerful than previous types of soldiers. 500 knights, plus 10000 peasants, would have demolished a roman legion of 10000 expert and well paid soldiers. Thus knights became their own social class, trained in warfare since childhood. Civilian based militaries absolutely could not compete, so societies moved away from imperial bureaucracies, into aristocratic courts. AI will be the same. People who use AI intensely, will be far more productive than those who don't, and don't think politicians will be able to stop this. Trump merely mastered social media, and it made him the president, you have no idea how powerful a politician who fully exploits AI will be. AI should be regulated, and people's livelihoods should be compensated to an extent. But if you think 'society can live without AI', then you'll soon find a changed society that can live without you. The rude reckoning will come for the people who think they can just regulate or ignore AI away, the wise know there's no turning back, and its time to surf the tsunami, for good or bad.
- majormajor 4y ago
  My issue with these projections is that they're so wildly ambitious yet so vague. What does "mastering AI" look like to you? Do you mean "mastering the generative language/image/video models we have today?" Are you expecting further massive leaps in capabilities and mean to refer specifically to people who master those? You compare it to knights and horses, yet "hard power" technologies like that have obvious aspects that today's "AI mastery" doesn't. (As an aside, I lose track of your telling of history, it seems like you're saying knights replaced Roman Legions but also that they made civilian militaries obsolete, but you also say those legions were "expert and well paid soldiers" already?) I'd also expect a lot of things to be more "reinforcing" effects vs "generating" effects. Trump, for instance, was already famous as both a big businessman and a television personality; lots of other people "merely" mastered social media and "only" got a bunch of money for it. Could Trump have become President before Twitter? Reagan did it... it took a slightly different path back then, but being famous is a REALLY BIG starting point.
SanderNL 4y ago
"Society" cannot, because capitalism. If you want to stay in business internationally that is. Curious to see how we are going to compete without AI.
brigadier132 4y ago
> Society can live without "AI" Much in the same way society could live without electricity or the personal computer.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  Electricity and computers are now deeply embedded into our society. AI isn't. Yet, anyway. So yes -- right now, if all AI vanished overnight, we'd be just fine.
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    Even if electricity and computers vanished overnight, humans won't just keel over tomorrow.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      Humans won't go extinct -- but a lot of people would certainly suffer and die, at least in the nations that have become dependent on them. For instance, if electricity and/or computers vanished tonight, store shelves would be empty of food in just a handful of days.
qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
Surely, consequences of copying will hit china any day now. And when the streaming industry collapses, the music labels will recover. This lawless local optimum for the masses, that is the market, will give way to a guild free monopoly. Any day now.
stuckinhell 4y ago
Whose society and properties? Corporations ? I'm asking because many corporations push copyright extension when it benefits (Disney) and then fight patents when it helps them too. A famous supreme court case Alice Corp. v CLS Bank nternational should be looked at. https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2019/04/article_0006.html https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2019/04/article_0006.h... Major tech companies like Google and Amazon wrote amicus briefs that were AGAINST patents because they had the money and power to stomp on the little guys. "Civilized" really has no meaning when laws are bent constantly by corporations.
BeFlatXIII 4y ago
That's why it's important for lawless AI to be freely distributed. It may be legally banned, but it'll still be used widely.
zirgs 4y ago
Our current copyright laws are too aggressive already so why should I stop doing things that are legal just because some copyright activist demands me to? They impose a century long copyright terms on me, and then have the audacity to demand me to stop training the AI to imitate the style of their movies - which is legal to do.
tomjen3 4y ago
Do you think this will stop China from producing AI? The choice we have isn't to live with or without AI, it is to build AI or be crushed by it.

recursive_loops 4y ago

But suppose the government dropped the hammer and banned any AI. Is it even possible to enforce? It kind of seems like the genie is out of the bottle here.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
We enforce copyright law, even though the actual act of copying is technologically trivially easy these days.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  >> But suppose the government dropped the hammer and banned any AI. Is it even possible to enforce? It kind of seems like the genie is out of the bottle here. > We enforce copyright law, even though the actual act of copying is technologically trivially easy these days. Exactly. Many software engineers have this weird misunderstanding of law that seems to come from misapplying mathematical standards to the legal system. A law isn't a fucking proof, it doesn't have to be 100% airtight, completely preventing all cases of the undesired behavior to work and be valuable.
- pixl97 4y ago
  >We enforce copyright law Eh... "enforce-ish" I'll make up an analogy on how we enforce it. Imagine that you're watching a bunch of unruly kids on a playground and you have a strict 'no violence' set of rules. The problem is all these children are straight out of hell and just love hitting each other as much as possible. You'd be physically worn out trying to cover lessor acts of violence your actual rule is "If there is bloodshed there is punishment" That is more how enforcement of copyright actually works. You really, really have to screw up pretty big time for it to be enforced. Now imagine the "Copyright Absurdism Universe". This is a place where any copyright infringement is immediately detectable by magic the moment it occurs. Do you think this universe would have anything even close to the laws we have? I do not believe so at all. Effectively it would cause society to fall apart very quickly since society and civilization are built on the sharing of all kinds of ideas including language and imagery where any form of copyright maximalism would cause people to be afraid to use any new ideas for fear of being fined by the owner of said ideas.
waboremo 4y ago
It's very possible to enforce when you realize most AI stems from a very select bunch of platforms, and even "rogue" AI makers rely on these choke points. In the current stage, enforcing a ban against current AI tools would be quite devastating. For clarity, I'm not in favor of banning, just that we're still a very long way away from the genie being out of the bottle here. Maybe within the next 5 years if pace keeps up.
blibble 4y ago
government could force nvidia/amd to add circuitry to their products to detect the linear algebra operations and slow down in the same way it was done for crypto on gamers cards of course this doesn't fix china but they don't have the technology anyway due to sanctions
- staunton 4y ago
  > they don't have the technology anyway due to sanctions that won't be true for long
- ronsor 4y ago
  The same way it was done for crypto and then cracked not long after?
- BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  > they don't have the technology anyway due to sanctions As if they don't use shell buyers.
  - blibble 4y ago
    theres like 3 EUV machines made over a 3 year period made by one company (ASML) if you aren't Intel, TSMC or Samsung you aint getting one
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
      I think the parent is implying that someone in Vietnam or Kazakhstan could just buy the finished product and drive across the border. So the restriction is effectively an inconvenient tax.
      - blibble 4y ago
        how does that help if the finished product has been made to detect LLM workloads in hardware and slow down?
carlosjobim 4y ago
> Is it even possible to enforce? Not a chance. But it can be added to the list of laws that everybody breaks all the time, that can come in handy when law enforcement wants to get you for other reasons.
pca006132 4y ago
You can't even draw a clean line between AI and optimization, so I don't think it is possible to enforce.
brookst 4y ago
It’s next to impossible to ban outcomes. That’s why the idiotic war on drugs is all about banning ingredients for drugs, and still doesn’t work. The only practical way to ban AI is to ban the hardware that makes it possible. Maybe ban silicon with more than X transistors, or ban clusters with more than Y total transistors. It would be dumb and would not work (you can still AI on a one CPU, just very slowly). But that would be the angle prohibitionists would have to take.
antifa 4y ago
Maybe this actually a good idea, then "AI" companies will say things like "It's not AI, it's Machine Learning" instead of everyone claiming everything they do is AI.

logicchains 4y ago

>Society can live without "AI", much less "AI" with no respect for peoples' properties IP is not real property; it's fundamentally different in an economic sense. If you have an apple and I steal it from you, you can no longer consume that apple. If you have poem and I make a copy of it, you still can consume (read) the poem. The notion of IP is fundamentally incompatible with a free society, because it necessitates a huge apparatus for violence and surveillance such that if Bob memorises your poem and tells it to his friend without your permission you're able to notice this and punish Bob for doing so.

LiquidPolymer 4y ago
This is fundamentally incorrect. I'd also wager that more than 50% of the commenters on here benefit from robust IP protection.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  While this is true, 100% of the commenters here also give up a "natural" right to copy certain information for robust IP protection. At the extreme end, this can result in absurdities like the attempt to ban dissemination of the DeCSS key for DVDs.
  - EntrePrescott 4y ago
    > give up a "natural" right to copy certain information Practical as it may be, that's not a natural right but merely a physical possibility. More generally, the concept of natural rights - except for a very narrow niche of special subjects closely centered on the individual's own life and bodily autonomy - is a shortcut to total subjectivity at best. And even for that very narrow niche, the "rights" part is a normative civilizational convention/construct, whereas nature conspicuously ignores such "rights" (as do humans for the most part when it comes to other species)
- chrismsimpson 4y ago
  Many here benefit from the industry and economy associated with IP, only a very small few actually benefit from ownership of IP.

anonylizard 4y ago

It is magical thinking to think 'the government' can stop a truly revolutionary technology. No, the technology will change the government, not the other way around. AI is not the internet, not the mobile phone, not social media, it is the printing press, it is the horse. The roman empire and its legions were replaced by feudal kingdoms and knights. The knights, armed with massive improvements in horse-breeding, saddles and horseshoes, became massively more powerful than previous types of soldiers. 500 knights, plus 10000 peasants, would have demolished a roman legion of 10000 expert and well paid soldiers. Thus knights became their own social class, trained in warfare since childhood. Civilian based militaries absolutely could not compete, so societies moved away from imperial bureaucracies, into aristocratic courts. AI will be the same. People who use AI intensely, will be far more productive than those who don't, and don't think politicians will be able to stop this. Trump merely mastered social media, and it made him the president, you have no idea how powerful a politician who fully exploits AI will be. AI should be regulated, and people's livelihoods should be compensated to an extent. But if you think 'society can live without AI', then you'll soon find a changed society that can live without you. The rude reckoning will come for the people who think they can just regulate or ignore AI away, the wise know there's no turning back, and its time to surf the tsunami, for good or bad.

majormajor 4y ago
My issue with these projections is that they're so wildly ambitious yet so vague. What does "mastering AI" look like to you? Do you mean "mastering the generative language/image/video models we have today?" Are you expecting further massive leaps in capabilities and mean to refer specifically to people who master those? You compare it to knights and horses, yet "hard power" technologies like that have obvious aspects that today's "AI mastery" doesn't. (As an aside, I lose track of your telling of history, it seems like you're saying knights replaced Roman Legions but also that they made civilian militaries obsolete, but you also say those legions were "expert and well paid soldiers" already?) I'd also expect a lot of things to be more "reinforcing" effects vs "generating" effects. Trump, for instance, was already famous as both a big businessman and a television personality; lots of other people "merely" mastered social media and "only" got a bunch of money for it. Could Trump have become President before Twitter? Reagan did it... it took a slightly different path back then, but being famous is a REALLY BIG starting point.

SanderNL 4y ago

"Society" cannot, because capitalism. If you want to stay in business internationally that is. Curious to see how we are going to compete without AI.

brigadier132 4y ago

> Society can live without "AI" Much in the same way society could live without electricity or the personal computer.

JohnFen 4y ago
Electricity and computers are now deeply embedded into our society. AI isn't. Yet, anyway. So yes -- right now, if all AI vanished overnight, we'd be just fine.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  Even if electricity and computers vanished overnight, humans won't just keel over tomorrow.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    Humans won't go extinct -- but a lot of people would certainly suffer and die, at least in the nations that have become dependent on them. For instance, if electricity and/or computers vanished tonight, store shelves would be empty of food in just a handful of days.

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago

Surely, consequences of copying will hit china any day now. And when the streaming industry collapses, the music labels will recover. This lawless local optimum for the masses, that is the market, will give way to a guild free monopoly. Any day now.

stuckinhell 4y ago

Whose society and properties? Corporations ? I'm asking because many corporations push copyright extension when it benefits (Disney) and then fight patents when it helps them too. A famous supreme court case Alice Corp. v CLS Bank nternational should be looked at. https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2019/04/article_0006.html https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2019/04/article_0006.h... Major tech companies like Google and Amazon wrote amicus briefs that were AGAINST patents because they had the money and power to stomp on the little guys. "Civilized" really has no meaning when laws are bent constantly by corporations.

BeFlatXIII 4y ago

That's why it's important for lawless AI to be freely distributed. It may be legally banned, but it'll still be used widely.

zirgs 4y ago

Our current copyright laws are too aggressive already so why should I stop doing things that are legal just because some copyright activist demands me to? They impose a century long copyright terms on me, and then have the audacity to demand me to stop training the AI to imitate the style of their movies - which is legal to do.

tomjen3 4y ago

Do you think this will stop China from producing AI? The choice we have isn't to live with or without AI, it is to build AI or be crushed by it.