3 ms·

I think there is a major qualitative difference between generative AI and search engines. Search engines index the web and point you at other people's work, al

I think there is a major qualitative difference between generative AI and search engines. Search engines index the web and point you at other people's work, along the way showing perhaps too much of that content (thus "stealing" users from the target webpage). But they don't reshuffle existing content into something apparently new and original. The "malicious" case for generative AI is that it sucks in copyrighted work (vs. indexing it), rehashes and produces something that is supposedly original, but really a sophisticated rehash of copyrighted work.

golem14 3y ago
... as opposed to a human doing the same thing ? It's hard for me to reconcile that it's somehow OK for a student to write a term paper about something (e.g. "Ulysses"), Wikipedia doing the same thing, but on the other hand, not OK for chatGPT doing it.
- 7jjjjjjj 3y ago
  Copyright is not a principle or an ideal. It's a pragmatic law designed to achieve specific goals. It can and does make such arbitrary distinctions.
olyjohn 3y ago
Indexing the copyrighted works is rehashing it. You're rehashing it into a different format that is more easily searchable by a computer. But that work is still based on other people's copyrighted works.
- rich_sasha 3y ago
  It doesn't produce a song if you ask for one. It points you at an existing one, with attribution and a (perhaps excessive) excerpt. LLMs do.
zlg_codes 3y ago
I'm not saying search engines will be considered the same as LLMs, but given that LLMs are pushing the tolerances of Fair Use, should that get limited through litigation or legislation, the things search engines get away with like caching or summarizing, AMP pages, etc may cease to be legal and search engines may have to adopt less rich means of communicating relevancy, perhaps by showing the keywords that match or something else indirect but still true about a source, without pulling content straight from it. As it stands right now, yes, Fair Use. But where do we draw the line? That line's been blurry for a while. Mostly limited to no more than 30 seconds of a performance, and no more than what's needed to quote literary works. Not sure about lyrics. The issue is on some level, most things we create are derivative. Someone had to have the idea first, but once an idea is unleashed upon the world, it seems very difficult and unwieldy to put the genie back in the bottle. I'm not really pro-LLM since it enables business to leech off of FOSS even more efficiently. The disruption of LLMs seems to be accelerating our philosophical re-examining of copyright and licensing terms in FOSS. We will inevitably need a GPL in the future that disallows remixing via LLM or other generative text algos, due mostly because ensuring all of a result is freely usable is not easy. Limitations could be built in to only 'fetch' code licensed under permissive terms, like MIT or BSD, but the tendency of these models to 'hallucinate' means you really cannot know the legal standing of LLM-generated code, at present.

golem14 3y ago

... as opposed to a human doing the same thing ? It's hard for me to reconcile that it's somehow OK for a student to write a term paper about something (e.g. "Ulysses"), Wikipedia doing the same thing, but on the other hand, not OK for chatGPT doing it.

7jjjjjjj 3y ago
Copyright is not a principle or an ideal. It's a pragmatic law designed to achieve specific goals. It can and does make such arbitrary distinctions.

olyjohn 3y ago

Indexing the copyrighted works is rehashing it. You're rehashing it into a different format that is more easily searchable by a computer. But that work is still based on other people's copyrighted works.

rich_sasha 3y ago
It doesn't produce a song if you ask for one. It points you at an existing one, with attribution and a (perhaps excessive) excerpt. LLMs do.

zlg_codes 3y ago

I'm not saying search engines will be considered the same as LLMs, but given that LLMs are pushing the tolerances of Fair Use, should that get limited through litigation or legislation, the things search engines get away with like caching or summarizing, AMP pages, etc may cease to be legal and search engines may have to adopt less rich means of communicating relevancy, perhaps by showing the keywords that match or something else indirect but still true about a source, without pulling content straight from it. As it stands right now, yes, Fair Use. But where do we draw the line? That line's been blurry for a while. Mostly limited to no more than 30 seconds of a performance, and no more than what's needed to quote literary works. Not sure about lyrics. The issue is on some level, most things we create are derivative. Someone had to have the idea first, but once an idea is unleashed upon the world, it seems very difficult and unwieldy to put the genie back in the bottle. I'm not really pro-LLM since it enables business to leech off of FOSS even more efficiently. The disruption of LLMs seems to be accelerating our philosophical re-examining of copyright and licensing terms in FOSS. We will inevitably need a GPL in the future that disallows remixing via LLM or other generative text algos, due mostly because ensuring all of a result is freely usable is not easy. Limitations could be built in to only 'fetch' code licensed under permissive terms, like MIT or BSD, but the tendency of these models to 'hallucinate' means you really cannot know the legal standing of LLM-generated code, at present.