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Making a large profit off of other people’s work, without their permission and without compensating them, is not progress. If someone said “for the sake of pro

Making a large profit off of other people’s work, without their permission and without compensating them, is not progress. If someone said “for the sake of progress we just REALLY need to use this GPL’d code in our proprietary closed source app”, I don’t think that would fly around here.

shadowgovt 3y ago
> Making a large profit off of other people’s work, without their permission and without compensating them, is not progress. Best dynamite all the bridges because I sure haven't paid any of the (now quite-long-dead) people who put them up.
ronsor 3y ago
> If someone said “for the sake of progress we just REALLY need to use this GPL’d code in our proprietary closed source app”, I don’t think that would fly around here. Arguably that's because putting GPL code in a proprietary app is making a free thing closed. FWIW, I don't like proprietary AI models either, but I think open-source ones shouldn't be hampered by the copyright mafia.
FrenchDevRemote 3y ago
Using content as training data is not making profit off other people work. Musicians don't pay royalties to every other musician they've ever listened to, but that's literally their training data, the brain is just a large neural network.
- deely3 3y ago
  How? They used content as training data and now selling access to model based on this training data. How this is not "making profit off other people work"?
  - FrenchDevRemote 3y ago
    You know that because you read it somewhere else, because someone put it online. Your brain took that as training data, and now you're regurgitating it, are you going to pay that person for the data your brain is using? A musician is just a big neural network, and they sell content that is nothing but the product of all their influences, of all the music they listened to. I don't see a difference between a musician making music after having listened to thousand of hours of music throughout their lives and an AI generating music. It's the same thing, in one case you have neurons made out of flesh, in the other neurons made of transistors and code.
    - DangitBobby 3y ago
      It's not a person. Some people make a lot of money off of it, and they are able to do this by siphoning knowledge and effort off of millions of others.
      - FrenchDevRemote 3y ago
        Why is it different if it's a person or a model doing the generation? "siphoning knowledge and effort off of millions of others." how is a regular artist not doing the exact same thing?
        deely3 3y ago
        Can I revert your question? Why it should be the same for one regular person and for profit-aimed corporation that did not bother to get consent from authors?
        DangitBobby 3y ago
        Artists learn through blood, sweat, and tears. No artist achieves excellence without significant effort, and won't arrive until they've attempted original works many times. And they can spend their entire lives without ever finding any success or actually being particularly good. Are their outputs colored by the culture and prior art they've experienced? Absolutely. That's how learning works. Compare that to AI. It doesn't do any actual "art" work to become an artist, nor do the people who train it, it just sucks up what's fed into it, without the consent of the creators. Then, it can create much, much faster than an artist without breaks and without pay, and it is owned and directed by a huge faceless company as, effectively, a fleet of mindless slaves, diminishing the livelihoods of the very people absolutely essential in training the model. From a moral perspective, all you really need to ask is, would these artists have consented to this training if they knew mindless AI slaves would replace them?

shadowgovt 3y ago

> Making a large profit off of other people’s work, without their permission and without compensating them, is not progress. Best dynamite all the bridges because I sure haven't paid any of the (now quite-long-dead) people who put them up.

ronsor 3y ago

> If someone said “for the sake of progress we just REALLY need to use this GPL’d code in our proprietary closed source app”, I don’t think that would fly around here. Arguably that's because putting GPL code in a proprietary app is making a free thing closed. FWIW, I don't like proprietary AI models either, but I think open-source ones shouldn't be hampered by the copyright mafia.

FrenchDevRemote 3y ago

Using content as training data is not making profit off other people work. Musicians don't pay royalties to every other musician they've ever listened to, but that's literally their training data, the brain is just a large neural network.

deely3 3y ago
How? They used content as training data and now selling access to model based on this training data. How this is not "making profit off other people work"?
- FrenchDevRemote 3y ago
  You know that because you read it somewhere else, because someone put it online. Your brain took that as training data, and now you're regurgitating it, are you going to pay that person for the data your brain is using? A musician is just a big neural network, and they sell content that is nothing but the product of all their influences, of all the music they listened to. I don't see a difference between a musician making music after having listened to thousand of hours of music throughout their lives and an AI generating music. It's the same thing, in one case you have neurons made out of flesh, in the other neurons made of transistors and code.
  - DangitBobby 3y ago
    It's not a person. Some people make a lot of money off of it, and they are able to do this by siphoning knowledge and effort off of millions of others.
    - FrenchDevRemote 3y ago
      Why is it different if it's a person or a model doing the generation? "siphoning knowledge and effort off of millions of others." how is a regular artist not doing the exact same thing?
      - deely3 3y ago
        Can I revert your question? Why it should be the same for one regular person and for profit-aimed corporation that did not bother to get consent from authors?
      - DangitBobby 3y ago
        Artists learn through blood, sweat, and tears. No artist achieves excellence without significant effort, and won't arrive until they've attempted original works many times. And they can spend their entire lives without ever finding any success or actually being particularly good. Are their outputs colored by the culture and prior art they've experienced? Absolutely. That's how learning works. Compare that to AI. It doesn't do any actual "art" work to become an artist, nor do the people who train it, it just sucks up what's fed into it, without the consent of the creators. Then, it can create much, much faster than an artist without breaks and without pay, and it is owned and directed by a huge faceless company as, effectively, a fleet of mindless slaves, diminishing the livelihoods of the very people absolutely essential in training the model. From a moral perspective, all you really need to ask is, would these artists have consented to this training if they knew mindless AI slaves would replace them?